Visa

As the credit card disappears and is replaced by less tangible forms of financial transactions, Visa asked Media A to help envision the attitudes, manners, rhythms and preferences of the 2020’s.

 

A persona was generated outside of commonly accepted demographic norms to suggest the emergent, nuanced and highly customized manners of living and transacting made possible by a radical increase in choice, a rejection of traditional career and domestic moinikers, and a change in the relationship with brands from authoritative to dialogic.

 

(With Lawerence Blough, April Mises and Sea Zeda. Image: Svensk Filmindustri)

The Universe Emerges from Information

The Universe Emerges from Information: 10^-43 Seconds in the State of Awareness of an Exo-Designer, 2055, is an exhibition and a component in a lecture for Studio-X in Istanbul, supported by Columbia University.

 

It uses the premise of a very small slice in time of the conscious and unconscious thoughts of a fictional persona, to suggest the order and certainty of design as a social phenenenon and practice when seen from afar, and its vulnerability and intimacy when experienced up close.

 

Download the complete pdf file of the installation here (zoom in to read in detail).

Horizon Projects

Conventional thinking about the future is linear, confined to narrow, “flashlight” views. Horizon Project workshops enable participants to see outside of these narrow beams by working from a future inspired by a hypothetical social, technological, economic or environmental condition.

 

At the end of the workshop, participants “look back from the future” to see how what has been proposed for the future can be made applicable to today’s conditions.

 

Horizon Project workshops have been conducted at among other locations, the Bremen, Germany Innovation Agency, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India and Tongi University in Shanghai, China.

TapIt

TapIt–a free, sustainable, public water bottle refilling network at hundreds of cafes and other locations in New York and Washington, came to Media A before it officially existed and asked that we help launch the entire company.

 

Media A, in concert with TapIt founder Kylie Harper, developed the company’s core strategy and branding approach, including a tagline and logotype.

 

Media A designed and supervised the production and implementation of the website, the blog, the shop, mobile smartphone website, a geo-location based iPhone application and numerous on and offline collateral materials. Media A also was responsible for locating key creative staff and is currently assisting in developing TapIt’s community building capabilities.

Hyper Island Innovation Tool

Developed for Hyper Island, a Sweden-based international school and consultancy, this workshop explores the unintended consequences of new technologies as a way to uncover potential business opportunities. The central example in the workshop is of a 10-year old who used Instagram to grieve her dying hampster.

 

Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian media pundit said that all new technologies re-scale the relative importance of our human capbilities and the speed at which they function, leading to radically changed behavior.

 

Instagram brought this girl together with firends at a here-to-fore unknown speed, creating an impormptu tribe of mutual empathy and responsibility collapsing into minutes the greiving and healing process. By carefully observing the effects of technology, it is possible to identify its un-promoted and unintended consequences, leading to new insights that may be applied to business formation.

 

See more details here.

Mecklai

Mecklai is a subscriber-based, financial service
market risk management company in India with
over 1,000 South Asian clients.

 

Media A was selected to create an interaction and visual identity website guide to help Mecklai make critical market information more readily available to its subscribers.

A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer’s Smart Things or A Day in a Designer’s Networked Smart Things, 2030

This 3-meter (10 ft.) long diagrammatic narrative, created with Irene Pereya and others, is a story in the form of a large data readout from a futuristic data gathering system. Media A was commissioned to create the project by the Singapore International Design Festival. It has also been shown in London, New York, Antwerp (Belgium) and Kielce (Poland).

 

The diagram portrays a day in a fictional designer’s life during the year 2030 as she interacts with and is guided by her smart things—objects, systems, and environments with embedded intelligence. It suggests a society in which smart things have civic and commercial agency.

 

See science fiction writer Bruce Sterling’s post about the project in his Beyond the Beyond blog for Wired.com here.

 

Get a pdf of the diagrammatic narrative file here.

A Networked Designer’s Critical Path, 1990-2090

Media A was asked by the Garanti Bank gallery in Istanbul to curate, design and produce an exhibition about new thinking in design. Created specifically for that show, A Networked Designer’s Critical Path, 1990-2090, portrays the life of a fictional designer as a dense grid of networks. Writers on the project were Andrea Herman and Stephanie Wasserman.

 

Based on emerging trends from biology, business, information technology, sociology, and transportation, it charts the connections that form, interweave, and dissolve both naturally and intentionally. Ideas flow across communities and leap spontaneously across broad spheres of thought and action, forging new pathways along the way. Politics, culture, style and language – continually trade places in an increasingly interwoven society

 

Download the complete pdf file here.

NASA RCC

The NASA Robotics Curriculum Clearinghose (RCC) asked Media A to create a streaming video for their mission of vetting robotics curricula for high school math and science teachers.

 

The video is based on ethnographic research gathered from online communities devoted to robotics and space exploration. It premiered during NASA’s presentation to the US FIRST Robotics Competition in Atlanta, GA.

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation wanted to track its
philanthropic history against technology milestones
to see whether there was a relationship among
those elements and what it might suggest for
future giving.

 

Media A designed and produced a diagrammatic timeline showing media policy from the 1940s to the present, including interrelationships
between technology, Federal Communications
Commission chairpersons, US presidents and what
Dr. Edward Lenert, the study’s author called,
“social entrepreneurship indicators”.