Pensive need

I am in a pensive mood, tired of colours and forms, and especially tired of creating someting that so many will have an opinion of, so publicly. I have dedicated the day to start preparing for my application for final appraisal and sort through the stuff I'm going to write when autumn sets in.

The entrance

I usually base my design ideas on images surfacing in my mind as I consider a topic. It is very intuitive. In my experience ideas that don't come as finished images often lack pizass. Atm I am labouring hard with the entrance. No immediate images present themselves. However, several ideas are peering out reluctantly, maybe this is the time when I will find the solution through hard work rather than through my inspirational muse...

o_O

Friday afternoon I spent a couple of hours feeling like the proverbial deer.

I then spent the weekend curled up in a safe place (licking my wounds?)

Now emerging, still chafed, always stronger, making the world mine again.

Webinar

I just ended the last of four webinars based on the book "Digital Museum - transforming the future now."

I wanted to join the webinar also because I was interested in the format. And I must say it was quite a pleaseant way of being at a seminar, while still enjoying the comforts of my best chair ;-)

A lecture these days is normally a PowerPoint presentation and a voice, and so this was not so different. I guess the major difference was the lack of smalltalk in the coffee-break... networking not being so obvious... but still happening through the chat window. :-)
And my questions were answered :-)

It was also quite nice to get an extended overview over what is happening, particularly on social networking sites and how some museums are using them. For some art museums the use and also the benefits are obvious, but for history and cultural museums there are also ways. Maybe ways that are even more interesting - like this example from Museum of London's "London's Voices" exhibition.

Stipendiatsamling

We are at the twice annual gathering of the research fellows. I held my presentation yesterday, Transformation, and it went quite well. People seemed to enjoy the thoughts behind Fiskeboller. Will post those images friday.

I am playing with Photobooth.

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.

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.

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.

Christmas

The project description is coming along now. Almost there! I have had some good advice from my supervisor Prof. Lohman these last days. Sending him texts in the afternoon and phoning him the morning after. Two days ago he said; I suggest you restructure your chapters into four sections! Once again the text was chopped up, shaken, stired and this time placed on the wall (together with the christmas decorations, accompanied by Elvis singing christmas carols^^). Et voilá! Brand new project description!

bringing It feels good working with the text physically, actuallyout a pair of scissors and hearing the sound ofthe paper being cut. Fortunato: Since the Mac is still not healthy I do not have a project planner software to make my detailed project plan for next year. So I will have to draw one by hand! Revolutionary, I know! Wish me luck!

Great meeting @ SIFO

On wednesday morning we had a great meeting with Annechen Bahr Bugge and Runar Døving at SIFO! The meeting was most inspiring and the two of them had lots of ideas as to what themes would be relevant for us. Now ofc we need to sit down and sort out what is relevant to our project. On tuesday afternoon I suddenly had three/four ideas of how this can be visualised.
So stay tuned! We will be right back after this...

Brainwork

I was going to write the new enhanced brief on friday, had told Jack I would send it to him at the end of the week... Just couldn't do it... postponed all day untill it was to late... then in the weekend I pretended to forget about it... did some work for my company (bills etc), some housework and generally had the time of... come monday morning and I wake up thinking: "...this goes before that... that sentence gets cut... I need to write about these things...". The structure was set in my mind, and I sat down at the computer and spent 3 hours writing it all smoothly! Good brain. Working when I am not ;-)

Fiskeboller at the railwaystation?

Some conceptual sketches of an installation at the railwaystation in Bergen... Could this be a location for Fiskeboller i karri?

Sensuous Knowledge 4.1

Comments from SK4:

I think that one of the differences between artistic practice and artistic research is that in artistic research must have something that is relevant to other people and that you have to communicate this.

From John Hyatt's talk:

If you ar going to design a car, study how they have designed cars previously, then go into your studio and forget all about it. All the knowledge will still be there and will come through no matter what. Everything you ever learnt is in there, you just have to open yourself to it.

Art and science were once the same line of inquiry.


First you have a question, you do the research; find out as much as you possibly can about the topic. You then spin it into the creative practice and hopefully something innovative comes out. This you again feed into the creative practice to test its viability and do more research and so on and so forth...

Scriptwriter needed!?

I feel very strongly that we need a scriptwriter. Where do we find the right person? Skrivekunst akademiet? Wibecke? TV-faget? Or could the content be developed through visual development and visual use of text? And then we could get a scriptwriter to make the actual texts... if it is necessary... hmmmmm.....

I am the boss!

We have had a meeting straightening out the lines of responsibility. We were all quite frustrated and by the time we met, all feeling that the project was not moving forward and not having the time to do anything about it. It was a long time since we had met due to Linda and Joannes workloads. After a short frustrated discussion we readily agreed that I need to be the project leader and must be aloud to make descissions. The two others will still be on board, but rather on concrete tasks, not as much in the daily running of the project. Which basically means that they decide what has to be done for the next meeting and I do it. They love it.

All cultures are dirty!

A-magasinet, the weekend magazine of one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, last Friday had a very good article about people from Somalia, apparently many have a hard time becoming integrated in Norwegian society. I will not discuss that topic as it is a bit too large a morsel to chew atm. It was the end of the article that made me think. It said "I remembered what a 19-year old I met outside the Somali mosque in Trondheimsveien had said. He was complaining in an aggressiv tone about how the media judges all Somali, before he said: -Kurds are rapists. But not Somali."

I think we have to be very clear in the exhibition about the fact that all cultures are mixes, are dirty so to speak (as opposed to the idea of national culture as something pure and uninfluenced), not only the Norwegian one. Otherwise we could get a situation where people could say; "Haha! You don't really have a culture, it is all a mix, nothing is Norwegian! It is not clean like our culture!"

All cultures are dirty, are mixes, are moving and growing. I like the description in "Blanke løgner, skitne sannheter" by Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud. Loosely translated they write: "In the large perspective we are all immigrants. Nations and land areas are like circular tube lines: an eternal stream of people embarking and disembarking throughout history through thousands of years."

Plan for week 41

Every week

Keep the blog updated


Work

• Working on the exhibition script through a storytelling workshop with Kelly Davis.
  

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda. (monday)
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft. (monday)
  

Meetings

• Department of Design - Petter - monday
  

Summing up Week 40

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda.
• worked on it, will send it today
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
• will be finished Monday October 8th

Supervision with Søren

Through gentle manipulation ;-) Søren made me decide to keep the evaluation on the process of Havlandet in the form of a bulletted list rather than in prose. The measuring and reporting fashion of the list makes it feel as if it is made by a machine analysing all the data available judging the different parts of the process against god-given questions.

The evaluation of the exhibition itself will be differeent from that with two parts; "what worked/what was good" and "what didn't work/wasn't good". With visuals ofc, and also with explanations (where relevant and possible).

What are we doing?

Wednesday there was a full day seminar about research and development at KhiB (Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen). I really enjoyed the discussions, even if they were not so much about research and development as such. The seminar is one of three this autumn and is obligatory for all teaching and researching personnel at KhiB.

We were placed in groups of ten and were presented with two projects, in our case very different ones. Professor Rita Marhaug was presenting a proposal for creating a platform for cooperation in development projects. And Professor Dave Vikøren presented his work with InsideNorway, a project where he works on increasing the reputation of Norwegian furniture design.

For me it was interesting to see that I felt more connected to Rita's project than to the industry of the furniture business. I realise that exhibitions (like all other spacial design projects) are "unika design", not mass produced (Yes it is obvious, but putting this into words put some things in place for me ^^).

I was pondering what the research part was in Dave's project and what differed it from a branding project in say visual or marketing communication.

In research by design it is the finished product that is the important result, in addition there must be reflections on the process, trials and errors. As the discussion progressed it became clear that Dave's project is twofold; he does design exhibitions for very different settings to display the furnitures. But the other, and I would perhaps say more important, part of the project is to actually design a system for promoting Norwegian furnitures, and give young designers a way into the market. The design of the system is in correspondence with the notion of the designer as an expert in problem solving. An exsample of this is the School of Design at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Their focus on design as a problemsolver has given them projects that is not typical for a design school. They have, among other things, re-organized the entire US Postal system and designed a new tax-system for Australia.