vive la sémiologie

Architectradure is a very cool blog about interaction design and ambient intelligence by Cati Vaucelle. For example, this post about Michael Graves and Universal Design found at metropolismag.com.

"People who become disabled have to radically redesign their outlook about the physical world," Graves says, remembering the first days after he was out of danger and learning to live with paralysis. "They redesign their sense of privacy and their sense of independence. Yet in the products they have to use, design has abandoned them."

If I were not married, I would be practicing my French while taking a plane to propose... This is just an excerpt from her lecture on semiotics:

"The main point is that social and individual percepts are codified into material form. Products can then be decomposed into separated features. This help understand that, when combined, these features become cultural choices. Pointing out the combination of features naturally point to cultural implications, i.e. are culture specific. The final point is to determine within a concept what are the assumptions while making design choices. It helps articulate a project within a framework and allows the identification of the 'why' of the final design choices that will later be encoded into material form."

... or this tool for evaluating Universal Design Performance, and one of my favourite posts: the shadow of objects. Installations created by Fred Eerdekens using light and objects to create unbelievable messages, and you can take that literally. I usually don't like works of art that use written messages, because they become "localized" instead of being universal. I mean, that they can only communicate to the people who understand that language. But in this case, I must say that it's really clever.

au revoir