Curated by Paola Antonelli the exhibition brings together diverse design projects that haven’t been highlighted before and includes numerous projects that we know and admire from around the world. From interfaces, appliances, products, installations, films, websites, games, to speculative objects, tools, visualisations, and information systems, the exhibition bravely takes on contemporary design head-on:

21st-century culture is centered on interaction: “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

The two projects, Immaterials and Nearness, both produced with BERG, are featured as films. Both of these projects translate obscure and often misunderstood technologies (like RFID) in a way that directly resonates with the exhibition’s intentions:

“Designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.”

It’s good that such design research work can be placed in a culturally potent setting, and that otherwise overlooked aspects of contemporary design is exhibited to such a broad audience. In it’s related review of BERG’s work, the New York Times talks about the work in Talk to Me:

“Technology has tremendous potential to enhance our lives, if — and it is a big if — it can be “translated” into forms that make it useful, attractive and accessible. Otherwise even the most promising technological advances risk seeming so opaque and intimidating that we will not make the most of them.”

The exhibition has been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others. It runs until 7 November 2011. We highly recommend it! Do check it out if you are in NYC.

More pictures from the opening event. And if you can’t make it, watch the two films here:

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The Touch project has a new exhibition in collaboration with the Record project at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design.

In recent years we have witnessed the growth of a new breed of consumer products and services that are a hybrid of tangible atoms and online bits. This exhibition offers a selection of products, demonstrators, videos and art objects that highlight the ways in which online social media now are becoming an important part of the functionality, design and desirability of new products and services. As products and services become increasingly digital and disappear into screens, Hybrids exemplifies some alternative strategies, where some of the magic of the social web seep out into the physical world through tangible things.

There are a number of products and services on show, including a new project by Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen:

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3. New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations......

In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations of radio ‘spaces’ are overlaid into urban spaces. The film has been made as a follow up to this video experiment and has been specifically designed for exhibition in HABITAR at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition description:

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

There are photos of the exhibition by Edgar Gonzalez here. The exhibition catalogue with essays by Anne Galloway, Usman Haque, Nicolas Nova and others is available to download here.

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Today has been spent setting up the exhibition space, which consists of three interactive installations that show various aspects of Touch design, innovation and research work including Anne Galloway’s Re/touch and many of the Touch design projects.

The exhibition itself is free to the public, so if you are in Oslo please drop by, and there will be more on the exhibition here next week.

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This week the the MA interaction design course Tangible Interactions is having its summer exhibition at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The students have been focusing on designing interactions with RFID technology. This years exhibition includes games, token-based media, transactions, wayshowing, a story-telling pillow, ‘twittering’ things and more.

The exhibition is a part of AHO Works.

• 9-12 June 2008 09:00-18:00 in the AHO library (map)
• Official opening 11 June 17:00
• @ Underskog
• Tangible Interactions course blog

• AHO Interaction design Flickr group

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Both are interactive and are running at the exhibition for you to try them out.

Sniff is also featured in the DESIGNBOKEN 2008 from the Norwegian Design Council.

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The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we created with Helsinki-based Thinglink was a great success. There are a few photos of the event from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. The local newspaper Evening Chronicle wrote a story on the exhibition:

Expect a write-up of the experience soon.

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