Google has officially released Google Latitude. It looks like a clone of twitter that includes the location of your contacts and other Google products integration (GTalk, Gmail, Maps…). It’s ok, but what the hell is going to happen? Some of your friends will have accounts in Facebook, others are Twitter users, a few will give Latitude a try…? Please, put everything together!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Oq-9enE-k]
An introductory but inspiring video from Ben Fry (co-founder of Processing and director of Seed Phyllotaxis Lab) and Carlos Ulloa (founder and creator of Papervision3D and HelloEnjoy)
More good stuff: http://www.creativitycat.com
Neat explorations by Sony Interaction Design Group:
http://www.sony.net/Fun/design/activity/concept/index.html
What will consumers, enterprises and society want from communications in 2020?
Life in 2020 reflects Ericsson’s view of what the world of communications might look like in the future. This multimedia experience illustrates how people may communicate in 2020, what applications they might use and what communication needs they may have.
Take a tour through the Life in 2020.
[via]
Sweden’s educational window to the world is currently featuring three UmeÃ¥ Interaction Design graduates in an article on their front page. Nice publicity for the program!
HOW Magazine’s 11th Annual Interactive Design Awards
Enter your work in HOW magazine’s Interactive Design Competition. All winning entries will be featured in HOW’s April 2010 Design Annual and will receive a $100 discount toward registration for the 2010 HOW Design Conference. One Best of Show winner will be prominently featured in the April 2010 Design Annual and will be our guest at the 2010 HOW Conference (round-trip airfare within the U.S., hotel and registration paid by HOW) .
DEADLINE
All entries must be postmarked no later than July 15, 2009. Entries postmarked after July 15 require a late fee of $25 per entry. Entries postmarked after July 31, 2009, will not be accepted.
http://howdesign.com/interactivedesignawards
The requested projects are very traditional (interactive media, websites, etc), but it still is great exposure if you have work along these lines.
Hey Matt congratulations on being featured on Core77.
Great work can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
The world is “craving” for more Matt Brown.
Best of luck in the wild world of design.
Own a piece of the road at the Tour de France. Write your message and it will be sent to the Nike LIVESTRONG Chalkbot. What words of hope, inspiration and encouragement will you share with the world?
http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/livestrong/en_US/chalk_messages
Meng is preparing the new/faster/better/stronger 2009 edition of the UID Arduino Kit. We received the shipment today from ElectroKit and 25 new packages are being prepared for September.
The 2009 edition has a couple more LEDs and potentiometers, an updated Arduino Duemilanove Board (with the ATMega328 chip), a mini servo and a DC motor.
Be sure to revise your Ohm’s law and AnalogWrite() during the summer. In September you will be blinking and PWMing those leds!
I was reading some examples for the kind of projects they are looking for
and I found some that reminded me the last UID degree exhibition:
The deadlines for submiting papers, studios and explorations:
Plug in the stuff to your Arduino, start NETLab and your favourite coding software, a few widgets here and there, connect and voilá!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6_eda0BEv4&feature=player_embedded]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQyuu4OYkHE&feature=player_embedded]
Really fast and easy! Hope still watches this blog, because this really helps those with problems in sketching in hardware.
‘In the end, all you can ever count on is the end. That and sometimes another beginning..’
– Jamie Peasley (thanks Roberto and Matt B!)
Its already been an emotional week… over half the class has now left and moved on to the exciting Future that lies ahead of us. The amazing adventure here has ended, leaving us enriched with many stories we will carry with us wherever we may be.
Here’s wishing all my super-awesome classmates, colleagues, mentors and most importantly – Friends, a wonderful and hugely successful Future. It’s been a super honor knowing, working, learning and sharing with you. I hope that we’ll always continue to be in touch, get excited and make things!
A beer lies wait in reward for the first among us who makes ‘Henderson’ part of a larger reality. ;)
Want to get some industrial designers riled up? Get them talking about how detached modern consumers are from the manufacturing process.
At some point in their education or early career, most product designers are faced with the realization that current standards of living depend on massively complicated networks of suppliers, manufacturers and distributors, and that hardly anyone considers their existence when making purchasing decisions. Initially a source of fascination, akin to discovering a secret world in your basement or something, it often turns to frustration. A repeated argument of the sustainable design movement holds that if people only understood how much effort and expertise, and how many resources went into the production of their inexpensive goods, they wouldn’t be nearly so cavalier about chucking them in the garbage at the first glimpse of something prettier.
Rather than spilling more ink about this global phenomenon, Royal College of Art student Thomas Thwaites (MA Design Interactions) has turned to a demonstration, in the form of a toaster. He’s been building one for the past several months from scratch, in the most thorough, radical sense possible: the project has seen him visiting mines and oil drilling platforms to obtain raw materials, synthesizing plastic for insulation, and learning to smelt iron in a microwave:
(sent via Martin Willers)
The growth of social networks indicates a fundamental shift in patterns of human behavior. The unsustainable practice of ever-increasing consumption of physical goods, and expressing oneself through what one purchases and displays, is being replaced by increasing consumption of virtual goods through virtual channels. This is good news for the sustainability of our economy.
Ben Cerveny — Play at creativity
Penny Sparke — Design and its history: from modernism to postmodernism
Maria Benktzon — Practising inclusive design—early beginnings and greatest hits
Lena Berglin — Interactive textile structures creating multifunctional textiles based on smart materials
Uta Brandes — Designing gender or the Gender of design
You can see and hear the talks that these fine people gave at Umeå Intitute of Design in the first installment of the UID Design Talks in early June by clicking here.