weblog December 21, 2006   Manifestos for/from the (near) future. I just received from the future the January 07 issue of Icon magazine. No, unfortunately it does not include racetrack results of any kind, but on page 21 Justin McGuirk writes what could very well be my manifesto for the upcoming new year: "There's nothing intrinsically interesting about technology. It's only as interesting as what you can do with it. You can create some piece of 'convergent' nonsense - a printer that plays music and polishes your shoes - or you can project an image of a tree in a public square, make the leaves fall as people walk past and have them swirl on the ground as pedestrians walk through them. The first is onanism, the second is poetry. The designers collected together in our feature on interaction design (Simon Heijdens, Moritz Waldemeyer, Greyworld, Loop and Troika) use increasingly accessible forms of technology to make surprising, delightful things rather than strictly 'useful' ones (isn't it useful to make someone feel better on the way home from work?). Now that, at least in the west, our design needs are largely met, the designer's role can become that of the humanist - or even magician. Our electronic devices can be so much more intuitive, our public spaces so much more magical. Advocates of a stricter notion of design may accuse the practices published here of playing around on the margins of the discipline. To them I would say that perhaps what we need - as a society - is less design and more magic." Posted by fabio sergio | 11:00 PM | permalink ............ Not bored yet? Visit freegorifero's weblog archives for more useless words.

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