A colleague of mine is testing a social game for the iPhone and is looking for Beta testers. They are looking for creative photo/game lovers help us test and develop an exclusive alpha release of PicTag. Go to http://www.pictag.net/ to find out more and to sign up.
Laser-Cut, RFID-Equipped Paper Radios Tell Your Speakers What to Play
Designer Matt Brown created these sweet-looking laser-cut paper radios with a twist: They’re equipped with RFID chips that can interact with a speaker to broadcast messages or change the radio to a pre-decided station.
Basically, you can program certain controls or sounds into the paper radio. Say you’re an artist who wants to bring attention to a local college radio station—you program that into the RFID chip, and then when the paper radio is draped on any speaker equipped with an RFID reader, it’ll change the station to the one you picked. Or you can have it broadcast short messages; Matt suggests a particular environmentalist star of 30 Rock might program in warnings to turn off your lights when not in use. It’s a very particular usage, but the radios themselves look so cool that we don’t really care if they’re 100% practical. from gizmodo
Excellent work Matt! To all, Matt is looking for work, contact him at deltaninertango **at** yahoo.com and check his website http://realtomato.blogspot.com.
Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted.That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation. 10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.
I’m not fully convinced of the whole idea of decoupling direct manipulation, but the video is really well done. What do you think? It reminds me of Jannes’ degree project in many ways.
For those who attended the Spring Summit at UID last March, you will recongnize this project from Timo Arnall‘s talk. Really cool how they show the making-of.
via BERG’s blog.
Here’s a video interview conducted (in english) by French graphic design magazine Étapes with Mr. Schmidt. Interesting to hear his design philosophy (or more accurately, an introduction to his design philosophy).
via PostSpectacular, his design studio.
Digital Design
Interview with Jack Schulze that unveils some of the process and thinking behind Nearness.
What inspired you to do this experiment, creating a sort of homage to Fischli and Weiss?
The Fischli and Weiss film is obviously one of the finest instances of the “chain reaction” form. I’m particularly fond of the bumpers in the Japanese kids show Pythagora Switch. RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp—Timo describes it as a technology that found its way from the obscure to the mundane without any real fame or apex in the public eye.
We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood, and I think we succeeded.
Full article here (Creativity Online).
via @timoarnall
“A new internet game is about to be launched which allows ‘super snooper’ players to plug into the UK’s CCTV cameras and report on members of the public committing crimes.
The ‘Internet Eyes’ service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers.
Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000.”
This is real!
In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion/projects done about the hyper-networking of our lives and the data that we generate from it.
The future of Healthcare would also be among the critical aspects of our life that would benefit from our interconnected society in the near Future.
via Fastcompany
“Health care is a personal issue that has become wholly public–as the (inter)national debate over reforming our system makes painfully clear. But what’s often lost in the gun-toting Town Hall debates about the issue is a clear vision about how medicine could work in the future. In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle.”
You can also download a .pdf version of this article from the last page. – Noah Robischon, editor.
Watch this space for more ‘Future of Healthcare’ projects from other companies ;-)
via ronnenstam.com
Creatives all over the world do their best to visualize their ideas when pitching clients, preparing for photo shoots or simply putting their ideas on paper. Apart from sketching with Sketchbook Pro I’ve personally been using Flickr and Google Image Searchcombined with Photoshop for ages. Lately I’ve added Bing and iStockphoto to the list. It’s a time consuming process but it’s usually getting my message across.
Today however I’ve seen the light. A new web based application (down at the moment due to high traffic) that I found on Mashable let’s you draw your ideas and then it composes an image out of that doodle of yours. It’s made by five Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore and it’s sick!
via Ben Parr
Step 1. Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture – anything from seagulls to a Mercedes, whatever tickles your fancy,
Step 2. Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background.
Step 3. PhotoSketch will then find real-life images to match your doodles and put them together in a Photoshopped image that will make your jaw drop.
Yes, this thing has such great image recognition technology that it can determine which dog fits best in your canine doodle.
Their demo video unveils the true power of PhotoSketch
Following the success of the Sensing And Sensuality Spring Summit, Umeå Institute of Design invites you to the
IxD Fall summit 2009, November 6-7-8 2009
One full day of talks + an incredible two-day of workshop with Fritzing.
Talks all day Friday. Workshop Saturday and Sunday (200 sek fee)
Preliminary list of speakers
German Leon
Vodafone User Experience (Germany)
David Rose
Vitality (USA)
Karsten Schmidt
PostSpectacular (UK)
Reto Wettach & André Knöring
Potsdam, Interaction Design Lab and Fritzing (Germany)
Jan-Christoph Zoels
Experientia (IT)
Clive Van Heerden
Philips design (ND)
More information to come.
Alot of my currently rocking IxD mates in Umeå are very gifted photographers.
Vancouver BC based DAK (Kunal Sen, Deniz Merdanogullari and Aparna Kapur) had shown me this amazing stop motion film that’s been winning some awards across the Globe. The group comprises animation designers (KS and AK) and a photographer (DM) and they’re doing alot of experimental animation. The techniques they use explore stop-motion at its most basic -“Persistence of vision, light, human form and time.”
I think imbibing techniques like these would rock our work IxD for the formation of quick narratives and their visualization.
some inspiration for the stop motion course.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5IqwECL6bo]
Over the summer I discovered the The Long Now Foundation. Here is how they define it on their website:
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
I really like how they communicate years: 02009 for example. A small detail but so clever and intriguing. Anyways, they have super nice projects and seminars. One of the latest talk is from Arthur Ganson, the famous kinetic sculptor. I saw his really nice machines/sculptures in Boston in the Spring, and since then I’m hooked on that type of work. His talk at the Long Now:
Full presentation here.
You can also check his TED talk, it’s shorter (~15mins).