I still don’t love persimmons, but they sure are beautiful. Despite near-freezing temperatures at night these persimmons are still being harvested, haphazardly.

Today is a sad day. My ~7 year old wacom tablet has died. At least I have my new lizard friend to keep me company. Made entirely out of masking tape, this is the best gift I’ve been given in years. Seriously.

Busy.

Last weekend Hongik University held it’s digital media design graduation exhibition. After a quick whirl around the incredibly good website I had high hopes, imagining something like what could be produced by my degree (Design Computing at Sydney University) if we had had more funding, an extra year, and more talent. The exhibition was in a suburb called Digital Media City (I know, right?) deserted and reminiscent of the Sydney CBD on a cold autumnal Sunday afternoon.

Fill Your Blank - an app for Incheon Airport

My first impression was overwhelmingly positive. My second, was that these displays were surrounded by gifts, flowers, bottles of soju and bakery treats. I wanted to make something awesome and have people give me biscuits. Money and biscuits. My third, slight disappointment.

These displays were wonderfully designed. There was professional quality video and iPads showing images of design perfection on almost every table. Some of the ideas were great: a kiosk to entice foreign visitors to learn Hangeul whose video totally sold me; an app that gives you information about Incheon airport helping you to fill in your time before boarding. But these projects seemed just to be ideas. IPads adorned tables just for show, it seemed. My endless tapping and swiping only confirming that this wasn’t an app I was playing with, just pictures. Some ideas were mediocre, some you could already buy in the app store, but the presentation and graphic design throughout was amazing. But I still really wanted to play with something.
I don’t fully understand what these degrees cover, but some projects were well realised, design, interaction theory and programming all coming together to blow those professional videos out of the water.

Meet the Hanguel

Sandbox Ocean

Concerto No.0 is a sculptural installation that seems innocuous but beautiful. Until you interact with it. By moving your hands over the tops of the different sized cylinders you activate them. A blue light appears and a natural-sounding tone. You can almost play this installation, theremin-like.

Robotbuddha is an interaction design installation. A computer screen at the right shows a twitter account. Instructions tell the viewer to tweet a wish or prayer with the #robotbuddha hashtag. When this happens the installation comes to life. The tweet is projected onto the black backdrop and a robot arm starts moving, slowly but surely hitting a prayer drum. The whirring of robotic motors and the clean natural sound of the drum are discordant and interesting. This project is simple and effective, but was unfortunately muddied by the unnecessary seeming incorporation of morse code.

Sandbox Ocean is easily the best project of the lot. A wooden sandbox at waist height has colours projected onto it. Yellow through blue, depending on the mountains and valleys of the sand. Play tools invite the user to interact with the sand, and when they do they are rewarded by an ocean of sea creatures appearing, swimming and disappearing again. Night comes and then goes again and the endless life and death of the ocean continues. This installation uses an xbox kinect sensor and a projector. It won an Adobe Design Award and was constantly surrounded by people the entire time I was there.

Hello, Stranger. A Korean food app. Not a terribly unique idea, but great design and a mockup of an iPad app with limited functionality. This was much more compelling that video/picture-only displays.

In the past week I’ve thought about this exhibition and I realise that my initial disappointment was un-called for. For all those projects with no technical backing, maybe that was their brief. For all the lame ideas, maybe that was their brief. I’ll never know. The interesting projects I saw here, and the slick, polished visual communication design will stay with me for a while. Well done graduates, this exhibition sure was better than that of my graduating class. And man I wish I could design like that.

CROSS+NODE <– check out the great website, too.

More photos on flickr