by Elaine Brechin Montgomery & Benedict Davies, November 23rd 2009
The European Union has dubbed 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation,organizing a year-long celebration of conferences and exhibitions. Creativity and innovation are subjects of significant interest and importance to us at Google, and to European policymakers, so we were delighted to travel to Brussels today for an EU-sponsored event titled Beyond the crisis: design for a sustainable future.
Reconciling Market Segments & Personas
by Elaine Brechin, March 1, 2002
Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organizations can use to design and sell successful products.
The value of market segmentation
The marketing profession has taken much of the guesswork out of determining what motivates people to buy. One of the most powerful tools for doing so is market segmentation, which groups people by their distinct needs to determine what types of consumers will be most receptive to a particular product or marketing message. These groups form a consumer model.
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"Brechin’s article covers the differences between understanding markets and understanding users, and makes the case for why both are necessary for application design in much greater depth than I have attempted in this paper. Her article is an excellent read for those who aren’t yet sold on the necessity of understanding users from a qualitative perspective."
Adobe Developer Connection
by Michael Naimark, 2001
A patent came out of this too. Windgrass was an experiment by Elaine Brechin, who came from the Royal College of Art in London. An interaction that requires people to be in a public space in compromising positions like on all fours. And they developed a breath, a wind, sensor and applied chaos theory to blowing on this stuff.
by William G. Keays on June, 1999
"The narrow bandwidth provided by a keyboard, a mouse and a relatively low-resolution screen leads us away from the physical world and reduces our sensory palette.... We are left with a connection between the creator, the material, the tools and the audience
that is often impersonal, distant, and impoverished."
by Chris Lambright, August 1998
Another compelling piece was "Windgrass" by Elaine Brechin. It was fun to watch people bend down and interact with her artwork. What ones sees at first is two wooden boxes of grass: one has a post with an electrical cord tied to it running to the otherbox of grass, which contains a large bowl-like structure with what looks like tall black grass growing out of it, but is in fact, a cluster of tiny incandescent light bulbs. If one bent down to the bowl, it would lean toward them. if one blew across the fiber optic grass, the lights would flow in the direction of the air movement, as would the bowl. It was almost like one was blowing it away from them. This was quite compelling and reminded me of watching a field of golden wheat flowing like water in the breeze.
The broad policy context is set by the current strategic reflection on the way forward from the current economic crisis (the post-2010 "Lisbon agenda"), which takes place against a background of heightened concern for sustainability. The more specific operational context is the new strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training and the follow-up to the public consultation which the Commission recently held on design as a driver of user-centred innovation.
Inventing Experiences
Artist, The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose 1999
A collection of seven New Media Experiments by Interval Research Corporation debuted as the first featured exhibit in The Tech Museum of Innovation's Center of the Edge. The exhibit will run from Oct. 31, 1998 through March 31, 1999 at The Tech, located in downtown San Jose, Calif.
The exhibit, titled "Inventing Experience: Experiments in New Media at Interval Research Corporation," showcases work that has informed a variety of research and development work at the lab.
Digital media is bringing about drastic changes in our nostalgic landscape: Seeking lights in the town of one's memory through the haze of a speeding train...Spotting a friend's face in a snapshot among a group of people...Following the flakes of words floating on the water, linking their connotations. Inspiring a dialog among shadows, real objects, people and nature...Constructing one's self-portrait from ciphers, particles, fragments...Stepping onto a virtual field of gravitation, playing a balancing game within a maze. Remembering Classical painting, recreating it in a tangible form of moving images. The forefront of Media Art - evolving out of the struggle for a human interface.
This milestone exhibition chronicled 25 years of computer art from early algorithmic drawings and paintings to modeled figurers and "pebble strings" by pioneering computer artists. Artistic insights revealed the simultaneity of touch and sensory experience and the ephemeral experience of being in touch electronically via the Internet. Artworks included digital paintings, drawings, and photographs; interactive installations; teleperformance projects and work by some of the earliest pioneers of computer art.
From blue jeans and surfboards to cosmetics and corporate logos, twelve everyday objects are recast as icons -- single, physical forms that embody a complex universe of associations -- and explored as benchmarks for the current state of design. Organized by SFMOMA Curator of Architecture and Design Aaron Betsky, Icons: Magnets of Meaning assembles nearly three hundred design objects, photographs, drawings, prints, and videotapes, and also includes works commissioned especially for the exhibition.
Through this strange and furtively populated urban interior, visitors were taken on an intricate journey through whispering corridors of stored items, sounds and visions jointly conceived by Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and a team of collaborators from the Royal College of Art. The RCA Acorn Research Cell was drawn from a wide range of disciplines across the college including photography, industrial and computer-related design, illustration, graphics, architecture, multi-media, painting and sculpture.
"You walk along a yellow line that runs down the long corridors lined with anonymous doors, and every so often a little arrow instructs you to pull a door open and see what you can see.…"
The Independent
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