Brian Lucid

The Fresh Media Exhibition Catalog by John Howrey & Gabi Schaffzin is now available to purchase at Blurb.

The Deja Vu bag, co-created by DMI graduate student Nicole Tariverdian, boasts an RFID system that helps you to remember important items like your wallet, keys, and cell phone. 

A video demo of the bag is here. Just attach custom RFID tags to your objects, turn on the bag, and you’re all set. The bag will automatically scan items as they enter and leave, keeping track of what’s inside. A simple squeeze of the soft button and the LED display will light up to show which items are accounted for.

The bags are currently on sale at Etsy.

Download a PDF of the Dynamic Media Institute’s latest publication: The Experience of Dynamic Media. The book documents five years of graduate-level research in dynamic media, and more. 

A more official blurb: On the occasion of our tenth anniversary, we are very pleased to present The Experience of Dynamic Media — the second book publication of the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Combined with the previous, entitled The Language of Dynamic Media published in 2005, the books cover work from the Dynamic Media Institute between 2000 and 2010. This edition is organized in several sections and includes short essays by DMI professors and visiting faculty, student work through articles excerpted from the larger thesis documents, examples of extracurricular projects which were developed between DMI and outside partners, a series of DMI student-curated exhibitions, a selection of essays written by current DMI students, short accounts of six DMI alumni sharing their thoughts on the DMI experience, all MFA degree thesis abstracts from 2006 to 2010.

For those of you close to Boston: The Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design presents Krzysztof Wodiczko: Works, the 2011 DMI Annual Lecture on Friday, March 18 at 6:00 pm.

Wodiczko, a celebrated artist whose video and sound installations have appeared in galleries and public spaces on nearly every continent, will discuss his latest projects and explore the potential of video, performance, and public artworks to draw attention to the most important overlooked social issues of our time.

The lecture is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required.

Hoopism debuts an Interactive video collection of the most important and amazing shots in NBA history, mapped by location and year.

Hoopism.com is a repository for two brothers to share their passion for all things basketball. Jason Bailey is an alumni of the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art. Matt Bailey is a software engineer interested in data visualization and interaction.

Lots of other fun Basketball stat visualizations are available on the site as well.

Hoopism has visualized the results of every NBA slam dunk contest… with video. Every NBA slam dunk contest (1984 to 2010) has been broken down by dunk, year, and score. You can see video footage of the actual dunk by clicking on the circles in the graph.

Hoopism.com is a repository for two brothers to share their passion for all things basketball. Jason Bailey is an alumni of the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art. Matt Bailey is a software engineer interested in data visualization and interaction.

Lots of other fun Basketball stat visualizations are available on the site as well.

mikemai:

Question NO.2

Isn’t knowing how to design layouts enough? Why should designers learn to code?

Brian answers »

For designers, nothing ever seems to be enough! As designers, we are both the victims and beneficiaries of a discipline that no longer has clear boundaries. We are expected to be visual, conceptual and highly technical. Not every designer can, or needs to, meet this rigorous standard—every designer needs to find the balance that is right for them – but I personally endorse the idea that designers should have a fundamental understanding of code.

Understand that when I define “coding” I am referring to systems that employ programmatic logic, not markup languages like HTML and CSS. Over the past few years we have seen an explosion of new languages designed for visual work. Never have there been so many options, or resources, for visual artists and designers who want to explore computation.

I feel designers should learn to code for two reasons:

1. Design has become increasingly focused upon the flow of information, meaning that designers now must work with real-time content that is generated from multiple sources and is often almost entirely removed from context. This creates a unique set of design problems, problems best solved not with static forms of design, but with dynamic ones. Programming gives us the tools to develop systems that filter, organize, normalize and visualize content in ways that our traditional tools cannot.
 
2. The fundamentals that programming teaches — system, logic, iteration, randomness to name a few— are fundamental concepts that must be understood when working in a design landscape where the computer and the network sit at the core of the medium.

On Wednesday, Brian will give his opinions on WYSIWYG editors. Stay tuned.