"Finally launched and available in the iOS App Store! [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drift/id524083174 ]

Drift helps you get lost in familiar places by guiding you on a walk using randomly assembled instructions. Each instruction will ask you to move in a specific direction and, using the compass, look for something normally hidden or unnoticed in our everyday experiences.

As you find these hidden or unnoticed things, you will be asked to document them with the camera, creating a photographic record of you walk. Drift also keeps track of where and when you took the photos and makes your documentation optionally available for others to view through the Drift website.

Drift was made possible with the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant for Emerging Artists.

Drift was developed by Justin Langlois in collaboration with Broken City Lab.

This project was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant for Emerging Artists."

“The one-caring, then, is not bored with ordinary life…the one-caring finds new delight in breakfast, in welcoming home her wanderers, in feeding the cat who purrs against her ankle, in noticing the twilight. She does not ask, ‘Is this all there is?,’ but wishes in hearty affirmation that what-is might go on and on…Now one may ask just how the celebration of everyday life contributes to the maintenance of the ethical ideal. First, of course, as we have seen, such celebration turns the one-caring in wonder and appreciation to the source of her ethicality. It is for the most part in ordinary situations that  we meet others for whom we shall care and who care for us. Second, celebration of ordinary life requires and is likely to enhance receptivity. The magic of daily life may be missed by one who constantly seeks adventure and ‘something new.’ Celebration of daily experience provides opportunities for engrossment, for complete involvement in living”

"Experiencing art in the places we inhabit on a daily basis remains a critical concern for us. It helps us move art from a privileged experience to one more directly related to how we live our lives. A variety of people should decide how art is seen and interpreted, rather than continuing to strictly rely on those in power. We move in and out of officially sanctioned spaces for art, keeping one foot in the underground the other in the institution. Staying too long in one or the other isn’t healthy. We are interested in art that takes engaging and empowering forms. We collaborate amongst ourselves and with others, even though this may destabilize how people understand our work."

"AGAINST COMPETITION… GROUP WORK & WORKING WITH OTHERS… BUILDING LONG-TERM INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT SIMILAR WAYS OF WORKING"

[via: http://www.dismalgarden.org/pages/links.html ]

"Unstable. Shifty. Unreliable.

Yes please!

I love that people and our words are all those things. As I replied to Peter, and would say to Matt, I prefer the sense of potential that comes from this kind of material and making.

It’s less prescriptive. Less efficient. Less technological. Less machinic.

More space to become something, someone else."

"I don’t mean to romanticise words and writing. And I don’t mean to suggest they are divorced from technology or machines or even code.

By identifying what is included in our definitions of making or Making–and asking what is excluded–we might, as Ben Highmore writes in the introduction to The Everyday Life Reader, be able to “find new commonalities and breathe new life into old differences.”

And I’m pretty sure there’s lots more to be thought and said about what gets made, how, when and where it gets made, and by whom it gets made."

[Follow-up to: http://www.designculturelab.org/2012/02/26/hi-my-name-is-anne-i-make-stuff-with-words/ ]

"I’m most struck by the possibility that a story’s capacity to affect a reader depends on how successfully a writer can bring people, places and things to life. And what I take from Hemingway here is that this requires a writer to blur the line between fact and fiction, to write truly without writing the Truth.

In any case, I want my writing to inhabit, and evoke, this space–and moving in this direction is, I think, the key to merging researcher and writer to create good ethnographic fiction."

“The very artiness of the events organized by even the most progressive artists showed thay they still saw themselves and their work as an elite – as somehow special. Nor could I sympathize with people who wanted to form an artists’ union or, to give a more proletarian ring to it, an art-workers’ union. To me such a pretence served only to emphasize the split between art and everyday life…Seeing art increasingly as a middle-class pretension, I had little choice but to give it up…I would have to sleep in a lonely bed.” – Roger Coleman

"I like "minutiae of everyday life" more than @cowbird does. I suspect ephemera may often outlast more consciously crafted stories. #pda12"

"Original and world-changing design was long considered the product of solitary geniuses, masters and heroes, but recent research has argued that cultural innovation is often the result of everyday actions by ordinary people. This course critically and creatively examines the dynamic and collaborative networks that characterise professional and amateur design today, and prepares students to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead."

[Course aims, course content, course assignments (4 of them) follow, all worth reading]

To get started, students are required to complete the following task (adapted from The Exercise Book) for the first tutorial:

1) Go for a walk with a notebook and pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

2) Compose one written page with three sections. Start the first section with “I see…”, the second section with “I remember…” and the third section with “I imagine…”."