The Cumbrian accent belied his long flight from California, where he's based as a lecturer at CALU, but the English sense of humour was well intact as Andrew Byrom stepped the audience through his astonishing 3D type works and his enduring love for the Eames' design duo.
Tangible Life
6 May 2012
A quick update on some of the things I've been up to in the last few months:
28 January 2012
Yep, it was a busy night. Last Wednesday was Drupal North East, where they investigated two of perhaps the most mysterious and intriguing developments in recent times for a Drupal dev: Drush and Git. (It did seem as if these topics did have a certain allure, with the group hitting its highest numbers to date!)
28 January 2012
The two talks at this month's Interaction Tyneside had a common theme of aging. Whether you realise your grandparents still use cheques, or are nearly knocked off the footpath by a motorised scooter, there were a number of insights to pull out of John Vine and Lynne Coventry's talks. My favourite: don't think technophobe, think technocritical.
11 January 2012
The first Design Interest of 2012 was nothing if not varied. Starting with kids, continuing with portraits and finishing with comics, the evening was packed that the work sharing afterward was abandoned for drinks!
7 December 2011
The situations ranged from Canadian telcos to African tribes, but the common theme was story. Or more specifically, storytelling. Malcolm Jones and Lizette Reitsma showed work they'd carried out before becoming PhD students, though in both cases the work is inspiring their doctoral research.
11 November 2011
A decade ago, while doing a school English project on the language of Peanuts vs Footrot Flats comics, I picked up Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' and was blown away by his thoughful unpacking of a so-called 'childish medium'. What would I think of the book today? We took a look at it at tonight's UX Bookclub Edinburgh. Our small group of readers came at it from a range of angles including working in UX, teaching visual language, and just being interested in it all (OK, that last one was me).
9 November 2011
Today was the inaugral Interaction Tyneside, an event that aims to be a forum for academics (and others?) to share their research around interactivity and design. Today saw both Toon universities represented, with Giovanni Innella of Northumbria University (and also a fellow student) talk about his work and questions on today's museums, and post-doc Newcastle University Culture lab researcher Marianna Obrist clued us in on her upcoming study on how older people create meaning with technology.
8 November 2011
Newcastle now has a pretty strong tech scene, but its design one — while high quality — hasn't been quite so engaged. So I was really excited a few months ago when I heard about Design Interest. I missed the inaugral meetup, but was able to catch the second event tonight at Post Office NE1 and see a range of talks as well as work-in-progress.
7 November 2011
This morning, Northumbria design students were treated to a talk by IDEO director — and former alumni — Tim Brown talking about design thinking and his company's forays into social innovation through IDEO.org and Open IDEO. Will a designer's DQ ('design quotient') be to them what Klout is to those in social media? Who knows.
The audience of MA and BA design students were also given a quick rundown of some of the social innovation related design PhD research happening here:
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