Museums and Justice

Museums and Justice

Sunday 18 March 2018

An introduction to Blockchain technology and Design....(among other things).



Photo above: background image of retro american publicity, source: 
https://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2013/12/30/new-years-eve-and-television/

Mr. Vassilis Papakonstantinou, mechanical engineer and chairman of MIT Enterprise Forum Greece, stated in his recent lecture at Eugenides Foundation UTech Lab* that Blockchain technology consists of the 3rd most important innovation the last decades, right after Personal Computers (PCs) and the Internet. Blockchain is the basic technology that will define a new circle of activities, facilities, communities, systems, habits, morals and relationships in the contemporary world, now and tomorrow.
The galloping digitalization of the material world and of Content, together with all diverse Internet transactions and new online liaisons, plus the banking/economic crisis- required a costless technology, whereas trust would be NO condition of successful completion and at the same time  transparency, authentification and audit would be necessarily incorporated. A public, immutable and distributed ledger of transactions of ALL kinds, an overall "packaging" of many technologies, in order to manage crisis: THAT is Blockchain.

The huge databases created and transparently distributed by and to- many PCs, form independent networks in the fields of economy, public administration, education, health and legal infrastructures- provided that every new/last transaction in Blockchain technology does carry the "signatures" ("blocks"), therefore the entire information of all previous transactions in the chain. The applications of Blockchain technology are multiplying, including production, normalization, design and copyright. Some examples: 
1. Peer 2 peer insurance lending 
2. Health & medical records 
3. Supply chain communications 
4. Land rights management (land registries)
5. Crossborder money transfers 
6. Banking fraud detection 
7. Self-executing contracts ("Smart Contracts") 
8. Digital identity security 
9. Distributed cloud storage (documentation, archiving) 
10. Government corruption prevention 
11. Music royalty collections 
12. Serial diamond verification/identification.

Blockchain also implements Artificial Intelligence (AI) a determining fact for many future platforms, including digital currencies or cryptocurrencies, nowadays a key blockchain-based industry, also encountering issues of technical manipulation and energy efficiency,(ex. Bitcoin farms are currently expensive Quantum computers with latest-technology graphic cards that are rapidly heating up during mining- a result that will possibly limit their use in countries primarily affected by global warming and high temperatures in the near future).

If we have to come undone at some point (sooner or later), so to "unstitch" stitch-by-stitch this civilization - will those technologies/ platforms such as Blockchain or UbuWeb be our post-millenial "Black Boxes" to carry on safely a legacy, no longer available? A question, waiting to be answered the following years to come.

(*Huge thanks to UTech Lab and Mr. Papakonstantinou for the dedicated workshop to Blockchain technology!)

Best,
A4D-D4A





Sunday 4 March 2018

A4D-D4A ThinkLab: Parallel lives, parallel designs - the works of Ingvar Kamprad and Steve Jobs.



In photo above: the Mac Pro by Apple, (https://www.apple.com/lae/mac-pro/) and the current version of Strandmon armchair by IKEA,(http://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/30361043/).

There is no obvious interaction between some design icons of the century but there is definitely a copy pattern in their evolution and the actual transition of these objects into the 21st century era.
The frugal lifestyle and the democratic vision of universal access to goods and services of the founders of IKEA and Apple- Ingvar Kamprad and Steve Jobs respectively- infuse those very values into the design of the Mac and the Strandmon, but most importantly, they transcend those items to ceaseless, expanding "design machines".
The inextricable fusion of design and manufacturing in order to give a product that will have endless possibilities of improvement the following decades after its birth, remains the key factor in concepts like the new Mac Pro and the Strandmon- revisited numerous times and following the spirit, the etiquette of contemporary society's needs. Super-flexible, highly efficient, uncommonly pretty, eco and energy-friendly, traditional yet innovative, mass-addressed but individually appreciated, ready to be re-discovered and redesigned by the next generation.That's what makes them eternal.

Cordially ?-))
A4D-D4A