You are getting better day after day.
I discovered these placebo pills by Broadhong Design on Idealist. The idea is that the more you take the pills, the more the pills get smaller. Each pill has the same effect, the only thing that differs is their size. The psychological effect happens when progressively the tablet-taker transitions from bigger pills to smaller pills. The taker might feel a physiological (mostly psychological) change as in they are getting better as the tablet become smaller. According to the designers, such Placebo effect actually helps patients to recover from physical injuries and psychological trauma.
I also found on the designer' site these intriguing pill-candy. The concept is that each patient has a right on his/her pill information, effect and prescription. Here the pills are wrapped in candy's paper, so the patient can easily recognize the pill's name. Apparently, it also works as a quick way to know what kind of pills they missed from their prescription.
Still implicitly working on the emotional attachment to pills and pharmaceutical treatment, the design team worked on Kisses Pills. You give a present such as kisess pills to your lover who just caught a cold. He/she picks and chooses a kisses pill according to his/her symptom.
Labels: Pink for a nasty cold. Blue for a runny nose. Green for a sore throat. Finally, they can take away the bitterness of the medicine by eating a real chocolate wrapped in silver color!
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Blog Jouons 
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Placebo Effect + Design Solutions
Saturday, March 15, 2008
These little things in the dark ...
Our childhood was filled with creatures hidden in the dark. The feeling of them existing outside of our imagination was a source of interaction with the physical world, creating places for them to live. Our imaginary friends were sharing our secrets, they were our closest partner in the world discovery. One book that I recommend on the subject is The House of Make-Believe
Children interacting with Kage no Sekai
When I discovered Kage no Sekai, I immediately felt in love with it. The piece projects cute tiny creatures on shadows -and only on shadows- so that anyone can play with them, try to grab them, make them exist in specific places with shadows created just for them, or even trap them (see video of the children interaction with the system).
Photo by the authors of Kage no Sekai
"This device expresses this perspective not by using existing media but in the real world itself. The mechanism is concealed, giving the device the appearance of an ordinary piece of furniture. Although at first glance it looks like a regular wooden table, if you look at the shadows on its surface you'll see the movement of mysterious life forms. When you approach it to have a better look, they sense your presence and hide away. They do not emerge while human shadows are cast over the table, but the life forms hiding within a distant shadow are watching them."
Video
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Blog Jouons
Friday, March 14, 2008
Recycle your equipment!
The power of digital technology fundamentally transforms our lives. Materiality is being technically extended. The digital offers another variety of artifacts that impact remembrance. While expanding our experience, some things also get lost along the path to de-materialization.
For the contextual area of my general exams I research on the attachments to physical, digital and virtual objects. I explore the psychological trade-off between what we call virtual and tangible “attachments”: I focus on people’s attachments to things, and through things, their relations to people (virtual and digital).
I investigate the journey of the physical and digital object being appropriated, collected, hacked, transformed, possessed and shared on virtual environments and communities. I review the hacker’ skills in appropriating objects by transforming it: the Nintendo Wii becomes an umbrella with a map to provide real time directions while on the walk. The Roomba becomes a robotic dog, Guitar Heroe becomes Guitaraoke Revolution a learning system!
A hacked Roomba by Hacking Roomba dot com
With the industrial revolution we lost our ability to intervene on the design of our objects. Even if the old paradigm of mass production has been thrown away, dixit Pine, I believe that Mass Customization only allows few parameters in a product to be customized. There is no appropriation of the object as in the artisan-customer relationship. That is what came to mind while I was repairing my old mac, I had so much fun opening the machine, looking for tutorial and guides, ordering missing parts just to give a life to this machine.
A bit of nostalgia maybe, but recycling and reusing laptop parts, computer parts, and any objects in general would not only be good for the environment but also recreate this sense of ownership through creative use and appropriation. That is why I am so fascinated by hackers, custom car designers and also collectors. Everything could be recycled, reused, repaired, reinvented and investigated!
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Blog Jouons
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Environmental Health Clinic
Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, my favorite artist engineer, came to our lab to share with us her latest research. I had the chance to work closely with her in Ireland for the Save the Robots summer exhibition so I was already familiar with her past work. She presented her new work, the health clinic, a clinic to which you can go to discuss your environmental health concerns.
Natalie with her robot-talkative duck
The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.
The clinic works like this. You make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change.
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Blog Jouons
SMS stamps!
Disappointed by the fact that there’s no way to save the humorous, strange or loving text messages that we send and receive – and that ultimately they have to be erased – Martin Frostner & Johanna Lewengard came up with a novel method by which they could be retained. 
By designing a series of rubber-stamps, the designers allowed the best messages to be stamped anywhere, perhaps to be used again with the postman as courier this time!
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Blog Jouons
The Fizzees: Physical Electronic Energisers
I came across the Fizzees (Physical Electronic Energisers) research project by Futurelab. Fizzees is a prototype project that enables young people to care for a 'digital pet' through their own physical actions. In order to nurture their digital pet, keep it healthy and grow, young people must themselves act in physically healthy ways!
The Fizzee comes in two parts – a wristwatch-style device where the pet resides, and an unobtrusive heart monitor which straps around the chest. A sensor in the monitor measures the wearer’s heart rate, and this data is sent to the Fizzee device, which houses an accelerometer to monitor movement.
I am not sure about the one-to-one mapping between a digital pet and a child. It also depends how the watch can be calibrated, and if there is a limit to the amount of activity! I understand why these devices could become popular especially after the Tamagotchis, and Neopets mania, but why don't we take it the other way around?
Wouldn't that be awesome to have a Fizzlazy(TM) with which the more you watch TV the more your digital pet would become fat and grumpy, and that eventually it will start reading comic books, play video games and sleep until 1pm!
Picture from the Fizzee's report. Download the brochure here.
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Blog Jouons
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Documentary: last in class!
Via my research lab, I heard about this ongoing documentary-making on the "last in class!". The documentary will be a light-hearted look at our culture's growing obsession with achievement as explored through the profiles of several people who finished at the bottom of their college (and in some cases, also high school) class and the somewhat unexpected, often ironic, lives they have lived since.
Check out the web site as they are looking for these exceptional low profiles!
The call:
1. We already have a number of possible people to profile for the film
(from a country music star to a serial entrepreneur and beyond) but are
always interested in hearing from, and about, more. If you know of anyone
who might fit the bill, please send them our way (info [at] lastinclass [.] com).
2. As you will see from the website, as part of this project, we are also
putting together a companion piece of truly memorable report cards and
report card comments, in particular. If you have any you would like to
share, please do.
3. Finally, please pass this email along to your friends and colleagues.
We know that those who finished last are just as rare as those who finished
first but we know that they are out there and probably the source of far
better stories to be told.
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Blog Jouons
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
TableCloth
Table Cloth designed by Maija Louekari.
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Blog Jouons
DIY: A latte art printing machine!
I posted on bread laser printing, fruit printing, computer etching, 3d printing your own guitar, printing your clothing (a next step for TUI), and also about the secret-spying marks left by your printer as you print!
Today, I found this wacky and so cooool tutorial on how to make your own latte art printing machine. Oleskiy Pikalo wanted art work on his latte, so he bought a x-y flatbed plotter (Philips 8155) on eBay and a great book by Matt Gilliland: “Inkjet Applications”!
Here is the result, see the video!
He offers a tutorial on how to build something like this, here you go, so you need (I quote him):
1) An old flatbed plotter (in my case it was Philips 8155) - make sure it has real x-y translation stage. Your best bet is to perform a search on eBay for flatbed plotter. On a good day, you may get a decent fully working plotter for under 100$. I got mine for 175$ with shipping, because I wanted A3 format for later use, and a bunch of pens.
2) Most old plotters connect through GPIB/Serial interface -mine connected through GPIB interface, so I needed a GPIB card, which I also got on eBay. I got my card for around 30$, because the one I purchased was not a popular kind (LTP1 - GPIB).
3) Matt Gilliland’s book Inkjet Applications. It looks like Parallax has this fabulous kit on 40% sale for 59.95$
4) A small 12V relay (my plotter lowers pen by applying 12V to the solenoid). This relay will enable the stream of ink from the inkjet cartridge.
5 ) Edible ink - preferably brown. You can work with coffee directly instead of ink, but the contrast is not as good as wwith ink. Again, I got mine on eBay.
Good luck!
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Blog Jouons
