Class Plan: Design and Technology 101 / Learning to Teach for SFPC.io

I was invited by my friends at the School For Poetic Computation (SFPC) to share some teaching tips with fellow design and technology teachers following their Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn conference from last week. It is based on my Digital Platforms class for 2nd year students at Shenkar College‘s Visual Communication program (and previously at Parsons and Bezalel) I usually prepare the class in advance with a blogpost so here goes:


 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8NZa9wYZ_U

  • Traditional phones ceremony
  • Smiles
  • How are you doing?
  • Our plan for today

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Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis (the essay)

Following my Disinformation Visualization workshop at the Info Activism Camp, the wonderful people at the Tactical Tech Collective have invited me to publish these ideas as an essay on their site. I am cross-posting the opening here and encourage you to read the whole thing on the Visualizing Advocacy site (and get their wonderful book … Continue reading Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis (the essay)

OPEN DESIGN NOW / Learning By Doing

open-design-now-why-design-cannot-remain-exclusive

I guess “NOW” is relative as the essay I wrote for Open Design Now is now at least 2 years old. But still I figured it makes sense to share. (on more than one level) I recommend reading this in the original site, but just as a backup I will publish it here as well. One of the reasons I waited with publishing it here in the blog (even though the whole book is CC-SA-BY licensed) is that the publishing model they took was to slowly publish the essays over a long period of time, one essay at a time. And the book was going from 0% open to 100% open. It’s an interesting model, certainly a compromise between the OPENESS tribe and the publisher’s concern over the INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and the commodification of the content. Now that it is 100% open, and my essay is just slightly dated, I think it’s fair to share it here :)

Mushon Zer-Aviv describes his efforts to teach open source design as an attempt to investigate why collaborative work combined with individual autonomy has not been common practice in design, as it is in open source software development. He discusses whether what worked for code might just as easily be transferred to design: the physical object as binary structure.

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Dis-Information-Visualization Workshop Summary / Helsinki Sep 2012

The 1st Open Knowledge Festival was also the host of the 1st Dis-Information-Visualization workshop, a critical attempt to actively explore the dark side of information visualization. In the full day workshop (led by me, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and organized by Pixelache and the Mushrooming Network) 4 groups were encouraged to lie with infographics. Rather than falsifying the data, the dis-info-visualizers have manipulated its meaning by creating truthful, yet misleading representations.

We started with an introductory presentation offering a few critical tools through which to investigate (and generate) visual manipulation. The talk suggested that rather than looking at data information visualization as “Beautiful Evidence” (to quote the title of a book by Edward Tufte) we should read them as often beautiful and sometimes even seductive arguments.

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סדנה בבצלאל – המרחב הישראלי: תאוריית הקשר

English notice: This post is a part of the “Israeli Sphere: Connection Theory” a workshop I lead in Bezalel Art and Design School in Jerusalem, Israel. The workshop will be led in Hebrew, but I will try to post its results here with some English to accompany it too. Here’s a short description in English:

The Israeli Sphere: Connection Theory

1948, The water level in the sea of Galilee, Bublil, Shema Yisrael, what’s the connection?
Through a design-research workshop we will place information bits lost inside the web of the “Israeli sphere” in an attempt to find out, where is this Israel sphere anyway? How to design inside it? Towards it? From it? Students will work in small groups and will conduct a networked research following cultural, logical and visual connections. The work methodology will be divided into three steps: Content, Structure & Presentation, inspired by new approaches of indexing, linking and delivering information online. In spite of the networked inspiration and practice, the output of the workshop is not limited to this medium or the other and the workshop is open to students from different disciplines as long as they are ready to work hard, sleep little and experiment with this new and challenging process.

תיאור הסדנה

1948, מפלס הכנרת, בובליל, שמע ישראל… מה הקשר?
במהלך סדנת עיצוב-חוקר נמקם פיסות מידע אובדות בתוך רשת ה”מרחב הישראלי” במטרה לגלות איפה זה בכלל המרחב הישראלי הזה? כיצד מעצבים בתוכו? לתוכו? מתוכו? סטודנטים יעבדו בקבוצות קטנות וינהלו מחקר מרושת בעקבות הקשרים תרבותיים, לוגיים וחזותיים. מתודולוגיית העבודה תחולק לשלושה שלבים: תוכן, מבנה ותצוגה בהשראה מגישות חדשות לתיוג, חיווט והגשה של מידע ברשת. על אף ההשראה והפרקטיקה המרושתת, תוצרי הסדנה אינם מוגבלים למדיום זה או אחר והסדנה פתוחה לסטודנטים מדיסיפלינות שונות כל עוד הם מוכנים לעבוד קשה, לישון מעט ולהתנסות בצורת עבודה חדשה ומאתגרת. Continue reading “סדנה בבצלאל – המרחב הישראלי: תאוריית הקשר”

Fail Gracefully

offf-title

The following is an essay I wrote together with Florian Schmitt (hi-res.net) for the Offf 2009 festival in Lisbon. Florian and I will also host a panel on Saturday, May 9th with Aaron Koblin, PES, and Joshua Davis, to discuss the ‘Fail Gracefully’ theme. Come say hi!

Fail Gracefully

Intro

We fail. We all do, and our failures often say more about us than our successes do. But we hide failure, we are ashamed of it and we often just deny it altogether. For almost a decade the Offf festival have featured successful digital creators in design and experimental sound and have celebrated the cutting edge of digital aesthetics. This year, we shed some light on the dark side of success and discover the dynamics and aesthetics of failure. Continue reading “Fail Gracefully”