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Merging Analogue With Digital: Q&A With Richard Harvey

We have a chat with a young interactive designer about his work.

Richard Harvey is an interactive designer with a background in art and engineering whose work looks at interactivity through the lens of both analogue and digital technology. His Floating Forecaster for instance, in the video above, is a floating display that started out as a weather visualization tool (hence the name). In it, users can create patterns and sequences using either an iPhone interface, or a sequencing program. This work, like many of Harvey’s works, explores how reactive physical structures can offer us an immersive experience.

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We sat down to find out more about the young designer and his practice.

The Creators Project: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Richard Harvey: Initially I started out in audiology, hearing and balance disorders, that was my first degree. I did a few years of that before realizing I couldn’t stand it and moved into interaction and moving image at LCC (London College of Communication) and just finished that degree and started doing a masters at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in design products.

Your website contains the phrase “the poetics of engineering.” Could you explain what that means?
I guess that a lot of things that I do are physical things you can touch and I think anyone can identify with something that’s there, that they can actually use. So the things that always fascinate me are usually some kind of physical thing. It’s more accessible I think, so you’re appealing to more people. Like, my family aren’t in the art area and [I’m] making things with them in mind. I find when I go ‘round an art gallery, it’s only if I know something about the artist that I find it interesting. I think something should entice me to want to know more about it and I don’t think many things do that for me. That’s why, with a friend who does spatial design, I set up a company called Poietic. I think a lot of people are looking for an experience and that’s what we want to do—give an immersive experience, a whole feeling that they can walk away with, that stays with them.

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Lots of your work has a playfulness, like toys for adults. Is this the appeal?
I guess it is. It’s a shame as it’s something you’re taught to grow out of, this playfulness and curiosity. I definitely believe in that, that idea of fun. There was an interesting TED talk by Stuart Brown where he talks about the importance of play and he talks about how it’s vital to life and gives an example of serial killers who are deprived of play and cites that as a big reason why they are highly deficient in life skills. Also with mice, they found that the ones who weren’t curious were always the ones who died earlier because they didn’t take risks and try new things. There’s maybe a snobbery towards playfulness, people don’t value the idea of playfulness as an end goal in itself.

Sound, Fire & Smoke: a video demonstrating how a Ruben's tube responded to different sound inputs: iPod, microphone, and guitar and with a circular shaped tube.

You have a kind of toy-like aesthetic as well, bulky and chunky like kids’ toys.
Yeah, I suppose. But a lot of that was driven by lack of funds; parts bought from eBay like air-bed pumps for the Floating Forecaster with toilet plunges wedged on the top. But I do like that aesthetic, a home-made look. But going back to that earlier point, I don’t think it’s all about purely play, anything good will work on lots of different levels, but I think play is an important part of it. It’s also a fascination with the physics of the real world and sound, like in the Sound, Fire & Smoke experiments where you’re visualizing sound with fire. It’s an old physics experiment, a Ruben's tube, which is used to show what a sound wave looks like. I hooked it up to an iPod and made a smoke one too, but the goal of it is to eventually make a fireplace. I think every household should have a fireplace linked to their iTunes so the flames dance around in time with the music. You could even separate the flames out, have high and low frequencies on different tubes—and it’s so responsive, as soon as you make that physical sound you can see it happening. Why would you not want that?

You're studying product design. What interested you about going into that, considering you work with installations?
I’ve actually just delayed that for a year because I was doing too much. But what interested me was it was something I didn’t know a great deal about and I always think that if you feel a bit unsure of yourself in an area, it’s a good feeling because you know you’re learning and pushing yourself. I knew that if I did product design I’d be out of my comfort zone. You feel like you learn more when you’re pushed like that and it’s not a nice feeling, but if you play safe too much, if you don’t take any risks, then you’re never going to come up with something new.

You’re multidisciplinary, how important is that for designers these days, the merging of different skills?
It’s like we’re living through the Matrix age where you can download information into your brain. But it’s like a much slower version of that, because anything you want you can learn it via YouTube or TED talks. The TED talks especially I find very inspiring, they cover a broad range of subjects by experts at the top of their game and I like using that as a resource; all this knowledge, really useful stuff like open source, is out there, it’s incredible. I’ve found that lots of companies and even the scientific fields are going into this multidisciplinary direction, merging, but that’s more to save money, for practical reasons by training people up to do different things, than through choice.

But isn’t this how many new ideas come about, through necessity. Like merging art and science, because the one can help the other?
It’s an interesting area, the merging of art and science. For me the good thing about doing two different degrees in two different areas is it gives you a different way of thinking, you’re trained in these creative fields to constantly come up with ideas and in scientific fields you’re trained with memory and I think it would be good to put someone who’s trained to come up with ideas into the science field and vice versa and see what happens. They’re only labels, I don’t see why everyone has to have their own specified job, look at Leonardo Da Vinci, he crossed disciplines. And you have so much open to you now, so many options because everything’s computerized and people seem quite keen, because of the internet, to share their knowledge. It’s funny though because at some point you have to make money from this knowledge.

How do you see people making money then, with all this freely shared information?
Well Hellicar and Lewis are an interactive group and what they do is they get paid to do something new and as soon as they’ve delivered, done their show or whatever, then they release it on openFrameworks, so it works like that. You get paid to innovate but after that, it’s open. And I guess things will keep progressing like that, as long as you’re paid to make something new I think that’s a fair enough way to do it.