Resonate 2016
I’ve been asked to share my most memorable experiences from the Resonate conference and festival earlier this year.
Kevin Walker of Royal College of Arts’ Information Experience Design programme (whose students I had the pleasure to meet when I ran a workshop at the RCA earlier this year) spoke on the topic of resonance.
He discussed physical, sonic and social resonance and went on to compare the oscillation between research and practice inherent in design practice; hypothesising & concepting, learning & making. By switching between doing and thinking we expand our knowledge while also grounding it in practice. This is important to keep in mind regardless of what we’re currently working on. I feel that is the essence of design and prototyping; to produce a response to a situation in order to probe, examine and explore that situation.
Here you can see more about how Kevin and his students have been exploring the concept of resonance.
Kevin also showed Eames’ amazing Powers of ten film, which is always worth watching one more time.
Karsten Schmidt put on a good show talking about tech, programming languages, their philosophy and education. He mentioned how our ideals are baroque and how our shining city looks more like a shanty town in reality. How people may be empowered in their use of technology; to edit the code rather than just executing it — to be an author rather than a user. How we need to find ways to dig deeper and learn how to understand code and not just copy & paste from sites like Stack Overflow. And how we can change the monoculture of tech to be more diverse, by lowering thresholds and inviting people who might otherwise not be able to influence the tech that they’re subjected. All very good points.
If we continue building our tech in the way we have been, we will uphold the divide between producers and consumers.
Is this what we want?
He practices what he preaches and a lot ot of Karsten’s current work goes into Thi.ng, a repository of his open source code.
Another great speaker was James Auger (of Auger-Loizeau & Crap Futures) who reminded us of the crazy unsustainable upgrade culture that we’re part of (new iPhones!) and shared some of his current thinking.
He’s now teaching in various places but based in Madeira where he’s looking to host residencies and workshops around redesigning systems and creating sustainable responses to the challenges of the local inhabitants. An example of a system in need of change is energy production and distribution; a one way system primed for consumption. With local production and storage, this resource will be valued and treated differently. One such experiment can be viewed here, and make sure to read about Mohammed’s previous work here.
Memo Akten also gave interesting talk, and kindly shared a transcript here.
The festival programme keeps improving and the highlight this year was Squarepusher with a brilliant show.
If you want to join Resonate next year, the tickets are on sale now.
