Interviews and organic design development

According to my project plan I was supposed to do interviews with museum professionals in March. However, due to easter being early this year and a couple of presentations in March I will move the interviews to end of April/May.

I am a little confused on how to continue the development of the design of Fiskeboller. It seems as if the design is just growing inside of me... Erlend Loe said in an interview with "Interiør" (1-2008) that the best ideas are the ones that stay with you, they go through a kind of destillation process and only parts remain. Often an idea is only good once you combine it with something else that has been around for a while.

Thats the way it feels with the exhibition ideas atm. They seem to be merging and shaping inside my head, without much of a visible output. At some stage they will be put on paper, and then into space.

The confusion I feel is because I am uncertain wether this organic way of working with the design ideas is ok, or if I should be more structured and exploring.

The smallest acceptable solution

In the smallest acceptable solution there will be aroma and projected images/text and a web solution.

In the (highly unlikly) case that the only funds we have for Fiskeboller i karri are private and from Kunsthøgskolen.

Producers

Through Amanda Steggell's website I found the name of the aroma designers she used for her Emotion Organ. Dale Air Aroma Design makes aromas for museums and shopping experiences. And it doesnt look that expensive either. :-)


Anne Mette Prestegård tipped me (even if she didint know) about using BEK for technical solutions on multimedia.

Both Trond Lossius at BEK and Amanda Steggell has completed their research fellowships in the same programme as me. It all stays in the family!

Design Methods

When I first started in 2003 there was very little inormation out there on the www. Last week I checked again. Lo and behold! Here is a nice article on Design Methods from Wikipedia. It says among other things that

Design Methods is (sic.) challenging to implement since there are not enough
agreed-upon tools, techniques and language for consistent knowledge
transfer.

Rita Marhaug said in a discussion once that

artists are not very true to method.

The purpose of design is to make something that doesnt already exist. Maybe you can not follow a recipie if you are to create something new? Just a thought.

Norwegian Traditions

Kaffistova promotes Norwegian food traditions. Warm ricepudding with raisins, sugar and cinnamon. "Risengrynsgrøt" was dreaded by purists when it first started getting popular around 1800. They were afraid it would take over for the true Norwegian rømmegrøt (porridge of sourcream)...

What has happened the last week

We have set up a list of potential sponsors and possible partners for "Fiskeboller i karri" and are researching our options. I met with Vigleik Røkke Mathisen from Museum Vest and he was very enthusiastic, both about the theme and about the idea of touring schools. If we team up with them, they could probably contribute personell, like educators and builders. Geir Sebjørnsen works at Museum Vest as a designer/carpenter and he is amazing on design details.

I have been asked to submit a proper budget to the programme comitee. This has made me think closely about worst case scenarios. The smallest amount of money we can raise is Nkr 125 000,-. If that is to be the case what is the most important thing to spend money on? It must be smell. Smell is the single most important sense in this project. Hopefully we manage to raise more funds!

What used to be

Thinking about origins of things and the paths they have travelled and are travelling. How did they protect their boats before there where exessive amounts of used car tyres?

new moodboards

...it seems that I keep turning out moodboards for this project...

Containers...

Back from an extended christmas holiday. Have been approved for "readmittance" to the fellowship programme!

However, after looking again at some of MMW's container projects, I got inspired to look into containers again for FiK... Apparently it is possible to buy used 20' containers for approx. 15 000,-. So I did some drawings and some thinking. Considering the problems of wheelchair access I started thinking about other types of disabilities. The combination of small and sound (and taste) makes the exhibition an interesting experience also for people with a visual impairment. And the combination of smell and images (and again taste) makes it interesting for people with an hearing impairment.

I would want it to be a seating area and thought about doing it with an organic shape and some soft surface, but that requires people to take off their shoes, and that again creates a whole set of problems relating to logistics, entrance threshold (mental ones :-)) etc. So maybe we just keep the organic shape, but make the seating of a hard, shoe friendly material.

Atm I am thinking of a sound, images, smell show that could take something like 10 - 15 minutes (or run continuosly when viewed in public) with visitor interaction deciding what section comes next. ("Is this the smell of Norway? Lean to your right if you say yes. Lean to your right if you say no. Why/not?") In this case the main development would be with the AV(S)-program and the interactive programming. As well as developing stable technical solutions.