Modern bird houses

I could not resist, these bird houses are awesome. Birds deserve architecture too!

Design Commission’s The Modern Bird, an exhibition of designer birdhouses created by more than 20 of the top artists and design studios worldwide, will show how far contemporary visionaries have taken the traditional wooden birdhouse.
The structures—of laminated wood, plastic, clay, and even stainless steel—include several designed especially for this show. They range in size from a six-inch creation to a 2-foot birdhouse.
The eclectic mix includes Modern Birdhouses’ sleek architect-designed homes made with oil-finished teak, stainless steel screws, and sandblasted aluminum roofs. For a little whimsy, there’s even J. Schatz’s colorful ceramic birdhouses shaped like eggs. Seattle artists Erich Ginder and Toi Sennhauser are also contributing original pieces to the show.

Web site of the commission

wireless power transfer

In last few years, our society experienced a silent, but quite dramatic, revolution in terms of the number of autonomous electronic devices (e.g. laptops, palm pilots, digatal cameras, household robots, etc.) that we use in our everyday lives. Currently, most of these devices are powered by batteries, which need to be recharged very often.

This fact motivated us to think whether there exist physical principles that could enable wireless powering of these and similar devices. Results of our research on the feasibility of using resonant objects, strongly coupled through the tails of their non-radiative modes, for mid-range (i.e. a few meters: e.g. within a room, or a factory pavillion) wireless power transfer applications seem to be quite encouraging.

Research by Marin Soljačić at MIT

A recent article mentions his work on "how to wirelessly illuminate an unplugged light bulb from seven feet away" which reminds me of the beautiful wireless lightbulb of Jeff Lieberman.

Interactive fabric patented

Conductive compositions have been developed for various purposes including facilitating electrostatic discharge and as a current transfer medium on printed circuit boards. Recently, conductive compositions have been used, instead of conventional wires, as part of an electrical system for conducting current from a power source to various current operated circuit components on a variety of objects such as wearing apparel, children's toys and books.

In 2001, a US patent is filled on interactive fabric articles that have conductive composition used as a portion of a switch in an electrical system.

A fabric article including a design arranged on the outer surface of such fabric article and having conductive composition arranged in registration with the design and with a printed circuit pattern is disclosed. The conductive composition effectively forms part of the electrical system of the interactive fabric article.

Full text of the patent

Telematic dress

The telematic dress project began at Nottingham-Trent University's DAP lab as an exploration into the development of performative fashion and the sharing these garments across distance. The Arizona State University team joined the project in the fall of 2004 with an interest in exploring shared telematic space and ultimately the notion performers cooperatively embodying remote spaces.

Paper The Telematic Dress: Evolving garments and distributed proprioception in streaming media and fashion performance
Web site
Video

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.

Bruce Sterling on design

On Technology Review, a video of Bruce Sterling on design. Science fiction author and design critic, he explains why so many technology designs seem hostile.

Video of the discussion with Bruce Sterling.

A translator between human gestures and machine functions

SmartRetina: a translator between human gestures and machine functions.

SmartRetina is a lightfast gesture-tracking platform written in Macromedia Flash 8, utilizing its flash.geom. package, flash.display package, Video class, Camera class and their motion-tracking capabilities.

Video of SmartRetina as a navigation tool.



Based on this technology, the company created Mossalibra an interactive game installation, operated solely by intuitive human gestures. "While dancing to surrounding music, the user (represented in pixelated form as a pure gesture) can mimic a given set of gestures in order to gain points."

A spying robot

Presented in Liberation, a highchool in South Korea, Seoul, will adopt a new kind of robot, the OFRO to check on kids at school. Communicating with school supervisors via a video camera and a microphone, it can detect any suspicious activity. Thank you Olivier for the link!

I now hope for a subversive robot, much cooler, with fancier behavior, created as a response to this very scaring surveillance attempt.

Interactive surfaces

Interaction with microsoft surface

Microsoft Surface, a finger interactive table to organize digital media, will be available on the market in winter 2007.
Videos.

Microsfot surface table

This very neat idea of interactive surface is in the research market for a long time now: for instance with Diamondtouch, Ali Mazalek's tangible viewpoints and James Patten' sensetable from 2000-2001. It is exciting the process of this research being revisted by giant companies for mass production. I wish they would have kept the tangible quality of objects to control digital data. Maybe Pattenstudio will take care of that part!

Video of audiopad by James Patten and Ben Recht.

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.