Toca Me - inspirational design conference

18 Jun 2005 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Japan

TOCA ME is Spanish and means “touch me” - a suitable title for this design conference which took place for the second time in Munich, Southern Germany. The concept for TOCA ME is to present “inspirational” or “motivational design” – as Thorsten Iberl, one of the organizers, explained to me.

written and photographed by Reto Wettach

TOCA ME is not trying to establish a new design paradigm, but wants to offer ideas, methods and styles for designers from all different backgrounds. It also wants to enable “dialog, discussion, controversy and harmony”.

This year’s conference was for sure a success in that sense: a perfectly sunny day, a cool and stylish lounging area, an exciting mixture of speakers and lots of interested and interesting young designers creating an unique atmosphere, somewhere between party mood and professional conference. A good DJ and German beer rounded off the whole event. As most of the guests are working as freelance designers, TOCA ME becomes an important platform for inspiration and exchange.

“I need to get away from my day-to-day work from time to time and get new inspiration through other designers, whether they are famous or in the same situation as I am”, tells me Boris, a 27-year-old freelancer from Munich.

The fact that some of the speakers were trying out new skateboard stunts even enhanced the spirit of this event: “Every speaker is here also in the breaks and it is part of the concept of TOCA ME that you can go to them and just chat. This is part of our philosophy.”, tells me Thorsten Iberl.

Of course, Joshua Davis (USA) was - again - very entertaining: he made the audience laugh, especially when he was talking about his “typical” client-meetings with TOOL , a heavy metal band from the US: first he would listen to 4 hours to their practice, maybe go during this time to the toilet, which appeared to have not been cleaned since the formation of the band, and which also hosts the golden and platinum records (all with an interesting layer of unidentified, sticky material on them). Then they would talk briefly about the job and finally complete the meeting with a few hours of shooting bullets in the shooting range. The rest of Joshua’s talk, especially about his philosophy of “designing by computing” and about his “composition generator”, is well known. New to me was his confession that he does most of his creative work by hand. Only when it comes to generating patterns and compositions, he would start to use the computer. And for being creative, he said: “I know that if I am thinking I am doing something wrong!”

The presentations by Niko Stumpo (Netherlands) and Rob Chiu (UK) were beautiful: they were presenting their very personal styles, which some people might find interesting, others not. It was impressive to see the output of Niko: he seems to me like a creative hurricane, producing lots and lots of designs every day. And still he finds the time to train his skateboarding skills. Impressive!

Rob, who is working and living in Huddersfield close to Manchester, showed an interesting new technique of combining hand-drawings and the 3-D-features of After-Effects: with this method he can create the illusion of walking through a hand-drawn city. When I talked to Rob, he admitted that he is afraid of getting to much connected to a certain style: “You have to be careful to not fall into the style-trap, especially when you are working alone”. That’s why he starts each project with a very free first phase, but unfortunately most of his clients want him to apply “his style” to the projects.

The presentation by Electronic Shadow (Naziha Mestaoui and Yazine Ait Kaci, both France) was about their installations. As most of you know, they won the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Art Festival last year. She is an architect by training and he was working as an Art Director in various advertisement agencies prior to founding Electronic Shadow. These different backgrounds are beautifully reflected in their art work. They want to “merge space, image and people”, trying to create “poetic installations”. For Electronic Shadow, “image and space are the same”.

Besides their art installations they also talked about their commercial work: for Giorgio Armani they built the “Sense Space”, which is a space within a shop, where people can experience the perfumes within a poetic and relaxing interactive experience. As with this example, the two artists of Electronic Shadow explained to the audience that most of their commercial jobs are based on art projects: the client sees one of their art projects and then asks them to apply this to a commercial situation.

As for me, the talk by Hi-ReS! (UK) was most inspiring: they did not present a design style, but an approach. When HiRes takes on a creative job, they open the field in many different directions. For example, they showed a project, which was done for PSP and its introduction to the European market. Hi-ReS! approached this design challenge by creating lots of different images and collages related to the shape, the use and the fun of PSP: they even developed new road signs, which would warn car drivers about mobile gamers.

For Hi-ReS! the basic conceptual questions come first and the style follows. When I listen to their talk I felt that their approach felt quite German, and in fact, both founders are German and studied in Offenbach, one of the more conceptual design schools in Germany.

Interestingly enough, with this approach a design consultancy can play much freer with different styles. Hi-ReS! did for example the brand identity and the web site for “Grey Goose”, a high class vodka brand; the design language they used here is not at all related to their other projects by HiRes as e.g. the style guide for MTV, which rather uses styles inspired by street art.

Quite surprising to me came the announcement of Hi-ReS! to start a second company called Nanika (obviously a Japanese word). This company will focus on interaction design “beyond the desktop” as Florian Schmitt, one of the founders of Hi-ReS! explained to me. The reason for starting a new company is to “put more emphasis on this field, both for themselves and for their clients”. One project of this company is already well known: Andreas Müller’s “For All Seasons”.

Overall, the talks and the conversation were inspiring and gave all visitors the good feeling that being a designer can be the most wonderful thing in the world.

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