Design Feed

Warning Signs from the Future No. 1: No Drones, Glass Ceiling

Spraypaint on pizza box.

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Playing with Peter Stoyko's SystemViz Iconography

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I have been playing with Peter Stoyko's SystemViz iconography.

SystemViz is a research project by Peter Stoyko exploring how visuals can enhance systems thinking, especially as it relates to inter-disciplinary, collaborative design. Findings are expressed as visual codexes and other applied tools.

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Earrings Drop on Wild Moon Jewelry Website

Today marks my first product release after finishing an OCAD Master of Design degree, and it also happens to be the day the OCAD University Senate confers my degree: Mantra and See to It earrings from Wild Moon.

During quarantine in May, I bought a 3D printer for Pandemic Post: Retrofuturist Mail Art.

I got to talking to Asia Clarke, one of my OCAD classmates, via text message over the summer about the jewelry design possibilities. We ended up doing a jewelry design collaboration via text, and the two different designs launched today on her Wild Moon Jewelry website. Asia described to me the approximate dimensions of an earring and I used a technique I had been playing with for picture frames to integrate text into a hoop earring. And Asia took it from there to do her jewelry magic. The results are amazing.

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Photography by Anothony Gebrehlwot.

There are two styles: one which says "Black Lives Matter," the other of which says "Defund the Police."

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100% of proceeds will go to supporting the Black Legal Action Centre, a non-profit community legal clinic that provides free legal services for low or no income Black residents of Ontario.

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100% of proceeds will go to supporting the Free Black University, a radical educational institution that exists to transform and to hold a space for the creation of radical knowledge that pertains to our collective freedom and healing.

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A Thousand Futures: A Search for Scenario Space
by Kathryn Cramer [MRP]

My OCAD University Major Research Project, entitled, A Thousand Futures: A Search for Scenario Space, is now available on the OCAD website.

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Abstract

Although both science fiction and professional foresight work both are engaged with what the future might look like, they operate mostly independently from one another. A literature search reveals the characteristics of written science fiction and foresight, seeking ways these practices could be successfully combined. Concepts are explored through the example of agriculture and agricultural technology as well as technologies for constructing narrative semantics. Approaches are outlined for generating foresight scenarios and for creating a semantic tagging system for generating a semantic space for scenarios using intellectual technologies from science fiction.

Keywords:

agriculture, agroecology, animals, apples, bibliography, books, category theory, climate change, chickens, computational narrative, computational thinking, design fiction, dystopia, farming, fiction, folktales, foresight, foxes, futures, genre, history, landscape, language, metaphor, motifs, nationalism, ontology, orchardry, organic farming, pattern language, patents, pigs, publishing, retrofuturism, rewilding, scenarios, science fiction, semantics, speculative design, speculative fiction, tagging, technology, transrealism, utopia, wolves, workshops, writing


My first custom fabric order

my first custom fabric order

For a while, I have been wanting to produce fabric art that makes use of my photos, my artwork, and my kids' art. The other day, I happened across a site called Spoonflower that prints custom images on fabric. As a test, I have ordered a yard of the fabric above, created using a drawing of mine from 2001. I've also ordered a map that Peter drew as fabric. We'll see if it truly suits my purposes, but I am hopeful.

I have some very specific projects in mind if it does. The test fabric design comes from this drawing of mine:

endpaper

My original intent had been to reproduce it as endpaper in a small press book.

I'm counting the days until my test yardage arrives.


A New Kind of Bridgebuilding: Stephen Wolfram on How We Might Design Better Bridges in the Future

In a short essay "The Space of All Possible Bridge Shapes," composed in response to the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Stephen Wolfram suggests design principles that could lead to stronger bridges:

. . . it's been known for a while that the best networks don't have that kind of simple structure. In fact, they almost seem in some ways quite random.

Well, what about bridges? I strongly suspect that there are much better truss structures for bridges than the classic ones from the 1800s--but they won't look so simple.

I suspect one can do quite well by using simple rules to generate the structure. But as we know from NKS, just because the rules to generate something are simple, it doesn't mean the thing itself will look simple at all.

Two students at our NKS Summer School (Rafal Kicinger and Tom Speller) have investigated creating practical truss structures this way--and the results seem very promising.

So what should the bridges of the future look like? Probably a lot less regular than today. Because I suspect the most robust structures will end up being ones with quite a lot of apparent randomness.