I was fortunate enough to hear Refik Anadol: In the Mind’s Eye – talk at Melbourne’s NGV as part of Melbourne Design Week at the NGV last week, part of the Telstra Creativity and Innovation Series. What an inspiring guy. Full of energy an enthusiasm, keen to share his story and vision with the world. Refik came across as a loveable little nerdy kid, a kid who gets to play with oodles of data and expensive projectors and then displays said data in ways that are truly jaw dropping.

There is unthinkable amounts of data being generated every day. What to do with the data? Are there new ways to display that data which might provide us with new insights into our lives and the way we live? Enable us to see a bigger picture? Discovering new ways to gather, display, project and hopefully interpret data are just one of the studios aims. Integration of projected data and architecture in the public space was also discussed, along with astounding demonstrations in AI and machine learning. One of the demonstrations showed experiments in searching for data via data tunnels (see below), driven by a handheld device. Groundbreaking ways of searching vast amounts of data is forecast. A “search” will clearly one day, be far more advanced than entering a text string into google. You can see plenty of amazing work at www.refikanadol.com.