Interview / taliaYstudio
Body, play, technology
Vienna-based taliaYstudio refers to a young designer Talia Radford, originally from Spain. Talia works with the newest digital technologies, but turns our common ideas about the way they are being used literally upside down. Her projects such as Kisscam or Thermobooth show that even „cold“ technologies have potential to extend the possibilities of „warm“, physical self expression and interaction.
Holdables, source: taliaystudio.com
What are your basic creative approaches?
TR: Strategy: group work – conversation through sketches, stirring the cauldron of ideas together to makesomething greater than the sum of people involved.
Focus: Human-based emotions. We love technology at the studio but we love people more – we are fascinated by the relationship people have with themselves, each other and the environment, and so the emotions involved in these complex interactions are at the core of our work.
Outcome: meaningful serious fun. PLAY.
Could you please describe a way, how you approach new digital technologies?
At the studio, we make technology tangible through design. This means we take emerging tech and frame itwithin a meaningful contemporary conceptual application in a beautiful aesthetic way to ignite user acceptance. Tech is moving at the same pace as fashion: it is getting smaller, cheaper, more accessible, and with code as a language prototyping in studio is really cheap and easy. Also, did you know its cheaper now to code components to turn on an LED by waving your hand in the air, than to do the same thing with a physicalswitch? We used to hang out a lot at fablabs, and I guess what we are doing through design is taking the tech out of the hacker´s basements and giving it design aesthetic and design thinking to bring it into a scenario ofpossible consumer reality. Also I think what design can do for tech is shed the cyborg aesthetic and bring it into the field of fashion.
Holdables, source: taliaystudio.com
Behind your projects, one can feel dreaming about a better society. How do you imagine such a society?
If you observe the integration of technology into our lives over the last century, it has turned a bit ugly. At first ittook us out of the factories which are great because then tech and machines could do the crude, difficult,dangerous jobs for us. And then tech was worshipped for „making our lives easier“. But it wasn´t like that really, was it? It just made us lazier and reduced the amount of movements we had to make to do things, whether it is setting navigation in the car, or sending somebody a love note via social media, or even baking bread. The potential of our body is absolutely not being taken into account and so we have become staticbeings thanks to “smarter“ devices. It is shame, really. I think gestures have super-human poetic power in communication, and as a medditeranean girl it´s part of my communication DNA, it makes you feel alive, andnow with the new era of coding of electronics and of physical things, we should also experiment how to become more eloquent in our communication with machines – as if we were talking to other people. So it´s notonly the spoken or the written word, but also the body language, as well as more subtle qualities like intonation, micro expressions, scent, even the chemical and biological workings of the body that make us thinkwe are being telepathic… all these qualities we should try and mimic into our communication with technology,so that we can feel more human, less drained. I think I enjoy the paradox of tech creating a more sensual society.
You were born in Spain, now you live and work in Wien. What does this city mean to you, as a designer? How does it inspire you?
My relationship with Vienna is ambivalent. It´s a small, safe, quiet, slow capital city. It´s because of Vienna thatI can work as a designer and I´m very grateful for the opportunities the city has given me during the last 12 years. The city is very good during summer for having good time and relax and very horrible during winter when I cannot stop shivering from cold for months. I don´t think the city, however beautiful, is inspiring in itself – cities that inspire me are the ones that exhaust all my senses at once,like Hong Kong or London. But more than anything I´m inspired by people, and it is because of Vienna (but notnecessarily always IN Vienna) that I have met some of the craziest, most driven, most inspiring eclectic mix ofpeople in bizarre situations that I don´t think could have happened because of any other city. Oh and Vienna has a bunch of very strong women who are doing wonders as entrepreneurs. Well done.
What projects are you currently working on?
The studio is still collaborating with OSRAM OLED GmbH, which is of course very exciting. The first twoprojects to come out of this collaboration, which are kindly funded by Departure, are the Thermobooth and the Holdables. But also I am currently working as part of an inter-disciplinary team on a therapeutically wearabletech, which is a dream project because it combines my love for tech, the sensual and the social, and I am very honoured the studio was chosen to participate. Also I start teaching in the autumn which is exciting.
Holdables, source: taliaystudio.com