Featured Projects
On 16, Jan 2018 | In Featured Speculative Tangible Teaching | By phil
Delft AI Toolkit
A tool for the design of AI
We are entering an age of pervasive machine intelligence, and there is an urgent need to develop strategies for the design of these new ecologies. The Delft AI Toolkit (GitHub repo) is a platform to easily create working AI prototypes that intelligently behave – see, hear, process, manipulate data, move, and speak.
Work in progress videos at the bottom of the post
On 30, Dec 2016 | In Featured Installation Tangible | By phil
Acura – Race Your Heart Out
Race Your Heart Out was the 2015 Acura Winter Sales event, which was a slot car race live broadcast on Periscope to raise money for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation. Hearts on Periscope controlled the speed of the cars and they raced. I consulted for Razorfish on this project and created the Arduino software and interface that received the “heart rate” (how many people were tapping the hearts) for each slot car, and controlled their speed – the more hearts at any moment, the faster the cars would go.
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On 13, Jan 2012 | In Featured Installation | By phil
A+D Museum
Recently a few of my students from the Media Design Program at Art Center and I created an interactive installation for the 10th anniversary of the Architecture+Design Museum. The A+D is a growing institution in the Los Angeles area, and they were having a party for their board and major donors. Two weeks before the event I got a call from museum supporter Garson Yu owner of yU+co, asking to help out in a volunteer effort to create something to show the history of the museum.
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NETLab Toolkit
The NETLab Toolkit is a system for integrating tangible interaction and media. Designed for project sketching and production, the toolkit enables novices and experts to integrate hardware, media and interactive behaviors for products, installations, and research.
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On 10, Jan 2012 | In Speculative Tangible Teaching | By phil
Interaction Design & Animism
In Spring 2011, the New Ecology of Things course in the Media Design Program had the theme of animism, and explored how interaction design can utilize the natural tendency to imagine that inanimate objects and spaces have motivation, intention and/or consciousness. I encouraged my students to design the project behaviors to indicate animism through kinetic expression. They created working, interactive projects with rich materiality, sensors, motors, and light.
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On 10, Jan 2011 | In Featured Installation | By phil
Acura Oracles
The Acura Oracle project was initiated by MDP alumni Nikolai Cornell at George P. Johnson for the Acura stand at the international auto shows (including Detroit, Chicago, New York, and LA) for the 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 exhibitions. It’s a 4 foot round multitouch table that enables a social experience for a group of people.
I participated as a consultant in the initial creative brainstorming and technical definition.
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USC Rossier School of Education
The School Performance Dashboard web project was developed for USC’s Center on Educational Governance provides an easy way for educators and others to explore a range of performance metrics for charter schools in California. Each charter school is rated on 12 indicators assessing financial resources and investment; school quality; student performance; and academic productivity. Users can evaluate individual schools; compare the performance of multiple schools; review the performance of a single school across several years; or download the entire data set.
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On 10, May 2009 | In Speculative Tangible Teaching | By phil
The New Ecology of Things Class
I just wrapped up my The New Ecology of Things class at Art Center’s Media Design Program. The class addressed the design of ubiquitous, massively networked systems – i.e. emerging ecologies of things. Our topic this term was “anti-homogenous” and we looked at heterogeneous alternatives to the mouse, keyboard, screen for specific work and play activities.
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On 13, Jan 2008 | In Featured Speculative Tangible Teaching | By phil
Object & Screen Speculations
Update, September 2017: I recently watched this after many years, because I randomly came across a SlideShare from a workshop that David Sherwin and Aaron Rincover ran back in 2010. The workshop was called “Prototyping Interaction with Video Scenarios,” and it references my video as an example of rough prototyping and interaction (slide 16).
When I made the video I was thinking about how to use tangible objects as a way to interact with screens. But what struck me watching it in 2017 is how relevant this kind of interaction is for AR and VR.
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On 10, Jan 2008 | In Featured Installation | By phil
Acura Oracles
The Acura Oracle project was initiated by MDP alumni Nikolai Cornell at George P. Johnson for the Acura stand at the international auto shows (including Detroit, Chicago, New York, and LA) for the 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 exhibitions. It’s a 4 foot round multitouch table that enables a social experience for a group of people.
I participated as a consultant in the initial creative brainstorming and technical definition.
Read more…
On 10, Jan 2008 | In Publication Speculative Tangible Teaching Web | By phil
The New Ecology of Things
The New Ecology of Things is a research initiative to explore emerging forms of interactive communication brought about by pervasive networks, low cost sensors, and computational capabilities in every object and space. The project began as a studio class hosted by Graduate Media Design, and has evolved into a conceptual model, a forum for discussion, and ongoing series of projects and courses, technological inventions, new issues for pedagogy, and a publication.
By phil
On 10, Jan 2008 | In Installation | By phil
Huntington Library
This project created two touch screen learning stations installed in the renovated Huntington House on the grounds of the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. Working with an education specialist at the Huntington, we developed projects around exhibits on Silver and Porcelain, targeted at 8-12 year-olds. These touch projects focused on the history and craft of the objects displayed, and involved children in interactive activities such as selecting the kiln temperature to fire the porcelain, or putting their stamp on a silver vase.
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On 13, Jan 2007 | In Speculative Web | By phil
Productive Interaction Experiments
I continue working on a series of design sketches that explore the ideas expressed in my essay, Productive Interaction. The main idea is that Interaction Designers should create interactive systems that allow users to create their own meaning space rather than designing scripted experiences. These experimental sketches are sometimes very rough, and other times more refined. They help me as I pursue new ways of interacting, driven by my writing as well as feeding new writing in an ongoing cycle of thinking and making.
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On 10, Jan 2006 | In Featured Installation | By phil
Infiniti Interactive Mirror
An installation for Infiniti at the International Auto Shows, the Infiniti Interactive Mirror is a 3 screen interface that uses mirrored glass and rear projection to create a seamless large screen touch interface. George P. Johnson created the project with Nikolai Cornell as creative director (MDP alum, based on his thesis project). Nikolai worked with The Designory, MindFlood, and my company Commotion.
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On 10, Jan 2004 | In Installation Tangible | By phil
Corporate Delicti
Corporate Delicti was a group exhibition at Nucleus Gallery around the topic of disillusionment with corporate life. Collaborating with student Colin Owen, we built a system of interactive objects from an office – a copier, file cabinet, and fax machine. Painted gray, each object was made interactive by removing the guts and putting sensors and speakers inside.
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On 12, Jan 2003 | In Music Speculative Tangible | By phil
Physical Music
Physical Music is a series of projects that explore new kinds of tangible interaction through the idea of enabling non-musicians to play with music. Starting in the late 1990’s, these projects have been a way for me to move from screen interaction design to physical interaction design, as well as learn how to prototype interactive objects and spaces.
Interval Research (1997)
I consulted for Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corp. in 1997 and 1998, working for early Apple innovator Joy Mountford, in her group focused on inventing new consumer electronics devices. In particular, we were interested in creating systems for casual music making by non-musicians. As part of this, we designed and built several working prototypes, including the MusicBox project that is written up in Bill Moggridge’s book Designing Interactions.
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On 13, Jan 1996 | In Publication Web | By phil
ArtCommotion.com (1996)
ArtCommotion.com, The Los Angeles Contemporary Arts Magazine was a very early web-based magazine developed by my company.
ArtCommotion is a web magazine and resource exposing contemporary visual and literary art. It focuses on the Los Angeles area and features commissioned art, interviews, weekly news columns, reviews, and classifieds. ArtCommotion is committed to expanding the audience for contemporary art.
For Issue 2, we collaborated with Yoko Ono to create a faux exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as a 25th anniversary follow-up to her The Museum of Modern FArt another fake exhibition at New York’s MOMA. The exhibition was presented on the website moca.org as if it were officially sanctioned (it was not). We acquired and controlled moca.org first and later gave it to the real MOCA.
On 10, Jan 1994 | In Music Publication | By phil
Launch Magazine (1994)
Launch Magazine was one of the first ever interactive publications, first released in 1994. My company was hired by Launch (later Yahoo! Music) to design and develop the magazine, as well as a production pathway so they could release a magazine every month. The magazine featured new music, interviews of bands, interactive advertising sold by its position in the “real estate” of the screens.
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On 10, Jan 1993 | In Featured Installation Music | By phil
U2 ZooTV (1993)
For the U2 ZooTV tour in 1993, I and my MusicWorks team at Philips Media (Brett Spivey, Randy Picolet, Mike Diehr) created two interactive projects for the band to use onstage. It’s fun to think about what it was like to make interactive media back then. Keep in mind, this was the year NCSA released the first real web browser called Mosaic, before Photoshop had layers, and when a 650 meg (not gig!) SCSI hard drive was $2500 and the size of a breadbox.
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CD-i Ready Hybrid Music CDs (1991-1993)
I led the MusicWorks group at Philips Interactive Media, where I was a Senior Producer developing titles for the Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i) set-top box multimedia platform. As part of our interest in making music titles, we collaborated with the Compact Disc standards group at Philips (the inventors of the CD along with Sony) to invent the first “hybrid” CD format, which included multimedia content on a standard music CD. This format was called CD-i Ready, because the biographies, discographies, videos, games, etc. were in the CD-i format.
Recording Engineer – Germs, Dils, etc. (1979)
On the westside of Los Angeles around 1973, I built a recording studio in my parents garage. It was outfitted with a Dokorder 4 track machine and a Tascam 12×4 mixing console. Initially I was just recording my high school friends (e.g. The Big River Band), but then started getting other paying gigs. These ranged from a 14 piece orchestra recording a film soundtrack, progressive jazz (including brothers Alex and Nels Cline), and some of the earliest LA punk bands.
