Collections
Future Interaction and Experiences
At first glance, it was difficult to understand the overall purpose of the MA Information Experience Design; the student’s work often feels unconcluded, it can be hard to identify the core concepts and I felt in absolute darkness. However, after a conversation with the Acting Head of Programme, Dylan Yamada-Rice, I came to understand the vision of the course, and began to think I had been short-sighted, confined by my own discipline of good design practice, which in retrospect may be an approach too practical to judge this work.
Instead, IED pushes students to seek their own fundamental topic and means of expression and purpose for life. This is evident in the way you are confronted by philosophical ideas, as well as science and technology. It made me question whether the current unravelling of global political structures might have come about because they were formed by practical thinkers and the evolution of technology. Maybe we have been ignoring fundamental concepts about how humans should/could live.
Traditionally, philosophy is an academic pursuit undertaken through reading and verbal discussion, but IED suggests the possibility of philosophical endeavours through making. Indeed, recent use of trendy communication platforms such as VR or AR could be better utilised if connected with a deeper understanding of philosophical study.
Furthermore, the students are true collaborators, crossing cultural boundaries, genders and ages to bring about a wider and broader perspective on the world. Thus, I have come to see these students as seven provocateurs who ignore the temptation to focus on business and money, which are the current trends of many neoliberal art and design disciplines, and instead have embraced a role to provoke and slap current society and contribute fragments to opening up a new way of thinking.
Yuri Suzuki
Yuri Suzuki
Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician. His practice explores the realms of sound through designed pieces that examine the relationship between people and their environments - questioning how both music and sound evolve to create personal experiences.
Suzuki was born in Tokyo in 1980. After studying Industrial Design he worked with Maywa Denki, the Japanese electronic art unit. During this period, Yuri began exploring the relationship between music and technology. In 2005, He moved to London to study Product Design at the Royal College of Art, where he further developed his interest in the crossover between art, design and music, using both analogue and digital technologies to explore this.
Central to Suzuki's practice is collaboration- he has worked with various musicians including will.i.am and Jeff Mills, as well as commercial clients such as Google, with whom he developed a unique AR Music Kit.
His work can be seen in several international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has had both solo and group exhibitions at the Tate Britain London, Mudam Luxembourg, MoMA and the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. In 2016, he received the Designer of the Future award at Design Miami.
In 2018 Suzuki was appointed a partner at Pentagram, the world’s largest independently owned design studio., where he began working as an artist in the London studio, Suzuki and his team work internationally - pushing the boundaries between art, design, technology and sound, crossing the fields of both low and high technology.
