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Until now, action to improve the lives of children and young people has tended to focus on the institutional spheres of home and school. Yet quality of life also depends on the access to and quality of shared resources such as streets, parks, town centres and playgrounds. And here, in the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. In the pursuit of sustainable communities and urban renaissance, children and young people are too often left out of the script.
This is the point thinktank Demos makes in their latest report 'Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the public realm with children and young people'. To launch this report, Demos organised an event with Lord Richard Rogers and the Rt Hon Beverly Hughes MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families.
I was asked to make the content of this report more tangible. Working in collaboration with Revital Cohen, we made a subtle intervention in the street in front of the event. Based on the way the lines drawn on the street tell us how to behave in a public space, we created an abstract pattern of more playful lines. By mixing different game-structures, words and objects, the installation still prompts playful behaviour but doesn't impose a closed set of rules.
In 1950, Alan Turing described what later became famous as the 'Turing test': a proposal to test a machine's intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine has passed the test. Since the 50's, no machine or computer has ever passed the test.
Angelina sings a version of Yesterday, created through several computer-translations. Project with Catherine Kramer and Steven Ounanian.
Dave Bowman always believed domestic appliances would liberate him. He thought he could use technology as a tool to control the world around him. The Story of Dave Bowman is a short-film about a man and his washing machine and wants to question our relationship with technology. Are we the master with domestic appliances as our slaves or might it be the other way around?
The stewardess just told you about the oxygen mask, the life vest and the brace position. You're in an aeroplane and you believe her, you think these things will save your life. But they can't. The only thing the brace position can do for you is preserve your dental records in case of a crash. It keeps your teeth close to your seat number and makes identification easier for the forensic team. In an aeroplane, you are totally out of control.
Larry's Pillow puts you back in control. In case of an emergency, it helps you to take the brace position and straps you up securely. If you then choose to pull the tag, the pillow will inflate and suffocate you. With that choice comes control. You're in control over life and death. You are in control.
This is my MSc graduation project at the Delft University of Technology for Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the national museum of art and history in the Netherlands. The outcome of this 8 months research and concept design project was the creation of a new relationship between the museum and it's visitors and a concept invoking new interaction. It is presented in a book, models and a movie showing the concept in the museum.
