Marek Walczak is an artist and architect who is interested in how people participate in phsycial and virtual spaces. This has led to digital tools and interactive projects such as Apartment which was shown at the Whitney Museum and many venues worldwide. Dialog Table has recently been completed for the Walker Art Center, it is a shared interface that replaces a keyboard and mouse with gesture recognition technology. Current projects bridge physical installations with user interaction, including a one block long façade at 7 World Trade Center that reacts to pedestrians walking beneath it (for James Carpenter Design) and video installations that activate physical space based on user engagement such as Third Person, recently shown at the ICA, London. Marek trained as an architect at the Architectural Assoc. in London and Cooper Union in New York.

John F. Simon, Jr. is an artist who uses programming language as an activated extension of written language. His software programs are displayed on the web and also on wall-mounted LCD screens. His software compositions never repeat. The beautiful patterns and movement emerge from Simon’s process of considering computer coding as a kind of creative writing. He is currently making an artist’s book about his software drawing tools that will be published by Printed Matter in New York City.

John Simon’s work has been included in the Whitney Museum’s 2000 Biennial and Bitstreams in 2001. He was selected to receive the Aldrich Museum Trustee’s Award for an Emerging Artist in fall 2000. His software panel works have been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

He holds an MFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and a Masters degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis.

He lives in New York City with his wife Elizabeth.

W. Bradford Paley is an interaction designer and artist whose focus in both worlds is readable, clear, and engaging expression of complex data. His visual representations are inspired by the calm, richly layered information in natural scenes. His process invokes three perspectives: rendering methods used by fine artists and graphic artists are informed by their possible underpinnings in human perception, then applied to creating narrowly-scoped, almost idiosyncratic representations whose visual semantics are driven by the real-world metaphors of the experts who know the domains best.

Brad did his first computer graphics in 1973, founded Digital Image Design Incorporated (didi.com) in 1982, and started doing financial & statistical data visualization in 1986. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; he created TextArc.org; he is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; has received multiple grants and awards for both art and design, and his designs are at work every day in the hands of brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, and is director of Information Esthetics: a fledgling interdisciplinary group exploring the creation and interpretation of data representations that are both readable and esthetically satisfying.

“…Lacan reminds his students over and over to stop trying to understand everything, because understanding is ultimately a form of defense, of bringing everything back to what is known. The more you try to understand, the less you hear—the less you can hear something new and different.”

Rama Chorpash Design focuses on how divergent cultures can celebrate existence through design. Through his New York atelier, Rama designs benchmark products, electronics, packaging, environments and furniture. Work ranges from consultancy, entrepreneurship to objects of provocation. Projects are done just a few at a time, thus employ a high level of personal dedication.

Rama has had a studio in São Paulo Brazil focusing on product development in Latin America. He has been a Senior Project Manager/Designer with ECCO Design, helped found the Swatch Lab New York as well as worked for DM9 / DDB Brazil. He has designed for: Herman Miller, Cisneros Group, Carlos Miele, Hewlett Packard, and Colgate.

Rama’s work has been shown in Central Park in collaboration with ‘assue vivid astro focus’ for the 2004 New York Public Art Fund and Whitney Biennial. His works have also been exhibited in the Bienal da Prata in Portugal with Frank O Ghery, Alvaro Siza and the Campana brothers, TKNY, as well as the Museum of Modern Art show, ‘Workspheres: Design and Contemporary Work Styles’.

Rama received his BFA from the California College of Art (CCA) in 1993. He is an assistant professor at the University of the Arts as well as an outside critic and lecturer.

The island in Midsummer Night’s Dream is intelligent, Caliban quiets his friends when they were frightened by it. The text here was taken and translated automatically many times over from English to German to English - a babel device created by Jonathan Feinberg - it produced new cadences to an ancient text.

This fear and love we have, our will assuaged by our private domain. Consciousness then exists in a place, as when you visit an apartment of someone recently died, their presence still rests there.
Marek Walczak

coming?

As interfaces mature into being windows onto the data feeds that people care about (e-mail, calendars, news) the varying degrees of consciousness or intelligence behind these feeds should be drawn to reflect varying degrees of self-directedness–evoking presences from table to refrigerator to TV to dog to phone to AI assistant: richer, more organic imagery to
represent richer data, plain imagery to evoke simple processes.
Brad Paley

who knows?

To plant is to put in place – control. Wander off the beaten path into wilderness, and plants reveal their sentience. In the kingdom of living beings, they are independent from us. Beauty lies in their province. How might our interfaces exhibit such qualities of splendor: autonomy, wildness and variance?
Rama Chorpash

Martin Wattenberg and I are thinking of a project called ‘House’ : People move through a space, if they go up to a wall, openings appear, if they go through an opening a space beyond is created. So you ‘path’ the space into existance. Its interesting that Rama is interested in that which we touch in our space, and John in the combinations of unfolding of a space.
Marek Walczak

I think a very under-explored aspect of information presentation, especially on websites with dynamic content, is the reinforcement of pathways and preferences. I identified with Rama’s path example, especially with the ideas of pattern formation/learning and amplification. The junk filter in Apple’s mail program is so good that it makes me hopeful for adaptive news filters and intelligent presentation. Consider someone using a piece of software, not from scratch each time, but evolving patterns and growing with it. The software should have the capacity to learn.
John Simon Jr

Jakub builds sophisticated video recognition software that can interpret hand postures as input commands for a computer. I believe using the hand itself as a symbol is less exploitative of typical hand use than using the hand to manipulate a tool: few populations use hands for symbolic communication, and even those that do it constantly (brokers, hearing-impaired) do it as a result of constraints (too much sound; not enough). Even those individuals use their hands for tool and object manipulation as much or more than they do for symbolic communication. Hands evolved before symbols–they’re tuned for manipulation, not representation.

I think the universal means of symbolic hand interaction here could be pushed back a level to be the universal technology of interpreted vision. And the means should be different tools–tuned for each different task.

The same software can be used to recognize tools, as Jakub has beautifully done in his human/machine image above. I believe this use could be vastly more effective for certain tasks because:

• The hand would be used for what evolution “designed” it for
• The hand might use the same tool in different ways for different operation modes–as a pencil is used to draw, and upside-down to erase
• The physical tool will comfortably comport the hand, avoiding the need for uncomfortable hand-posture lock
• The feel of the tool may suggest how it can be used
• The look and feel of the tool can bring back memories and associations of interaction modes for specific tasks
• A tool might be more recognizable than hand postures for the system
• The hand posture may be more easily misinterpreted mid-action, “lost,” causing task flow interruption & restart.

Brad Paley

maybe he’ll do something

John Simon found a portable baby sonogram. Freeing such cumbersome technology from a conventional CPU and hospital local opens up many novel uses. As technology becomes portable, interface should help guide it’s potential. It could be adapted to check seed content in watermelons while shopping, or used by plumbers to find clogs in a pipe, or by fishermen to know if their catch has roe and should be thrown back.
Rama Chorpash

This is a still from the piece Third Person, which I am developing with Jakub Segen. On the screen people see themselves - if they are still. However, as they move they are ‘averaged’, meaning they look a little like a Muybridge photo. At the same time, as they are active, a ‘third person’ appears. In this case, as the two people in the foreground move, a black curtain behind them becomes ‘invisible’, revealing a lady cleaning the bookshelves.
Marek Walczak

This is my ‘Unfolding Object’ software. It is a simple square that may be unfolded along any side. The marks on each face tally the number of times that face has been unfolded. Each person’s decisions determine the shape the object takes. Each square of the object has identical code for unfolding and transfers it to the new pages it opens. The potential for every shape the object can take is contained in the code for the the first single square.
John Simon Jr

Different attributes engaged me in these very different objects. Could I combine what intrigued me about each in a single tool? I wondered what sort of problem domain might let me create a tool that: Fit the hand like the saw tooth straightener. Would suggest to the body how it should be used as the drill does. Might feel as resilient as the rubber bands. Have the gorgeous & subtle tactility of the emu egg’s surface, and Express its “content” as differently as the stiff steel versus the liquid copper slinky.
Brad Paley

coming?

Clapping and Knitting Few objects unify bodily polarities (left and right), as does the slinky. Pouring coil back and forth is a centering meditation for child and adult alike. We write with one hand, but type with two. Technology can form us into a cohesive body, or fragment us. Which is better: backpack or handbag, faucet or faucets, steering wheel or joystick?
Rama Chorpash

What if the environment could respond to your body’s gestures? As you walk the street your action suggest possible replies from the environment, either from electronic infrastructures or even people passing by?
Marek Walczak

My wife is pregnant and so we have a sonogram at our checkup every month. It is an amazing technology which made me wish I had it to play with. Why not compact the electronics and mass market the sonogram to plug into the PC? Something similar has been done years ago for microscopes.

Well, the web connected world moves faster than my imagination. No sooner had I wished it than I found this device made by a Chinese company…
John Simon Jr

coming…

The artist Abraham Cuellar makes rubber bands that have been silver and gold leafed. They have a quality of disposability and preciousness wrapped together, and don’t quite fit any easy category. People find them intriguing and somehow love them and use them for unexpected things. I like to think of them as Buddhist jewelry.
Seamus Moran

Stores once X-rayed shoes on feet to check fit. We’re surrounded by invisible fields - some harmless, many potentially dangerous. This illustration imagines a screen that would allow us to sense the invisible. It could see in real-time electromagnetic waves of a cell phone, or a blue-tooth field, or the heat of ones body. Playing with the invisible would allow us to better recognize imperceptible interaction. Spheres we may want to expand or censor.
Rama Chorpash

Overlaid images by Lequeu, a French architect-artist of the 18th century. A time of classification. Diderot’s encyclopedia etc. Later Darwin says that human expressions are equivalent across cultures and today we know that the muscle’s in the face act involuntarily to emotional stimulus, and we’ve classified expressions accordingly.
Marek Walczak

to come

I have come to believe that a “universal means” is not desirable. User interfaces that reduce everything a common interaction pattern seem to imply everything’s the same–they squeeze the life out of the world’s variability and ignore distinctions that help us remember things and bring to mind the different mental operations we use on different kinds of information.

Here I show the huge variability in the way we name relationships and distinctions. We can see that the English language richly differentiates among kinds of relationships and the ways entities can be distinguished. Using the same means for all entities and relationships is a crime against the beautiful complexity of the universe; it’s a misguided gesture towards simplification as a way to help people remember how to operate on things in a interface–seeming to stem from the idea that people are stupid so if you give them fewer rules to remember they do better.

In fact, people deal with ten thousand objects and relationships a day in ten thousand different ways, and I’ve rarely seen someone try to operate on a bicycle as they do a fish. It’s the rich distinction in their physical forms that activates completely different mental tool sets, enabling easy heterogeneous operations on heterogeneous objects. As interface designers
we should not be looking for ways to make everything look & act the same, but make things suggest to us how they should be manipulated–as they do in life.
Brad Paley

I reorganized my library by colour of books, and I love it and I learnt some new things about books. I need more yellow books, the black books are pretty serious, there are lots of bland pinky coloured books that I feel like throwing away. As a metaphor, organizing anything by colour create unlikely juxtapositions.
Seamus Moran

PDA’s have keyboards with text capacity of a PC. Although email function is similar, scalability of interface is not. Aside from voice, digital tools have been bound to our digits. Shouldn’t a universal controller be scalable? Must we always rely on our hands?
Rama Chorpash

The hand is a tool. But its actions are marked by patterns of movements as much as specific gestures. So to create interfaces for pervasive computing, we would design from the activity, from the work required not from the tools. Hm. Perhaps we need to crack pattern matching first.
Marek Walczak

I love the compiler. It is a universal tool for a universal machine. It is a word processor that processes words into works.

If you can imagine the steps, you can code them. But it is better than this because you don’t even need to imagine. If you start with a loop and improvise, you can discover what you can’t imagine.
John Simon Jr

A tool should engage with people in such a way that it enhances one’s capabilities. These two kinds of storage situate information in a space that’s both tactile and differentiated. The fact that it’s tactile taps into the kinesthetic sense and spatial memory; differentiation of storage bins allows one to mnemonically associate the contents with the location.
Brad Paley

Completely remaking something and thinking through how and why it all fits together seems a useful tool, this is an extreme example “…the Inner Shrine at Ise was first built in 4 B.C.E, the Outer Shrinein 478C.E. Every twenty years for well over a thousand years the all-wood shrine has been totally reconstructed - a perfect replica built next to the previous building…Ise is the world’s greatest monument to continuity - an unbroken lineage of structure, records, and tradition on a humid, earthquake-prone, volcanic island. Ise ancient rites are alive and meaningful.” Stewart Brand
Seamus Moran

Binding Competition - ‘Binder Clips’ are sold in office supply stores for combining a stack of letter size paper. However, beyond their intended use lie a multitude of others. Allowing users to come up with individual solutions to problems, this inexpensive tool competes directly with specially manufactured products. They compel us to employ creative and innovative responses to the everyday.
Rama Chorpash

This is a movie, originally the perfect interface I thought was the human head and was going to stretch it out flat as you do. So I like how the nose and ears are going, having lots of them, so where is the nose and eye when they are displaced? A sensorium. The distributed nose, or the distributed eye.
Marek Walczak

I think the perfect interface is the one which works for me today and allows me to work today. I don’t want to relearn all the shortcuts and secrets every year.

That being said, I really do think the Macintosh interface is great and has been much improved in System X. The switch to System X was painless for me - everything was in the same place but worked better.
John Simon Jr

A “perfect interface” would be one that effectively taps into the incredible capabilities people have for processing natural scenes. For example trees are incredibly complex, yet their structure is easily discernable.

I’m not saying that we should slavishly copy nature and make every interface look like a landscape. But if we look at the specific mechanisms that humans use to extract information from the scenes we were evolved to understand, we may be able to tune our interface techniques to show us things in the way we can grasp them most easily.

For instance, fruits ripen along a green-yellow-red spectrum–spanning the most recently acquired color channel (green to red) that our eyes use to encode color. We could use this deeply-wired continuum in an inventory system to show maturing, ready-to-sell stock, as red. This would make it stand out, as well as unconsciously saying “ripe & ready to pick.”
Brad Paley

I’ve been learning Flash because I’ve been wanting to animate older abstract paintings, and these are Argentine abstract paintings from the 1950’s. The one on the right. If you see the painting, the canvas is decaying, the original idea was much more a pure thing. and so my proposal is that the smooth computer surface is the ideal interface for these ideas.
Seamus Moran

It deals with trail making, a design approach seen in 60’s university architectural planning. Students were allowed to freely traverse their newly built campus for a period of time before the designer instituted their paths as permanent walkways. Perfect interface allows for pattern learning and amplification of what’s working. Interface here is not a plan but a process.
Rama Chorpash

The interactive table for the Walker Art Center. I just liked these girls and what they are saying, things like ‘This one reminds me of my aunt because that was a black cat really…..” and they are all chatting and putting icons together of paintings in the museum. So you’re seeing the machine and the social situation.
Marek Walczak

Part of this little book I am working on those are all single stroke vertical lines and the differences that the drawing tool in between the hand gesture and the drawing. Its based on speed, the interface is influenced by the code in between your hand and what you finally see. That’s been my position on programming, that you cant ignore that, or that you can explore that creatively.
John Simon Jr

My work in making information more meaningful to people revolves around two key ideas: that information should be presented in a way better tuned to human perceptual abilities (for example, I typically make “information objects” rather than tables). And the best way to make information more easily understood is to design the representation around the way that the user thinks.

This image contrasts a standard table, which must be read to be interpreted, with a table of information objects. The shapes and colors are tuned to the specific job: blue=buy, red=sell; left=buy, right-pointing=sell; dark=new, light=seen; no color=completed. In this way we get the perceptual system instantly to do things that perviously had to be extracted by reading. The most important function demands the most visual attention, assuring attention where it’s needed.
Brad Paley

This wallet contains a lot of objects that we carry with us but function as intermediaries in the our interactions with machines. Subway cards we swipe to get on trains, phone cards that get us on the telecommunications network, credit cards that link to global supercomputers storing our data, and keys to locks to let us into our houses. I love going to houses in the woods or on beaches where I can put all these things away, and forget about all these machines for a while.
Seamus Moran

Machines have specific zones of human touch, and areas without. You can take any object from coffee cup to a pay phone and chart contact points. Yet touch can be distant, such as with virtual interfaces. We’re often not touching an actual machine, but rather a system of linkages (be it mechanical or electrical). Prescribing boundaries of connections is one way to define what is a ‘thing’ vs. boundless system.
Rama Chorpash