X-tremely X-pensive.
“Scott estimates that a tabletop remote such as CRISTAL could cost $10,000 to $15,000.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tio5OvIqToc]
Business Week is running a little article/slideshow about recent big names/projects of Data Visualization. I’m not sure they are the 21 best examples out there, but some of them are worth discovering.
In continuation with the MIT Metropath(ologies) installation posted by Annika recently, I stumbled upon a site called Spezify.
Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of websites in different visual ways.
Asides the cheeeez-zy name, its actually a lot more hi-fidelity that the Persona’s.
Try it out! This is what Annika is seen as on the web.
A fun project put on by the MIT Media Labs called, Personas. Scouring the internet, it finds and relates all references to the entered name and surfaces them in linear block pattern. This is mid-scour of Mike Stott on the internet. I wonder if Rahul’s photo got picked up in the mix ;)
Here’s a little article from John Maeda telling (his) little story on how Processing came to be.
Link to article: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23187/page1/
The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac ity of our minds. “My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”
We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change.
In short, we need to slow down.
by John Freeman via Wall Street Journal
‘As Creative Review reports:
To promote Calvin Harris‘s new single, Sony Music creatives Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne (who you may remember were responsible for the AC/DC ASCII Excel video last year) decided to use Bare Conductive, a technology developed by RCA Industrial Design and Engineering masters students Bibi Nelson, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt Johnson. Bare Conductive is “skin-safe, conductive ink”. When painted on the skin, it allows a current to be passed through the body without causing an electric shock.’
Not sure if this is gimmick, Wizard of Oz or really working. But its worth a peep!
via Fastcompany
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It’s finally shipping and I’ve just got my copy of the O’Reilly book Programming Interactivity by Joshua Noble. The title says it all: A designer’s guide to Processing, Arduino and openFrameworks. It’s a pretty thick volume with 700 or so pages. I was pleasantly suprised to find decent advanced topic like OpenCV, how to connect LED matrixes in serie and stuff beyond blinking lights. I feel it’s a great intro to openFrameworks for people who haven’t touched this package yet. Many examples are presented for both Processing and openFrameworks. It makes it easier to go back and forth between the two environments, and learn more about each of them.
I’ll dive into it during the coming days. It is a great excuse to start coding a bit again.
Which Medium Is More Sustainable? Paper or digital? [link]
A nice little article about sustainability aspects of print and digital media. We often think digital is greener since it is easier to adapt, repurpose and fill our multiple needs. You commonly hear that mobile devices and always-on network access will reduce all the static wasteful printing and static instances we need in this world. Well, it’s not that simple.
Have a read at Don Carli’s article to discover a bit more.
A village turns its streetlights on by cell phone–saving money and the environment.
This exhibit enables visitors to explore various forms of electricity, and to experience and reflect on energy consumption. Some of Sweden’s best known artists and designers have been brought together with engineers, technical know-how and environmental consideration in this ground breaking exhibition. You will see electricity as never seen before. By the Swedish Institute and the Interactive Institute
Energy AWARE Clock is an electricity meter that resembles an ordinary kitchen clock.
Wonderfl is a nice online platform to code, share and build Flash application online. It is developed by Kayac in Japan. It allows very simple development, efficient collaboration and help around writing Actionscript 3 code.
With wonderfl, you write Actionscript3 code in the html form, and our server compiles your code.
You’ll see warnings, maybe errors from the compiler, and if your code is valid, your Flash(swf) will be automatically shown besides your code.
Now this gets really interesting with the newly launch addition of physical computing functions to Wonderfl. The work is a collaboration between Wonderfl/Kayac and the team at IAMAS lead by Shigeru Kobayashi (the nice guy behind Gainer and Funnel).
Wonderfl now offers support for uploading/sharing circuit diagrams, images and videos to support “sketching in hardware”. If you have compatible hardware and software bridge, Wonderfl will also work directly with it from the browser. It means that you write code online, compile it and it connects directly to your I/O modules. It is really “Wonderfl”! This is quite impressive when you see it all working together.
In my opinion, the best part is that if you don’t have the hardware connected, you get an abstract representation on top of your swf to show how it would work on the hardware side. A nice “simulator” function that allows you to get going and explore even if you don’t have the hardware available. Also the community sharing/support and “forking” from others’ work is a big boost for learning.
The project is just launching and naturally some of the documentation/support is in Japanese for now.
Check it out here: http://physical.wonderfl.net/index_en.html
Alright ladies ‘n gents, this ain’t related to interaction design, and well, barely to design, but since it’s summer time and some of us aren’t quite as busy as during the school year, well, let’s ditch our TV dinners and go down in the kitchen!
I present you A kitchen diary, by Vancouver-based French designer Xavier Encinas.