Design and the Elastic Mind

After reading Arturo's post, A Place for Artists to Step In, I took a look at some of the videos posted for the "Design and the Elastic Mind" show. A video about visualization introduced me a work of Laura Kurgan called "The Million Dollar Block Project". In this project, Kurgan creates a map that is divided into city blocks. The blocks where one million dollars or more is spent on keeping people in prison or taking care of people between prison terms are colored red. Such places as Brooklyn, with over 300 such blocks, suddenly become difficult to ignore. This project succeeds in taking a lot of information, condensing it, and making it visually accessible with few words of explanation needed. The curator points out that though it would be easy to ignore such information if it were mentioned in the daily paper, it is difficult to ignore the same information when presented in such a powerful way. She goes on to say that such methods give designers power to influence policy.

I'd like to learn more about data visualization and take a look at Processing. Ben Fry, working with this concept, made a work that showed how chimps have only 9 different genes than humans. Though I've heard this before, I've never seen a visual representation of the information. Now that I have, the information has become much more meaningful and will stick with me at a deeper level. Next time I look at a chimp, I'll remember no doubt remember this work and look at the chimp in a new way.

In another video that talked about 3-D modeling I was introduced to 3D printing. This allows designers to design objects in the air with the motion of their fingers. A sketch is simultaneously rendered in the computer at the same time. This sketch can be sent to a resin/laser chamber where such objects as furniture can be "carved" with lasers. I found the process fascinating, though I can't say that I actually liked the end result.