Video clip on YouTube

David Carroll, Sven Travis, Benjamin Bacon, and Haiyan Huang debuted their mobile media installation, “1000 Cellphones” at the opening of Synthetic Times 2008, a media arts exhibition at The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, as a Cultural Olympics venue.

1000 Cellphones is comprised of custom bluejacking and bluetracking software visualizing active devices on four aligned flat-panel displays mounted in the foyer of the museum’s café.

The software extracts the last six digits from discovered device MAC address ID signifiers gathered by the tracking tools. It then converts these digits to an RGB Color HEX value, and renders a 2D perspective particle in virtual space. Device names animate across the screen, revealing radio identification evidence of the most recent 10 devices found.

In addition, devices are bluetooth push “spammed” mysterious photographs to willing device users.

The custom PULL software tools were written in Python, mySQL, PHP, XML and ActionScript 3.0. PUSH tools are “off the shelf” Bluetooth spammers.

“1000 Cellphones” and the Synthetic Times exhibition remain on view through July 3, 2008 at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China.

• View photo gallery of Synthetic Times 2008 Exhibition
• View photo gallery of 1000 Cellphones Process Documentation
• Visit official Synthetic Times website

The professorial site’s URL identifier has been streamlined to an expressively concise:

»»» dave.parsons.edu

Update your bookmarks. Here you can see Ivan Sutherland busy updating his link to my site on the TK2.

It has been awhile since posting to mercurious. However, we’ve been hard at work updating our academic site. This site now documents recent student work:

• Freshmen Processing work
• Muzzi, the digital pet —music player hybrid
• Info Wraps, a mobile informatics research project

It also now features a commercial work samples page that highlights an eight-year career in the interactive media industry. Perhaps the most interesting additions include ancient works from the vault, some almost a decade old.

In fact, getting this site together in this manner has been long overdue.

» New and improved professorial site on parsons.edu

On Teaching Mobile Application Design at Parsons

Dr. Dobb’s Journal, legendary software design publication, published our phone interview on its web portal yesterday on the subject of teaching mobile media design at Parsons Communication Design & Technology. John Dorsey, the editor of Dr. Dobb’s, offered probing questions that got at the nature of the program, the challenges of teaching Flash for application design, and how various tools and platforms can fit together in a technology curriculum at the service of the arts. This is all very interesting when you consider Dr. Dobb’s target audience, clearly hard-core coders and application developers. It’s a good sign when engineer-types are starting to take what’s going on in art and design schools more seriously. These distinctions are very much starting to blur.

» Interview

Web Ink for Mobile Media Curriculum

Adobe published a case study on my work with students at Parsons Communication Design & Technology in the area of mobile media design.

As a professor of media design at Parsons The New School for Design, I was invited on Chinese grant funds to teach a month-long intensive design workshop at the Art and Design Academy at Tsinghua University in Beijing as part of China’s recent national initiative to embrace Western modes of thinking and educational approaches. Tsinghua is one of China’s most prestigious and perhaps well-funded institutions, often compared to MIT as a bastion of brainy, competitive, but brilliant national minds. Judging by the newly opened art academy building designed by American architectural firm, 70 million RMB (US$ 9.3 million) is a small price to pay for a world-class design education facility. Indeed, compared to our cramped quarters at Parsons, somewhat scattered throughout real-estate challenged Greenwich Village, I was afflicted with space lust as I wandered, upon arrival, through a dizzying maze of studios, workspaces, classrooms, offices, galleries, art supply and book stores. The academy even sports a Starbucks-style coffee shop where baristas pull lattes for a fraction of the cost of our all-too-familiar daily grandé. The more I discovered about the Tsinghua Art and Design academy, the more I appreciated how the university, and by-proxy, the Chinese government, invests heavily in the importance of a Westernized (or maybe Globalized) higher learning design education. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if America’s investment in our own creative capital could measure up. The last time I checked back home, primary and secondary art education was being eviscerated in favor of test prep education, art college enrollments were flat and the national mood was generally complacent and decadent. Clearly, being here, it is understood that China’s globalizing ambitions imagine itself someday becoming the world’s creative agency, and not just its factory.

This idea is underscored when considering the process of designing many of the identity systems for China’s current national obsession: preparing for the 2008 Olympiad, as it extends its unique culture, language and hospitality to the rest of the world. Typically in the West, design products, such as a visual identity system, are outsourced to a private design agency, through an arduous and competitive design bid process. Rather than become the mother client for its homegrown but nascent design firm industry, China tapped its own universities, in keeping with its deeply historical respect for scholars. Instead of farming out the work to lowest bidding, but hottest design and branding firm, the Beijing Olympic Committee ‘hired’ its own university design professors to create for the Olympics 2008. In particular, the official mascots of Beijing 2008 were conceived and born in these shiny new halls of the Art and Design Academy under the direction of Professor Wu, a high-ranking member of the Party. Although, somewhat insipidly and overly cute by Western standards, the set of five mascots cleverly epitomize cultural memes of China, symbolize aspects of the Olympic spirit, the elements of nature, and even form a language pun in Mandarin, when their names are properly sequenced. They are unmistakably an inside job. Until the court of public opinion meets next summer along with merchandising sales and media ratings, the verdict is out on Fuwa, the Five Friendlies.
During my workshop with a group of 23 second-year Tsinghua Art Academy undergraduates, I easily encountered their reputation to be hard working, competitive, and brilliant. However, I also confirmed some of the stereotypes originating from preconceived notions about Chinese students. These students lacked some of the core conceptual capabilities notable in their Parsons counterparts, especially the ability to think critically and innovate rather than absorb and merely emulate. They also seemed to suffer from an obsession with cute character culture, an influential import from neighbors Japan and Korea.

I knew that I was brought here to broaden their perspectives, and export not only my practical experience working in the New York City interactive design industry, but also to engender an appreciation for original thinking, true creativity, and help them discover more sophisticated design frameworks that extend beyond character artwork. At the same time, I knew that it would be senseless to attempt re-education in my own Maoist ‘Cute Cultural Revolution’ and repress their love for all that is cuddly in favor of an American style hyper-pragmatism as I critiqued their design forms and motifs. Instead, I would need to devise a means to hybridize the decidedly modern but Eastern compulsion to express profound concepts through a cartoon character, with our decidedly post-modern Western fixation with design models that valorize a purity of form in a luxuriously ironic package. Perhaps, the Beijing Olympics offered the ideal opportunity to combine these two perspectives as subject matter for a design project well suited to nurture the advancement of both my Tsinghua students and my own at Parsons. My statistically insignificant dent in the trade deficit with China during this month of export — the precious resource of American ingenuity — would need to return another kind of investment. This exchange had to reinforce my understanding of what needed to be imported back to Parsons in hope of contributing towards preserving, if not reinvigorating, our own national endeavor to lead the world in idea creation.

There’s a giant generation of Chinese artists and designers starting to emerge into the global creative economy. Former Red Guards and victims of the Cultural Revolution, alike, raised these young minds. They possess a passion to succeed where their parents did not, perhaps could not. The US must acknowledge this newly emerging Red Studio in the anticipation of a marketplace of ideas and economies that will only become more intertwined with Chinese-American interests and competition. After the closing ceremonies of Beijing 2008 conclude, and the torch extinguishes, incalculable tons of unpurchased Five Friendlies Olympic junk will probably be land-filled or ‘donated’ to Africa. It may seem a colossal waste of resources on cuteness, but China’s Red Studio will enjoy having penned history’s greatest Olympic mascot, and perhaps most merchandised state sponsored character design.

See Also

Project: Olympic Mobile Visitors Guide ↑

The Origins of Interactive Media.

交互式多媒体的起源

A brief examination of two influential American scientists who pioneered the idea of interactive information systems and graphics. Dr. Vannevar Bush, The Memex↑ and Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad↑. Their research accomplishments resonate through every aspect of modern computing. A lecture given on Thursday, June 21, 2007, 13:30, Room B413 at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University.Sponsored by Information Art & Design in collaboration with Communication Design & Technology, Parsons The New School for Design.

Lecture downloads available below.

Lecture Images

Lecture Downloads

» Download Lecture PDF↓ (6.5 MB)

» Download Lecture PowerPoint with QuickTime video ZIP ↓ (135 MB)

» Download Lecture Poster PDF ↓ (780 KB)

» View Lecture SWF in a Popup Flash Player → (20 MB)

See Also

• Memex, The Dawn of Informatics↑
• Sketchpad, The World’s First↑

A collaboration between the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing and Communication Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design

Objective

Develop a design prototype to present to the Art and Design Academy and BOCOG proposing an interactive Mobile Visitors Guide for the 2008 Beijing Olympiad. Comprising of a desktop web product and a downloadable mobile media component, the Mobile Visitors Guide will offer travelers to Beijing helpful information about Olympic events, venues, the visual identity system, transportation, language assistance, and the unique and vibrant culture of China. In particular, the mobile component offers visitors a useful electronic assistant to navigate the city and manage culture shock and language barriers.

Goals

The workshop students (RedStudio) will present prototypes and design documents suggesting and demonstrating how this product might be further defined and developed. The short timeframe (three weeks) will not allow the creation of a fully functional product, but we hope that it inspires further study and development.

Solution

Adobe Flash technology offers the best platform to rapidly design and prototype the Beijing Olympics Mobile Visitors Guide. Using Flash Player to deploy the desktop web feature prototype and Flash Lite to deploy the mobile media prototype on Nokia Series 60 handsets, the students will easily integrate design and content across delivery mechanisms for a unified and integrated user experience.

Mobile Media Enabling World Class Hospitality

Everyone knows that the Chinese are famous for great hospitality, and preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics is no exception. However, the rapid pace of development and the intricacy of the Chinese language and culture creates
barriers for visitors to enjoy their experience in Beijing. Now that most people carry a mobile phone or laptop when they travel, the Mobile Visitors Guide solves common problems for foreigners to help them communicate across languages, discover the delights of the city, manage its challenges, and more easily find their way around.

An Essential Companion

In the New China, driven by high technology and media innovations, visitors to the Olympics Beijing 2008 should enjoy digital services to help them make the most of their time here, whether on their laptop or mobile phone. Consider these modules:

• Find your way. Visually link event schedules to venue locations and find your way by subway, taxi, bicycle or walking.
• Keep score. Follow sports events by medal counts, in real-time, as winners are announced.
• Communicate. Blaze through the language barrier with common translations for useful phrases and situations on your mobile. Get pinyin transliterations, hanzi characters and audio pronunciations. Point your way out of a tricky situation using Chinese characters on your mobile’s screen. Hand over your mobile and let the Beijinger listen to your needs.
• Participate in China’s Cultural Olympics at the National Art Museum of China and use a mobile phone in an experimental large-scale group interaction within the gallery spaces.
• Explore and discover the Old Beijing and take a guided tour through the famous hutongs, an intricate maze of traditional culture and cuisine.
• Meet the Five Friendlies. The Fuwa have a great life story and getting acquainted with them will help you better enjoy their intricate symbolism which elegantly evokes the many layers of Chinese language and culture, not to mention the universal spirit of the Olympics.

Conclusion

This project prototype was presented to the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University on June 20, 2007. Relevant industry critics from Nokia and Microsoft R&D laboratories in Beijing attended the presentation.

Presentation Photos

See also

Red Studio: Teaching Design at Tsinghua↑