USA Fellows Stories: Sigi Moeslinger and Masamichi Vdagawa

Sigi Moeslinger and Masamichi Vdagawa - New York
USA Target Fellows 2006,  Architecture and Design

by Susan Morgan

“The word antenna is the same in English, German, and Japanese; it’s pronounced the same in each language, and the meaning doesn’t shift,” explain Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, interactive designers and partners in Antenna, the New York design studio.

And the very idea of an antenna — a finely tuned device capable of both receiving and transmitting information — appealed to their thinking as well.

Since 1997 Antenna has been developing and creating objects and environments—including the user-friendly Jet Blue Self-Service Check-in Kiosks as well as fleets of gleaming scratch-resistant subway cars—that engagingly reconcile human concerns and new technologies through the universal language of great design.

“We see ourselves as communicators and cultural commentators as much as practical problem solvers,” Udagawa and Moeslinger stated in their introduction to Antenna’s 2005 catalog. “Our language is design.” When the designers first met in 1994, their far-reaching yet intersecting circumstances seemed suitably local and global: they both worked in the San Francisco Bay Area’s international design community and lived in the same North Beach neighborhood. Udagawa is a native of Tokyo, a graduate of Chiba University with an MFA from Cranbrook Academy (1991), and Moeslinger was born in Vienna, studied industrial design in Europe, and graduated from Art Center College of Design and New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (MA, 1996).

As interactive designers, they bring to their work a comprehensive understanding of art and science while utilizing the acutely observant methods of sociocultural anthropology. Moeslinger and Udagawa mindfully design objects that are altogether new but readily encourage use, humanize our relationship to technology, and ease the demands of contemporary life. “I don’t think a person using a check-in kiosk makes a distinction between computer hardware and software,” observes Udagawa. For Jet Blue, Antenna produced a full custom design: hardware, screen interface, and a simple yet elegant freestanding kiosk. “Design guides people,” says Moeslinger. “Every artifact that is inserted into public space will provoke an interaction. Those interactions shape the impression of the city and become part of the urban experience.” In their design for the kiosk, Udagawa and Moeslinger introduced what they refer to as “slightly anthropomorphic gestures”: the screen tilts to look up at the customer and “privacy wings” frame the structure, creating a sense of enclosure and suggesting a welcome embrace.

While Antenna was developing a prototype for the New York City Transit System’s MetroCard vending machine, they discovered that nearly half of the seven million daily subway passengers hadn’t used ATMs. “People didn’t respond to the prompt ‘touch the screen to begin,’” recalls Moeslinger. Antenna’s MetroCard machine anticipates questions and provides help; a sturdy arrangement of big buttons and primary colors, the complex machine is a highly functional Pop art/Fisher-Price object accessible to an enormously diverse audience. On screen, they’ve added an animated hand that reassuringly points the way: “Touch Start,” it says, and another small aspect of everyday life proceeds smoothly.

“Ephemerality—particularly the essential aesthetic of appearance and disappearance,” Udagawa and Moeslinger note, “is really the essential aesthetic of interactivity.”