After hauling all 230 lbs of my body fat up to the almost-top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, touring the Design Museum, and going to Wicked, my brain has evaporated into a pile of goopy grey mush between my ears (which, after unclogging, have clogged again!) and so I’m copping out of an intelligent post today in favor of spamming a lot of photos.

Okay, a little bit of intelligent discussion; in the California exhibit in The Design Museum, there were two pieces of design work that really, really got me jazzed up. The first was ‘Duet’, and interactive animation, animated by Glenn Keane (an animation legend) and created in partnership with… Google Glass, I believe? The placards are lost somewhere in the depths of the 600+ pictures I took today, and given that it’s 2 AM and, as mentioned before, my brain is a mostly non-functioning slushpuppy of half-firing neurons, I’m going to favor skipping ahead to my point rather than lingering.

Displayed on a tablet that made use of the same 3D functionality and interfacing as most VR games and apps, the animation for ‘Duet’ was revealed by moving the tablet around a full 360 degrees around the room, including up and down. Whether or not you were looking at the animation, it progressed of it’s own will, with characters running on and off screen and dipping in and out of the ‘deeper’ parts of the picture plane. As a pseudo-animation, pseudo-design student, the collision of these two mediums is exciting enough, but seeing the potential for animation and its integration and reinvention in the future is always fascinating and inspiring.

The second piece, which I will talk about in more detail… Later ™, was an open source genome coder that was set up to function in exactly the same way as traditional HTML/CSS coders, that allow biologists to experiment and write DNA from home, increasing the accessibility and shareability of what was once a very exclusive and expensive process.

And now – photos. They do say a picture is worth a thousand words, right?