Month: November 2012

Designing for the Senses, Designing for the Future

Ekaterina Vekova

The BE OPEN Forum at Design Miami/ reveals the sensory visions of today’s most innovative designer.

Imagine if you could design a product that appealed to the sixth sense – something that felt intuitively ‘right’.  It would be a runaway success because everyone would want it, without questioning it.  This is the area that the BE OPEN Foundation has chosen to research over the next year. It launched the project at the 2012 London Design Festival with a series of events that focused on the sense of sound and how to design for that.

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The Art of Noises 100 Years Later

The Art of Noises 100 Years Later

Ekaterina Vekova

Predicting the sound of the future is an indvidious task. Listening again to the work of Francesco Balilla Pratella who wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians in 1910, it is surprising just how dated the music is.

It could have been an Italian version of the piano sonatas that Stravinsky wrote but disavowed later in his life as being too like late Beethoven. Pratella’s piano piece, La Guerra, captures a world of established structures collapsing; what we understand as the tonality is frequently suspended but never fully lost. The focus on chords and their progression is dissolving but we recognise the series of notes played on the piano.  It sounds like Europe as it plunged into the First World War.

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The Winner for the Sound of the Future Is Back to the Planet

Ekaterina Vekova

The winner for the sound of the future is Back to the Planet

http://beopenfuture.com/poll

BE OPEN searched the world of today to find a series of diverse sounds that might represent the soundscape of the future.  No one quite knows what we will be listening to in the future, perhaps with advances in technology our planet will be a much quieter place, with the only sounds being bleeping computers, electric cars, giant wind turbines and spacecraft.  Or perhaps the soundscape will be even more chaotic than the world of today.  Either way you can catch a glimpse if you listen again to our collection of sounds.

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