Last weekend Fresh Starts published a column in the New York Times about the up and coming job of the digital archivist. The article explains the new role of the modern archivist with both digitized, born digital and analog files becoming increasingly messy and cluttered and how it’s growing increasingly harder to find that good stuff hidden away in collections.
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This is part of the mission of the Internet Archive, a group located in San Francisco’s historical Presidio area that took upon themselves the huge task of archiving the internet. Today, I had the chance to attend a tour of their facilities and was given an overview of their mission, practice, and current projects followed by a Q&A session.
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Talk about the perfectly designed summer of my life—this was it. This summer I spent 14 weeks working as an experience and interaction designer, conceptualizing and rapidly prototyping for T-Mobile at their Creation Center (!cc). Here I not only found a fantastic company to work for, new friends, and exciting projects, but I found what type of designer I want to be.
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Picture happy hour on a Friday at 5:35pm on 8/8/08—same day as the opening for the Olympic Games. I’m at this great restaurant & lounge in downtown Seattle one block from the !CreationCenter having some food and drinks and last conversations with my summer colleagues. Towards the end of the evening, the conversation turned from design, technology, and Seattle summers to the word “Designer”.
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Curiosity Cabinet (connecting real objects and RFID) from robertanderson on Vimeo.
Robert embodied his entire portfolio of work during his time in design school into a single piece of furniture that both houses the original artifacts, and acts as a digital interface/storage device for his computer files for each piece Read the rest of this entry »
On Thursday and Friday this week Jason Tester from The Institute for the Future (IFTF) dropped by the Media Design Program. He shared IFTF’s process and some experiments and provocations they’ve produced. Jason also specified the product they produce as a consultancy has shifted over the decades from a thick printed 300-page report that gets handed off to a client, to a landscape view of not what the future will be but what the future will be “like”. And in addition to that, IFTF has begun to make artifacts to go along with the maps, although Jason admits he is not sure which is more important, if they’re equal, if they must be used together or can one still remain on its own.
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Notes from my reading of Information Is Alive, selected essay “Archive and Aspiration” by Arjun Appadurai.
Begins by introducing the idea of two memories: the personal memory and the collective memory.
Memory vs trace vs accidental trace.
With digital archives becoming more popular, archive returns to general status for being solely a site of anticipated memories.
Digital archives rely on the absence or impossibility of face-to-face.
With arrival of electronic media, collective memory is interactively designed and socially cultivated and edited.
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alt="Jean-Francois Blanchette" />Jean-Francois Blanchette, Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, came to speak in my Design Dialogues class on Friday afternoon.
Jean-Francois said some fascinating things that related to some of my own interests. In particular, he spoke about two paradoxes:
(1) Being able to archive and store it all and the unknown rendition devices (future technology & access).
(2) Preserving and archiving without knowing of future needs, relevances, or issues (context). What do we think is important vs. what could be.
Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ SPOOKY That Subliminal Kid, stopped by the MDP. In his seminar, Paul talked about his specific kind of media design he does in relation to DJ mix culture and how open source and gift economies are a very good thing. One very cool guy, and one very bright artist.
