My favorite design conference, the TYPO Berlin, will, this year, be opened by media activist Kalle Lasn, founder of AdBusters (the self-proclaimed anti-advertisng magazine) and CEO of the BlackSpot Anticorporation (in which I own 1 share as I once bought one of their sneakers )

This year’s TYPO, to be held from 18-20 May, 2006, will be have the theme: Play.

Play will be the topic of Typo 2006. Which means neither football, nor the design of toys. We will discuss
the impact of elements of gaming on electronic communication. Play has long been considered a useless pastime. Emotion, associative thinking, intuition and subjective experience have not mattered much in the world of labour. The all-too human has been eliminated.

However, the computer and the internet have removed the split between work and play. Suddenly and once again, people must be capable of anticipating trends and grasping intuitive user guidance. Typo 2006 will focus on the combination of technology and emotion.

Lasn’s latest book is called Design Anarchy:

A radical new aesthetic vision by Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn, Design Anarchy takes an unflinching look at contemporary art and design, implicating its seemingly innocuous practices in crimes against our culture and our planet. Equal parts memoir, manifesto, scrapbook and revolutionary design manual, this book is an urgent call for artists, designers, architects and communicators to re-engage with the world, to explore their role in the pollution and future redemption of our mental and physical commons.

AdBusters?

Speaking of AdBsuters, here’s something I wrote for the Jordan Times a few years back:

Today’s global polarized political climate is generating more interest in what used to be a fringe phenomenon: culture jamming. It’s the act of turning media into a weapon of resistance of corporate dominance and an ever more branded world.

One example is the Buy Nothing Day media campaign started by the magazine Adbusters (check: www.adbusters.org).
The campaign aims at convincing people to refrain from buying anything for 24 hours, in defiance of a consumerist culture that equates shopping with living.

Buy nothing events have so far been held in dozens of countries and drawn a lot of media and public interest.

Read these related posts on 360east:

• Blogging from Berlin, the TYPO and DesignMai
• Impressive names (like Bruce Mau) at the upcoming Tasmeem Doha design conference
• Apple creates the world’s thinnest laptop (but still can’t get its CEO’s keynote to stream to Jordan!)
• Unbrand America?
• There is FOOD at the Forum!