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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A quote from the jury (in Norwegian):

Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen og Einar Sneve Martinussen er designere og forskere som jobber med design, media og teknologi. De har base ved Institutt for design ved Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo, der de formgir, underviser og forsker i skjæringspunktet mellom interaktive produkter og utforskning av digital teknologi og kommunikasjon. Gjennom sine forskningsprosjekter er de blitt en betydelig stemme i forskningsmiljøet, og har vakt internasjonal oppsikt i fag- og populærtidsskrifter. Deres tilnærming til designforskning er praktisk – de designer for å forklare.

De har utviklet nye metoder for å påvise usynlige teknologiske og sosiale sammenhenger, og bruker visuelle midler til å forklare interaksjonsdesign og ny teknologi. Alt er gjort med en god sans for internettkultur og populærkultur.

Det siste store prosjektet de er involvert i er YOUrban, der design forklarer teknologiens effekter på byen. At deres siste video ‘Immaterials lightpainting WiFi’ har rundet 600 000 visninger på nettet og er omtalt i en rekke globale media, sier noe om deres påvirkningskraft.

Arnall, Knutsen og Martinussen har undervist og påvirket flere kull av interaksjonsdesignere til å tenke forbi skjermen, og til å ta i bruk elektronikk og kode som materialer.

Alongside Arnall, Knutsen and Martinussen the nominees are Batlak og Selvig and Yokoland. The award will be given on the 7th September.

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“The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.” – Adam Greenfield (2009)

Immaterials: light painting WiFi film by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen.

This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

This builds on a technique that was invented for the 2009 film ‘Immaterials: the Ghost in the Field’ which probed the edges of the invisible fields that surround RFID readers and tags in the world. It also began a series of investigations into what Matt Jones richly summarised as ‘Immaterials’.

While we were mapping out tiny RFID fields, we wondered what it would be like to apply the light painting process to larger-scale fields of Bluetooth, WiFi, GSM and 3G. What if we built huge light painting apparatus that could map out architectural and city-scale networks in the places and spaces they inhabited? We’re still very interested in understanding radio and wireless networks as one of the substrates essential to contemporary design practice.

We built the WiFi measuring rod, a 4-metre tall probe containing 80 lights that respond to the Received Signal Strength (RSSI) of a particular WiFi network. When we walk through architectural, urban spaces with this probe, while taking long-exposure photographs, we visualise the cross-sections, or strata, of WiFi signal strength, situated within photographic urban scenes. The cross-sections are an abstraction of WiFi signal strength, a line graph of RSSI across physical space. Although it can be used to determine actual signal strength at a given point, it is much more interesting as a way of seeing the overall pattern, the relative peaks and the troughs situated in the surrounding physical space.

After a week of walking through urban spaces holding and photographing this instrument, we have a much better sense of the qualities of WiFi in urban spaces, its random crackles, bright and dim spots, its reaction to the massing of buildings, and its broad reach through open areas. The resulting images show some of these qualities, and light painting is a brilliant medium for situating visualisations and data into physical world locations and situations.

Lots more visualisations and ‘making of’ pictures.

Einar writes more about this in an upcoming article called ‘Making material of the Networked City’ in Design Innovation for the Built Environment – Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice. There is also more detail on the project at the YOUrban weblog.

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One of the first long-exposure photographs that proved the mapping technique.

Adam Greenfield uses the work to reflect on how design decisions about seemingly small details—such as the range of an RFID reader—can have significant implications for wider systems and infrastructures:

“Rather than asserting “an RFID” as some eternal given, something that will produce the same linear, determinate effect each and every time it is deployed, Immaterials reminds us that the choice of material, shape, size, direction, orientation and power rating of the components involved have distinct consequences for the uses to which those components can be put. And as we’ve seen, these choices can produce effects on levels seemingly entirely removed from the interaction itself.”

Dan Hill goes back to the ‘invisibility’ of electricity and relates the work to his own experiments looking at the immaterial aspects of the city:

“In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. ”

Here in the discussion Mitchell Whitelaw responds to what he sees as the false opposition between material and immaterial, suggesting transmaterial as a suitable alternative term for the new kinds of materials that we are working with. Have a look at Mitchell’s weblog for more on the term transmaterial and ‘expanded computing’.

The technically focused audience at Slashdot questioned the reasons for doing such a study. A common criticism here is that manufacturers data sheets and computer simulations should be able to give us a quicker and more accurate model of the interaction:

“For a theoretical/measured depiction they could just read the reader manufacturer’s data sheet, which will almost certainly contain a diagram of the antenna sensitivity pattern in a couple of planes and probably some concrete figures.”

“The subtlety seems to be that they’re not plotting an RF field, they’re plotting the volume in which the passive tag will respond to an RF field (of a given strength). It’s another level of abstraction. Yes, once somebody has come up with the idea then the implementation looks simple enough, but the idea is quite remarkable.”

“The main reason they did this is to map out the field interaction between the RFID tag and the reader, which is not a trivial thing to visualize based on the two data sheets.”

Also discussed here was a technical point that raises wider concerns about privacy, security and eavesdropping:

“Remember, anything radio is not theoretically limited in range. Only practical implementations have set limits. ”

“Yes, but RFID passive responses very quickly go below ambient background noise, in effect limiting even the theoretical range to 1-2 m for all but most exotic radio-noise free environments.”

This discussion shows that—even though we are keen for these images to be used as material in the discussion of privacy and the problem of invisibility—the physical limitations for snooping or eavesdropping are more complex. And if we then take RFID systems as a whole, there are far wider concerns that are much broader than physical/spatial relationships such as the long-term storage of data on travelcard or passport usage for instance.

A glimpse behind the scenes of the Immaterials filmmaking.

We received lots of emails and comments from specialists involved in radio and antenna design, who saw the visualisations as empirical evidence:

From Paul B. via email:

“I’ve worked in both passive and active RFID for about 15 years and want to congratulate you on the very effective and entertaining visualizations. I’ve done my share of winding coils, blinking LEDs and have created diagrams mapping fields so I know how hard it is to make something that is useful and actually helps non-tech people understand the weird world of RFID.”

From Dave H. via email:

“We have had to use huge anechoic chambers with massive parabolic reflectors and extremely stable transmitters to measure the field strength pattern of antennae. I know it’s a world away from that sort of large scale tech but your RFID visualisations blew me away. It’s fantastic. A brilliant idea. And it works perfectly.”

And finally some kind words from both Fast Company:

“As technology progresses, we need better symbols to understand all the gadgets and electrical hubbub that surrounds us. What could be better than symbols that actually reveal a bit about how a technology works?”

And the Helsinki Design Lab 2010:

“Rarely does one have the opportunity to watch a discourse take large strides, but I get the feeling that’s exactly what we’re witnessing as Touch/BERG elaborate nearfield communications as something with nuance – in other words, as a material.”

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