Design Documents

How do interdisciplinary teams communicate in media design and electronic art? If they do communicate well, what are the ways that artists, designs, programmers, engineers, and those they work with, such as users, discuss their ideas, clarify problems, and find results that enhance their work? In the developing area of social software for instance, how could a social network draw up a brief? How does media design itself create tools and materials for such work? Are there new opportunities for the creation of design documents that come out of networked and computational digital media? How do the cultures of open and distributed creativity and production experienced in Free Software and other areas allow us to see other forms of collaboration?

Key to the theme of the symposium is the discussion of boundary objects within projects, devices, documents, sketches, plans, briefs, models, prototypes, mock-ups, experiential accounts and so on. Under the magnifying glass: examining existing design documents; creating typologies; vocabularies, in-project vernaculars; boundary or shared objects such as drawings, diagrams; in-code comments; divisions of labour; designing speculative research; mapping interactions; resisting or working with multiple economies of time and resources.

Schedule
This event will be webcast live by V2_ (Thu 13 Oct, 10:00-17:00 CET).

10:00 Entry
10:30 Introduction by Anne Nigten (V2_Lab)
10:45 Introduction by Matthew Fuller (PZI)

First panel
11:05 Nina Wakeford
11:50 Kristina Andersen
12:30 joint Q&A

12:50 Lunch

Second panel
14:00 McKenzie Wark
14:40 Victoria Donkersloot
15:10 Dennis Kaspori / Jeanne van Heeswijk
15:50 joint Q&A

Bios and links
Kristina Andersen works with sensors and sensuality, with performers and circuit hacking.
http://www.lockergirl.com/
http://www.tinything.com/

Victoria Donkersloot is a media designer from Rotterdam. She recently worked as the interface designer for the cultural file-sharing application Apnaopus.
http://apnaopus.var.cc/

Nina Wakeford Director of INCITE in the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey. Along with colleagues at INCITE she is interested in the ways in which collaborations can be forged between ethnographers and those from other disciplines, such as engineering and computer science. She asks how critical social and cultural theory can play a part in the design process, including the challenges which feminist and queer theories pose to collaborative projects between designers and sociologists, as well as technology studies.
http://incite.surrey.ac.uk/

McKenzie Wark is Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New School University. He is the author of several books, most recently Dispositions and A Hacker Manifesto.
http://www.ludiccrew.org/

Dennis Kaspori / Jeanne van Heeswijk are collaborators on a unique spatial and social planning project, Face Your World. Using sophisticated custom software, children are engaged in a serious process of social-spatial decision making. Most recently, Face Your World has been a six month project to design a park in the Sloterplaas area of Amsterdam.
http://www.faceyourworld.net/
http://www.themaze.org/

This event is organized by:
Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
http:// www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/
http://www.wdka.hro.nl/

and V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media
http://www.v2.nl/

It is a contribution to the MultimediaN research network.
http://www.multimedian.nl/
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/