Christmas is a bit early this year at UID. During the Fall, we acquired a few nice additions for the Interaction Workshop. We just picked up the new XBox + Kinect combo today, and Mikko is sweating like never before :-)
Here are some the nicest items we now have for all of your interaction work:
-Microsoft XBox 360 with Kinect controller, with some games
-Canon 7D, with 50mm/1.4, 28mm/1.8 and 8.5mm/3.5 fisheye
-New portable studio lights/flashes kit, with soft-boxes
-Pico Projector, 3M MPro150
-Two HTC Nexus One Android phones (Processing on Android, yippi!)
-A bunch of DMX boards with 8-9 channels out for relays, PWM, servos.
-Many new Manfrotto Flexi Arms, to clamp and secure whatever you can dream of.
-HP touchsmart 600, all-in-one computer with touchscreen, Windows 7
-Two iPads, for iPading all you want
-Roland MDX-40A CNC milling machine, to sketchmill your ideas.
That’s about it from the top of my head. I hope you enjoy and take care of these items.
What it is:
During 4 days we are in groups setting up tools for capturing data regarding a comparison or question we care about. This capture will run until next year when we give the data some TLC and tell a story.
Original illustration for Program or be Programmed, by Leland Purvis
I recently read Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book Program or be Programmed and found it really interesting. It addresses the issue that we are loosing understanding and control in this new digital age. People are becoming more and more alienated users, digital illiterates. I really recommend this book for anyone interested in IxD out there.
By the way, OR Books is a small progressive publishing company that tries to do things differently in the business. It’s very refreshing and encouraging to see commercial initiatives trying to shake-up the often very conservative publishing industry. Along the same lines, Mr. Rushkoff was recently interviewed by GRITtv‘s Laura Flanders. Watch the 15 minutes video on GRITtv or below:More GRITtv
An 18 year old Italian man gets an asthma attack every time he logs on to Facebook, but in the hospital the doctors didn’t find anything abnormal. Why? The doctors discovered that had recently broke up with his girlfriend who removed him from his friend list. Using a false alias the man managed to get in to the girls friend list again and spied her profile page every time he logged on to Facebook. This caused depression in him, which led to an acute asthma attack.
The doctors now recommend that social networking should be investigated in case acute asthma attacks on young people.
*Yay, the second (first, Orthorexia Nervosa) information age disease I know of. Someone should do a thesis or something on diseases that come from this overload of information we are subjected to* Read article on The Lancet.
It’s been less than two weeks since Microsoft released Kinect and there’s been plenty of people trying to release an open-source driver to interface it with other devices. Adafruit offered 3000 dollars to the first one to release open-source code and show it working, that happened only three days after the announcement and today we already have a fully functional Processing library (only for OS X for now).
For those of you who haven’t had a chance to play with the new Windows Phone – get it, its awesome!
Our classmate and dear friend Jannes Peters has released his own WP7 app which is available for free download. It looks really cool !
Img is a visual news reader. Add your blogs or any other news source, and it will extract all images. Img is great for browsing design, architecture, art and photography blogs.
If you find a picture that interests you, you can tap it to read the blog post behind it or save it to your local gallery.
Friday night and you are drunk. Maybe a bit of Facebook? Regret it the next morning? You need help. Just install this to your Firefox or Chrome and you are saved from embarrassments.
This guy has been going strong since the 60’s making electronic music that still sounds great. In order to visit the studio you need to fill out a visa, I guess that is what it takes to see some of that equipment. Check it out in this part of the interview. Have a nice weekend!
Here is one interesting project at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, could be some inspirations for the Second Year IXD’ers who are palying with light this week.
When music or any sound is detected by the microphone it is being led to the equalizer connected to the computer. If there is a base sound the computer transmits a signal to the battery to send pulses of electricity out to the leds in the dress. This obviously lightens the leds up. Then in a second or so they softly go of again. So when listening to music the leds are pulsing to the rhythm of the music. There is also a small lever attached to the microphone, making it possible to adapt to the loudness of sounds around you. This makes the dress work both where there are low volumes like being at home listening to music or out clubbing where the music is very loud.
What was your inspiration/motivation for this project?
When I made the dress I were out clubbing a lot. Finding it dull that so many people weren’t dancing but just hanging around sipping on their beer. I wanted to make a garment that would help to create an atmosphere of dancing and partying even though the wearer wouldn’t dance. Much like something visual such as a discoball or a set of strob-lights helps to give a greater experience of sounds. The garment is of course not only made for people that doesn’t dance, but for all people in the club.
Most challenging step you encountered while working on the dress?
The most challenging part of the task was creating a functioning equalizer out of some electronic devices, and also making the programming of the computer work as I wanted. It was an absolute nightmare! But I got loads of help from Mackie and Marcus two teachers and students of our school.
Do you know Kicker Studio? Well you should. Kicker is a nice little IxD consultancy in San Francisco (USA) started from Dan Saffer, author of a few notable books on Interaction Design. They specializes in work at the junction of IxD and ID. Well, earlier this summer, Kicker organized an event called Device Design Day, aiming to bring “visual, industrial, and interaction designers together to discuss the next generation of consumer electronics, mobile and medical devices, and appliances”. The videos of the presentations are now available online for your viewing pleasure. They had an impressive lineup of speakers including the following:
Kim Goodwin and Michael Voege, Convergent Products, Convergent Process
Mike Kuniavsky, Information as a Material
Julien Bleecker, Design Fiction Goes From Props to Prototypes
