Astrid Bin
Astrid Bin is a designer and researcher who specialises in making complex things useful, beautiful and understandable. She's spent the last decade working as a music technology designer and researcher, including roles such as the founding designer at Bela and speculative research at Ableton. She is currently a part-time researcher examining e-textile interaction for music, and continues to work as a freelance design consultant for all things interface, interaction, and documentation. She lives in Berlin, and works worldwide.
Talk: Electric Dreams: The Story of Little Character
This is the story of the time I went on a wild goose chase, trying to capture a font that kept eluding me. This mysterious font seemed to have no origin, no author, no history, and maybe wasn’t even really a font at all.
In this talk I tell the story of how this font took a circuitous route through the early days of Silicon Valley, passed by the inventor of the camera phone, through a compiler, and hid for over three decades inside legacy software before becoming my months-long obsession. This is how I (and others) tracked down its origins, how it proves that everything a designer does counts, and that we’re all much more interconnected than we think.
