V2_ Knowledgebase

Aeolab is a design & technology firm founded by Elise Co and Nikita Pashenkov. We specialize in projects that cross boundaries: from online to in-person, physical to digital, often spanning multiple technologies and always within the context of creating a compelling experience. Our areas of expertise include interactive software & hardware, environmental installations, responsive lighting systems, and electronic device prototyping.

James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have been collaborating on projects since the concept of the Audio Tooth Implant was first conceived in October 2000. Industrial Design heretofore has mostly been concerned with the process of bringing products to market, making them desirable and therefore saleable. With a slight sideways step: removing the commercial aspect from the requirements of the object, it can adopt a whole different agenda, questioning the process that gives birth to it rather than blindly conforming to it. In this way design can comment on consumer culture, the role of products and the ubiquity and function of technology. It becomes a tool for questioning rather than problem solving. Through the development and dissemination of speculative and critical products and services we hope to instigate a broader analysis of what it means to exist in a technology rich environment both today and in the near future.

Christopher Pearson Studio is a cross discipline design studio. Working on commercial projects in Art & Design. Specialties include Pattern, Animation and unique conceptual projects

Extreme Textiles highlights successful collaborations between design, industry, and science. Large, full-color illustrations and essays by some of today's most influential designers and scientists trace the extraordinary developments made in textiles over the last twenty years and suggest what is to come.

Thesis: This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able. As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through “open source” fashion “cookbooks”. By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative “hacking” at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on.

Syuzi Pakhchyan is an User Experience Designer, robotics instructor, writer, blogger and a seasoned tinkerer working and residing in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores the intersection of culture and technology through the research, investigation and design of technological systems and interactions for a range of cultural contexts.

This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open-source electronics prototyping platform that's taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for projects and helps you get going on them right away. To use the introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED. This 128-page book is a greatly expanded follow-up to the author's original short PDF that's available on the Arduino website.

This book will be the first in-depth monograph on his work, celebrating Chalayan's tenth anniversary in fashion. It does not simply document the highlights from ten years of fashion design, but also includes his installations and video projects. Besides an essay on Chalayan's work by leading fashion critic Caroline Evans (author of Fashion at the Edge), other authors, including Suzy Menkes (fashion editor for the International Herald Tribune) and Bradley Quinn (author of Techno Fashion), shed light on his work from various angles and disciplines.

I am a visual artist who specialises in textile design and collaborative projects. I have recently completed an MA in Design for Textile Futures at Central St Martins College, which focused on issues including; sustainability, new materials, new technologies and the delivery of multidiscipline arts projects.

LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.

In Making is Connecting, David Gauntlett argues that through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other. Both online and offline, we see that people want to make their mark on the world, and to make connections. During the previous century, the production of culture became dominated by professional elite producers. But today, a vast array of people are making and sharing their own ideas, videos, and other creative material online, as well as engaging in real-world crafts, art projects, and hands-on experiences. Gauntlett argues that we are seeing a shift from a 'sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a 'making-and-doing culture'. People are rejecting traditional teaching and television, and making their own learning and entertainment instead. Drawing on evidence from psychology, politics, philosophy, and economics, he shows how this shift is necessary and essential for the happiness and survival of modern societies.

Through a series of simple projects, this book teaches you how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.

This web site is a complete document of the work of the Human Connectedness research group during its 3 1/2 year existence at Media Lab Europe (September 2001 - January 2005). Media Lab Europe is now closed, but the vision of the group is still alive. Many former members are continuing their projects independently, and many of the our prototypes are still available for exhibition.

The MIT Media Lab applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday lifeótechnologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities. Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work atelier-style in close to 30 research groups conducting more than 400 projects that range from neuroengineering, to how children learn, to developing the city car of the future. Lab researchers foster a unique culture of learning by doing, developing technologies that empower people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all societies, to design and invent new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

This Masters programme will be a stimulating and supportive context for your development as an innovative creator of distinctive moving and still images. The courseís mixture of critical research, development of new technical approaches, and sustained project work is designed to give you the opportunity to develop the original portfolio of work you will need to succeed in todayís highly competitive media environments.