Invasion of new AIM buddies

I recently found 4 new AIM buddies: Prof Gilzot, sharthisdotcom, Spleak and WSJ. I started looking online for some info about these new buddies and I discovered that Prof Gilzot is an automatic tutor to help school students prepare for their S.A.T with practice questions. Type "Menu" or "More" will get you started!
sharthisdotcom is an aim version of share this
Spleak is a 21-year old virtual girl who can chat with you.
And your WSJ aim buddy is the Wall Street Journal!

Info online about these new AIM buddies and more info here.

Framework: the four pleasures?

Designing Pleasurable Products by Patrick Jordan presents four pleasures to understand human experience (with products and services). In an interview for design and emotion he explains: "The Four Pleasures is a framework developed in the field of anthropology. In his book, The Pursuit of Pleasure, Lionel Tiger identifies four different ways in which humans can feel pleasure. These are: physiologically [the body and the senses], psychologically emotions and thoughts], sociologically [relationships], and ideologically [values]. I thought that if we applied the framework to understanding people and what they wanted from products, it could provide some useful insights and help guide design, marketing and branding decisions as well as business strategy."
His book aims to help designers structure their approach in understanding their users.

Playground for all ages

The company Lappset designed Smart Us, a technological playground to connect all age users. Even though it is a very interesting concept and I cannot wait to try the interactive playground, I could not determine how it can really connect users of all ages, especially ederly. Thank you Susanne Jacobson for introducing me to this innovative Finish company!

SmartUs is a product concept developed by Lappset that uses technology to link the playground and its users. SmartUs offers interactive games for all age groups. The users can create games and applications based on images, sounds and text that support learning on the playground. The SmartUs product concept can be made use of in learning through play, playing computer games physically and in different kinds of well-being applications for special groups.

Among the four games available, the conquistador is a game of conquest, which gets people moving. Conquistador is played over the whole SmartUs field and players compete to be the first player or team to gain a specified number of different territories within the field. Territorial conquest is achieved by getting to the iPosts message poles and showing your iTag ID at the pole’s identification point. "It is especially suitable for players who are agile and alert. On the field, each player tries to conquer his/her own part of the game's fantasy world, and helps his/her team towards a common goal. The game develops tactical ability and teamwork skills."



Players carry on the iTag with them. The iTag sensor, distributed to users of the SmartUs environment is a key-sized sensor, that can be carried as a wrist watch or at a key chain.

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."