Video scenarios of tech-enabled behaviors

Mobility platform videos for Intel by Ideo.

Visualizing high-tech's human-centered future by Ideo.
Tapping into the growing broadband access around the world, Intel has innovated a series of chipsets and mobile platforms that enable smarter, more efficient laptops, mobile phones, and PDAs. While these offerings represent new possibilities for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), it's not uncommon for OEMs to need an added push to invest in unproven technology. To bring to life the potential of this technology, IDEO worked with Intel to visualize what user behaviors might be enabled by the offerings. The work, which culminated in the form of three videos, points to Intel's larger shift toward human-centered technology innovation.



In looking at Intel's next-generation products, IDEO had a clear sense of the emphasis on mobility. From a design perspective, the offerings were each exciting, offering new ways for people to live and work, but lacked the cohesion of a system. To integrate the platforms, IDEO developed user scenarios that merged product, interaction, and experience as they related to such behaviors as hands-free communication, social networking, and purchasing. These user scenarios were then fully storyboarded and scripted for video production.

In depicting user behaviors through video scenarios, IDEO created a unified vision for Intel's offerings that has served to foster alignment within Intel as well as to communicate product value to OEMs and service providers.

By Architectradure

Poetic chairs

I stumbled upon Stuhlhockerbank by Yvonne Fehling and Jennie Peiz. For a public use of architecture merging chair and stool into seat elements, the life of the sitting place becomes engraved in the artist' sculpture. The chairs are discombobulated.




By Architectradure

Children's toys

Toys always invite for reflection, but toys within the contemporary art context bring another dimension. I select these ones featured on Artnet.

I also author another blog that reflects this passion of mine!


Therapeutic children's toys by Renate Müller & Helene Haeusler, 1960.
Materials: Canvas, leather, wear

A 39cm high camel, a dice of 29.5 x 30 x 32 cm and an Hippopotamus of 35 x 75 x 34 cm.


Detail Song of the Finsh (The Bride) Jigsaw Puzzle by Isabel Samaras. The stories of Monsters and the mystical lives they lead ...



Benny and Red Bird Color Version by Kathy Olivas

(...) Many of the toys show a meticulous care in their creation; they are mechanically functional and cleverly conceived to move, lift or turn. I consider them to be truly remarkable in their abilities to function as well as being aesthetically pleasing. The enormous creative potential inherent in each piece became a challenge that I could not resist. Initially the toys were seen as individual objects, as the series developed, so did the thematic complexity. I did not realize that it would lead me on a journey of re-discovering my own childhood - Sidney Menkes

By Architectradure

A special chandelier

Back from the ICA with Adam, I was struck by the work designer Tobias Wong a provocateur who creates the unexpected from the everyday and the everyday from the unexpected as he was being introduced during the exhibition, but I also think it is more than. What is so special about such art and craft work is to feel inspired in experiencing the work.

The object is special. It takes a refined sensitivity from the artist to make the careful design decisions exhibited by this piece. In the black shade chandelier, a classical design is made new by a switch between the form of the candelabra and the candle. These are two different objects, two different materials that create a single form in glass and insist on the simple mechanism of an oil lamp. These subtleties are the decisions that I love in this work.

In the exhibition was also presented the Disposable Crystal Cup, a sixteen-ounce paper cup printed with a trompe l’oeil crystal pattern. In this piece I felt Tobias Wong took the epidemic of the thrown away and juxtaposed it with the ultimate of luxury imagery.


Tobiad Wong also created this traditional crystal chandelier encapsulated in industrial white rubber

By Architectradure

Transitional objects

Filet From the series Hommage au Sol - accesoires de prolongement du corps, objets transitionels de perception
1989-1994

Marie-Claire Bevar works with textiles, transforms them, adds all kinds of other materials to them, turns them into objects which has been her passion and necessity since childhood.

After collaborating both in trade and in theater, she decided to create objects as part of a personal introspection expressing itself through propositions evolving around the theme of the body. Both in Hommage au Sol and in L'Avant-Bras, Le Lien, Le Trait d'Union on one side and in Artextilabo, a laboratory of experimentations.


Doré

Hommage au Sol focuses around the foot and its relation to the ground. It includes accessories extending the body, transitory objects of perception, photos, videos and written documentation.


Venise

L'Avant-Bras, Le Lien, Le Trait d'Union is a work in progress. First she experimented with materials and techniques proper to the theme. A first series of objects were created, and now the artist is reflecting on them, furthering her research and figuring out how to stage them and present them to the public.

Chatting with Paulina on transitional objects made me revisit its classical roots. And what a pleasure to re-read Jerome Singer and his wife Dorothy's -authors of the awesome house of make believe book- fascinating journal paper from which I quote:

One possible route to the beginnings of the creation of miniaturized virtual realities by the very young may emerge in the course of older babies’ or toddlers’ manifestations of what the psychoanalyst, Winnicott (1971), termed involvement with “transitional objects.” Early on many children become attached to a soft cloth or to some combination of an old crib blanket and a “plush” toy, a cloth bunny rabbit, bear, or lamb. The well-known Peanuts’ cartoons’ youngest character, Linus, carries a worn blanket around all day and clings to it tenaciously. Such behavior generally meets those criteria of play developed in the research of Smith and Vollstedt (1985), nonliteralness and associated positive affect. Actually, one might propose that the tenacity with which children cling to these objects even as they fade in color, shrink or become ragged, may reflect the very beginnings of an experience of autonomy (“my blankie”) and personal ownership, a primordial expression of our nearly universal adult sense of private property upon which whole societies and legal systems are constructed.

In Singer, Jerome L. & Singer, Dorothy G. (2006). Preschoolers' imaginative play as precursor of narrative consciousness. Imagination, Cognition and Personality 25 (2):97-117.

By Architectradure

The mix tape business

A come back for the mix tape business. After the tape with style we have the regular tape packaging that hides a usb key.

My favorite part is the usb mix tape's advertisement:
Stores up to 1 hour of high quality digital music - the same amount as you get on a C60 cassette tape. Perfect for creating your own unique compilation or mix ‘tape’. When you have 60 minutes you have to think carefully about what you are going to put on there!

Is the idea that by constraining the potential of a product, users will carefully consider the potential being given? This is a bit sad.
Or is the idea that this product is super conceptual and needs to offer the same amount of 60 minutes of music that is usual in C60 cassette tapes? In that case there is a nostalgic connection, but no innovation. At the end I like the metaphor effort in it, but I prefer the possibility to uniquely tailor my tape with style. The tailoring of the tape could take advantage of online digital art communities such as Open Studio!

A link to cool looking cassette tapes.

By Architectradure

Birthday invasion

Today it is my birthday's invasion!

Bio Battery Powered By Sugar

4 prototype bio battery units connected to Walkman for playback

Following up on my previous post kinetic vs electric toys by Sony, Sony also developed a bio battery prototype that generates electricity from sugar, similar to the method used in living organisms. Sugar is a naturally occurring energy source produced by plants through photosynthesis. It is therefore regenerative, and can be found in most areas of the earth, underlining the potential for sugar-based bio batteries as an ecologically-friendly energy device of the future.



As humans breakdown food for energy, the battery would generate electricity by breaking down carbohydrates or sugars through the use of enzymes. Since sugar is a natural energy source, the bio battery would be an environmentally friendly choice as it would dramatically reduce disposal issues with disposable batteries used today.

Test cells have generated up to 50 milliwatts, which is the highest for a bio battery of this type according to Sony. Currently, it produces just enough to power music play back on a memory-type Walkman. Thank you Got 2 be green for the source!

An intelligent bar of soap!

The Bar of Soap, created by Michael Bove, Stacie Slotnick and Brandon Taylor at the MIT Media Laboratory, is a handheld device that recognizes how it is being held and adjusts its functionality accordingly. For instance if you want to make a phone call, just hold the bar of soap like a phone!

The device senses the pattern of touch and orientation when it is held, and reconfigures to become one of a variety of devices, such as phone, camera, remote control, PDA, or game machine. Pattern-recognition techniques allow the device to infer the user's intention based on grasp. We are now adding display surfaces across the entire device so that buttons and indicators can be created where needed for a particular mode.

A portent of human augmentation

Greasy Spoon, 2007 by Brian Walker

In our cyborg world, I think it would be nice if prosthesis could mean expanding human skills or on a contrary re-creating fragile and powerless human sculptures.

Examples of prostheses

Researchers explored the ability of the skin to acquire and process information rivaling our senses of sight and hearing. The e-skin lab researches on tactile interfaces consisting both of sensors and actuators: wearable artificial skins as a navigation aid in space.

The Rheo Knee made by Ossur adapts to an individual's walking style by detecting 1,000 times every second the knee's position and the load applied to the limb. The user gets the proper amount of resistance for every step.
Via wired

Victhom's urinary implant, a catheter-free, fully implanted pacemaker for the bladder. If trials go well, it could help 800 million people worldwide with bladder dysfunctions caused by spinal cord injury.

Durom™ Hip Resurfacing a joint replacement system that offers "freedom" of movement.

The cyberhand gives amputees the ability to use thought to move and grasp naturally, even to feel whatever the device touches.

A nanotechnology developed at MIT can "knit" together damaged neurons. Researchers have already restored sight to rodents and they believe the technique might also help repair injured spinal cords

Penn State developed the first fully implantable artificial heart, and in 2000 AbloMed acquired rights to further develop the technology. It is FDA approved only for emergency use and the company hopes to have broader approval by 2008. Eventually, researchers hope it can be a long-term solution for heart failure patients.

Current research on technological prostheses by Hugh Herr -director of the bio mechatronics group at the MIT Media Laboratory- transforms the perception a person wearing a prosthesis has of his artificial body part. While the mechanical properties of conventional passive prostheses remain fixed with walking speed and terrain, this research explores the prosthesis not just as a passive object, but also as an extension of the body. The prosthesis enables additional mechanical energy for forward propulsion of an ankle as well as controlling the ankle joint impedance.

The rehabilitation institute of Chicago made a biohybrid arm that allows amputees to move the prosthetic by thought alone.

For patients who have lost the use of their arms, scientists at the Cleveland FES Center are developing functional electrical stimulation systems.

Harvard and Massachisetts General Hospital researchers are developing an implantable artificial electrolarynx communication system for patients who have had a complete laryngectomy. The technology includes a neural interface and hands-free control of a natural sounding voice prosthesis.

Advanced Bionics made a cochlear implant that sends sounds directly to the auditory nerve instead of amplifying sound like a regular hearing aid.

IIP technologies and Intelligent Medical Implants made a retinal implant that bridges and replaces the processing function of a defective retina. Using it some blind persons can regain partial vision and orientation, even in unfamiliar surroundings.

A silicon hippocampus replacement could eventually replace damaged areas of the brain. Currently being developed by scientists at the University of Southern California.

Cyberkinetics created Braingate, a neuroprosthetic system with a patch that attaches directly to neurons in the brain to sense electrical signals. The sensor sends signals that can move a computer cursor or flip a switch.

Living bacteria have been incorporated into an electronic circuit to produce a supersensitive humidity sensor. Similar devices could one day be made that take greater advantage of living organisms, perhaps even using bacteria's energy systems to power electrical devices. Via We make money not art.

Microsoft Research filed a patent on power and data transmission through the human body. The human body is used as a conductive medium, which distributes power and/or data by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes. In this case, the body acts as a computer network.


Don't forget to check out the insightful Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future

The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
—Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time


Natalie Portman by freaking news.