Dear LIFTers (not people who use lifts a lot, ha, alright, bad joke :-P )

After several days of trying to digest all the inspiring things I got at LIFT, I wrote an article to share some of my thoughts discussing social applications we are talking about and designing today. I look forward to having your comments!

Here is the link - http://idbi.us/lexblog/archives/339

PS: Be honest with you, though I know it can be simpler and shorter but my English is not that good, so you might be suffering when you are reading it, please be patient and give me a chance to 'brainwash' you :-D

A friend of mine, just sent me an important and intriguing work about sustainability, which triggers me to write this post to share some of my thoughts.

The Story of Stuff - with Annie Leonard
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Sustainability, well, this is usually the thing that industrial designers feel like there are prickles down the back. It is usually perceived that engineers can far more better than us to work on this issue, at least they are more piratical than us in a way.

Interestingly, some Taiwanese friends of mine studying at Design Academy Eindhoven had also got this topic to work on and found it is really difficult to position a designer in the cycle of a ecologically sustainable system, whereas you might agree with me, the way they design is rather artistic-based - which is good because they are extremely good at sending messages to people, but for us, interaction designers, are we also good at contributing to this?

We are trained to be good "system" designers, how and what can we do to contribute designs based on "10 Little and Big Things You Can Do" as Annie points out on her website? or even improve it? Does the thinking behind designing an interactive system has values to this? or we are still like "value is rated by consumption"?

While nowadays we talk a lot about designing intelligent products and systems, almost every time when I want to start up a project I encounter a question and ask myself "Am I here just asking and convincing people to buy a product with a function they are already able to do and have?", alright, I admit that it seems that an industrial designer should not think too much like this, especially in this consumerism and material world. Indeed, we can work on emotional design or explore more possibilities of creating things by interactive technologies, even in a "magic" sense as Kees Overbeeke pointed out. But how does this fit to the world which becomes more and more (finally) aware of environments?

Thanks to Gebert Rüf Stiftung, I am one of the lucky students who won the free passes to the conference.

I have been thinking maybe I can propose a workshop for the conference?

Although I am just an international student studying in the Netherlands, as the conference opens a wonderful opportunity for anyone to propose workshops, I would like to quickly put some (four) dirty and rough thoughts I have as themes for a workshop people may find they are interesting as I do.

1. Locative Media + Human Body = Locative Body?
Things you have thought, Activities you have done, Places you have been to..etc..are composing who we are or who we do not want to be, the scale of designing locative media in urban city can be big or small, but does it have influence and opportunities for designers who work not in an architectural domain but in a more bodily area? Is there any way that we can either make people more aware and take care of the environment like the way they care their body?

A photo on InkedBlog - on Tuesday Sep 26, 2006 - Kyle
http://www.inkedblog.com/archives/2006/09/

2. Human senses + Virus Tech. = Contagious Sensation Technology?
Technically, RFID is highly efficient, but as Timo Arnall proposed, it's a technology very much related to one of the human senses - Touch. Despite the fact that using a mobile phone to use and interact with RFID products and services is a bit unnatural or even weird, Touch, this action itself, it's very often to be perceived and associated with the way virus spreads and affects one, however, this is an interesting topic to play with, especially the advent and development of nano technology, a physically contagious technology is about to happen, how can we be prepared? how can we better make use of this? Interestingly...not mentioning the way Facebook works is like a social virus...when you bite or hug someone on Facebook...

Alice Wang's "nanoweapon"
http://www.alice-wang.com/nanoweapons.html