Well, the big news I suppose is that I've taken on a new job at LCC. As of last Wednesday I'm Course Leader for MA Interaction Design Communication. I'm really excited to get knee-deep in a new challenge and craft something amazing with a great course but I guess I'm also a bit sad to be leaving the undergraduates behind. I'm still going to be teaching on BA Interaction Design Arts and BA Information and Interface Design but my focus will be on working on a vision for IDC. There's lots of other stuff going on at LCC too. I'm currently deep in planning for two other side projects:
- London Design Festival. I'm curating the show for the Critical Design and Digital Futures cluster at the design school. We've got big plans for a showcase of work and research being done by staff in this area, and I"m looking forward to showing it to everyone
- Speculative and Critical Design Summer School. We've got another edition organised by Ben Stopher and myself coming up in July. This time on the theme of 'Limits to Growth.' With Anab Jain and Georgina Voss we produced a short podcast discussing some of the ideas which you can listen to here.
- Interaction Design Arts' graduation show opens on June 15th. There's some great work. Please come along if you can.
- One point eight million other things.
Studio
Finite State Fantasia is at De Brakke Gronde in Amsterdam until July in a very different form. I'm genuinely excited to keep playing with it and find other ways of getting it to talk and say stuff. My admin/creative work balance is way out of alignment right now and so any time I get to just sit down and play around with actual projects is a joy. This latest iteration is probably my favourite and it's had some good feedback. I've blogged about it here. Also at De Brakke Gronde is mine and Natalie's Alchemy podcast. Rumour has it that it was one of the key inspirations behind this year's Fiber festival so I'm really happy that it's found a place.
Over in Athens at the 'Tomorrows' exhibition I've got New Mumbai on show. They've also made prints of some of the images that I never really meant to exhibit but actually work quite well.
The video from my talk at STRP about some of the context about the project has been put up. I've been working through the relative themes of 'What's It Doing,' 'Swimming With Submarines' and 'Haunted Machines' over the last few months and if you've been at talks I've been doing you've probably seen a sequential tightening of the narrative.
Strange Telemetry
Georgina and I just returned from Athens where we were running a workshop on speculative design and the city as part of the Tomorrows exhibition mentioned above. We had a great crew of participants from across the city and had some really interesting discussion. I'm sure there'll be a writeup soon.
Upcoming
I've got Mercenary Cubiclists going back on exhibition at the Vienna Biennale 'How Will We Work' show curated by the Superflux folks. The lineup for that show is stellar. I don't currently have any plans to go out and see it yet but I'm really hoping I will soon.
Natalie and I are going to be chairing a seminar on Haunted Machines and Wicked Problems at the HKU in Utrecht which puts me in Utrecht again every weekend throughout the end of June. Engaging students in the festival is a big part of what we want so I"m excited to be running this little summer school for them.
There are literally hundreds of other things. I've got nested to-do lists hidden inside other to-do lists set to ten minute timers. But if I look I'll never finish this so I'm just going to call it quits.
I can't embed an Instagram as normal because Blogger is rubbish as everyone knows but I"m too stubborn to leave.
Love you all,
Tx