Studio Dumbar

Studio Dumbar produces brands they describe as meaningful. The studio emphasises it’s work as “Pure. Simple. Powerful.” Studio Dunbar has worked on a number of diverse projects including Cities in Motion (moving custom variable typeface), Club Brugge (One of Belgium’s top soccer clubs) and Transavia (Airline).

The studio’s creative director Liza Enebeis in her talk Design in Motion, speaks about the importance of motion in branding stating that static is not an option. Enebeis presents motion as another phase of communication and talks about the project motion as a language for Amsterdam Sinfonietta ( a world-renowned string orchestra from Amsterdam). They found the brand was not working on multiple platforms the approach they used to tackle this problem was to revisit their communication language by generating patterns through moving image and sound.

Enebies then discusses design in motion and talks about the Cities in Motion project in which Studio Dumbar used a moving custom variable typeface on advertising screens at train stations that were originally playing penguins when no one had bought the advertising time. This project gained quite a lot of attention with some people even visiting the 14 stations to take pictures with each of the screen playing the cities names, see clip below of 3 of the final outcomes.

 

I think the work Studio Dumbar is doing in Motion Design is amazing and would love to learn more about this area of design and how to create it. I agree that motion is becoming more popular within design and has its place and therefore would be a valuable medium to explore further.

 

Feld Studio

Feld studio is a digital design studio that provides consulting, concept evolution and design, planning, development and operation of projects.

One of the really cool projects Feld are working on at the moment is on new principles for the communication between people and autonomous systems. This was done for the Volkswagen Future Centre, Europe in 2017 and includes a number of speculative design experiments.

The project attempts to build trust into communication between humans in autonomous systems (i.e. artificial intelligence) through empathy. They call this empathic intelligence. The study began with attempting to develop this relationship by having 500 participants sign up to the empathic futures website where they are invited to download the app. The participant downloads the app and after 5 days receives a good morning message from the EI after that there if 5 days in which a gradual development of the relationship occurs e.g day the EI tries to understand daily routine.

Text is not the only form of communication that is used through the 5 days as challenges and feedbacks are incorporated like sending favourite emojis and photographs. This leads to the EI moving to try to understand what the participant is interested in e.g. hobbies and feedback. The feedback is used to establish how the participant’s experience of using the EI is going and how they would describe their relationship with the EI e.g. assistant, friend or partner.

However, while you might imagine that they were engaging with a computer the whole time this was not the case. What was actually happening was that a group of people involved in the studying were actually responding to the participants playing the role of the EI. These peoples were called operators and were able to speak to multiple people at the one time and analyse the data simultaneously.

This lead to an archive of 500 conversations. In order to analyse the data tolls are being built to find connections and similar patterns.

I think this is a really interesting field of study and would love to work on a project like this. I love the idea of taking the fear out of Artificial Intelligence however I do agree that we should proceed with caution and consider all of the possible outcomes of these new innovations in order to avoid negative side effects.