December 2015: What is beautiful software?

Throughout 2015, Matt Nish-Lapidus has been thinking deeply about what it means to be “beautiful” in today’s age of software. He has presented the results at events such as MidwestUX and CanUX — and now, he joins us in Waterloo to share his thoughts and lead a spirited discussion. Hope to see you there!

Thursday December 17, 2015
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub
Atlas/Matrix Room

Beauty doesn’t have to be just skin deep, and many of the best designs throughout history have shown that. The need to make beautiful things is as critical now as it was to designers and architects over the last hundred years, only our materials and outputs have changed dramatically. Beauty is more than a layer on top of the product, it’s not superficial and “nice to have”, it’s a critical part of the human experience.

Every era has a different sense of beauty, from the renaissance through pop-art. Each of these evolutions has accompanied changes in the world, technology, culture, and politics. As the work of designers changes, so does our need to understand beauty and how to make beautiful things to put into the world. Design’s traditional critical language doesn’t adequately account for the aesthetic properties of these new kinds of design outputs and practices. We will explore a frame for beauty that extends tradition and works to evolve how we think about, and do, design in the age of the network.

About Matt Nish-Lapidus

Matt holds a degree in new media art from Ryerson University and has a rich background as a practicing designer, musician, and artist. His work has included everything from the digital library catalog in use by the New York Public Library to enterprise software for hospitals, video games, and large-scale public installations. He spent the first few years of his career assisting international new media artists such as Stelarc, David Rokeby, and Haruki Nishijima, while developing his own art and design practice.

Matt is an independent designer and creative technologist in Toronto, Canada where he focuses on design practice development in for the 21st century, a deign instructor at Sheridan College and CIID, and is also the Vice President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), a global organization dedicated to the advancement of the interaction design practice.

Please register for this free event