Pecha What-cha........?!?

Pecha Kucha....Sounds like an exotic sushi dish but is in fact a style of presentation. 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each…. Easy enough eh!?!?!

Not when you’ve got to do one yourself!! At the end of this term we need to present a pecha kucha on our chosen blog topic, mine being how technology affects relationships and communication. 

I was pretty intrigued by this mysterious event so went along to the pecha kucha being held at The art school on Wednesday .The Vic was so busy! Turns out art school students are really into a pecha kucha! ( I feel like the more I say pecha kucha the weirder it gets.) Confused and filled with anticipation we sat down with a drink and ordered some edgy snacks. The art school food never fails to impress- I chose the honey battered aubergines ( too much batter to aubergine ratio if you ask me but enjoyable none the less )

There were about 8 presentations and all the speakers took a very different approach. The first speakers chosen topic was the history of road signs- seemingly boring topic but he added an element of excitement to it in the way he ran about the stage and spoke as if he hadn’t taken a breath in about 20 minutes. His fast paced technique made it exciting and fun, I was on the edge of my seat clinging onto every word he had to say about the history of road regulation. It was quite a stressful watch though and afterwards I breathed a sigh of relief that he had made it without spontaneously passing out!!!

Other techniques of note were the use of a poetry: It was nice to listen to and quite soothing but to be honest I didn’t have a clue what he was speaking about. Too edgy for me.

Some presentations were so well rehearsed and smooth flowing that you didn’t even notice they had a specific format.

And one guy used awkward pauses to his advantage (still unsure whether this was intentional or not ). There was a lot of hilarity and laughing from the crowd and umming and ahhing from him….. ‘hopefully this slide will change soon…..

…..

….’

So now I'm a pecha kucha expert! Overall it was fun and made me realise how many different approaches there are to this presentation technique and got me thinking about how I would approach mine.

Maybe I’ll use the art of interpretive dance?

Maybe I'll replace my words with mimes?

Maybe I wont say anything at all…

Or maybe the edginess of the art school has gone to my head.  

Live In The Moment

Have smart phones stopped us from living in the moment? 

Perhaps we should stop interrupting our lives to 'capture the moment' with our camera phones because we're not capturing it, we're ruining it! 

Are we incapable of having fun anymore for fear of not letting everyone else on our social media feed know how much fun we are in fact having? 

Put your smartphone down and breath in the world.

(I'm going to pretend its meaningfully ironic that I'm blogging about this on my laptop with my iPhone charging next to my iPad..... Let's just say I'm a victim too.)

Form Follows FUN

Why do things look the way they look? A very big question. So how do we answer it?

The most logical answer is form should follow function.  Everything is designed with function in mind which the form will naturally follow on from. Thinking about it from an engineering point of view this clearly makes sense; for a product to be successful it must foremost be successfully functional and the form it takes should follow on directly from the function it carries out. 

We explored this theory by going back to the beginning of time, always a good place to start. The olduvai handaxe  dates back to 1.2 million years BC and was made in a time when speech had not yet been developed. It is shaped like a teardrop and beautifully worked; It took much skill to create and was the result of much experience and careful planning.

However inspection of a particular ‘handaxe’ tells us something more about the people that made these beautiful objects. One would assume they were purely functional, these people did not make to be creative and expressive but rather to be functional- this hand axe would be the most important tool they had to keep them alive. Mr james dyson spoke about this particular handaxe and described how it in fact didn’t seem very functional at all- too large to fit comfortably in the human hand and a double edge made it dangerous to hold. Was this stone in fact a thing of beauty? A decorative piece almost like a ceremonial sword? Perhaps a status symbol or even an accessory for pulling the ladies?! Made oversized to symbolise importance and represent the social pecking order. Were these people creative people who wanted to make beautiful objects? A very early example of a contradiction of the ‘form follows function’ debate.

So if form does not always follow function then what is form based on? When you start thinking about it you realise there’s almost an endless list of influences on the aesthetics of an object…

A lot of objects reference the human form or an animal ;Characters can be built into objects to tell stories and make illusions to other things.

Branding can influence the aesthetics of a product hugely; Companies need to differentiate their products from competitors in the marketplace.

Materials and manufacturing changes the way things look as it controls the possibilities designers have to produce objects; As technology of materials and manufacturing advances then aesthetics can change and push new boundaries.

There can be a national/ regional form. Objects designed from a certain area of the world take on a form which is typical of that place. But is this still true of the internet age?

Design can follow fashion trends and reflect the current trend of the time or revert back to a previous time to create a retro feel.

So clearly form doesn’t only follow function.

I think the aesthetics of technology is the result of an eclectic mix of a number of factors. The way I see it it’s ultimately and most importantly a form of expressive art from the designer- it’s their way to communicate with the world and embed their characteristics, values and thoughts into their designs. If form only followed function I think the world of design would be a boring place. Playing with the aesthetics of a product is fun and so it should be. If you ask me, the ‘form follows function’ debate has an obvious answer : NO! It does not. Form follows FUN! That’s the beauty of design.  

Space ODDyssey- What the heck is going on!?

We’ve all been well trained throughout our many school years to get over excited, and giggly when class time is replaced by ‘film time’!!!!

All set up with our snacks and cans of juice we embarked on the journey that was ‘A space Odyssesy’. I was pretty intrigued since our tutor Hugh had earlier described it as the ‘best film of ALL time’. You’d built up some pretty high hopes Hugh... But being completely honest I spent the vast majority of the film wondering what the heck was going on and what on earth those horrible noises were; the film has very little scripted words and a whole lot of screeching, heavy breathing and dramatic music.

The whole experience was confusing to say the least, confirmed by the fact that the whole class piped up with a unified ‘WHAT?!?!?!!?’ as the end titles rolled.

So what the heck was going on?! After digging deep I kind of started to understand. This is how I see it…. Its all about the evolution of man and his ‘tools’, controlled by this big black cuboid (this mysterious cuboid plays a big role in the film so remember him).

 In the opening scene the apes discover bones as tools after touching the mysterious cuboid, this snaps straight to the space age, man has evolved so much by this point that his tools have turned to technology, space craft and most importantly the computer system ‘Hal’, an artificial intelligence, my favourite character of the film, she’s got sass! This demonstrated how man had evolved to such an extent that he now used technology to further progress his intelligence.

But ‘Hal’ gets too smart for the mere humans and plans a revolt! She throws one of the 2 main astronauts, Frank, into space and then as Dave goes to save him she locks him out of the space ship – technology has taken over mans intelligence and may be his demise- how ironic! But man has something technology does not : courage and determination. Dave gets himself back into the space ship and uses his tools to shut Hal down. THE TABLES HAVE TURNED!

What may seem like a victory for man kind but we now realise Dave Is alone in space without his artificial intelligence and things aren’t looking good. Can man survive alone? This is when stuff gets particularly abstract… a lot of flashing images and loud music leading up to the end scenes showing Dave looking upon himself as he ages through his life and his evolution, until Kubrick predicts the next step of human evolution: Dave reaches out for the black cuboid and turns into a ‘star child’. He has all of the knowledge of the universe and has been transformed into an immortal to be sent back to earth to act as ‘god’ to guide the process of evolution.

Simple eh? Now I think I get it all I’ve got more of an appreciation for this cult classic.

All in all it got me thinking…When does mans race with technology end? Will we eventually lose to the robots?