I was recently tasked in my class Animals, Humans, and Those in Between with what may just be the most badass assignment ever—Draw yourself alongside your animal spirit guide. Here’s the somewhat rushed result – me alongside a Barred Owl, aka the Hoot Owl. Apparently, I am the Midwestern Harry Potter.

The main rationale for using the owl as my spirit animal came from taking an online quiz, Teen Magazine style. They stereotyped me as being an “Owl”. Whatever, there wasn’t much explanation, but maybe it has something to do with me being a bit of an eccentric loner who works best during the evening hours? (half of NYU’s ITP program, described right there) Owls are beautiful critters though, and fun to draw – so I took it as flattery.

Thanks for the link Sam. Apparently by analyzing blood-flow in the brain researchers are able to reconstruct images inside the test subject’s head. This is both terrifying and amazing. I would love to be able to draw using only my mind. Even better though is the following possibility – from the article:

ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”

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This was buried at the end of a Frieze Magazine article about conceptual art. Some of it sounds familiar to anyone following the discourse about design as a discipline, but I’m really interested in the idea of artistic exploration creating the systems that then feed into “experiences” like riding the bus or cooking a meal. When (not if) will we reach a point where artists—designers—customize our everyday lives in incredible detail?

The customization of epistemological Conceptualism represents the most significant paradigm shift in living memory, as design professions migrate from myopic design assignments – design me a toaster – towards conceiving the intangible commodities that feed the experience economy – design me a system. Ways to describe this nascent paradigm vary – Banny Banerjee at Stanford Institute of Design talks about ‘design thinking’; at the Experience Design Group in Stockholm, Rolf Hughes and I consider it as a trans-disciplinary form of ‘disruptive innovation’ – but held in common is the belief that designers should be critical thinkers and strategists first, capable of addressing cross-disciplinary problems by designing the social, political, economic and educational ‘systems’ that give them greater reach, responsibility, influence and relevance. It is reasonable to conclude that the Conceptual artists whose work first embodied ontological and epistemological methodologies were engaged in the rarest research of all, known as fundamental research. Perhaps this is an accolade deserved by the designers who carried over those methods into an ‘economy of borrowed ideas’, without regard to whether or not the knowledge discovered would be of direct practical use.

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