Yesterday I attended a lecture in H.I.T (Holon Institute of Technology)  titled Useful Toys & Useless Tools by Victor Vina, an interaction designer and educator from Barcelona Spain, who’s working in the intersection of design research, digital craft and open technologies. Vina was invited by H.I.T to give a workshop and talk with product design students at the institute.

The lecture was fascinating. Vina displayed some nice examples of works and hacks, and the overall message was for students to open their minds and experiment with technology. He encourages the student to play around with electronics until “something nice happens” and then think of some concept for it.

I was surprised by Vina’s statement about not considering the works he displayed in the lecture to be art, and especially the ones he called Political Artefacts with the clear political and social orientation. To me, the lack of function of what he called Useless Tools was all the more a characteristic of their artistic expressions.

Vina’s workshop was all about the Arduino micro controller which has its own open-source Arduino environment makes it easy to write code and upload it to the i/o board. I signed up for an Arduino workshop over at Garage Geeks in Holon (Garage Geeks is a physical & virtual space for multi-disciplinary creative people to meet, innovate and build non-commercial projects that would otherwise may not come to life).

I’ll write about the workshop and Arduino next week. Cheers, Omer.