Espace créatif Caran d’Ache, Plateforme 10, Lausanne, Switzerland
14-24 May, 2024
09h30, 14 May 2024 with Laure Krayenbühl, Arnaud Pfeiffer, Douglas Edric Stanley
18h00, 14 May 2024
Mathis Baltisberger, Naomi Blidariu, Basile Brun, Sarah Meylan, Lauren Thiel
- Responsable Communication & Digital, Caran d’Ache : Sophie Murbach
- Director HEAD–Genève : Lada Umstätter
- Project Director: Douglas Edric Stanley
- Department Head, Master Media Design: Alexia Mathieu
- Interim Department Head, Master Media Design: Félicien Goguey
- Artistic Direction: Laure Krayenbühl, Alexia Mathieu, Douglas Edric Stanley
- Professors: Alexia Mathieu, Douglas Edric Stanley, Laure Krayenbühl, Pierre Rossel
- Assistant, Master Media Design: Pablo Bellon
- Exhibition Scenography: Lison Christe
Andres Acosta Blaschitz, Ares Pedroli, Naomi Blidariu, Basile Brun, Adam Chatir, Daria Kotova, Debjyoti Dhowmick, Ekaterina Bliznyuk, Jonas Wolter, Lauren Thiel, Leyla Benkais, Mathis Baltisberger, Sarah Meylan, Jasmine Molano, Océane Serrat, Mathilde Schibler, Enzo Seurre
Alexandre Simian, Chloé Michel, Clément Schlemmer, Frédéric Butor-Blamont, Isabelle Schnederle, Sébastien Pitteloud, Vytas Jankauskas, Xavier Plantevin
Drawing Futures is an exhibition that merges traditional creative practices with emerging technologies, envisioning a future where creativity flourishes through hybrid solutions. It begins with color, to which we add movement, collaboration, music, and storytelling — resulting in a playful combination in which analog and digital forms joyfully collide.
For this exhibition, our aim was to craft playful AI creative assistants. The element of playfulness served as a catalyst for inspiration, encouraging individuals to broaden their artistic horizons. Leveraging the rich offerings of Caran d’Ache tools, we conceived a new breed of interactive objects.
Our primary focus was on designing interactive objects tailored for beginners — those who may not consider themselves artists or professionals and may benefit from additional guidance in their creative journey. Such individuals often require a lighthearted approach to ease into creative activities.
Throughout this project, we asked ourselves the following questions:
- In what forms and with what characteristics could an AI serve as an artist’s assistant?
- What novel combinations and engaging interactions could we envision in this context?
- How might we transcend the conventional metaphor of AI as a replacement for human creativity?
By novel combinations we mean juxtaposing simple materials in unexpected ways. This can be achieved by taking complex and misunderstood technologies and integrating them into familiar technologies or gestures — thereby simplifying their complexity through the poetics of well-understood mechanisms or materials.
For this exhibition, the first semester students of the Media Design Master, HEAD – Genève collaborated with Caran d’Ache, a renowned Swiss company specializing in a wide range of writing and drawing instruments. Although the world of Caran d’Ache may initially appear distinct from digital design practices, a closer examination reveals a significant connection. Writing and storytelling, for example, serve as foundational elements for digital practices, whether it involves composing algorithms to generate poetry or experimenting with drawing machines.
The principal working method of the Media Design Master programme uses a combination of field research, rapid prototyping, user journey studies, and technological development. In the field research phase, students explored various hypotheses using field observations, data collection, and user studies in order to develop their central concept around drawing futures. From this phase, we added rapid prototyping methodologies and experimental playtesting in order to further discover the core interactions and goals of each project. In parallel, students learned new methods and technologies related to electronics, programming, and industrial design and started integrating them into each project as it evolved.
In January 2024, the Media Design Master students presented seventeen prototypes related to the “Future of Drawing”, along with methodological and technological documentation of each project. From these early demos and prototypes, four projects were selected for further development for the exhibition “Drawing Futures” at the Espace créatif Caran d’Ache, Plateforme 10.
Sarah Meylan
- color, gameplay, movement, sound, vibration, palette
« I don’t know what to draw and which colors to use » – citation from Project User Study, November 2023
Color Catcher is a playful color grabber that allows the user to create their own Caran d’Ache Luminance 6901® palette by using curiosity as their guide. It is both a toy and tool that uses play as a means to facilitate the creative process. By allowing the detection of colors that are invisible to the naked eye, Color Catcher encourages the player to physically move all around the room to discover colors in a game of sound and vibration.
A strong color palette can powerfully transform any creative project. And yet choosing colors that complement each other in unique and compelling ways can be a daunting task. With Color Catcher, the player explores the object’s interactive potential in order to capture an unexpected color palette.
At the end of the experience, the user will be able to retrieve their personalized palette of colors generated during gameplay, including indexed references to Caran d’Ache.
Lauren Thiel
- pastels, paint, markers, frame-by-frame image capture, projection, onion-skinning, automated animation
Magic House automates the analogue animation process. At the center of the room sits a large collective drawing surface. On this surface lives Magic House, an animation capturing device that turns individual drawings into a collective animated film. The installation bridges individual creativity with a collective journey, revealing the hidden movement within static shapes and forms.
Magic House simplifies the complex process of traditional frame-by-frame animation. With its playful form and innovative projection system, Magic House helps animators to see the previous frames of their emerging story and easily augment each previous drawing with their next frame of animation. As visitors continue to add new illustrations to the collective surface, the room projects the animated results in an endlessly looping projection.
Basile Brun
- markers, drawing tools, color detection, music box, generative music
Suètone is a generative music box that transforms your drawings into musical partitions. Like a musical stone, Suètone generates melodic patterns as drawings flow around it like a stream of colors: an infinitely evolving musical texture; a sonic journey down the colorstream.
Suètone travels with a series of drawing tools that work in conjunction as creative assistants, opening up new vectors of shape and line for even greater musical opportunities. By moving these assistants around the drawings, artists can explore new visual and musical expressions.
Mathis Baltisberger & Naomi Blidariu
- color markers, marker dispenser, collaborative drawing, color detection, generative storytelling
Trame Tram Trame is an experience designed to inspire the illustration of collaborative stories. In a playful inversion of traditional roles, here it is the machine that prompts the human, guiding them down unexpected paths of storytelling possibilities. What unfolds is an adventure in which each participant adds their personal touch to a narrative tapestry that gradually reveals itself, like a river of ink ever expanding across the page.
Trame Tram Trame is an interactive system that combines traditional drawing, interactive electronics, and artificial intelligence into a combined collaborative storytelling device.
- [email protected] Mathis Baltisberger a suivi sa formation à la haute école d’art de Genève. Sa pratique s’articule autour du design sonore et de la programmation audiovisuelle. Sans cesse à la recherche de nouveaux outils à s’approprier, il désire évoluer dans ce vaste univers qu’est le design de nouveaux médias.
- [email protected] Naomi Blidariu est une illustratrice genevoise, récemment diplômée d’un bachelor en communication visuelle en option image/récit à la HEAD. Son intérêt se déploie autant dans le domaine médiatique que sur des supports traditionnels. Que ce soit pour la conception de jeux vidéo dans le cadre de ses études, d’identités visuelles d'événements comme PolyLAN ou de dessin de presse pour le numéro spécial de “la HEAD dessine la Tribune de Genève”.
- [email protected]
- https://www.instagram.com/chap0ng/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/basile-brun-76a5732ba/
Basile Brun, formé à la Haute École d’Art et de Design de Genève, est artiste, illustrateur et compositeur. Il arpente les réseaux sociaux et présente ses travaux sous divers pseudonymes tels que Chap0ng ou Oh Deer. Le cœur de sa pratique réside dans la réalisation d’animations et films expérimentaux. Il travaille notamment sur les questions de pratiques sonores dans les mondes 3D ainsi que sur diverses installations génératives. En parallèle de sa pratique de vidéaste, il travaille sur un jeu vidéo, ses illustrations ainsi que sur ses multiples projets musicaux.
Étudiante en Master Média Design et diplômée d’un Bachelor en Communication Visuelle, Sarah Meylan est une designer qui souhaite évoluer dans l’interaction afin de relever de nouveaux défis technologiques et sociaux. Curieuse dans plusieurs domaines tels que le design génératif et spéculatif, la psychologie, le biomimétisme et la science, elle souhaite pouvoir par la suite mélanger technologie et nature dans sa pratique.
Lauren Thiel est étudiante à la HEAD au Master Media Design. Avant cela, elle a étudié la conception multimédia en CFC, puis la bande dessinée et l’illustration. Elle travaille sur de nombreux supports avec différents médias, notamment l’animation. Elle a produit quelques courts métrages de styles divers, dont un surnommé « L’île du vent », qui a été sélectionné au festival d’animation de Savigny ainsi qu’au festival Animatou de Genève.
Alexia Mathieu is a UX researcher and design strategist. Her work focuses on user research for interactive products and services, merging human-behavior, cultural and business insights to prototype alternative futures. For the past 7 years, Alexia has led design strategies for several interactive products at New Deal Design in San Francisco, working closely with start-ups, engineers and designers. She also worked at Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colorado and London where she created digital storytelling platforms for brands. Since September 2017, Alexia has been the Head MA Media Design program at HEAD – Genève. With a BA in textile design from La Cambre and an MA in Material Futures from Central Saint Martins UAL London, Alexia has built a multi-disciplinary background from interaction design, textile design to advertising. She is currently leading a research project on the narrative potential of digital fashion at HEAD – Genève.
Douglas Edric Stanley is an American-born artist working principally in the field of new media where he explores the complex intersections of algorithms and æsthetics. At once artist, designer, researcher, curator, developer, and theoretician, he documents the means by which various disciplines are progressively being transformed by the algorithmisation of the world. Active in the scene of video games and experimental forms of play, he co-founded with Antonin Fourneau the hydra-monster otherwise known as ENIAROF. His current research is concerned with writing systems and the manner in which playable non-linear narratives can model the real. Douglas Edric Stanley has organized numerous workshops related to creative coding and experimental game design for museums, non-profits, universities, and art schools. As an artist, he has participated in several exhibitions related to digital art.
Félicien Goguey is a media artist and interaction designer who lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. He explores the creative potential of programming languages and new technologies with a preference for open-source tools to create interactive installations, live performances, applications and connected objects. His main interests lie in communication networks and their imperceptibility, more precisely in the factors responsible for their imperceptibility and the invisible mechanisms that a user encounters, as well as their political and social consequences. His work involves design methods that question or develop strategies to tackle these issues. Among other subjects, his research tackles mass surveillance conducted within the Internet and mobile phone networks by governmental entities (intelligence services, police, army) and the relations between monitored spaces and their users. He holds a PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in the “Architecture and Sciences of the City” doctoral program in partnership with HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), for which he developed a practice-based research focused on one specific object: the IMSI catcher, a monitoring device that intercepts mobile phones identity and data by mimicking the activity of a cell tower. Félicien Goguey is currently Interim Head MA Media Design program at HEAD – Genève.
a-project studio is a Swiss-based design and interior architecture practice founded by Laure Krayenbühl in 2018. Graduating from the écal in 2009, Laure worked for 7 years as a product designer and project manager at atelier oï before starting to work independently and founding her own studio. The studio designs a wide range of objects and furniture as well as temporary or long-lasting projects for residential and commercial interiors. Teams of experts are put together to answer challenges such as the interior refit of a sailing yacht, the design of heritage-inspired furniture or the development of electronic products, for one-off or serial productions. Among others, the studio counts projects for brands such as BMW Switzerland and USM Modular Furniture. The studio’s versatile identity is reflective of Laure’s childhood in different countries, and of her interest for human-centered projects, cultural identities and material and production processes.
In 2002, Pierre Rossel joined the Haute école d’arts appliqués, now known as the Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD – Genève). First as part of the Immédiat postgraduate programme and then the department of Visual Communication as well as the Media Design Master. Pierre teaches programming and electronics, participates in carrying out mandates, applied research, and development projects. He also provides technical support to graduates and develops student projects for exhibitions.
- Interaction Design, Game Design, Connected objects
The MA in Media Design offers a two-year professional programme based on learning about interactive design for scientific and social innovation. Whether you are a graphic or industrial designer, a general engineer or computer engineer, you will address the technological and societal challenges generated by artificial intelligence and new interfaces.