marks / Mark Jensen

Je suis un romantique.

There are no people in marks’s collective.

Huffduffed (24)

  1. The Transformers

    When you think of a city, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most likely it is the stuff that it is made up of: its streets and buildings, its parks and squares. But what sets a city apart, aside from its architecture, is how all that stuff is put to use. A city’s nightlife, a city’s cuisine, a city’s culture. In other words, what people make of the space they live in when they are at play.

    Play isn’t limited to the ‘soft side’ of urbanism. In fact, it turns out a building isn’t some prefixed structure capable of doing one thing only. Adaptation and reuse continuously transform what a city’s architecture is for, often from the bottom up. In this way, a city’s people shape their homes as well, quite literally.

    What is at work in this process of city transformation, is nothing less than play. In cities, just as in games, people and the space they inhabit shape each other. Thus, in our Western cities, where reuse is overtaking construction of new space, we are all becoming architects.

    In this session Kars looks at how game culture and play shape the urban fabric, how we might design systems that improve people’s capacity to do so, and how you yourself, through play, can transform the city you call home.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kars-alfrink

    Kars Alfrink is ‘Chief Agent’ of Hubbub, a networked design studio for applied pervasive games. Hubbub works with organizations to create games that take place in public space, engage people physically, and are socially relevant. Amongst other things, these games are used to encourage good citizenship and to facilitate cultural participation.

    Besides this, Kars teaches at the Utrecht School of the Arts, where he mentors students who are pursuing a Master of Arts in Interaction Design or Game Design & Development. He is also the initiator and co organizer of ‘This Happened’ — Utrecht,a series of lectures dedicated to the stories behind interaction design.

    In his spare time, Kars practices a traditional Japanese martial art, and tries to keep up with geek culture.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  2. Emotional Design for the World of Objects

    Welcome to the world of atoms. Remember when the mantra was that bits were more important than atoms? That we could dispense with physical things because information was all that mattered? Well, that was nonsense then and it is nonsense now.

    The human body is part of the physical world. It savors touch and feeling, movement and action. How else to explain the popularity of physical devices, of games that require gestures, and full-body movement?

    Want to develop for this new world? There are new rules for interacting with the world, new rules for the developers of systems. But the new rules still follow the old principles. Let’s not throw away the old lessons of interaction. In fact, these become even more important than ever before. And yes, there are some new things to learn as well, new technologies to master, new words to learn.

    Today the need is for complex, rich, emotionally satisfying things. It is no longer just about function and service. Those are still important, but they are taken for granted. Today we must add convenience and comfort, fun and excitement, pleasure. We needed to develop applications that both delivered real value but also was high in emotional value, experience, and engagement.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/don-norman

    Dr. Don Norman is the author or co-author of fourteen books, with translations into sixteen languages, including: The Design of Everyday Things, Things That Make Us Smart, and The Invisible Computer. Business Week has called this the bible of the ‘post PC’ thinking. His latest book, Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things marks the transition from usability to aesthetics, but with the emphasis on a well-rounded, cohesive product that looks good, works well, and gives pride to the owner. The well-rounded product, says Don, will enhance the heart as well as the mind, being a joy to behold, to use, and to own.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  3. Kerning, Orgasms And Those Goddamned Japanese Toothpicks

    Freud popularised the term, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”, to describe how adjacent villages—identical for all practical purposes—would struggle to amplify their tiniest distinctions in order to justify how much they despised one other. So you have to guess how much he would have enjoyed design mailing lists. And, Perl.

    Truth is, to the untrained (un-washed, un-nuanced, un-Paul-Rand’d, and un-Helvetica’d) outsider, discourse in the design community can sometimes look a lot like a cluster of tightly-wound Freudian villages.

    So, how is the role of design perceived by the people who are using the stuff you make? What role (if any) should users expect in the process of how their world is made and remade? What contexts might be useful in helping us turn all of our obsessions into useful and beautiful work?

    Can an Aeron chair ever be truly ‘Black’? Will there ever be a way to get Marketing people to stop calling typefaces ‘fonts’? And, when, at last, will the international community finally speak as one regarding the overuse of Mistral and stock photos of foreshortened Asian women?

    By leveraging his uniquely unqualified understanding of design, Merlin will propose some promising patterns for fording the gap between end-users and the unhappy-looking people in costly European eyeglasses who are designing their world.

    Is there hope? Come to Brighton, pull up a flawlessly-executed mid-century-Modern seating affordance, and we'll see what we can figure out together. One village to another.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/merlin-mann

    Merlin Mann is best known as the creator of 43folders.com, a popular American website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  4. Making Friends: On Toys and Toymaking

    Toys are not idle knick-knacks: they allow us to explore otherwise impossible terrain; fire the imagination; provide sparks for structured play. They do not just entertain and delight; they stimulate and inspire. And always, they remind us of the value - and values - to be found in abstract play.

    Toymaking is not an idle habit. Toys are a fertile ground for creators to work in. They offer a playful space to experiment and explore. They are a safe ground to experiment with new techniques, skills, or ideas. Though they emerge from no particular purpose, they expose purpose and meaning through their making. Toymaking ranges from making realistic simulations of life to producing highly abstract playthings. And everyone who makes things - out of paper, wood, metal, plastic, or code - has something to gain from making them.

    Trying to draw a thread through what, it turns out, has been a lifetime first shaped by toymaking, and then spent making toys in idle moments, Tom will take in (amongst other things) woodwork, Markov chains, state-machines and fiddle-sticks, to examine the values of toys and toymaking to 21st-century creators.

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/armitage/

    Tom Armitage is a game designer at Hide & Seek. He’s also a hacker in the true sense of the word, wrangling code to create a Twitter account for Tower Bridge and print out eight years of links.

    He writes on his blog Infovore (and elsewhere) about code and play. You should read it. It’s excellent.

    He also talks about games, technology and social software.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  5. Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We’ve Learned From Printing The Internet Out)

    What's happening now is that the web of data wants to escape the screen, it wants to materialise into the real world, it wants to get physical, become objects. And that the next exciting stuff is going to be about designing data that can live on the screen, in devices, on paper, as things, wherever.

    So that's what I’m hoping to talk about. About getting a little post-digital, about analogue friction, about printing to large industrial infrastructures, about unproducts and letter-boxes and rabbits. And there’ll be jokes and silly videos too.

    http://2009.dconstruct.org/schedule/russelldavies/

    Russell was born in Derby, enjoyed an uneventful childhood, did college, all that. After failing as a popstar and a joke writer he ended up in advertising and tried to do ‘interactive marketing’ way before anyone was interested. Ended up at Wieden Kennedy working on clients like Microsoft, Nike and Honda. Then he went to work for Nike as Global Consumer Planning Director.

    He went freelance in 2006 and works with shadowy organisations like the Open Intelligence Agency and the Really Interesting Group. He also writes eggbaconchipsandbeans occasionally organises ‘Interesting’ conferences, plays with things like speechification, dawdlr and slowpoke and does columns for Campaign magazine and Wired UK.

    If asked what he actually does all day, he’ll normally mutter something about ‘post-digital’.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  6. Reality is Plenty

    Lately, Augmented Reality (AR) has come to stand for the highest and deepest form of synthesis between the digital and physical worlds. Slavin will outline an argument for rethinking what really augments reality and what the benefits are, as well as the costs.

    Rather than considering AR as a technology, we will consider the goals we have for it, and how those are best addressed. Along the way, we’ll look at the history and future of seeing, with a series of stories, most of which are mostly true.

    AR may be where all this goes. But how it gets there, and where there is, is up for debate. This is intended to serve to start or end that debate, or at a minimum, to bring the conference to a close by pointing at the future, perhaps in the wrong direction.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kevin-slavin

    Kevin Slavin is the Managing Director and co-Founder of area/code. He has worked in corporate communications for technology-based clients for 13 years, including IBM, Compaq, Dell, TiVo, Time/Warner Cable, Microsoft, Wild Tangent and Qwest Wireless.

    Slavin has lectured at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Parsons School of Design, and has written for various publications on games and game culture. His work has received honors from the AIGA, the One Show, and the Art Directors Club, and he has exhibited internationally, including the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  7. The Full Stack of Entertainment: Storytelling, Play and Code

    Forget transmedia. Forget alternate and augmented realities. Forget multimedia magazines, tablets, phones and puzzling QR codes. Our challenge lies in figuring out the full-stack of entertainment, designed from the bottom right to the very top: for phones, physical objects—part of the Internet of things or otherwise—tablets and conventional computing devices, where art, code and design mesh together perfectly with directorial vision.

    These teams producing our next generation of entertainment are right at the heart of Steve Jobs’ placing of Apple at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. Where did they come from, how are they evolving entertainment and how are they making storytelling, play, code and technology sing?

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/dan-hon

    Dan Hon is a Creative Director at Wieden Kennedy in Portland, OR, where he works on the intersection between storytelling, games, play and code. A former lawyer, he’s worked for Mind Candy helping to build their first product, Perplex City, and co-founded Six to Start, an award-winning entertainment production company in 2007. He’s most known for being passionately for, and against, ARGs. He does not play World of Warcraft anymore.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  8. Beyond Mobile: Making Sense of a Post-PC World

    Native applications are a remnant of the Jurassic period of computer history. We will look back on these past 10 years as the time we finally grew out of our desktop mindset and started down the path of writing apps for an infinite number of platforms. As the cost of computation and connectivity plummets, manufacturers are going to put 'interactivity' into every device. Some of this will be trivial: my power adaptor knows it's charging history. Some of it will be control related: my television will be grand central for my smart home. But at it's heart, we'll be swimming in world where every device will have 'an app'. What will it take for us to get here, what technologies will it take to make this happen?

    This talk will discuss how the principles of the open web must apply not only to prototocols but to hardware as well. How can we build a 'DNS for hardware' so the menagerie of devices has a chance for working together?

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/jenson/

    Scott Jenson used to work at Apple, developing the Human Interface guidelines and working on the Newton, no less. He also worked at Symbian and Google so he knows all about mobile devices of all kinds.

    Scott is currently Creative Director at Frog Design where he has been writing about the coming zombie apocalypse.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  9. Everything The Network Touches

    The work we’re collectively doing—opening up gradually all of human information and media, making it recombinable, helping people create and share their work—is a huge unspoken, sexy, world-redefining mission.

    It’s a mission that many of us have become blasé about, almost unaware of. It’s a project so large that it’s hard to get a grasp on. And the next few years are going to get even more interesting as the network pervades physical objects and environments, sensing and manifesting information in the real world.

    It's time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity—even the planet itself—is our canvas.

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/tom-coates

    Tom Coates is a technologist and writer, focused on the shape of the web to come and on developing new concepts that thrive in it. He’s worked for many prominent web companies including Time Out, the BBC and Yahoo! where he was Head of Product for the Brickhouse innovation team. He’s most known for the Fire Eagle location-sharing service, and for his work on social software, future media and the web of data.

    —Huffduffed by marks

  10. Oh God, It’s Full of Stars

    The relationship between digital and physical products is larger than if it exists on a hard drive or a shelf. It’s the tension between access and ownership, searching and finding, sharing and collecting. It’s a dance between the visible and the invisible, and what happens when we’re forced to remember versus when we are allowed to forget. How does this affect us—not just as makers, but as consumers of these products? Does collecting things matter if we don’t revisit them? We may download, bookmark, tag, organize, and star, but what then?

    A digital Zen master would say that if everything is starred, nothing is. We’ve optimized the system for getting things in, but how do we get something good out? How can we make meaningful connections between all of this stuff, and make constellations out of all these stars?

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/frank-chimero

    Frank Chimero is a graphic designer and illustrator. He makes pictures about words and words about pictures. His fascination with the creative process, curiosity, and visual experience informs all of his work. Each piece is part of an exploration in finding wit, surprise, and joy in the world around us, then, trying to document those things with all deliberate speed.

    —Huffduffed by marks

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