Last weekend, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival took place in Rotterdam. Most inspiring venue was the Las Palmas. where lots of intsallations triggering interaction were displayed. Also, v2 celebrated its 25th university, with a great interactive party at Staal, Rotterdam. The picture above shows a visualization of musical data. Very nice! See www.deaf07.nl for more info and workshop results.

the venue of the conference in Potsdam.

Just back from my trip to Berlin, where I attended the interaction design conference organized by (amongst others) the Fachhochschule Design in Potsdam. Check talks and responses on we-make-money-not-art. Besides the staggering and ever-clever story by Bruce Sterling, putting us designers back in our place again, the most inspiring talk in my opinion was by Gillian Crampton-Smith. She reflected on 20-years of experience in the field (Apple, Ivrea, RCA, Arduino) of design-research to conclude that is does not exist. She advertised design-by doing, iterative processes and rapid prototyping. Design research nowadays can only be reflective, due to its nature. By trying to combine different disciplines into this ‘new field’ of research brought upon it many problems, because design is not science and it will never be.
She proposed a new approach to design research by stepping out of the ‘academic’ area of hypothesis and verifying/falsifying.