Antenna Design’s Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger presented their body of work to Red Burns’s Applications class on November 2, 2010. I was grouped together with Geetha, Eric, Doug and Ara to present our reactions to Antenna’s presentation. Keeping with the Applications course protocol, we were given only a week to prepare and 25 minutes to present.
We all agreed that part of Antenna’s credo is that industrial design is an intervention of public and psychologic space. But what we were most impressed by was their ability to make things better with less.
We brainstormed for several days and agreed we wanted to build something for our audience to alter the physical space of our classroom. After a very painful process of killing some very innovative ideas, we finally agreed on one. We designed three viewfinders that act as frames for the world. The user can see through them in various orientations or alter them by drawing or cutting them in order to change how they see the world.
We distributed a set of the viewfinders to our class of 120, in a way controlling their perspectives. In order to express this without giving explicit instructions, we choreographed and acted out a skit without any props or sets but depended on the viewfinders to put the actions into context.
Slideshow and video excerpts of our skit:
We allotted ten minutes of our presentation time for the audience to play around with their frames. A slideshow of our interventions ran through the background
And the audience was encouraged to send whatever photos they took during the skit and during their ten minutes of playtime to a tumblr blog.
We spent so many hours talking and planning and locked ourselves into a room for two days in a row preparing for our presentation. It’s insane to think the culmination of our work could be summed up in roughly twenty minutes on a stage and one blog post. But ultimately our plan worked! And I made friends with four very talented individuals.
