Monthly Archives: February 2012

Project Masiluleke

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Here’s a pdf of the project’s brief: Project_Masiluleke_Brief

Key contacts: Leetha Filderman, PopTech, leetha@poptech.org
Krista Dong, MD, iTEACH, woodil.iteach@gmail.com
Zinhle Thabethe, iTEACH, zinny.iteach@gmail.com
Gustav Praekelt, Praekelt Foundation, gustav@praekeltfoundation.org
Robert Fabricant, frog design, robert.fabricant@frogdesign.com

From PopTech site: http://poptech.org/project_m

Project Masiluleke is a signature program of the PopTech Accelerator – a social innovation incubator designed to foster breakthrough, interdisciplinary solutions to pressing global challenges. The Accelerator aligns world-class companies, foundations, NGOs, funders and thought leaders to collaborate on outcomes none could achieve independently. Each PopTech Accelerator program will focus on using new technologies and approaches to effect scalable, replicable and sustainable social change.
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When Krista Dong and Zinhle Thabethe came to the 2006 PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, they hoped to expand their fight against HIV/AIDS, one of South Africa’s greatest problems. They were the founders of iTEACH, an HIV/AIDS and TB prevention and treatment program in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Impressed by their story, conference organizers and Robert Fabricant of frog design came together with iTEACH to address these real-world challenges through the conference’s vision – accelerating social innovation through technology.

http://www.frogdesign.com/work/project-m.html – more photos and a video
http://poptech.org/project_m 

Almost 90 percent of people in South Africa own a mobile phone, allowing Project M to use mobile technology in three crucial ways: to encourage use of low-cost diagnostic test kits (which frog created; see video, below); to walk patients through the at-home testing process; and to guide people into care should they need it and encourage healthy preventative behaviors if they don’t.

1 Million Texts Per Day

Project M launched its first phase in 2009 when a text message was sent to 1 million phones to encourage people to be tested and treated for HIV/AIDS. The Economistcalled it “the world’s largest field trial in mobile health technology.” This campaign helped triple the average daily call volume to the National AIDS Helpline, encouraging more than 150,000 people to reach out for information.

Since the initial launch, we’ve done more extensive user testing and added treatment and compliance reminders in the form of an SMS-based alert system for HIV and TB patients. Our long-term goal is to show how mobile technology can positively influence healthcare issues in Africa, so we can build a series of alliances around the world that bring together mobile operators and distributed diagnostics.

The Future of Digital Healthcare

We see a future in which local healthcare providers, NGOs, and government agencies can log onto a website and configure a cost-effective diagnostic solution tailored and scaled to their needs. They will be able to increase access to diagnostic tools and regimens in some of the world’s most under-served regions.

 

Article from the Economist

Project Masiluleke, or Project M for short, has been a cause celebre in several design subfields since its primary announcement last October. The project, which centers on text messaging to distribute information about HIV/AIDS treatment in deeply afflicted parts of South Africa, has been warmly praised by interaction designers, proponents of socially conscious design, advocates of technological leapfrogging in the developing world, and much of the design and innovation press as well (like Fast Company…and us).

If there were any concerns that this was a well-meaning but impractical solution that succeeded better in the minds of designers than the hands of users, though, they can be confidently put to rest, as this special reporton health care and technology in April 16th’s Economist points out.

The article, aimed at as pragmatic an audience as any publication on earth, introduces the project with a touch of skepticism, observing that “modern wizardry like molecular diagnostics and digital medical records seem irrelevant” in much of the developing world, and describing initial doubts about the effectiveness of high-tech to improve lives in the poor places of the world, by none other than Bill Gates.

It then proceeds to note that “the response has been spectacular,” and outlines numerous related health care projects in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere that are succeeding in providing services to populations that had formerly been written off as unreachable:

The most promising applications of mHealth for now are public-health messaging, stitching together smart medical grids, extending the reach of scarce health workers and establishing surveillance networks for infectious diseases. The use of the technology is spreading: a recent report funded by the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, two charities, documented more than four dozen projects across the developing world.

 

It’s truly wonderful to see such an idea catch on and gain traction — one that’s both clever and full of conscience — but a little bit of a bummer that the design expertise that’s made it so successful gets such short mention. Project M is introduced as a co-operative project between South African outreach program iTeach, mobile carrier MTN, and “American academics and several other innovative groups.” Careful followers of the project will recognize that frogdesign is one of those “innovative groups,” and the extensive effort the consultancy has put into the structure of the project and some of its future extensions (like a locally appropriate testing kit, which the article does mention) has been key.

Still, we’re not complaining. In a design environment where the most awarded products rarely make an impact on more than a handful of enthusiasts, a project with this kind of global reach and positive influence is worth a little short shrift.

COOPA-ROCA

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COOPA-ROCA in Brazil is similar to Kala Raksha in India in that they combine craft and design to generate income for poor communities.

COOPA-ROCA, Rocinha Seamstress and Craftwork Co-operative Ltd., is a cooperative that trains, manages, and coordinates the work of female residents of Rocinha, who produce artisanal pieces for fashion and design markets.

The Cooperative was established in the early 1980s, with the mission of providing the conditions for its members, female residents of Rocinha, to work from home, thereby contributing to their family budget without having to neglect their childcare and domestic responsibilities.

The work developed at COOPA-ROCA has allowed the craftswomen to improve their quality of life and, indirectly, that of their families. In addition to allowing Artisans to work from home and supplement their family income, COOPA-ROCA contributes to improve their vocational skills, and to foster growth in self-esteem and collective learning.

With a professional approach, COOPA-ROCA values artisanal production based on the continuous improvement of cooperative members. COOPA-ROCA’s vision is to expand the social impact of its experience in Rocinha, becoming a national reference for the social integration of low-income communities. Today the Cooperative includes approximately 100 Artisans.

World map

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Did some digging and seems the team that made this info graphic is quite diverse. Christian Werthmann is a landscape architect at Harvard and the other two are design grad students I believe.

 

Creative visual graphics can enhance the understanding of statistics. Based on population size instead of land mass, the Informal Settlement World Map displays global population growth in informal settlements in a way that makes the numbers more meaningful. Current slum populations are represented as orange squares distributed in a checkerboard pattern over black squares, which show overall population. Future population projections are depicted in shaded tones—light orange for slum growth, gray for overall population growth. The resulting image shows what many viewers have likened to a “firebrand raging across the southern hemisphere.” The shadows of future growth immediately illustrate the explosion in Africa and Asia. The design team used quantitative data from various sources, including UN-Habitat, which counts informal settlements, or “slum households,” as any that fulfill at least one of five criteria: inadequate housing, insufficient living space, insecure land tenure, and lack of access to improved water and improved sanitation.
from Design with the other 90%
Designers: Christian Werthmann, with Elizabeth Randall and Fiona Luhrmann, Harvard Graduate School of Design. United States, 2011

YOUORLEANS

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YouOrleans is an identity system developed by a team of students, alumni, and instructors from Art Center College of Design, formed to brand the Katrina Furniture Project. The identity graphically represents the resilient and ever-optimistic citizens of New Orleans as well the craftspeople at the Katrina Furniture Project, who are using their talent and determination to effect recovery and reclaim their lives. In collaboration with Art Center’sDesignmatters initiative, a United Nations–designated non-governmental organization (NGO) which acts as an educational laboratory for best practices and social engagement, the project based its design solution on the typographic identifier of “Re“―as in Recovery, Revitalization, Reformation, Reuse, Redevelop, and Redeem―embodied in the furniture.

  1. DESIGNERS: Graphic Design department, Art Center College of Design; alumni Jae Chae, Ayumi Ito, Atley Kasky; students John Emshwiller, Janet Ferrero, Matthew Potter; project director and department chair Nik Hafermaas; lead instructor Paul Hauge; in collaboration with the Designmatters initiative
  2. Recycled cypress, recycled e-flute material, recycled paper stock
  3. United States, 2006–07

Chapter — Method — new bits of writing

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This section follows the description of “in your head” thinking and focuses on collaborations between two people:

Once your interdisciplinary geenie has been unleashed, seek out partners with whom you can create new work, free of artificially imposed restrictions of academia.  (Add more here: we present the work of collaborators: Electroland, Skyrill and MMParis, each doing different things to merge disciplines)

Seeley and McNall are partners in Electroland, an interactive studio based in Los Angeles, California. They specialize in immersive and responsive graphic environments, focusing on the overlap of graphic design, media and architecture, on the way people experience spaces visually, through typography, image and color. A designer and architect by training, Seeley and McNall have fused their respective disciplines with electronic tools, to create site-specific experiences. As a result, they have used motion and scale in fresh new ways.

Motion is usually the domain of the media designer, while architects work with material and space. In Drive By, 2007, Seeley and McNall have given motion an urban dimension, connecting it to traffic. An electronic display along Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood tracks the passing of cars by flashing phrases and abstract letterforms. Here, an unremarkable slice of metropolitan life — cars speeding along a thoroughfare — has been transformed into visual play with the merger of architecture and graphic design.

While architects tend to think large-scale, graphic designers usually work smaller. In Author Wall (2009), visitors to the Guadalajara Book Fair enjoyed playing with authors’ names on a touch screen, and seeing their interaction simultaneously projected on a 30-meter wall. This type-driven environment enriched the event by making everyone, and not just the authors, feel like “makers”. The close-up experience of a touch-screen has been writ large, influencing the look and feel of the entire event.

In College Faces (year??? has this been realized?), Electroland took the intimate beauty of the personal photograph and blew it up to architectural scale, projecting a yearbook of sorts on the facade of the Gateway Community College in New Haven, Connecticut. The faces of students, teachers and staff are cast in slow motion on the building’s glass curtain wall, generating a sense of togetherness on campus. To make the project more meaningful to its most frequent viewers, individual faces can be accessed on a website (which one??) or via smart phone.

Joshua Davis: design, painting, programming

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Holiday Reflections (2008)

Anderson Ranch 2011


Bags for Miquelrius (2008), and The SAK (2010), demitasse for _______? (2009)

 


Prius Plug-in Hybrid: Signature Series (2011); Toyota collaborates with four artists to bring you a collection of unique, custom decals for the first-ever Prius Plug-in Hybrid.

Design as Art
Designer Joshua Davis www.joshuadavis.com hacks Flash and Illustrator to make “paintings” with software. He was a groundbreaking web designer and embraced code early on, in the 90’s, as a painting medium. He is another example of interdisciplinary thinking “within one’s own head”. As a young painter and illustrator, Instead of being put off by code, he went for it, conquered it, and took it on as a tool for making form that would not be possible any other way. It’s interdisciplinary in the sense that he invents his own tools to make his images. He uses programming languages like Pearl and Python, meant for other kinds of computation, to generate visual complexity. He pushes the limits of technology. Further, he applies his flat work to products (bags, dinnerware…). Interdisciplinary thinking allows us to ascend creatively; once something is done, use it to make something completely new. It’s about ascending levels of involvement, thinking and production. Again, it’s about asking, “what if?”

In 2002 he published Flash to the Core, which has an online version, too. http://flashtothecore.praystation.com/
Once Upon a Forrest is an online work of his.

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This below is from an Adobe profile of Davis, August 11, 2007 by Elise Malmberg:
http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/joshuadavis/

“I’ve always done kind of weird, strange things, and that’s what I get hired to do: weird, strange things,” he says. “The type of work you make is the type of work people will hire you to do.”

“And since I work with programming, I can do things I would never dream of doing manually. For example, I might say, ‘Let’s draw a seahorse, then add it in again 20,000 times.’ Believe me, I don’t want to be the guy that’s sitting there copying and pasting a seahorse 20,000 times. But a program can do it in less than a second.”

Once Davis has determined which elements to combine, much of his creative process involves watching and waiting as the programs arrange his forms into different configurations. “I might spend two weeks just waiting for that perfect composition, that beautiful accident,” says Davis. “I decide what to keep, what to add, and what to eliminate. I have the best job in the world: I get to be the designer, the programmer, and the critic!”

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From an interview on the website of the Design Museum in London, around 2002:
http://designmuseum.org/design/joshua-davis

Q. Describe your working methods. How do you begin work on a new project, for example? Do you sketch, make notes, write code or go straight to the computer? And how does the process develop from then onwards?

A. I’m totally into free-flowing consciousness. I tend to NEVER sketch. I just sit down and start exploring ideas. Some nights will pass and I’ll have made eighty builds of pure crap. Other nights I’ll make sixty things and turn out with one good idea or exploration. I try to let the work lead me instead of the other way around. I guess I still want to explore, create accidents, make mistakes – and planning or sketching seems too serious and rigid for my taste.

Zvez: Good example how method cannot be prescribed. Take the general guidelines and develop your own method. 

Q. What do you consider to be the main challenges facing web designers right now?

A. Learning what’s already been done, the hacks, the work-arounds, failing, succeeding etc. I know designers who still don’t know how to write HTML by hand. It’s like being a print designer and not wanting to know about typography or paper.

Convergence of GD and programming

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programming_and_design

THE CONVERGENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING AND GRAPHIC DESIGN
A paper by two professors from Creighton University:
David Reed, Chair, Department of Computer Science Creighton University davereed@creighton.edu, and
Joel Davies Director, Graphic Design Program Creighton University joel@creighton.edu
Published in the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Volume 21 Issue 3, February 2006 

The conclusion of the paper states:
As the computer science and graphic design disciplines converge, it is inevitable that cross-pollination between the two result in a blurring of the lines of professional practices. Computer scientists increasingly need exposure to design trends and principles, so that they might take advantage of lessons learned by graphic designers. Likewise, designers will require the computer science experience to accurately and efficiently code projects, in addition to the ability to comprehend new technologies as they emerge. Collaboration between computer science and graphic design educators is imperative to ensure that each discipline learns from the other and is prepared for future developments.

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This is an interesting scientific paper that argues for skilling the programmer with design basics.

Georgia Tech

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Interesting things are happening at Georgia Tech intersecting design, art and technology. Amazing collaborative classroom set up!

Description of an upcoming event at Georgia Tech>
From a 3-D drawing experience that incorporates artificial intelligence to a competition that features cutting-edge musical instruments such as a partially edible toy piano, there will be something for every arts lover on campus the week of Feb. 13.

TechArts, a campuswide initiative inspired by Georgia Tech’s strategic plan, will present three events during the week. The initiative is co-chaired by Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of Interactive Computing, and Gil Wienberg, associate professor of Music and director of the Music Technology Center.

“With TechArts, our goal is to both push the boundaries of research and innovation in art and technology and to enhance and nurture the creativity of the entire community here at Tech,” Bobick said.

“Art and technology are more entwined than ever before,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “If Georgia Tech intends to define the technological research university of the 21st century, we have to find ways to incorporate the arts into everything we do, from research to our curricula. These events are the first major step that TechArts is taking to accomplish this.”

http://www.id.gatech.edu/news/new-techarts-initiative-delivers-events-inspiration

 

Also video that describes what they do in their interdisciplinary design studio>

 

ice typography by nicole dextras

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canadian graphic designer nicole dextras embraces the cold climate of her native country through her ‘ice typography’ installations – a series of larger than life words spelled out in block letters made from ice. the three-dimensional texts are fabricated using moulds
dextras pours water into (sometimes colored for a more dramatic effect), allowing it to freeze and assembling the letters in a means that speaks to how a viewer’s gaze frames and informs the landscape in which the frozen statements are placed.

varying in size from as low as 18 inches in height to a whopping 8 feet tall, regardless of where the texts are installed -whether it is in canada’s northern province of yukon, or the metropolitan city of toronto – it is always the temperature which determines the life of the works, and how long it will take for nature to takes its course and change their state of solid to liquid. as dextras states, ‘this phase of transition becomes symbolic of the interconnectedness of language and culture to the land
as they are affected by time and by a constant shifting and transforming nature.’

the visual poetry which the designer’s ice typography creates, aims to subvert the authority of the english language and the commerce of signage, selecting words which represent a sense of vulnerability and transition. ‘words cast in ice interrupt our literal narratives, allowing a more integrated reading of the land we inhabit, as opposed to the past and current commodification of land as limitless resource. this fundamental split in perception lies at the crux of our environmental crisis. I therefore choose to create within an ephemeral vernacular to accentuate the collective physical and psychological experience of flux and change,‘ dextras says.