Milan 2014: futurist and writer Bruce Sterling was among this week's visitors to the FOMObile in Milan – the first mobile press room for an algorithmic publishing experiment led by Joseph Grima (+ download).
Sterling's comment on events being "the new magazines" became one of the guiding principles for the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) project, which centres around a piece of software that combines voice recognition and data from social media to produce an instant newspaper.
"The project was born from the idea of publishing not being compatible with such a timeframe [as Milan design week]; asking how it can embrace this notion of the event, as Bruce Sterling stated," said Grima, whose design research collaborative Space Caviar developed FOMO.
"If events are the thing that now drives contemporary production, we need to find a way for publishing to adapt to that condition, to explore a way to create an instant record," he said.
FOMO had its debut in Milan this with a series of evening talks from leading designers called On The Fly. Taking place underneath Nike's Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, the presentations tackled themes including weightlessness and sustainability in design. Speakers included Atelier Bow Wow, Clemens Weisshaar, Martino Gamper and Formafantasma.
Their words were combined with social activity trawled from the #ontheflymilan hashtag, including Instagram pictures and Tweets, which were put together by the algorithmic publishing machine into a PDF, printed and bound, and handed out for free to visitors at Palazzo Clerici.
You can now download issues four to eight of FOMO from day two of the experiment, with contributions from Italo Rota, Ianthe Roach and Pier Nucelo on the theme seamlessness.
» Olympia Zagnoli - download here
» Italo Rota - download here
» Pier Nucleo - download here
» Marco Raino - download here
» Ianthe Roach - download here
The final issues of FOMO from Milan will be available on Dezeen next week.