Insect telepresence

Suppose we can make a miniature camera whose motion can be controlled by a human. Put this camera in a colony of insects, and the human will gain a whole new perspective on the insects and their biology. Blow up the image to scale down the human appropriately, and amplify the insects sounds as well, and you have a complete telepresent experience that is incredibly exciting and educational at the same time. Technically, camera technology, optics and manipulation are well up to the task. A complete insect telepresence exhibit is now being constructed for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's entrance, in collaboration with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, by Stacy All, Angela Demke and Ben Shamah at the Toy Robot Initiative.



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Finally I got an iPhone

This week end I bought an iPhone. I never bought a phone so far, I wanted to feel I could still be lost. As mentioned in an interview for neo-nomad, I did not own/use/carry a cell phone. I was exclusively on Trillian and Skype. It started becoming an handicap, friends want to organize things, my research group needs to reach me in a blink, I felt too unreachable!

I am still working on the design of my own gear. Well, yesterday I tested the Apple Macbook air, it feels like two sheets of paper maintains the all thing together. Too fragile. Very light. The design is too beautiful to be touched, held, hugged and smashed. When design becomes a constraint, it kind of misses the point. After all, materials are socially constructed through a sensory education and tools.

The iPhone, on the other end, looks beautiful and sturdy. The only inconvenient is its shiny screen that easily becomes a repository for oily molecules. Other than that, it is traveling in a brown sock in my bag. What better casing than a sock! It can protect anything, and I just slide the iPhone in and out of it and feels part of the smooth iPhone finger tip design! I could not help it: I took pictures of the Stuff-my-love and Terminally Juvenile-iPhone combo!


The expected features are awesome. I spent an hour at the Apple store bombarding the salespersons with questions. I am satisfied. Now that I've used it, I love it. One of my fear to use the roaming data versus wifi is gone. It is fast enough! I can read my pdf on it if the data comes from the mail. One thing that bothers me is that I cannot import my bookmarks from firefox, I cannot download my pics/movie from the web, etc... So to fix that problem I looked at some third parties apps. I made a list at the end of the post. If you recommend some necessary ones, let me know. Apple lists the popular ones, but unfortunately not popular to my taste.


Now the 2008 updates are pretty cool. I wanted to design a GPS system connected to an iphone. Well the map location works pretty well. The newest version of Maps allows you to find your approximate location using information from Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. Drop a pin on the map then drag it to a specific location to get directions and real-time traffic information and search for nearby points of interest. The new Hybrid map view lets you see major street names on top of satellite imagery.

A few samples to code the iPhone.




As a start I selected a good list of iPhone apps. My favorite ones so far are the Erica utilities, a collection of handy command-line utilities. picSnap snaps one picture (jpg) from the command line. sendFileByMail takes a file to send by mail. It opens the mail program, creates a new message with that attachment, snap2album snaps a picture of your screen and adds it to your Photos library on the iPhone.

The essential one seems App.Tapp. It supports installing, updating and uninstalling applications from multiple sources.

iFlickr is pretty neat too. This is an app to take pictures on your iPhone and upload to your Flickr account.

I have aim and will now install MobileChat. Also not tested yet but IM+ for Skype is now available on the iPhone ...



Mobile-RSS is a native iPhone application which remembers all your feeds and give you an easy interface for viewing, adding, and removing.

Also why not the Nes.app, a fully functional, feature-rich Nintendo emulator, or the Sketches, a way to sketch a simple diagram as a quick reminder. "Scribble your thoughts quickly, select a picture from your photo album to draw notes on top, you can even erase your drawing by shaking your iPhone, as if it were an etch-a-sketch!"

And to finish by a pedometer, an experimental iPhone application to measure steps as you walk. SiffyTech author of this app, also provides us with their source code.

Those will be my first try. Many more to test!

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Coded silverware

Organizing plane tickets, barcode, highway lines in term of their coded visualization, Rodolphe Dogniaux presents the visual common coded points between these objects. He proposes that if a weave pattern can be a structural element of a function, then he can use it to conceive objects. He starts by playing with a leather sofa under the principle of weave pattern. He ends up with two weave coded sofa!




He applies this principle on silverware and thinks in term of geometrical zone rather than geometrical weave. He creates “couverts zonés codés” Coded zoned silverware



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Twirl the reactive skirt

Twirl, created by Megan Galbraith, is a dynamic and reactive skirt that is controlled using a fuzzy logic reasoning algorithm, and programmed with a fuzzy logic controller, dixit Megan. This skirt has a bend sensor embedded along the seam of the back side, and it thus detects when the wearer is standing up straight, sitting down, or bending over. The sprinning flourishes alter their behavior based on the posture of the wearer.


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Talking with owls using mobile phones

This project explores technologies to augment our understanding of bird populations in order to allow these populations to speak to us about their habitat. In particular, in a collaboration between the MIT Media Laboratory and Maine Audubon, the researchers use cellular technology to augment the process by which volunteers collect information for an annual owl survey in Maine.

The core methodology was developed in a regional pilot census of Connecticut's owl population demonstrating that the audio quality of cell phones is sufficient for the discovery and interaction with owls.

In Maine, they plan to deploy cell nodes for calling and recording owls, and provide an interface for the public to vicariously participate in the census from the internet. They hope to gain insight into the social networking processes of collaborative interpretation and annotation of a shared database; and knowledge representation for the bird-census domain.

The cellular-based survey may also provide insights into the hearing range of owls, duplication of vocalizing individual responses in adjacent experiment sites, the response rate of owls due to current weather or human presence, and comparison between trigger-based and naturally occurring responses in surveys.

The Owl project's web site.
This work is created by Dale Joachim, Susan Gallo , Glorianna Davenport.


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Zone of emergency - Networks, Tactics, Breakdown

Amber Frid-Jimenez is teaching a class at the MIT Visual Arts Department this spring on Introduction to Online Participatory Media: Zone of emergency - Networks, Tactics, Breakdown (4.366/4.381). The course is equal parts theory, art, technology and play, exploring the wild archive of the web. The class combines an overview of the historical "art for all" approach of early net-art and tactical media with an experimental take on the popular social web today.

Time Mondays 7 – 10pm and Wednesdays 9:30am – 12:30pm
Location N51-315 IEL

The course introduces an overview of web-based platforms as means through which to explore the cultural, social, political, and economic impact of mediated communication. Hands-on design exercises and experiments are continually framed and examined by critical reflection and discussions. An overview of historical "art for all" and participatory art practices, of early net-art and current public art practices will show how digital communication and culture have altered the way in which collaboration occurs, changing conventional notions of authorship and giving rise to the collective elaboration of meaning.

This seminar/workshop is taught in two parts. The Monday Night@VAP lecture series entitled Zones of Emergency co-organized by VAP Director Ute Meta Bauer and Lecturer Jae Rhim Lee will be open to the public, but will be considered a lab for the course. Lectures and panel discussions will serve to contextualize the theory of participatory design practices in times of emergency. This course is being co-organized with Jae Rhim Lee (4.391: Understanding the Problem: Research as Artistic Practice - FEMA Trailer Project).

Students from various disciplines and backgrounds are welcome. Please
contact Amber at amber [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu for more information.

Prerequisites: permission of the instructor. Limited enrollment of 12
students. 4.381 Graduate Level H (12 units), 4.366 Undergraduate HASS-E
(2-4-6 units).

Instructor
Amber Frid-Jimenez,(617) 869-9840, Office: N52-342, Hours: W 1–3pm and by appointment

Teaching Assistants
Kate Hollenbach, Course
Cati Vaucelle, Lecture Series
Lauren McCarthy

About the Instructor
Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist, designer, and recent graduate of the MIT
Media Lab, where she studied with John Maeda in the Physical Language
Workshop. Her work confronts issues ranging from politics and surveillance
to representations of women in media. Her recent work includes interactive
video installations, performance-based participation from large-scale online
audiences, and painting. She has presented her work internationally at
institutions including Banff New Media Institute, Rhode Island School of
Design, Cornell University, Harvard University, School of the Museum of Fine
Arts (Boston, MA), Smithsonian Institution, American Institute of Graphic
Arts, and at independent venues such as Art Interactive (Cambridge, MA),
Upgrade! International (online), WMMNA (online), and DFN Gallery (New York)

More resources
Amber's MS Media Lab thesis
Course

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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...


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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!


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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!


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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.



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