[events]

ambient: interface. 54th International Design Conference in Aspen (2004)

[06.2004]

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Over it's 50 plus years, the venerable International Design Conference in Aspen was host to some of the most important thinkers and makers in the history of 20th century "design" (most broadly conceived). From the inaugeral address by Albert Schweitzer, to the design management years in the 1950's, to Reyner Banham's run as director in the 1960-70's, to the national and topical years of the 1980's and 90's, Aspen was quite literally, TED before TED. (Richard Saul Wurhman founded TED after years at Aspen).

Christian Moeller and I co-programmed and hosted what was to be the last IDCA conference, as the event was in effect sold to AIGA who now hosts the laudable, but less auspicious Aspen Design Summit. Chrisitan and I were interested in developing a theme around the convergences of digital media architecture, and more specifically around the convergences of practices which begin with an expertise in data and move toward the physical and spatial emplacement of that data on the one hand, and those which start with an expertise in physical spatial systems and work toward an employment of data as another building material.

Eventually the curatorial discussion became less about technique and more about the general design problematic that was focused and revealed by these convergences. In short it became about how different design disciplines (architecture, product, interaction, media) deal with the interface as central concern, consciously so or not.

I have continued to explore the theoretical implications of this in my own work, and use the name
(ambient : interface) for my consultancy.


Point and click, pull and push, connect and disconnect, splice and split, envelop and engage: the world is an interface, and all design is interface design.

Design is about points of contact --staging them, positing them, modeling them, accommodating them, provoking them, preventing them, dreaming them, rendering them, haunting them-- designing them.

In our network society, points of contact are condensed into windows and menus, dashboards of buttons and icons, into familiar pathways and fast surfaces, diagrams and directions. On a continental scale interfaces are nodes along lines of flow, terminals, ports and stations. On a global scale,  interfaces link and partition society itself, as belief systems, ballots and borders: the interface is elemental, material, imminent. Such points of contact, everywhere and nowhere at once, connect us to the operating systems of power, interdependency and opportunity. They are not just our interfaces to the world, but also the world's channels to us.

To question what is designed is immediately also to question how things are designed, and today both are increasingly computational in form and content. Not only does software change how design works, more importantly it changes how design thinks. The logics of computation and the design languages of user interface transform one practice into another: cinema into architecture, product design into philosophy, urban planning into advertising.

To the 54th Annual meeting of the International Design Conference in Aspen, we have invited designers who work with many kinds of interfaces--digital and environmental, virtual and tangible, and hybrids of all of these- in ways that move us emotionally, physically and physiologically. We have asked them to demonstrate their expertise in conceiving the interface as a moment of exchange.

Ambient: Interface, the 54th International Design Conference in Aspen seeks a renewed sensitivity toward the points of contact that weave our world.

Speakers:

• Greg Lynn (architect, Yale and UCLA)
• Thomas Y. Levin (media theorist, Princeton)
• Joachim Sauter (media architect, ART+COM)
• Natalie Jeremijenko, (designer/engineer, Yale then NYU now)
  
• John Maeda, (computer artist, MIT then RISD now)
  
• Joel Burdick, (roboticist, Cal Tech)
  
• Mikon Van Gastel, (motion graphics, Imaginary Forces then, New York)
  
• Dunne + Raby, (product and interaction designers, RCA London)
  
• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, (media architect, Montreal)
• Kevin Kennon (architect, New York)
  
• UN Studio, (architects, Amsterdam)
  
• Realities United, (media architects, Berlin)
• Hernan Diaz-Alonso, (architect, SCI_Arc and Columbia)
• GRAFT, (architects, Los Angeles and Berlin)
• Chrisitan Moeller, (media architect, UCLA)
  
• Bratton interview with assembled members of United Architects

• Conference introduction by Benjamin H. Bratton 
  

I also programmed and co-hosted satellite conferences in New York at Columbia GSAPP (with Ed Keller, Jeffrey Inaba and William MacDonald) and in Los Angeles at the Materials & Applications gallery.

In addition to gathering in Aspen in August, the IDCA community will convene twice over the summer for two satellite conferences in Los Angeles and New York.

New York
at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation on
July 19 at 4:00 PM, Wood Auditorium

IDCA:54 New York was co-organzed by Ed Keller, with Benjamin H. Bratton, William MacDonald, and Jeffrey Inaba, and co-sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

• Opening remarks by Mark Wigley, Dean Columbia GSAPP
  
  
• Andrew Benjamin , University of Technology, Sydney
• Benjamin H. Bratton, SCI_Arc and UCLA then UCSD now, IDCA:54
• Hernan Diaz-Alonso, SCI_Arc and Columbia
• Tina Di Carlo, MOMA
• Keller Easterling, Yale
• Shelley Eshkar, Artist, New York
• Jeffrey Inaba, (SCI_Arc and Harvard then, Columbia now)
  
• Ed Keller, Columbia/ A.UM Studio
• Tali Krakowsky, Imaginary Forces
• Wayne Ashley and Tom Healy, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
• Mark Leiter, Neilson and Ambientdevices.com
• William MacDonald, (Columbia then Pratt now, Kolatan/MacDonald)
• Chris Romero, Oscillation.com
• Vivian Rosenthal, TRONICStudio.com

Los Angeles
at M&A (Materials & Applications, Architecture and Landscape Research) on
July 29 at 7:30 PM

IDCA:54 Los Angeles Co-Sponsors:
SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture), Archinect, and VICE

• Benjamin H. Bratton, (SCI_Arc and UCLA, IDCA:54 then UCSD now)
  
• David Erdman, (SERVO then now david clovers now, UCLA)
  
• Adam Eeuwens, (co-author, False Flat: Why Dutch Design is So Good)
• Peter Lunenfeld, (Art Center College of Design then UCLA now)
  
• Richard Metzger, (Disinfo.com then Dangerous Minds now), Los Angeles
• Daniel Sauter, (media designer)
  
• Marcelo Spina, Patterns, SCI_Arc
• Natalie Jeremijenko, Debut presentation of OOZ (artist, NYU)

Tags: conferences, bio media, digital media

Published: 06.07.2006

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