Tuesday, March 31, 2009

This Happened....

While I would have loved to be the first to find this amazing site - Cool Hunting's Brian Fitchner reported on it yesterday.
This happened... is a company that organizes events focusing on the stories behind interaction design. According to them having ideas is easier than making them happen so they delve into projects that exist today and how their concepts and production process can help inform future work.
Created in 2007 by a threesome of London based designers, this happened...encourages people to be more open in their methods and ideas in a fairly proprietary industry.

With over 30 different 20 minute talks online this site provides a wealth of information and inspiration for anyone working in design or interested in the creation of interactive art. Some of my favorites are the talks given by Dominic Harris who runs Cinimod Studio, a multi-disciplinary design practice spanning architecture, lighting and interactive design. He talkes about his collaboration with New York artist Peter Coffin, for which he designed and built a UFO that flew over the Polish city of Gdansk.

I also really
appreciated the talk given by Ben and Russell of
Really Interesting Group a multi-disciplinary organization working in post digital design who talk about Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet(TOFHWOTI). TOFHWOTI is a collection of things from the Internet they thought would work well on paper so they made it into a newspaper and had it printed with a limited edition run of 1,000 that they hand numbered.

Ben and Russell's impetus for this project was not only to work out Christmas presents for their friends but also to try to transfer web content into a more interesting and traditional forms that people are accustomed to. While they aren't the first to do it - company's like MacGloud and Tabbloit have been working it out for a while now The Really Interesting Group not only put an artistic spin on their project but also spawned a Flickr community of online collectors who are trying to capture images of all of the 1,000 newspapers.

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