Motionpedia on IDEAT China

We are happy to see that MOTIONPEDIA one of the projects presented at the Significant Others grad show in May has been featured on the July Issue of IDEAT China in their IDEAT LAB column. Congratulations to professor Ren Lei and his students! More on Motionpedia below.

About MOTIONPEDIA

Motionpedia is a long-term research project and a new digital platform developed by professor Ren Lei together with his students Chen Jue, Justin Bao, Xu Chumin and Deng Zixian, that is presented in its first demo at the 2019 graduation show.

A research rooted in reassessing the relationship between information and the transforming interfaces employed for its consumption, the project is a radical attempt at leveraging the potential of widespread digital literacy and technologies of accessibility like crowd-sourcing platforms to reconfigure the units of communication that make up our linguistic world – i.e. words – into co-signs, or more simply iconized language.

Motionpedia takes its name from the key action that generates its contents, that is how the three essential geometric shapes (a circle, a triangle and a square) that form its ‘’alphabet’’ are snapped together into ever re-composable graphic items allowing users to easily design their own iconized words – a visual wikipedia endlessly fed by authors-as-designers.

The project includes the development of both the online platform and the tool to contribute one’s own creations, comment and exchange information with other users, rate their work and eventually collaborate in the edification of a new syntax of ‘’meaning’’: one that celebrates diversity and encourages a virtuous arbitration of its coming into being.

Motionpedia proposes to build a digital place where intercultural dialogue can be performed in the recognition of the plurality of systems of thought and belief that inform our understanding of both the material and intangible universe that we cohabit.