today and tomorrow

The Royal College of Art in London is currently showing the work of their postgraduate students: Show RCA 2008. Here are some projects:

Home Sweet Home by Marie Retpen (Ceramics & Glass).

The Aftermath by Caroline Tattersall (Ceramics & Glass).

Blog Bot Platform by Andrew Broomfield (Design Interactions).

Blog Bot Platform is an open source system which I have developed for creating Different types of Blogging objects. Turning Simple experiences into online encounters. These bots ‘tweet’ to their experiences to micro blogging services. I am interested in how people react when they encounter these Blogjects invading their web 2.0 space.

White Lies by Alice Wang (Design Interactions).

This scale allows one to lie to him/herself.
The further back you stand, the lighter you become.
The user can gradually move closer and closer to reality.

Nanofutures: Sensual Interfaces by Christopher Woebken (Design Interactions).

Rather than focusing on the current development of nanotechnology, such as creating lighter and stronger materials, this project focuses on exploring its potential further, creating more manipulative prototypes such as organic electronics.

What do organic computing look like and how will our relationship with these products change? Can organic electronics with biosensors open up new possibilities for sensual and poetic designs?

Seeds contain material and information needed to grow organisms as well as algorithms for device networking. Using seeds as a simulation for smart dust, it allows one to easily visualize new interactions such as breaking, sharing, throwing away and mining data. These new interactions not only generate new behaviors but also redefine existing stereotypical electronic products.

Plugless Sink by Maja Ganszyniec (Design Products).

Plugless sink is exactly that, a sink without a plughole. To get rid of the grey water we have to tip the water out. By doing so we become more conscious of how much water we are using and mainly throwing away. This sink shows the value of water through its volume and promotes water re-usage.

Potato Chips by Cyrille Najjar (Design Products).

The Fastest Clock in the World by Freddie Yauner (Design Products).

Exhausted Cutlery by Kathryn Hinton (Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery).

The AirPiano is project by Omer Yosha, an Interface Design student from the FH Potsdam (Germany).

The AirPiano is an innovative musical interface which allows playing and controlling software instruments simply by moving hands in the air.

Above the AirPiano is a virtual matrix of keys and faders, each assigned with MIDI messages and ready to be triggered. The length of a triggered note is equivalent to the time a hand
is placed on the corresponding virtual key.
This is also confirmed by LED feedback.
The AirPiano Software allows easy setup, loading/saving presets and transposing notes.

The AirPiano is still in its prototype phase and its concept of a virtual matrix might eventually be used for other applications and purposes.
The AirPiano concept is filled as a Provisional U.S. Patent Application (Number: 60/989,986).

In this video he uses his AirPiano to control Ableton Live.

found at Create Digital Music

One more month baby!

play > smart is a small website to promote the smart in Japan. You can customize your own car and the drive it in simple game. You can even printout a paper model of your design. The game itself is quite simple, you just have to follow the numbers. In the end you’ll get a drawing, almost like those GPS ones. Worth checking out.

ECAL is an University of art and design in Lausanne, Switzerland. This showreel is a short overview of works done in the Media&Interaction Design Unit. You just have to love student projects.
found at Fubiz

The Attigo TT is digital DJ setup designed by Scott Hobbs, an Innovation Product Design student from the UK. There are already a few mp3 DJ mixing systems out there, but his is a little different. He didn’t use any breakthrought technology, just 2 touchscreens to manipulate a visualisation of audio files. He used Flash for the interface and Max/MSP to control the sound files. He has a lot of documentation on this project on his website. Honestly, I don’t think that it’s very innovative, but well done anyway. Hey it’s a functional prototype afterall.

For those of you who want to come and visit Berlin there is this new website called berlin.unlike. You can find addresses of bars, shops, clubs, … etc, but also events; it’s an ongoing collection of course. You can add all this info to your own tour. It’s dead simple, you don’t have to register, you can start right away with adding the things you want to visit.  Your tour will get it’s own unique id, you may not forget to bookmark it when you want to add anything later (go to your tour and click on settings on the right). You can share your tour with anyone and browse it on your mobile phone, hé it’s hooked up with google maps. Here is mine. Very neat!

‘Hello, World!‘ is a brand website for the Japanese telecom company SoftBank. Again, I can’t understand anything, just nod my head to the music. Mesmerising!
Made by tha inc.

I know, I’m a little late to this Muxtape party. The tag line explains it all: a simple way to create and share mp3 mixtapes. You can upload up to 12 mp3’s to this service and share the mixtape with your friends and the world. The interface is soo simple and perfect.
On the technical side, all files are hosted on the Amazon S3 servers (one of Amazons Web Services). I really would like to see some stats and the bill on the end of the month.

This is the dashboard of the Lamborghini Reventón, the 20 owners of this car can also switch the dashboard screen to a more classic layout. I would go stealth all the time.