“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” – Timothy Ferriss

Inspired by the quote above,  a group of designers was challenged to create something which provokes an uncomfortable yet important conversation. Participating designers were given complete freedom with the type of object they created, the materials they used, and the topic of the conversation they set out to provoke.

As a result, Uncomfortable Conversations ended up with a wonderfully broad body of work – housewares and furniture, jewelry and fashion, graphics and video. Still, everything exhibited here has one thing in common: the desire to make you uncomfortable.

I’m Not An Artist is a work in progress project commissioned by Elisava School of Design with concept, creative direction and design by Soon in Tokyo, a communications agency made up of former Elisava students and teachers.

It started with 56 animated gifs directed by Johnny Kelly and Matthew Cooper and aims to grow and to be a platform with the participation of young designers and creatives from all over the world.

StokkeAustad’s Dayboard Calendar started as a research project looking at how different people visualise the year. The starting point was that time is a very subjective entity and we felt traditional calendars did not leave enough room for personal interpretation of how time passes. This calendar allows the user to arrange the year as one sees fit. Are the days ordered in a strict chronological fashion or does it appear more like a blur? Does winter feel longer that summer and so on. The individual dates are held in place by magnets, so each day can be moved around. The different days can also be used to hold in place theatre tickets or reminders.

Creative Allies gives passionate art students, designers, creative types, writers, photographers, videomakers and fans (Allies) the opporunity to work with their favorite bands. Allies can from anywhere in the world upload their creations inspired by music. The creations can be licensed by the musician it was made for.

Musicians on the other hand can post requests for whatever they need made,  and allies can browse jobs to find something that strikes their creative chord.

As part of the Afternoon Travel Type performance workshop led by Professor Karel Boonzaaijer and Prof. Ilka Helmig on three-dimensional typography, the students of FH Aachen created more than 100 characters and symbols. The designs were then used in a four-hour performance in and around the central train station of Aachen.

The video shows impressions of the production of the letters, and of the performance.

Mobile Mobile is an interactive installation by James Theophane, where he reinterprets the Christmas tree and its role as the traditional focal point for a communal space. ’Mobile Mobile’ is a six metre circumference interactive sculpture, and signature piece for the entrance of the Brick Lane studio.

Each phone is individually addressed by a computer to cofunction and create a choral arrangement.  Assigning each phone a tone, the mass is transformed into an aural form that appears to come alive, shimmering and flirting for onlookers.

To add a little xmas spice to the mix, anyone can visit our live stream and serenade bystanders with their keyboard dexterity: xmas.lbi.co.uk

Box Animation is a 3D animation created by Canadian Motion Designer, Jordan Clarke. The animation was presented as an Event installation using matchmoving and compositing techniques.  Box materials were hand painted and scanned into the computer to create the materials for this project.

Click to watch the video.

Silhouettes of Jazz is an animated short movie that outlines the history of traditional jazz music in a virtual walkthrough of a shadow art museum. Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.

The movie highlights five different milestones in the evolution of jazz: the early songs of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop. Each era is represented with a room containing 3D sculptures which cast multiple shadow images at the same time. This unique property is achieved using a novel computational method for the interactive creation and manipulation of shadow art. Given a set of desired silhouette images, a global geometric optimization builds a 3D shadow volume that can subsequently be edited by the artist using a set of 3D modeling tools.

Silhouettes of Jazz was one of the three nominees for the Best in Show Award of the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival. Authors: Dominik Kaeser, Martin-Sebasian Senn, Mario Deuss, Niloy J. Mitra and mark Pauly.

Urban Screening was produced by  design students from the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. The students turned the movie into a giant light projection using the walls of the campus building.

When Blu Dot opened their SoHo store in 2008, they became surrounded by the resourceful culture of “curb-mining”: the act of finding furniture and art on the street. Now that a year has passed, mono approached them with a way to conduct their own curb-mining experiment: What would happen if we left a bunch of GPS-enabled Real Good Chairs all over New York, free for the take? Who will grab them? Where will they go? How will they get there? What will their new homes look like? Thus, the REAL GOOD experiment was born.

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