Brian Eno shares his views on creating situations to let go of control, reducing one’s options to avoid known paths, the concept of a “genius” and his idea of art education for everyone in this interview at Red Bull Music Academy in New York in May 2013.
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This quick experiment shows how logos of major brands are rebuilt and distributed by the public and made available on the internet. It’s impossible to say which is the original logo, all versions that are freely available online differ a little bit. This is a compilation of the logos of six companies: Nike, adidas, Coca-Cola, Apple, BBC and bp. More

I’ve explored cartography in several projects before, and I’m especially fascinated by the way we memorise maps, for example how we build mental models of a city layout, and how we experience and remember space.

A recent brief at RCA was to think about remapping Europe. I took this as an opportunity to make an experiment to find out how we remember maps: I asked people to draw the map of Europe off the top of their heads, without preparation or reference, within a 5 minute timespan. More

Last but not least, I’d like to add a classic TED talk to my list of inspirational talks. Actually it is the most watched TED talk ever – over 15 million on the TED website and another 5 million views on youtube since 2006. And quite rightly, I think. While folks like Evgeny Morozov love to hate TED talks, which is debatable of course, Ken Robinson’s remarks on creativity and the educational system can be considered a masterpiece, rhetorically as well as regarding the argument he makes. More

I’ve spent the last two days at the IDEO make-a-thon, a workshop where 78 people met to think, create and make. The 12 challenges on the topic of “superhuman” have been meticulously chosen by IDEO staff. Our challenge, entitled “Super Games”, was how we might help the elderly strengthen their skills through play.
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According to John Cleese, certain conditions make it more likely that something creative might occur. In order to get into the “open mode”, you have to create an oasis of quiet for yourself by setting boundaries of space and of time.

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In this interview with wired Joi Ito, the new director of the MIT Media Lab, explains why he sees the future of education and research in “open universities”. 27 years after its opening, Ito wants to open up the Media Lab into the “world’s leading ‘antidisciplinary’ research lab”, where everybody, academically qualified or not, can take part. He sets out to create a movement based on disobedience and breaking the rules attempting to solve the world’s most persistent problems. More

My newest work is a visualisation of various demographic and US election-related datasets called United Stats of America, which I created in collaboration with Melissa Kim. We’ve been commissioned by KK Outlet, the London outpost of infamous Kesselskramer from Amsterdam, and they provided us with a large amount of datasets based on research carried out by Sarah Williams, Assistant Professor at MIT. The brief was to create infographic posters based on this data for their exhibition Mapping America. Let me explain what it’s about and how me made it. More

I joined the #vizmarathon 2012 at the meetup in University College London on Friday, where Alastair Moore uf UCL Advances had prepared a great environment to work in and provided pizza and beer. After getting the brief and the datasets, we watched the keynote speech by Richard Saul Wurman. Sitting in his comfortable chair in his home office / library, he inspired all of us, but also got me into thinking about the relevance of data visualizations. More

Following Neville Brody’s brief to create a language has sparked my interest in investigating the origin, structure, purpose and design of a language. More

It’s crucial to select the right tools for each project. Equally important is not to spend too much time checking out the newest tools – there are just too many of them. The practice of creative coding is evolving quickly, so I thought it might be useful to document the current state of my toolbox. More

We’ve been watching Renzo Martens’ film “Enjoy Poverty” from 2008, as well as “Manufactured Landscapes”, a 2006 documentary about the photographer Ed Burtynsky. Although fundamentally different in language, aesthetics and topic, both films left me devasteted, as they adress pressing problems of our world. Ultimately they raise the question for me, where I can start to make a change? More

I was fortunate enough to get a place at this year’s summer school at Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design – CIID. Led by Matt Cottham of Tellart and his wife Maia Garau, the three-week course was aimed at getting a hands-on experience, behind-the-scenes insight and realising short practical assignments in teams and individually. We had amazing lectures on interaction design and service design, and got a good background in historical studies and design theory. The second week focused on computational design with Processing and Arduino led by Dennis Paul of The Product* and Jacob Sikker Remin, who brought a bunch of self-made sensors to realise physical computing projects. More

This blog documents my design research while studying Information Experience Design at Royal College of Art. Keeping a research blog is an experiment and I don’t know if it works out, if my posts are worth reading and – most important – if I update the blog regularly with relevant content. More