Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Tag: future

  • Gui Bonsiepe Chair: Designing for Possible Futures

    Gui Bonsiepe Chair: Designing for Possible Futures

    The Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago de Chile has dedicated a new educational chair named »Gui Bonsiepe-Chair: Design for Possible Futures«. It honors Gui Bonsiepes work and influence on the Design Culture and Design Education in Latin America and aims to expand knownledge and reflection on the social and political role of design.

    »A profession that does not know where it is coming from might not know where it going to. The teaching of the history of design and the design theory are fundamental to any future activity. Without this there is no future.«

    Gui Bonsiepe

    This event is accompanied by a debate and exhibition featureing a life sized model of the OpsRoom of the CyberSyn project (»Cybersyn: 50 years later and its contribution to democracy«) that Gui Bonsiepe and his team designed for the goverment of Salvador Allende between 1972 and 1973.

    The OpsRoom of the CyberSyn project is a key piece of the Exhibition »Cómo Diseñar una Revolución« (»How to Design a Revolution«) that will be documented in a forthcoming book by Hugo Palmarola, Eden Medina and Pedro Ignacio. »How to Design a Revolution« documents the Chilean visual language born out of exceptional circumstances.

    Presentation by Gui Bonsiepe »Continuities and ruptures in the design discourse« (unfortunatly the audio is not very good in this recording):

    Inauguración Cátedra Gui Bonsiepe Diseño UC: Diseño para futuros posibles

  • Thinking alternatives: From “Mobile” to “Mobility”

    Shai Agassi is the CEO of The Better Place to get rid of oil dependency (especially for running vehicles). The idea: Give away electric cars for free (like mobile phones) and make the batteries part of the electric grid system (instead of a costly component of the car). You basically pay for miles, thus the service of mobility – not for the hardware.

    Here is an interesting interview with him:


  • Lovelock: One last chance to save mankind

    James Lovelock in The NewScientist about the ecology and global warming today:

    I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.

  • Fundamental changes ahead: petaflop barrier broken

    According to this WIRED blog entry IBM and Cray have both cracked the petaflop barrier.

    Computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claims that this will change the scientific method for the first time since Galileo invented the telescope (in 1509)”.

    The reason for that is that simulation and approximation can be used to come to acurate models of complex phenomena instead of just reasoning about formula by theory and experimenting to prove those.

    With 362 terabytes of memory and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second the Jaguar of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is tuned for scientific calculations like climate and energy models, drug discovery, new materials, etc.

    The question arises if these amounts of speed and data processing could one day break one fundamental rule: that some problems will always be beyond discovery through calculation. Neurology, psychology, sociology, economy and cultural studies are scientific areas that haven’t really started yet. Large scale simulation can be the one scientific method that is missing for those (implied that the methods of observation deliver enough data to model upon).

    And if so, there is a danger that even governmental policies may one day be driven by probability and not ethics.

  • Web 3.0? Maybe user generated applications…

    In few seconds I was able to create a new music browsing application combining puzzle pieces together without any effort:

    todaysfashion.muxtape.com

    All I needed was Fluid and an example to learn from.

    Fluid basically is a bare-bones web browser that turns a website into an double-clickable application. It is a website – but it feels like an application (as long as you are not offline of course). The original idea for Fluid was inspired by Mozilla’s Prism project.

    But wait… what’s happening here?

    Is this a step back because it disregards the openness and hypertextuality of the web by suggesting to constrain web pages that are not meant to be pointing to other sites into windows?

    It is an interesting trend that — after big browser vendors now finally comply to standards — new concepts appear that require users to use certain devices or browsers (or plug-ins) to use them. Actually the initial design goal (and the reason for standardisation) was to get rid of these dependencies.

    But this is not just about the web as standard. It is about users being able to create applications from the rich offerings of the web. It is about DJ-ing with code, mingling logic and shining ideas. Users that can translate “cool ideas” into fun things without becoming an expert first. And it’s about developers creating pieces that are basic and yet well crafted and interoperable. It is about everyone contributing to the story.

    While it right now does conflict a little bit with the device-independency that has made the web strong… it may turn out big on the long run.

  • Yahoo Badges

    Many month ago Yahoo introduced Yahoo Pipes to the public – allowing to mix and process data from sites and RSS feeds from different sources (I have a master RSS feed of a pipe that represents almost all my blog activities)

    Now Yahoo has expanded this model to include widgets for displaying the resulting: Yahoo Badges.

    See the a demo here: