After several years I have updated my portfolio, which I hope reflects my current aesthetic sensibility in an unforced way. I would like to migrate the articles from my old blog as soon as possible, but since many of them have gathered the dust of grey academic vocabulary, I fear that some intervention in their content will be necessary.
With all modesty and humility I further announce that this academic year I have become a student of the master’s programme in New Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. After just two weeks I am already thrilled by the immensely stimulating environment that reigns on the grounds of StuNoMe.
This stimulation will furthermore (obligatorily) be reflected in the content of my blog. As some of you have surely noticed, many StuNoMe students started out as promising bloggers, but then suddenly there was silence, nothing, zilch, digital white noise. I suspect I have already discovered the secret behind these fluctuations; it has to do with the course Information Science and Comparative Media Studies, taught by our colleague Mgr. Josef Šlerka. I will keep the mystery to myself, but you can be sure that if regular posts do not appear on my blog in the coming weeks, my studies are definitely not going according to plan.
Apart from new media in general, you can count on me reporting on and continuing along the path I set out on by defending my bachelor’s thesis on the theory of (web) design. In 150 pages I explored all the information I had wished to read myself, but nobody had found enough courage (or time and money?) to serve up to me, right under my nose, a synthesising work in which the theory and psychology of creativity would be presented together with the theory of design and new media, all of it wrapped in UX, interaction and web design.
(By the way, did you know that Nikola Tesla had already predicted the Internet; that design is not about the product but about a specific type of thinking that we find not only in designers; that we can look at web design as a new medium and thereby apply all the findings of new media theory precisely to the platform of the Web? If not, try reading about it.)
Besides that, I will be exploring how interaction design can help solve so-called wicked problems, what role design and designers play in post-industrial society, what philosophers claim about technology, how virtual reality can be quite a good model of our own world too, and last but not least how the ideas of transhumanism and artificial intelligence are changing the role of the human being in our Universe.
P.S.: Will robots take your job?