Here are our highlights from the OFFF Barcelona 2014 second day.
An hyper crowded Open Room Stage opened with the finish creative agency Kokoro & Moi. They showed us their imaginative approach to give their clients ad-hoc design solutions, regardless of being digital or print. They also proposed some challenging equations like “Openness + Randomness =3” or “People + People =3”, meaning the importance of working collaboratively and with no preconceptions.
The Bangkok-based designer and illustrator Pomme Chan presented her work, inspired by everyday life and obsessed with details. A good sample of that are her hand lettering illustrations made light for the Absolut Artelier.
After that, it was time for a break, while eating our “bocata” under the sun, the relaxed surroundings of Disseny Hub looked like this …
The artists we were longing most to see came in the afternoon, starting with Second Story, the Portland-based studio part of SapientNitro. In our opinion, they made the best and most lucid lecture of the Festival so far. They push the boundaries of storytelling to a whole new level, a spatial one. Having a huge power of abstraction, they materialize the ideas their clients want to transmit to create interactive experiences across web, mobile and mainly physical installations. Pure postdigitalism. Some phrases of theirs: “We are obsessed with making” or “Stories + Space + People”. Here a project of theirs.
Lobulo (Barcelona –> London) made a great talk too. On stage he looked like a close, friendly, tender guy, he made some funny references to his personal life and family (in fact, his relatives were in the audience !). He’s a master of manual labor, mainly on paper techniques, a “scalpel’s jedi” as a friend of him say. He also explained the importance of pop culture on his creations. Surprisingly, he barely talked about the digital part of his work, even though he has worked for Google.
A phrase of him: “There are many different ways of doing things and now we have the means more than ever to do it.”
HerraizSoto & Co, the agency based in Barcelona, explained to us how to create technological tools for beauty and meaning in our day-to-day world. Their speech addressed the impact of Design has on people and the responsibility that designers have. According to them, beauty makes us happy but digital world that we made “is shit”, so designers have to make things beautiful to improve it. To accomplish that mission they have created Notegraphy, “the Instagram of words” app. A phrase of them: “We want to use technology in a sensitive way”.
While Alicia kept tweeting from Disseny Hub, I headed to Big Bang Data to see Aaron Koblin. He will also be on OFFF stage this Saturday. The third member of The PostDigital Node Team, our cat Kafka, preferred to stay at home designing his dinner to print it on his Foodini 3D Printer.
By the way, we’ll post on this blog about Big Bang Data events soon.
The PostDigital Node
Postdigital Node 