Daily Loaf

Courtesy Sarasota Int’l Design Summit/Pininfarina

Today and tomorrow, the Sarasota International Design Summit continues. (Click here to read an earlier overview of the event.)

At this point, the ideas start coming fast and furious, which is why the summit’s “visualization maestro,” Tom Wujec of Autodesk, plans to recap yesterday’s big ideas (memes, if you will) in sketches this morning. Throughout the conference, Wujec and a team of Ringling College students transcribe the speakers’ main arguments and/or research insights into digital tablet-drawn graphics. Believe me, by mid-Tuesday a mnemonic device or two starts to come in handy.

More of yesterday’s highlights:

Franco Lodato of Pininfarina described his company’s design for an electric car, Sintesi, that engages with the surrounding environment (i.e., the city) as a network. Hair-raising concepts included the absence of mirrors from the car – why have them when the automobile could network with a city’s omnipresent surveillance cameras? – and the obsolescence of stoplights when the cars themselves are able to negotiate who will stop when.

Call me old-school, but I found one of Lodato’s other comments the most earth-shattering: he explained that Pininfarina still begins each concept car as a sculpture of sorts, searching for “a pure object of art or desire” before adding the technology or figuring out how the thing might work. Aesthetics reign supreme – for example, in an interactive dashboard that allows the driver to customize the interior lighting and other environmental variables of the car. Experience, experience, experience.

AP photo

Walter Bender of Sugar Labs spoke about his company’s further development of the operating system, Sugar, initially designed to run on the One Laptop Per Child computers. (Bender, who was instrumental in developing OLPC, recently parted ways with founder Nicholas Negroponte over a difference of opinion about whether the OLPC laptops should run a Microsoft operating system or open-source Sugar.)

I have to say, I’d heard ad nauseum about the green-and-white laptops but not so much about the operating system they run. Hearing Bender and seeing Sugar screenshots demonstrating how intuitive the OS seems, I felt first my first attack of SIDS-fever coming on. (That’s when some design innovation or philosophy you hear about at the summit triggers an urgent desire to be involved in its development.)

Bender’s talk focused in part on a music-production application (or “activity,” in Sugar lingo) called TamTam that allows a variety of interactions, from simple (playing musical sounds by clicking buttons) to complex (networking with other children for collaborative compositions; reprogramming TamTam to include a new sound). Scary insight of the day that you already knew in your gut: programming emerges as a must-acquire skill of the 21st century.

Megan Voeller is Creative Loafing’s visual art critic. She teaches at the University of Tampa and The Art Institute of Tampa, edits the weekly online newsletter of CreativeTampaBay and blogs at Artsqueeze.com.

Posted in Art Squeeze, Arts & Entertainment | Leave a comment