Ross Lovegrove

The designer which I have to present in pichi kichi event is calles Ross Lovegrove. He seems to be a designer who has worked on multiple areas starting from bikes to watches. It seems that he is influenced by organic forms but you can read more of him in this blog in near future!

Hugh Pizey: Aesthetics and Technology

On Thursday's Design & Technology lecture we discussed a lot the question does form follow function? As a designer it is a very interesting topic and you find numerous arguments against and for it. I did a bit of research on the topic and found that one of the first people to state the whole idea of form follows function was an American architect called Louis Sullivan. I think that it is quiet interesting that it was an architect instead of an engineer who came up with this concept because usually in architecture through out the whole history the most memorable buildings have been fighting against that statement.

Personally I don't think that form should follow function since that would reduce the creativity and playfulness of design. In the other hand I think that people see the "form follow function" principale as a boring way of designing which doesn't create beautiful object which is not the case! For example the picture below interest me since it is a chair where form follows function and it is a beautiful chair.

Dutch designer Daan Mulder has created the 'Form Follows Function' sofa. A three dimensional model of the sofa is created with a computer program


It was also interesting to get a bit of timeline of different design periods. I knew a bit about it but I think it would very useful to know more about it.  I found an interesting website where you have a timeline of remarkable design's of the 20th century.

http://www.industrialdesignhistory.com/timelineproducts

The lecture made me also think that I should drill in to Finnish design since it was an interesting movement since design gave the country a way to build their national identity. These days it doesn't happen as easy anymore because of globalization.

CCTV

I found an interesting article about CCTV in UK by Aaron Saenz who is a freelance editor and writer. The article is a bit old (9/1/2009) but if the situation was like that back then I could just assume that the surveillance has improved since then.  I knew before reading this article that UK is the most recorded country in the whole world but I didn't know any figures. They are quiet extreme: UK police spent £500 million pounds between 1996 and 2006 installing 4 million cameras (one million in London) across the country.This means that you can be seen in 300 cameras a day! I personally find it scary since the footage is stored and if someone unwanted gets this footage he/she will know what you do, who you meet and where you go.

The article pointed out an alternative system which is more "active". This means that the cameras wouldn't store anything unless they react to something unusual. European union has been developing a new system called the HUMABIO. It is a very interesting technology and I recommend to go check it out (http://www.humabio-eu.org/index.html)

http://singularityhub.com/2009/09/01/londons-surveillance-fails-only-1-crime-solved-per-1000-cameras/

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A space Odyssee is a science fiction film produced by a famous director Stanley Kubrick. The movie is definitely a classic and I think everyone should see it, even though I think many people wouldn't like it. It is the most slow paste movie what I have seen but if you are in the right set of mind it brings you to an enjoyable trance. The filming and the filming techniques are unreal for a movie produced in 1968 and some of the techniques like Matte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matte_(filmmaking) or Chroma Key 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_key) were completely new and made Kubrick a pioneer in film making. I do understand that for a Thursday morning the movie might be a bit heavy especially with the long silent scenes so I was  happy to watch it at night instead. I find it  very interesting to watch futuristic movies from the past since it is interesting to compare how far or close their predictions get.

Surveillance and Tecnology

I find it very interesting how the improvement of technology will affect the control and surveillance systems. Already while you are using the internet you leave a footprint on everything where you go and that has been used recently a lot for marketing purposes etc. For example it is pretty scary when facebook know that you have looked flights into somewhere and advertises them to you. I can see many problems if all the material of surveillance systems would leak out of the control of the government.

There is an interesting article about the topic below:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html