Designing the future

Food for Thought: typography and food reunited.

"Holidays are always a time to gather around the dining table with family and friends to share good food and stories about times gone by. Now family favorites--whether text or images--can actually appear on the fruit, nuts, and vegetables being served with the help of a laser sign cutter. Since the process takes only five minutes per edible, the food messages can be extremely timely."

Before 3D printing musical instruments or computer etching on bread, David Small had thought of printing on fruits, a way to catch the attention of Martha Stewart. This is the story that today Dr David Small told us during a talk at our lab.

Awesome speaker and visionary designer, he presented his twenty-year history of inventing the future of visual design. From the beginning, as a student of Muriel Cooper in the Visible Language Workshop, he has maintained a strong interest in understanding how technology is changing the way that information can be designed and appreciated. His company, Small Design Firm, creates unique environments in which people come into contact with rich, tactile information. With a focus on the interplay between computer technology, interaction, dynamic typography and information design, he sketched out some next steps towards the Design of the Future.

I loved his story, the way he is fond of typography and sees it everywhere as a design principle for his interactive products. I found his Museum of Sex installation perfectly expressive.


One of the four interactive exhibit for the Museum of Sex

He revisited the written correspondence of a prostitute with one of her client. The exhibition presents a bed, with a women underneath a fabric, with letters projected onto the body shape traveling through the interstices of the white sheets. The letters resemble ants that dynamically convey the message of her fate, constructing words from her correspondence that announce her death. Very well executed, the piece is moving. What fascinates me about his work, is the actuality of his design principles. He proposes that design research is the key to the future innovation, well... we'll see...


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Graphic new theme for iGoogle

After Boing Boing's Adventure in Lollipopland theme for iGoogle, John Maeda just released a graphic theme. John Maeda offers a series of online gadgets, e.g. a calculator, a clock, an elegant interactive display of his Ten Laws of Simplicity. More recently he launched a new theme on iGoogle. The theme changes based upon the time of day (every 4 hours), and is based upon a series of strokes he drew by hand and a simple algorithmic manipulation thereof. Enjoy!


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Web trend map 2008

I loved the web trend map of 2007 by Information Architects Japan. Here it is, the 2008's version as an interactive web trend map and/or A0 size printable poster for your office as presented by Swissmiss. The map includes almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. Enjoy!


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Wearable vs furniture radiator

Another interesting design concept, the modulo radiator by Anna Gotha, discovered on Kontrastblog. Anna Gotha wanted to make more use of the heat from a radiator by designing a radiator with multiple functions. The modules are designed with an upholstered aluminium core to use the installed radiator parts as a piece of furniture to lean up against. The core is warmed up by the radiator to be used outdoor.

Apparently the radiator is made of multiple parts that can work independently from one another or connected to each others. Heating parts can be hanged on a wall, carried in a purse, or used more traditionally as a "furniture" that heats a large surface.
Existing radiators take up too much room and the design is often rather conservative. With the new radiator, Anna Gotha has made use of the heat, and at the same time given the user a more functional and simple design.



Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

RSS feed what is in my pocket!

Burak Arikan just released his latest creation my pocket commissioned and announced by Turbulence.

"MYPOCKET discloses the artist's personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist's two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today's techno-cultural milieu, MYPOCKET presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process."



Woaaaaa I cannot wait to know what Burak is spending these days away from the media lab! The software does object prediction -ATM, groceries, rent, Fauchon, Les Galeries Lafayette, and so on.
The objects are the products of deliberate analysis and living. A predicted object is the physical evidence of a future event, it is produced when the event happens.
It does generate stunning graphs of transactions with Burak's personal touch. The network model generates list of predictions about future spending. It shows the unprocessed model of dynamic relationships between transaction items and their effects changing overtime.
And the cherry on the cake: an RSS feed of banking transactions!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Hugging my furniture

A landscape designed for the body. These livingstones, "les coussins galets" created by French designer Stephanie Marin, remind me of Ernesto Neto's work. I stumbled upon these and I love them. I can now embrace my furniture, discover the spaces inside, around and between my body!

See also the felt rocks by Molo!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

A button to learn electronics

If electronics for dummies does not work for you, there is a button that teaches you electronics.
The Digg button works as a beginner electronics that teaches how to solder and program microcontroller. The link with Digg is that each time you push the button, the button flashes "Dug" and increments the counter up to 999 "diggs". The Digg kit was created by Phillip Torrone from Makezine, Kevin Rose from Digg and Limor Fried aka Ladyada from the MIT Media Lab.

The project is open source, and documented with parts list, schematics and code available.

NB: For every sale of the Digg button kit the designers are giving $1 to the EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation.



Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Useful inventions

By graphic artist David Aja.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Tell me a story about computers ...

These pictures are part of an awesome book Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by by John Alderman.

Today with my three fellows from the media lab - Nan Wei, Amit and Seth - I just passed my final physics 123 exam at Harvard University.
I am now qualified to connect the world of analog electronics to the digital one using... a beautifully vintage 8051!!! If you want an easiest way to make things talk, Tom Igoe's book might be the way to go!

Don't forget to check the computer history museum and the post by 37signals showing outstanding computer pictures. We never get enough of seeing all their buttons and the magic of their mechanics.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................

Pictograms

Screenshot from the symbol serie building

I love pictograms. IIT Bombay offers graphic icons for signage systems to be used for your design works in .eps format: Hospitals, Railway/Bus stations and Public building environments. Enjoy!


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
.............................................