Hello World (again)
Jørn Knutsen | 8. September 2015
Hi. It’s been a while since our last dispatch. As you might know, Einar and I have been busy wrapping up our PhDs for the last couple of years or so (yes, academia is slow). In June I successfully completed the oral defence of my thesis. So you can call me Dr. Knutsen now. Einar will do the same on October 6th at AHO. Come along!
This is a post to say that we are still alive, and perhaps more importantly, to remind ourselves that we have done other things than hammering out academic epics over the last two years. Anyway, here’s a brief summary of what we have been up to alongside The Typing:
New office space
We’ve secured ourselves a couple of desks in a fantastic new office space together with our friends Bengler, Skrekkøgle, Node and a smattering of other design and technology oriented companies in Thorvald Meyers gate 49, Oslo (come visit!). Apart from the obligatory foosball table there are also well-equipped workshops and a brewery. Voy Pilsner coming right up!
New website
We have built ourselves a new website which you are using right now. Hope you like it! The new design will hopefully enable us to present our work in a more flexible and engaging way. On a technical note, we have ditched Wordpress and untethered ourselves from a CMS all together using Jekyll and Github pages. Going static seems like a sensible move for such small and contained site like this. How it will work in the long run remains to be seen.
Projects
During our radio silence we have been working on a range of projects, some of which have been written up and presented elsewhere. Unfortunately much of the other work have been for secretive clients which we are not allowed to talk about. Hopefully we will be able to talk about these in the not too distant future. However, we have also done public project such as Satellite Lamps–which reveal the material qualities of GPS signals. Barnetråkk–a tool for schools kids to participate in local planning processes, on stage decorations for Todd Terje–based on Bendik’s brilliant illustrations we designed and built a set of decorations for Todd’s performance at Øya festival, and Vega–we are currently working with Bengler on a system for academic publishing, scheduled for release in 2018. Soon, we’ll have write-up of all of these projects.
Teaching
At the Oslo School of Architecture and Design we have developed and carried out a new undergraduate semester in interaction design (2014 and 2015 editions). It’s a high paced semester packed with 13 briefs where the students get an introduction to the many varieties of interaction design practieces ranging through paper prototyping, material explorations, electronics and micro-controllers, film production, UX and screen design.
Exhibitions
Last year we gathered many of the projects that we have been working on in our research over the past five years or so into a designated exhibition. Thanks to Honor Harger who initiated and curated the exhibition that was shown at the Lighthouse in Brighton. In February we brought the exhibition back to Oslo at Grafill R21,. We even made a website for it. Our Satellite Lamps project was also featured in the DREAD exhibition in Amsterdam, curated by Juha van’t Zelfde.
That’s mostly it. Probably some items I’ve missed. But it’s an impressive inventory. Well done us! For the future we’ll be more frequent and verbal about our endeavours. So, watch this space.