Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
collaboration

 

Frames: Notes on Improvisation and Design by Liz Danizco

People are improvising. Whether intentional or not, designers are putting forth opportunities for people to engage in frameworks, giving them connections to take advantage of (or not). Liz Danzico explores how these frameworks take hold and what the opportunities are for interaction designers.

I saw the slides of this talk online a little while ago, but it makes a lot more sense with the video. A really, really great presentation!

(via swissmiss)

Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating?
David Byrne on collaboration (via austinkleon)

jenbee:

Seven on Seven - Rhizome

Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new —be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine— over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.

A pretty interesting lineup. Includes Tauba Auerbach and Evan Roth, as well as Matt Mullenweg and David Karp, the creators of Wordpress and Tumblr, respectively. The others I am not familiar with, but look cool also.

Determining aural usability

A new tool makes the connection between architectural drawings a space and the aural experience of its soon-to-be users:

A powerful tool, called auralization, is available to help make this connection. Using computer modeling and signal processing techniques, acoustical consultants can transform architectural drawings into realistic, surround-sound aural renderings of a space (an “auralization”) that allows you to “hear” your space before it’s built.

(via bobulate)

This goes well with the previously posted: The Fountainhead is Dead, about how the future of architecture is collaborative.

Lined & Unlined  » Blog Archive  » Permutations

So we’ll each make a work and place them together. Or side-by-side. Or within one another. I’d like to make a new work with glass clipframes. I’ll use the words then, clipframes and permutations. Maybe your poems in my frames? I like this idea of an accident waiting to happen. What if it’s more specific to the space itself? Because it’s quite small, it’s only a storefront. The show’s not up for long, so consider the duration. Roughness, too. And compression. Yours are modular in the same way as mine. They’re permutations, visual rhymes of each other. That’s what gives it meaning. It should be quite an empty gallery when you look at first. Yes, the gaps are what will fill it.

Semi-mysterious opening by Daniel Eatock and Rob Giampietro this Thursday, excellent!

Over the next week I need to schedule something like nine phone calls with artists living in New York, California, London, and Canada, among places and time zones. Also, I work in New York from 9am to 6pm, 5 days a week. Coordinating these phone appointments by email would be a major headache not only for me but for everyone involved. That’s where doodle.com comes in.

In one semi-cryptic sentence doodle.com is democratic, complex decision making and scheduling done right.

How it works:

  1. I decide that instead of bouncing back and forth forever on email, text, and IM between 9 people to find dates that work I will go to doodle.com and pick dates and times that work for me. (e.g. 9pm on Sunday) I set these time slots through next week, which is the period in which I want to have the conversations.

  2. I send a secret link to my doodle.com page to each of the people I want to talk to. One email is sent once to nine people.

  3. Each of the people clicks on the link, checks one of my times that works for them, and hits save. (There is no need for anyone to register at all or provide any information besides their name, but I provided my email address initially so that I get a confirmation each time someone picks a time.) Our shared time is immediately blocked off for others so that nobody else can pick it.

  4. I get a table like the one above that shows me who to call and when. No double booking. No confusion. No headaches, period.

What’s really awesome is the extensibility. Almost every function when creating the form is an option, so I was able to check no duplicates and enable timezones. Doodle.com has a separate (but similar) functionality for group voting on things like, “where should we have dinner next week?”

Not only is this an example of excellent design, it’s a triumph of technology. When technology works, and this really works, it’s fabulous.

Hierarchy is reinforced by exclusion; teamwork is reinforced by inclusion.
John Maeda

Google just killed email. Their new collaboration/communication product, Google Wave, is coming later this year. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a long, interesting video on their website.

For as long as I’ve known about Imogen Heap, I’ve never really been that interested in her music. That is, until I saw a video of her making it…live. I am enamored by her process.

Her music is richly layered but she is the only performer, playing all instruments and singing all vocals. To accomplish this she uses a looping machine and am impeccable sense of harmony as well as timing. In a way, she is collaborating with herself (something I thought a lot about this summer, and am reminding myself to write about soon).

If you want to see more of how she does it, another great example is this PopTech video.

(via maniacalrage)

I participated, tonight, in some impromptu collaborative spreadsheeting. My incoming freshman class at Cooper Union set up a real-time group editable Google Docs spreadsheet and everyone went nuts. It was wonderful and looked, for a moment, like the beauty that you see above.