Jared Ficklin

Jared is a designer, futurist & artist. He was a founding partner at argodesign and is one of four frog design fellows. He has been working at the intersection of humans and technology for over two decades with a focus on innovative technologies or unconventional interfaces such as voice, gesture or multi-modal interaction.

His design creedo is Think by Making and he has designed products for clients like HP, Microsoft, Magic Leap, Harman Kardon and many more. He spent 3 years leading a strategic design partnership with Magic Leap, helped design the Voice and Gesture interface of the Xbox One and has published many vision pieces on the future of computing.

Jared also is an Interactive Artist having directed the SXSW Interactive Opening party. His pieces provoke an examination of technology vs humanism have been activated around the world including in Black Rock City home of the social experiment known as Burning Man. He speaks international about Design, Art & Technology and was the first person to bring live fire onto the TED stage in his talk “Eyes Can Hear”

Art in Dusty Places

Every year a city of 75,000 people is built in the middle of a dry lake bed which is in the middle of the Black Rock Desert which is in the middle of nowhere in Northern Nevada in the USA. Black Rock City exists ephemerally on a substrate of an ancient lake bed that is an unhealthy and caustic mix of alkaline salts and fine minerals laid out perfectly flat for miles in all directions. The smallest movement of air raises the dust, a breeze necessitates eye protection, a wind creates a whiteout so complete you can experience vertigo. The dust coats everything and everyone.

It is an environment naturally devoid of the influences of contour, contrast, color, liquid water, animal or plant life. In this setting humans arrive for a month of building and 10 days of existing. Then in effigy it is all burned to the ground. With no other natural influences the emergent culture is unique and decidedly humanistic. Life can become so amplified that the world outside is referred to as analog. Any day at This Thing in The Desert is a practice between survival and self-actualisation and like no other day lived. And it comes with two constants: Dust and Art.