Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man is a compilation of essays by authors who are part of the universe of Burning Man or who engage the many ideas and landscapes on its periphery. By juxtaposing an unusual array of voices and stories, it reveals the complex nature and range of this annual pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert.
Samantha Krukowski (ed.)
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2014
Parallel Projections investigates two types of postindustrial site: the architectural and the agricultural; it conflates (projections of and into) spaces as means of making visceral our intellectual comprehension of the
relationships between materiality, surface, place and history. Parallel Projections is not meant for specific
places but for specific kinds of spaces: defunct industrial buildings, abandoned urban edifices, and mechanized
natural landscapes. The authors, living in places (Iowa and Ohio) that have both been radically altered by scalar
economic shifts, adapt alien (guest) project components to their native (host) contexts. Both types of spaces, host
and guest, as spaces of urban and rural abandonment, share surfaces that are compelling palimpsests. These
surfaces are encrusted with nearly-obliterated histories, emptied by changes in production methods and habits
of occupation and revealed by ghost texts. In opposition to the idea that these sites should be whitewashed and redrawn, the authors see them as grounds for new layers that can receive projections of phenomena from other postindustrial sites and as repositories for material evidence that deepens, rather than erases, the evidence of their
pasts.
A 1948 exhibition catalogue of the work of Alberto Giacommetti, with an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, highlights the relationships between sculpture and psychoanalysis, phenomenology, existentialism.
An overview of Bonnie Cashin's life and work which led to the concept of lifestyle design in fashion during the mid to late 20th century, forming the foundation of contemporary sportswear design.
Interactive product prototyping has been widely taught in industrial design studio courses to prepare design students in dealing with dynamic interactions of using digital products. While it requires the integration of design and technology, the lack of systematic approaches of the studio curricula creates a great challenge for students who are not familiar with technology in creating interactive prototypes successfully. A theoretical framework is developed from the human-machine interaction model and the sequential flow of task analysis methods. Based on this framework, a human-machine interaction (HMI) flow diagram is proposed with which interaction elements, relationships, and flows are specified and categorized. The flow diagram is utilized to create a storyboard and an allocation flowchart subsequently. A structured design process based on these methods was applied to an interactive product design studio course in an undergraduate industrial design program. Students created working prototypes of interactive products, following the structured design process consisting of an HMI flow diagram, a storyboard, and an allocation flowchart. 104 students (87.4%) among 119 succeeded in translating their ideas to functioning circuits. 74 students (62.2%) successfully integrated electronics components into working physical prototypes while 30 students (25.2%) just made the circuits work. The structured design process makes a transition from initial ideation to programming smooth and incremental. This helps students without previous programming experience to understand the logic flow and to develop algorithms. The HMI flow diagram is useful for analysis, concept development, and the specification of interactions, and helps students to grasp the effect of interactive features on user experience.
