Listening to birds between meetings

Dana's work is always so delicate, inspiring and challenging. Here is her WildUrban Radio. My take on it is that you just need to turn the knob to listen to a variety of birds from your area. The radio is mapped directly to your location and you can hear the smallest species directing you closer to them whether you are going North or South ....
I have ordered one of those from her and will update on my productivity level asap.

Healthy sculptures

Grassland designed by Bernd Oette turns real dried grass into an element of the living room. The grass seeds grow not on soil but on various materials-using water and light only- and are dried subsequently. What is special about them is that the grass changes from lush green to straw-colour. Bernd Oette developed growing and drying techniques for the roots to adhere to the stainless steel mountings.

Grassland is the result of many years of experimentation to grow grass and to let it dry under controlled conditions. The special appeal of the objects is to make visible the concept of change and the transitory nature of things, turning them into real “memento mori”. To experience every moment of change makes these objects fascinating and vests them with a life of their own in the living room.



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Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

A chair to peel

The Cabbage Chair, 2008

Nendo designed the cabbage chair for XXIst Century Man exhibition curated by Issey Miyake to commemorate the first anniversary of 21_21 Design Sight in Roppongi, Tokyo.

Miyake asked the designers to make furniture out of the pleated paper that is produced in mass amounts during the process of making pleated fabric, and usually abandoned as an unwanted by-product. The designers' solution to his challenge transformed a roll of pleated paper into a small chair that appears naturally as you peel away its outside layers, one layer at a time.



Resins added during the original paper production process adds strength and the ability to remember forms, and the pleats themselves give the chair elasticity and a springy resilience, for an overall effect that looks almost rough, but gives the user a soft, comfortable seating experience.


Photo by Masayuki Hayashi

Since the production process is so simple, the designers thought that eventually, the chair could be shipped as one compact roll for the user to cut open and peel back at home. The chair has no internal structure. It is not finished, and it is assembled without nails or screws. This primitive design responds gently to fabrication and distribution costs and environmental concerns, the kinds of issues that face our 21st century selves. Thus, the cabbage chair fits active, optimistic and forward-moving "21st century people", the kind of people who, to borrow a concept Miyake expressed during a meeting with Nendo, "don't just wear clothes, but shed their skin".



Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Blog Jouons Blog Maison Blog Passion

Recycle your equipment!

The power of digital technology fundamentally transforms our lives. Materiality is being technically extended. The digital offers another variety of artifacts that impact remembrance. While expanding our experience, some things also get lost along the path to de-materialization.

For the contextual area of my general exams I research on the attachments to physical, digital and virtual objects. I explore the psychological trade-off between what we call virtual and tangible “attachments”: I focus on people’s attachments to things, and through things, their relations to people (virtual and digital).

I investigate the journey of the physical and digital object being appropriated, collected, hacked, transformed, possessed and shared on virtual environments and communities. I review the hacker’ skills in appropriating objects by transforming it: the Nintendo Wii becomes an umbrella with a map to provide real time directions while on the walk. The Roomba becomes a robotic dog, Guitar Heroe becomes Guitaraoke Revolution a learning system!


A hacked Roomba by Hacking Roomba dot com

With the industrial revolution we lost our ability to intervene on the design of our objects. Even if the old paradigm of mass production has been thrown away, dixit Pine, I believe that Mass Customization only allows few parameters in a product to be customized. There is no appropriation of the object as in the artisan-customer relationship. That is what came to mind while I was repairing my old mac, I had so much fun opening the machine, looking for tutorial and guides, ordering missing parts just to give a life to this machine.



A bit of nostalgia maybe, but recycling and reusing laptop parts, computer parts, and any objects in general would not only be good for the environment but also recreate this sense of ownership through creative use and appropriation. That is why I am so fascinated by hackers, custom car designers and also collectors. Everything could be recycled, reused, repaired, reinvented and investigated!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Blog Jouons Blog Maison Blog Lesson

The Environmental Health Clinic

Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, my favorite artist engineer, came to our lab to share with us her latest research. I had the chance to work closely with her in Ireland for the Save the Robots summer exhibition so I was already familiar with her past work. She presented her new work, the health clinic, a clinic to which you can go to discuss your environmental health concerns.


Natalie with her robot-talkative duck

The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.



The clinic works like this. You make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Blog Jouons Blog Maison Blog Lesson

Kinetic vs electric toys

Odo by Sony

We change our habits and we design accordingly. In the era of socially responsible design, a new business model is emerging. Discovered on Idealist, Odo by Sony is a generation of toys that takes advantage of user-generated kinetic energy. As mentioned in Sustainable Day: "there are a lot of conceptual solar powered cell phone prototypes and hand cranked chargers popping up in response to the strong consumer interest in more environmentally responsible products but in general consumer electronics usually lag behind in the development of green alternatives."




Odo Spin N'Snap

In 2005, I co-designed Playpals, a set of figurines with their electronic accessories that provide children with a playful way to communicate between remote locations. In our first prototype, the figurines were activated using the child-generated kinetic energy. We tried to find a branch of alternative to electrical by using reverse motors.

Playpals movie

Jouez l'ecolo

Bendable interior objects

Yanko Design announced tha launch of BIO in September 2007, Bendable interior objects (BIO) comes in the form of a flat bag. Objects are laser cut in recyclable aluminium and ready to be assembled.

Renewable energy

Aurelius introduced me to Cool Earth, a renewable energy startup. It has patented a way to make solar energy more efficient than coal. Impressive ...

Three years ago our top scientists and Nobel Prize winners met in Washington in search of a solution to energy-related Global Warming. Four points came from the meeting:

- there is no solution available
- yet we must implement one by 2050
- the only power source that presents a viable solution is solar
- but solar energy is currently far too expensive.

Cool Earth was formed to solve this problem. Now. With currently available technology. We are working to reduce the cost of solar electricity by a factor of 25, making it cheaper to produce than energy from coal or other non-renewable sources. By developing a solution from minimal, low-cost materials, we aim to make solar generation as profitable as today's best investment options.

This extreme goal has led us to exactly one real and viable solution: a solar farming approach, based on concentrated photovoltaic collectors, constructed from inexpensive, widely-available plastic films.

Here's how the system works:

Inflatable concentrators gather light and focus it onto photovoltaic cells, increasing the energy impacting the cells many times over. Our design costs 400 times less per collected area than conventional mirrors, can withstand 100 mph winds, and can protect the mirror surface and receiver from rain, insects, and dirt.

Series of concentrators are suspended on support and control cables stretched between poles. By suspending the concentrators, vast areas of land can be easily converted for solar energy production with limited environmental impact. The ground beneath the concentrators remains free for other uses, such as farming or ranching.

The timing is perfect. Our technology is in place. And we have a plan to reach "grid parity" in three years, not thirty.

When technoloy tries the impossible

Turn off your cell phone, GSM system tracks mobile phone via the GPS-TRACK satellite network! Thanks Josh for the link!
Online software (beta)

Do strangers meet?

Drawing and Tag cloud I made for the Kendall T Band

Looking for a site to show Charles Goldman when he is in town, I finally picked the famous Kendall Band - Kepler, Pythagoras, Galileo designed, fabricated and installed by Paul Matisse.
In 1987, Paul Matisse installed in Cambridge, Kendall T Station, the The Kendall Band a musical sculpture. Passengers can move handles located on each platform and will activate hammers that strike the bells. The instruments are suspended in arches between the tracks. Made of aluminum, teak, steel, the band consists of :
· Kepler a 55-inch aluminium ring that hums for five minutes after it is struck by the large teak hammer above it.
· Galileo a sheet of stainless steel that imitates a train roaring in when a train roars in.
· Pythagoras twin sets of eight bells of the type of the new memorial bell in Washington.

The Kendall Sculptures are very much the thing I love to show to a tourist in town. Being a student at MIT, I am not afraid of technical objects, I find them sexy. Bringing technicality into the T station where it is full of machines and the metallic sound resonating with its own voice: the sound of the train, the aluminum as a metal and the reverberation of the vibrato into the station, is exciting. It is definitely unique and as Paul Matisse says: “it is MIT’s baby”.

Social challenge: talk to strangers
It seems contradictory to what my grand ma told me: do not talk to strangers. Well, artists are different, they want things to be different. Paul Matisse wants strangers to talk to each others and maybe meet. He also thinks music can help that to happen. Passengers waiting for their trains can play with the sculpture. Sometimes, strangers can meet: can look at each others, can smile, maybe play together? I believe that one can cut herself from the visuals, but it is harder to do with sounds. So one can notice the change of sounds. Because propagating the sounds throughout the entire station is not directed towards one person, people can then feel free to respond or ignore the gesture. The inside is invaded, but somehow no pressure is put on bringing it outside. One can choose. And sometimes strangers can meet.

Music
The Kepler strikes an F sharp to go with the B minor of the Pythagoras.

Pictures
No picture for this post so you can then fully discover it when you are in Boston!

For more info, read the article Kendall Sculptures Bring Music, Talk to Strangers, The Tech, Volume 115, Number 66, 1996.

Marisa Jahn

Artist Marisa Jahn gave a talk at the MIT Media Lab, in the Tangible Media Group.

Her work explores ways to engage people in gaining knowledge, from literacy, to environmental literacy. She designed tools and methods to invite people in a comparative analysis of information and self-reflective process. She collaborates frequently with Steve Shada and Natalie Jeremijenko.

Interested in how human interact and communicate with each others, she designed wearable musical instruments.
video



For her master thesis in the visual studies department at MIT, she designed a game called Set. Elements of the set can be regrouped, labeled and organized and shared within the players.
video

Project most easily understood through direct engagement, boxSET is a game played as an intervention into any existing collection of objects (archives, record albums, a heap of junk—anything). Involving multiple players, some of whom may not have any prior relationship with the objects to be sorted, the game asks players to develop categories that describes a grouping of objects. However, the creation of order occurs simultaneous with disorder: a player may choose to remove an object from another player's collection in order to place it in his/her grouping. This rapid taxonomic metabolism encourages players to narrate out loud (or 'show-and-tell') their categories with the anticipation that it may soon disappear. Further, through taxonomically engaging with different kinds of objects, players become aware of what kinds of objects (data) are better for certain kinds of analyses (formal, textual, psychoanalytic, etc.). As the game evolves, players become aware of the difference in interpretation, the subjectivity of order, and the contingent production of knowledge.

She created throw-n-Sow a new way for people to think about and engage with their environment. Frisbees deposite seeds while in the air...

Throw-n-Sow is a flying disc toy similar to a Frisbee that uses the centripetal force generated in the act of throwing to distribute seeds into the environment. Manufactured as a toy made from environmentally-friendly, biodegradable plastics, Throw-n-Sow consists of a main body and a separate container that slides and locks under the disc. This container contains adjustable holes of different diameter to accommodate variant seed sizes. In other words, Throw-n-Sow is a literally empty container into which individuals and communities emplace selected seeds.
Throw-n-Sow is interactive eco-art project that engages diverse communities in each step of the project (manufacturing, seed-selection, site-selection, plant stewardship, art education), Throw-n-Sow raises questions about the expanded field of drawing, indigenous ecologies vs. selective human cultivation, landscape evolution and succession, ethnobotany, agronomy, etc. Throw-n-Sow ultimately aims to valorize distributive intelligence and interdisciplinary learning.
Throw-n-Sow is the kind of art that literally passes between two or more individuals. Leaving behind a trail of seeds as it sails through the air, Throw-n-Sow essentially imprints moments of play into the landscape. Individuals carrying the Throw-n-Sow disc from one place to another develop an affective relationship to the toy and to the sites in which it is deployed.