Tag Archives: Ben Hooker

Where urban and digital realms merge, the post-geographic city emerges

Everything, On Time (2015) by Tim Durfee and Ben Hooker (with Jenny Rodenhouse), "a testing ground for what the city is, and perhaps will be."

Everything, On Time (2015) by Tim Durfee and Ben Hooker is “a testing ground for what the city is, and perhaps will be.” Image courtesy Tim Dufee and Ben Hooker

This Friday is ArtNight, a twice-a-year event in which Pasadena’s most prominent arts and cultural institutions—including ArtCenter College of Design—swing open their doors for a free evening of art, music and entertainment.

In addition to attending a celebration for the opening night of the College’s street art exhibition OUTSIDEIN, visitors to ArtCenter’s South Campus will have a unique opportunity to see in the Wind Tunnel Gallery a preview of Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, an exhibition from ArtCenter’s Media Design Practices (MDP) program which will be installed at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture this December in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Curated by MDP’s Professor Tim Durfee and faculty Mimi Zeiger, Now, There explores “what is now and where is there” in today’s reality in which “urban and digital realms are inextricably linked” by presenting a selection of screen-based works, objects and texts that “develop, explore and visualize a city not tied to any physical locality.”

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Move over, Siri, and let Nan Wang’s Cartner do the driving

Still from graduate Media Design Practices student Nan Wang’s Cartner project.

Earlier this week at its WWDC 2015 developer’s conference, Apple announced that iOS 9–the next iteration of its operating system for its iPhone and iPad devices–will include a beefed-up “proactive” version of its voice-driven Siri software that will anticipate user’s needs and deliver relevant information in a timely manner.

Cool stuff, right? Now imagine how such a human-computer interface might evolve. And imagine it in your car.

That’s precisely what graduate Media Design Practices (MDP) student Nan Wang envisioned last fall in a course entitled New Car Experiences.

In that studio course led by Associate Professor Ben Hooker, MDP students spent the entire 14-week term creating “video sketches”–polished visualizations intended to spark discussion–based on student research conducted during the previous term in a class also led by Hooker and his MDP colleague Professor Tim Durfee.

“We immersed ourselves in the current visions of the automotive future to find out how different industries think things are going to play out,” says Hooker, whose expertise lies in collaborations within the field of human-computer interaction, of the research that led to the video sketches. “It soon became apparent there wasn’t one clear view, and that there was space for fresh thinking in this arena.”

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Dispatches from the future of design thinking: MDP’s Faculty Work-in-Progress show

MDP Faculty Work-in-Progress Show. Video by Nick Meehan from MediaDesignPractices on Vimeo.

“Being part of a community that provides support and critique is important,” said Media Design Practices (MDP) Chair Anne Burdick as she kicked off the department’s first ever Faculty Work-in-Progress show on a recent Thursday evening in Art Center’s Wind Tunnel gallery space. “It’s really a super amazing gift.”

As the MFA program’s twelve faculty members’ presentations unfolded over the next two hours, it quickly became clear that Burdick was not overstating the rewards of her department’s commitment to open dialogue. The event, which Burdick hopes will become a regular piece of programming, was organized around the following theme: a piece of something bigger. Faculty responded to that imperative with a series short presentations of unfinished projects they’re cultivating in their private creative practices.

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Nailing it: Grad students pioneer wearable tech’s entree into quantified manicures

Handiwork courtesy of the team behind the Sensor Salon

Fresh from wowing a tough techie crowd at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, Media Design Practices grad students Kristina Ortega and Jennifer Rodenhouse give us the lowdown on their novel nail salon concept that turns fingernails into a dynamic digital platform. The duo first hatched the idea for a “Sensor Salon” in a Wearable Ecologies class sponsored by Intel and led by MDP faculty members Philip van Allen and Ben Hooker. Now it’s taken flight, attracting interest in the field as well as a flurry of media attention, from public radio to Fast Company and Geekwire among other outlets. Their Wearable Services—proffering technologies embedded in nail gels, from LCD screens and 3D printed objects to GPS and haptic feedback devices—may well be fashioning the future.

The Dotted Line: What was your main inspiration for this unusual type of wearable device?

Kristina Ortega: We were really inspired by nail art culture and nail art salons in Los Angeles. During our initial research into the current state of wearable tech we noticed that many devices were one size fits all. This seemed in such stark contrast to this process of self-maintenance we saw with nail art and salon culture, which is all about the process of personalization.

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Precognition 101: Media Design Practices’ visiting researchers explore the ability to predict the future

“Brainwave Canon” (2011), an earlier project by visiting researcher Sitraka Rakotononiaina.

Each summer, Art Center’s Media Design Practices (MDP) graduate program invites outside researchers to join its faculty researchers and post-graduate fellows to run design-driven investigative projects.

As part of this week’s graduation week festivities, MDP is hosting a free event tomorrow from 3–5 p.m. in the Wind Tunnel at South Campus to share with the public the result of this summer’s research.

“Design-driven investigations can generate new approaches to design, culture and technology,” says Anne Burdick, Chair of the department. “They can provide insights into people and their daily practices, and bring new knowledge to life.”

MDP’s summer research projects often result in works that don’t fit neatly into conventional categories, such as Curious Rituals by Nicolas Nova, which studied the gestures, postures and digital rituals that have emerged with the use of current technology, and Suspension of Disbelief (“The Promise”) by Ingrid Hora and Daniel Salomon, which explored the worship of objects through the creation of a fictional cult.

And this summer’s projects—one of which explores human precognitive abilities—promise to be just as unconventional.

This summer’s visiting researchers are Andrew Friend, associate lecturer in the Department of Spatial Practices, Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, and Sitraka Rakotoniaina, co-founder of Good One, a speculative design collective with friends coming from computer science and architecture backgrounds.

Together, Friend and Rakotoniaina will discuss their project The Prophecy Program, which is part of their ongoing research into the convergence of art and science through artifacts and experiences that address people’s perception of emerging technologies.

According to the duo, the project “looks at how the power of predicting the future has often been attributed to prophets or people with super capabilities, yet on closer inspection we all have the ability to experience a premonition of future events that cannot be otherwise foreseen. The Prophecy Program proposes that through undergoing the correct, intensive training one may be able to improve their pre-cognitive ability, in turn gaining an ability to project into, and (to a degree) take control of a future.”

Also on hand to discuss their research will be MDP faculty researchers Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen, whose project Neighborhood Watch Files imagines a world in which drones are as ubiquitous as pets, as well as Art Center Fellow Tanner Teale and MDP Post-Graduate Fellow Jeremy Eichenbaum.

Immediately afterwards, there will be a reception and exhibition featuring work by MDP’s Field track students.

Research Review: 3–5 p.m.; Reception and Exhibition: 5–10 p.m.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Art Center College of Design, South Campus, The Wind Tunnel
950 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91105

Something Made Up This Way Comes

Ah, summer, that time of year when research-led design turns to rocket scientists, parking lots, quantum physics and the formation of cults.

Daniel Salomon, Ingrid Hora and MDP students at a desert shoot for their "Suspension of Disbelief" project

These summer days have been far from lazy for Art Center’s Graduate Media Design Program (MDP), whose students, faculty and researchers-in-residence have been knee-deep in off-kilter research projects for the past 13 weeks. Their findings will be unveiled at “In/Conclusions: Results from the MDP Research Residencies,” tomorrow, Wednesday, August 18 at 1:30 pm in the Wind Tunnel Gallery (RSVP here).

“In/Conclusions” is just one of several events surrounding a newly-launched bi-annual program designed to identify and explore ideas that emerge from recent MDP faculty and student work. A related exhibition, Made Up, and panels, screenings and readings are also scheduled for the fall and spring, and all the activities will be captured in a publication released in Summer 2011.

For its inaugural year, MDP chose the theme Made Up, which it describes as a consideration of “the relevance of speculation, role playing, idealism, skepticism, and simple lying as instruments or objects of the design process.” This year’s researchers-in-residence—Sascha Pohflepp and duo Ingrid Hora and Daniel Salomon—were chosen by a jury made up of MDP faculty Sean Donahue and Ben Hooker; Fiona Raby, principal of design practice Dunne & Raby; and science-fiction author, WIRED columnist and former Art Center Visionary-in-Residence Bruce Sterling.

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