We Feel Fine

So Mario, James, and I went to Breather this weekend. There were two very good presentations, but the one from Tali Krakowsky at Imaginary Forces REALLY stood out. Not only was she the most engaging speaker, she had the best content. It was about media in the future and highlighted a lot of innovators in the field, including her company. It reminded me of the kind of stuff Paige was showing us at the beginning of the semester about gathering data, like that name frequency chart. She showed us many projects on ambient storytelling and experience design: ads that streamed across thousands of LEDs on the side of a building that actually interact with the passerbys and art installations that changed based on peoples' proximity so that no two experiences would ever be the same. This really blew my mind.

In the virtual world there are no limits on what can be done. Architecture and the way we display data are never going to be the same. Three of her main points for this futuristic media were as follows, basically if you can exploit one of these points, you can think outside the box -- 1)re-imagining rich-media content; 2)re-imagining media delivery; 3) re-imagining the environment. The billboard will soon be replaced by interactive holograms and massive hot-air balloons playing streaming video. All unique. All based on the person standing there or the data being collected.

I think that if any of us as designers can think like this, we will have a bright future indeed. Here is a site called We Feel Fine, it collects data from blogs and gives you a visible, interactive catalog of how people are feeling, or at least what they're writing about. I think that this is just the beginning of things to come.

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Next is a link to New City, an experience design project from Imaginary Forces. I am definitely going to be following what this company does from now on. This is a video describing the project and its potential.

http://www.imaginaryforces.com/featured/3/435