Curve Labs is architecting cybernetic solutions for the distributed economy. We build digital souls which disintermediate rent seekers and provide infrastructures for efficient and equitable markets. We engage in the playful, combinational use of different modules to architect institutions that couldn’t exist before: digital cooperatives & artist collectives, distributed energy communities, or market primitives which automate liquidity and provide real time price discovery. Our team has deep experience in distributed and open-source technologies, and together, we believe we can address pressing problems of the anthropocene today. https://www.curvelabs.eu/#About

The Sphere  enabling agents in the performing art ecosystem – artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.

Please join us April 22nd-23rd for the Cryptoeconomics Design Labs, organized in sympoietic partnership with the well-rounded CurveLabs! We have an amazing list of guests to build up our blockchain quadratic alliance with, our para-liquidity pool is wildly speculative and open to all, detailed schedule here:

https://www.thesphere.as/cryptoeconomics-design-lab-1/

As a collaborative and emergent web3-based infrastructure, The Sphere is a call to challenge and experiment with the traditional frameworks of cultural production. In the spirit of the open source movement, The Sphere wants to enable every agent in the performing art ecosystem - artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.
This open office session will be an occasion to present the current development of the Sphere’s cyber-infrastructure, as well as opening up a space for collective imagineering around the potential for web3-based derivative art communities. In sympoetic partnership with Curve Labs, The Sphere is catalysing a “quadratic” alliance with 4 key partners - Gnosis, Furtherfield / CultureStake, Black Swan and Spectre - in order to model and implement a radically innovative commons 3.0 for circus and the performing arts.

Erik Bordeleau
thesphere.as
Apr 22 at 8:30 AM EDT – Apr 23 at 1 PM EDT

As a collaborative and emergent web3-based infrastructure, The Sphere is a call to challenge and experiment with the traditional frameworks of cultural production. In the spirit of the open source movement, The Sphere wants to enable every agent in the performing art ecosystem - artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.

This open office session will be an occasion to present the current development of the Sphere’s cyber-infrastructure, as well as opening up a space for collective imagineering around the potential for web3-based derivative art communities. In sympoetic partnership with Curve Labs, The Sphere is catalysing a “quadratic” alliance with 4 key partners - Gnosis, Furtherfield/CultureStake, Black Swan and Spectre - in order to model and implement a radically innovative commons 3.0 for circus and the performing arts.

Some of you know that one of our projects puttering along for awhile has been trying to create some alternatives for portals,

Re portal video:  I’d like to create something that is as polished as these but propose alternatives  (old somewhat tongue in cheeky work Table of Contents ).  Can anyone feel like working with Andrew Robinson on a next version of some “portal” work?   See "Suturing Space: Tabletop Portals for Collaboration” 

Talk by Dr. Niklas Damiris. 20 November 2010, Montreal.

Co-sponsored by Topological Media Lab, Design and Computation Arts Department, and the David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Concordia University.   

This wide-ranging lecture outlines a set of core and critical issues:

Sustainability as symptom rather than goal. Desire.  Symbolic mediation + being part of the world.  Nature-society divide.  Materiality.  Quantum entanglement.  Foucault parrhesia and Socrates contra psychology (identity, personality, self).  Limits of sustainability construed under an "economic” frame.  Money as symbolic mediation. Productivity. Excess and generosity. Service, entanglement. Governmentality.  Using materials in a dematerialized way.

For more extensive inquiry, contact: Niklaswild1000@gmail.com, or xinwei.sha@asu.edu

Superflux create worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world.

Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, the Anglo-Indian studio’s early work brought speculative design approaches to new audiences, working for some of the world’s biggest like Microsoft Research, Sony, Samsung and Nokia, and exhibiting work at MoMA New York, the National Museum of China, and the V&A in London.  

Over the years, the studio has gained critical acclaim for producing work that navigates the entangled wilderness of our technology, politics, culture, and environment to imagine new ways of seeing, being, and acting. The studio’s partners and clients continue to grow, and include Government of UAE, Innovate UK, Cabinet Office UK, UNDP, Future Cities Catapult, and Forum for the Future.

Natasha Jen: Design Thinking Is Bullsh*t

If Google Image search is your sole barometer, “design thinking uses just one tool: 3M Post-Its,” says Pentagram partner Natasha Jen. “Why did we end up with a single medium? Charles and Ray Eames worked in a complete lack of Post-It stickies. They learned by doing.” In her provocative talk, Jen lobbies for the “Crit” over the “Post-It” when it comes to moving design forward.

Natasha Jen, Partner, Pentagram

Natasha Jen is an award-winning designer and educator. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, she was invited to join Pentagram’s New York office as partner in 2012. In 2014 she was acclaimed by Wired magazine as one of nine ‘Designers Who Matter’.

Jen’s work is recognized for its innovative use of graphic, digital, and spatial interventions that challenge conventional notions of media and cultural contexts. Her work is immediately recognizable, encompassing brand identity systems, printed matters, exhibition design, digital interfaces, signage and way-finding systems, and architecture.

She was one of the winners of Art Directors Club Young Guns, for which she also served as a judge in 2007 and 2011. She has been a guest critic at Yale University School of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Maryland Institute College of Art; and currently serves on the Board of Directors for Storefront for Art & Architecture and AIGA’s New York Chapter.

Research Outreach

March 2021

Hi Megan,

News Item:

The Synthesis-UNDP Navigating Complexity Project piloted the alpha prototype of an alternate reality role-playing simulation for Mexico City 18 March 2021:

Introduction and Reflection (in Spanish). The image shows roles for the Ciudad de Mexico 2022++ scenario designed with the UNDP country office for Mexico.

Xin Wei

A short video by Sander van der Leeuw full of useful points.

"Adaptive Design: Designing for Change”  (8:34)