Death by Design – documentary-log.com by tims877

As part of a very enjoyable friday evening in Edinburgh, i found myself engrossed in Patchwork Cinema, part of Torsten Lauschmann’s current show at the collective gallery. One part of this compilation which particularly intrigued me were clips of a film, ‘death by design’, partly because of a pavlovian response to anything with the word ‘design’ in it, but secondly for an amazing erudite nobel scientist talking about intuition in the sciences and how she felt her process was as ‘artistic’ and it was ‘scientific’, describing in some detail her work with cells. Thought this whole exhibition provides much food for thought in terms of ‘moving image’, and very worth a visit.

While on the subject of moving image, there is some great moving image work in this year’s Visual Communication degree show at GSA. I’m really interested in where this might lead, and how critically reflective designers can use this expanding set of tools in useful and exciting ways. There does need to be some critical thought though – If only to counter the ever-creepy Kevin Roberts, who talks about this need for communication to embrace ‘sisomo‘ (that’s sight, sounds and motion, because we, the dumbed-down recipient of this type of garbage, can’t understand all those words, together, at once, and he can’t stick a ‘TM’ on it…) — there’s clearly a market for his kind of multi-platform whizzy-ness, but it’s interesting (indeed exciting) to think about how the post-digital and screen fatigue may help make the decisions about when, where and why to use technology more nuanced.

In case anyone thinks I’m being excessively mean about Kevin Roberts… something from the archives.