Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.

Like a fine glass of Boreal Barolo

Hello and welcome to issue #8 of the oio newsletter!

Your monthly bundle of non-spammy updates from your favourite internet café. Last month was quite busy all across the board - running workshops, organising events and setting up a public installation in Madrid. That's right, if you are in the Spanish Capital you can now pay a visit to the incredible Espacio Fundación Telefónica, where in one of the most iconic building in the city there's an exhibition called "La gran imaginación, Historias del futuro", where we did set up a future travel agency called "Blue Marble Travels".

Wait what is a future travel agency? Well, Scroll down and you can learn all about it. On other news we just published a short article about some of the workshops and courses we've been running in the past few years in design schools all around the world, lecturing about new design processes involving other intelligences.

We have new articles on our blog, upcoming public talks, a new section of the newsletter (yes my friend) and more oio news - spoiler alert - we are hiring.

It feels good to reboot some of our public channels, after a few months of hibernation. Expect more content all across the board, from social media to Discord and your favourite content delivery networks from the Metaverse.

Surreal Entertainment

🗞 Oio News

We are hiring!

That's right, oio is growing! We are of course very excited about it. We need more arms and brains to help us building technology products that are human, playful and ultimately good for people and the planet. We have some very exciting projects in our pipeline and we need a good team to help us building it. The open positions are Visual Designer and Creative Technologist, full-time, remote-friendly.

Apply here!

Blue Marble Travels

On the 4th of November we were in Madrid, opening of the exhibition "La gran imaginación. Historias del futuro". Hosted in one of the most iconic buildings in the city and impeccably curated by Jorge Camacho, the exhibition features a collection of artefacts depicting how visions of the future changed across history. How our future changed throughout our past 🤯.

Among a fine selection of items from the last few centuries, the exhibition also features a section about the future, where four artists and designers (oio being one of them) were called to imagine a set of scenarios taking place in the coming century, building on a framework from one of the pioneers of futures studies, Jim Dator.

We designed and built A Future of Transformation - Blue Marble Travels - a travel agency for the year 2050. Inside the installation visitors can book their journey to one of the many future destinations offered by the travel agency. They can take a Slow Plane to Manaus into Autonomous Amazonas - the first small state run by a jungle, or a trip for the wine lovers across the vineyards of the Polar Artic Circle, to enjoy a taste of a vintage Boreal Barolo. They can even fly with a rocket to the Orbital Space Station, where travellers enjoy 16 sunsets every day.
It's a rich installation, with plenty of delightful details and hidden surprises. We would love to write all about it here but we would probably need a separate newsletter just for that and most importantly we don't want to spoil the surprise.

"Blue Marble Travels" is a collaboration with professor Holly Jean Buck, author of the book "After Geoengineering" and it will be open until April 2022. The best part? It's free! Book your free ticket and find out more on the official website.

Workshops

FABRICA in Treviso

November was quite a busy month on the educational front as well. We have been running a few workshops and events, among them a short course at HEAD - Geneva's University of Art and Design, and one at FABRICA, Benetton's communication research centre. We won't write too much about them in this newsletter here as oio's co-founder Matteo Loglio wrote a good recap of these experiences on oio.land, our research notebook, see below.

New entry in our research journal

📖 Read it here!

We just published a short article about some of the teaching activities from last year, with plenty of interesting students' projects and a few reflections about post-human design processes and teaching practices. We don't have a comment system in place yet but we are having conversations about it on Discord, our favourite platform, so join our server to join the conversation.

📖 Read it here!

Talks

On December 10th oio's co-founder Simone Rebaudengo will be giving a keynote at Thingscon. Tune in here to listen about oio's stories about designing in collaboration with non-carbon based designers like Roby and more than human futures.

🎁 Holidays Special Edition

Still undecided about presents? A book is always a great idea, and you know what? We wrote two of them!

Everything is Someone

by Simone Rebaudengo

Everything is Someone is a book about objects, technology, humans, and everything in-between. It is composed of seven “future fables” for children and adults, which move from the present into a future in which “being” and “thinking” are activities not only for humans. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this collection explores the point where technology and philosophy meet, seen through the eyes of kids, vacuum cleaners, factories and mountains.

🛒 Buy it here 19.90€

Read about it on Wired / FrizziFrizzi

Many Intelligences

by Matteo Loglio

What do robots, starfish and toasters think about? As time goes by, objects and all the artefacts serving our daily life become more and more intuitive. Self-driving cars communicating with each other to avoid accidents, alarm clocks able to wake us up when we feel less sleepy... What will they think? How will they treat us? And how do we treat other kinds of intelligence? The book lets us peek into the future and imagine a world where cars and toasters will be as clever as we are, or more.

🛒 Buy it here 18€

Reviews on FastCompany / Wallpaper / It's Nice That

🌐 Oio Community Links

Our Discord community is growing, we are now almost 400 people. Discord is where we announce things before any other channel - workshops, drops and job ads. If you want to stay tuned with the hottest news from oio, make sure to smash this JOIN link.

Here some cherry-picked links for you:

💰 Stripe is now Block

☄️ Hicetnunc's death and re-birth

🐛 Jodorowsky's Dune book

🔮 Ursor is a safe browser for kids

☠️ The NFT bay

♣️ Climate Catastrophe Cards