A personal fitness coach

The Personal Robots Group at MIT researches on social affective touch for robots and designs robotic teddy bear! Recently Cory Kidd completed a PhD from the group and started a company: Intuitive Automata Inc.

Intuitive Automata Inc. creates robots that can help you in your everyday life. By applying new research in sociable robotics, the company is developing robots that can talk, see you, and help you in many ways.



Their first product is Autom™, a robotic weight loss coach, designed to help people who are trying to lose or keep off weight. Autom helps by encouraging you to stick with your diet for long enough to create long-term change and keep extra pounds off!


Autom the weight loss coach! - Photo © Intuitive Automata Inc. 2007

The research that led to this product started at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Personal Robots Group. Their earlier results in controlled Human-Robot Interaction studies have shown that a robot can be seen as more credible and informative than a character on the screen. Hence, there is reason to believe that a robot may be a more effective mechanism for conveying the behavior change message. Results showing that a robot can be more engaging than an animated character lends itself to the possibility of creating a set of longitudinal interactions, or a relationship, that is longer-lasting than previous techniques and therefore also more likely to have the opportunity to create long-term behavior change.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
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Physical visualization

Mount Fear Statistics for Crimes with Offensive Weapon South London 2001-2002 (2002) corrugated cardboard 2.3m x 1.85m x height 1.85m

After tactile videos or high touch visual, data visualization becomes sculpted and physical. Artist Abigail Reynolds works with materials to bring fugitive knowledge and connections into the immediacy of physical experience.


130 layers of 10mm polystyrene with sprayed finish

In this work, she generates data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain.


MOUNT FEAR Statistics for Violent offences 2001-02 Central Manchester (2003) Scale: 1:22,000 (1cm:22m) Relief: 1:24 (1 layer represents 24 offences per km2) Fits a 4x8ft x 70cm plinth. Height 203cm (including plinth)

The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it. The object does not describe an ideal other-worldly space separated from lived reality, but conversely describes in relentless detail the actuality of life on the city streets.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
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Participation Art Online

Amber Frid-Jimenez, member of the Open Studio team, focused on the emergence of online art communities for her master thesis.



She designed WikiPhone, a system in which multiple participants collaborate on soundtracks in real-time, modifying existing online videos; OpenBrand, a system that allows participants to rewrite advertisements; Emma On Relationships, a video blog inviting participants to call in for love advice; and several other projects, exploring aspects of creativity and collaboration.

For her thesis she examined the commonalities within these systems to define design principles governing the creation of participatory media, and to explore the potential of these systems to effect social and political change.

You can download her thesis!

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The Den Den Mushi

Have you ever thought of inventing a new fruit? The type of fruits you find in anime can be inspiring. Slugs, insects, monsters can also be a source of inspiration for new design objects. I remember loving the Den Den Mushi, the Transponder Snail Phone, a snail that works as a portable phone in One Piece.


A physical representation of the One Piece "den den mushi" - Photo by MJ Reyes

Well not far from these electro-snail ideas, designer Peter d'Alessandro invented a fruit, sketched a cannibal one, a fruit that cooks another fruit by working as a solar oven. This is particularly self-contained and sustainable!


The plant cooks the fruit by working as a solar oven


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Flat or wrapped machines

All the parts of this sewing have been polished and nickel-plated. Every reference to hand making has been avoided, although this is the most labour-intensive work Marloes Ten Bhomer said she has ever made. The piece deals with the trust humans have in machines.



This next piece contrasts well with the polished sewing machine. Would the artist say that it contains references to a labour-intensive wrapping process? The artist motive for making this beer bar came from seeing a documentary on a meat-factory. This factory made one big piece of meat out of little pieces of meat by gluing it together. Afterwards it was being presented as one big rump steak.
"What I find very interesting about this is the way that people deal with information. Something is not what it seems to be - Marloes Ten Bhomer"

This work by artist Marloes Ten Bhomer stands as an example on how social and individual percepts can be taken for granted in everyday design. The artist usually revisits these percepts and sometimes codifies them into material form. Last year I gave a lecture on semiotic principles for practical design that takes in consideration the visual aesthetic production process from the perception, the conception, the inception and the reception of information. I see a lot of table top interfaces in interaction design. Their references should be made clearer. It would strengthen the definition and context of the project and clarify their research goals. I find the analysis of this process very useful to organize how social and individual percepts are codified into material form.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
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Knitting RSS feed data

Created by Ebru Kurbak and Mahir M. Yavuz, News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data.

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period.

New Knitter will be presented at the Seamless fashion show in Boston at this end of the month! In 2006, my team and I had presented at the Seamless fashion show, Taptap , the affectionate scarf!



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Playstation human sculptures

Sculpture in perforated steel with sections upholstered in felt

Designers came up with a landscape of concept furniture derived from the statue-like forms of people sitting, standing or leaning against walls engaged in playing the PlayStation Portable (PSP). The result is "sculptural and machine-like". Each piece contains a PSP unit and users are encouraged to step inside these structures to play, the idea being to create an individual gaming experience while allowing for interaction with other gamers in other pieces using the PSP’s wi-fi capabilities.

Inspired by gaming, after the Nintendo Wii, the Wii-fit is coming. Also check the new hypnotic video-ad for playstation!




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Rapid manufactured textiles

Macedonia Tray design by Janne Kyttanen, 2007.

Following up on this thread about rapid prototyping and mass customized objects, Jiri Evenhuis came up with the concept of Rapid Manufactured textiles in 1999 opening new frontier of possibilities for the production of textiles in the future. The first commercial products were launched by FOC in 2005.


City Hall, Amsterdam. Ramon Albers. 3D computer graphics enable designers and architects to envision very complex creations at ... the miniature scale


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Structural innovation

Re-designing acoustic musical instrument according to the abilities and characteristics of rapid prototype materials

After laser printing on bread, one can print instruments! My friend Amit Zoran designed this really neat concept of an acoustic guitar sound box that has been given a unique sound and behavior through a CAD/CAM process. His research goal at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Ambient Intelligence research group, is to find and analyze a space for structural innovation, especially for acoustic instruments.

His works enables players to customize their own sound by assembling different sound cells, e.g physical parts of the instruments designed in CAD/CAM, instead of considering the instrument as one big sound box. Each string can have its own bridge and each bridge can be linked to different cells. By changing a cell' size, material or structure, one can create customizable sounds.

His innovative take mainly consists of printing, using a 3D printer, cells drawn into a vectorial software. These cells, made of 30cm radius, have a variety of materials strong enough to carry the pressure of the strings and handle resonance.
People can download recommended sound cells from the internet in order to change or manipulate their guitar sounds.
In the near future, Amit is planning on testing the physical behavior of different combinations and to find optimal structures.

Don't forget to check the video!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
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Mediated Social Serendipity: a new SMS system for taking care of your Facebook friends

Mediated Social Serendipity is a report describing mobile-phone services and applications that enable users to “stumble into” friends despite being apart physically. It develops in four concept-categories for social serendipitous mobile-phone experiences.

One of the most astonishing idea presented in the report is “Nudge”, a system that recognizes patterns of everyday life and detects if a user has not send news to a friend for a long time and acts on his/her behalf accordingly. For instance, Asa’s phone registers that she is far away from home. It gathers surrounding information and will generate a text message to a good friend of hers who she has not called in several months.

The automated message would be:
Hi! Right now I’m about 3142 kilometers south-west from where you are. Felicia, Per and I are walking along the beach in Tarifa, Spain. It’s 25°C and the sun shines. We hear seagulls and waves breaking. Speak to you soon! /Asa

As she walks down to the water to dip her toes in the ocean, her phone automatically sends a message to her friend. One can immediately sees the pros and cons of such system, but what strikes me the most is the desire to have an automatic scriptwriter who kind of takes care of forgotten friends. Imagine the friend receiving an automated SMS that is kind of saying:"I am having fun at the beach, I have not contacted you for 5 years, I really don't have time to send you any news, I don't even think about you because my phone does the job for me, have fun in your gray Paris!"



Wouldn't that be an awesome insulting SMS?! I seriously think this system has to be implemented and connected to Orkut, Facebook, MySpace or any social networks. This could be a new generation of text messaging system who takes care of all your social network pseudo friends. At the end of the day for a lot of people (but not me!) most of these contacts are not really your friends, you are not really honest with them, so you can take care of them in a semi-automated way. You don't really receive news, they are not really interesting and personal, they are just Spam version 2, the kind of spam you don't know what to do about. I am not sure what to think about it, but it is a very daring idea! This report was really exciting to read with a lot of funny, clever, and realistic visions on what mobile technology could mean within various social contexts.

Don't forget to check another way mobile technology tries the impossible in a funny way!

More information on the report that also surveys existing systems:
Formo, J. (2007). Mediated Social Serendipity. Master thesis. The Institute of Industrial Design at Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
[PDF]


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure