Get out of my phone, Get into the world. (aka get outta my screen and into my life.)
(title inspired by the song “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” by Billy Ocean.)
The other day I went to see the exhibition at the ICA The Record: Contemporary Vinyl and Art, which I highly recommend seeing. Its on view until Sept. 5, 2011. And to correspond with the show I saw a ICA/AIGA design series lecture by Vaughn Oliver. I took aways some new idea’s from both and both have given me further validation to a current belief that I have that people like connecting with physical things. People can’t keep just living in a virtual world connecting only through a screen.
One of my favorite new things is the Postagram app. Through the app you take one of your instagrams, select someone to mail it to, and pay 99 cents and Postagram will print it and mail it to that recipient. The recipient then has a physical print of the photo to pop out of the card and save. To me our current and future applications of technology should not only enhance our worlds through the digital space but they should be connected to a tangible product or physical interaction. And i don’t mean like you buy a groupon and then go use it, or you see your friend drank a Houblon Chouffe so you go and have a Houblon Chouffe. There is still a disconnect there. I want the end user product to be something physical that involves your other senses and you don’t need your phone to operate.
I think Breakfast NY who just happened to be recognized by Mashable as the #1 innovative digital agency is thinking this way too. One of their recent creations, again working with Instagram, is a printer that will instantly print every Instagram with the same location or hash tag. BTW it uses Zink paper, which is an awesome product with tons of potential applications!
“We simply think of ourselves as inventors who are trying to take all the amazingness of what can be done online and bring it into some sort of device or experience in the real world.”
-Breakfast
They are taking it Analog in a way. Such a great word. This brings me back to the vinyl records and Vaughn Oliver.
First off, two things I took away from the exhibit that i found inspiring. Everyone is familiar with the top 10 concept, Dave Muller has taken various top 10’s from friends and has made a series of large scale pantings of the 10 records spines. The record titles were not always legible, but that wasn’t really the point. It was more about the character the physical records had taken on in the possession of their owners and how Muller then interpreted them in his painting. Basically they are a portrait of that person through their top 10. He is exploring the relationship between human experience, memory, and music.
Dario Robleto’s exhibit is collaged record covers made from colored paper, cardboard, glue, ribbon, and foamcore. Each grouping of fictitious records belongs to a fictitious record label that holds certain religious beliefs. The records are based off real records that he has reworked to fit under one of the value groups. I didn’t really get a chance to delve into each one and its humor, but I did appreciate the hand made craftsmanship of the covers cut and pasted together. Another point to bring up here is the fact that with most of our music coming in straight from the tubes or from the cloud, out of our phone and into our ears, where we can hear a preview before downloading, the album cover and artwork that once was the only indication of what the record might sound like is no longer present as that physical interaction. Push the screen or push a mouse button and hear the music instead of going to the record store to purchase the album based on how the artwork on the cover makes you feel, holding the album sleeve, opening it up, admiring the whole packaged as a piece of art, sliding the record out, putting it on the turntable, setting the turntable speed, cleaning the dust off the record, setting the needle into the groove, and adjusting the volume slider.
So are we remiss in sourcing our music digitally? Maybe. But obviously music is an experience in itself, independent of the packaging. Are bands failing to adapt to the new ways people are finding and experiencing their music in a personal and/or visual way? Not all of them, although they may be not bringing it full circle back into the real world, but they are at least trying something new. Example Arcade Fire. Are album designer’s such as Oliver remiss in just wanting to create a package design for an album instead of recommending or developing ways to incorporate interactive devices that can facilitate real world experience? For the most part, of course they are. Should the world of album and package design being on the opposite side of the coin with all tangible object design step more into the digital world? I think its something to explore, especially if the design isn’t reaching far enough, or traveling as fast and far as the music is. I mean nothing beats that box set of your favorite band, but only seeing a 300x300 pixel thumbnail of an album cover on your iPod really isn’t how that cover was meant to be seen.
Ill leave you with another quote I just found that’s sums up my argument for creating tangible things using the online tools. It’s like they say about Photoshop, its a tool that helps you solve a problem, its not the solution to the problem. An online creation should not be the solution to your problem but a tool that aids in the solution.
People treat things different once they are physical. People feel a lot more connected to the message they send. It’s not just throw away sentiment. Now it’s somewhere. Now it’s something.
-David Evans (from or formerly from?) DeepLocal (a post-digital shop) talking about the Chalk Bot
Now onto conceiving a project where I engineer an ever lasting iphone that tastes like chocolate.
