Good video from Reuters giving a brief overview of some of the work done by my team and others in Cambridge. There’s a bunch of projects done by us that pass by in a flash.
This was shot as part of our recent Enabling Innovation event at the lab. More videos of items from the event on our site here, including this one of me demoing Timecard.
I’m really enjoying QuadCamera on the iPhone. Lovely, spontaneous shots.
The Lookout by rbanks.
We got our money’s worth from London Zoo, even though the day started very wet, and the place is pretty expensive (£18). The live nest of leaf cutter ants working hard; the huge butterflies fluttering around among exotic plants; the birds above and below us as we walked through the Snowdon Aviary at about 30 foot above the ground. Architecturally, it seemed a strange mishmash of 19th century, 50s brutalism and contemporary Scandinavian look, although the real story, as always, is far more complicated than that.
Highlight of the DIY for CHI workshop that I attended during the CHI 2009 conference was a little session done by Hannah Perner-Wilson on the design of flexible/fabric circuits. Just finding out about Velostat and Eeontex, two materials she uses heavily in her work, made it worth while. The later is particularly useful for making linear touch sensors.
Website
Interview
Hannah’s Instructables (lots of stuff to make and do)
Hannah, and her tilt sensor:
The Product Design and Interactive Media Design students at Dundee University are participating in Microsoft’s Design Expo (part of the 2009 Faculty Summit) for a second year in a row. These are 2nd year undergraduate students (see my notes and the student presentation from last year), working to combine the brief we’ve set around “Work” with their goals of getting some ethnographic experience studying their grandparents, learning electronics, designing network objects and so on.
All 8 teams did an amazing job in their presentations, putting together their videos, as well as actually generating and developing their ideas into working prototypes and renderings.
Well done to all of them, as well as specifically to the Social Sewing group who’ll be going on to present their project in Redmond in July.
Thanks to Tim Regan for taking the following shots while we were there:
Amazing place. I have more shots up on my Flickr account.
I really likethis idea by Kacie Kinzer of “robots” ( she calls them tweenbots) that rely on the kindness of strangers to get from A to B.
"The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
Received today. A message from myself sent 5 years ago:
Ironically, I found this in my junk mail folder.
It must have been a pain for the guys at Nearfield to draw all these little dotted circles, but it’s an effective way of highlighting the quantity of wi-fi devices of one sort or another around us.
PSFK posted the video of the talk I gave recently at their Good Ideas Salon in London. It’s about 30 minutes long and covers some of our thoughts in Cambridge around how people get sentimental about objects, particularly heirlooms, and how that might apply to digital and technological objects in the future.
During the editing they seem to have replaced the Photosynth that I originally used (of a Guitar workshop) with the one from Obama’s inauguration, which changes the context a little (since I was really talking about capturing sentimental spaces).
