Seeing Spaces by Bret Victor

REally interesting talk from Bret Victor on the futur of Maker spaces as a Seeing space .a must watch IMO

Seeing Spaces from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

-What if we designed a new kind of "maker space" -- a space that isn't just for putting pieces together, but also for seeing and understanding a project's behavior in powerful ways? - seeing inside - seeing across time - seeing across possibilities "I think people need to work in a space that moves them away from the kinds of non-scientific thinking that you do when you can't see what you're doing -- moves them away from blindly following recipes, from superstitions and rules of thumb -- and moves them towards deeply understanding what they're doing, inventing new things, discovering new things, contributing back to the global pool of human knowledge." Presented at the EG conference on May 2, 2014. Art by David Hellman. Bret Victor -- worrydream.com more info

Pencil by Fiftythree

-Today is the day, after releasing "book", a service to print your artwork directly on a moleskine , Fiftythree is releasing their first ever physical product called "pencil" , an active stylus that compliment their award winning application "paper" . Check on their website to discover what Pencil has to offer,but trust me , this is one comfortable and intuitive piece of hardware. Palm rejection, eraser,finger recognition ( blend effect) ..... check them out... more info

Inform:Interacting With a Dynamic Shape Display

-

inFORM - Interacting With a Dynamic Shape Display from Tangible Media Group on Vimeo.

more info

Ara by Motorola meet Phonebloks: Open hardware platform for Smart Phone

-Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. Led by Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group Project ARA want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software. "Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it." The design for Project Ara consists of what we call an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter--or something not yet thought of! The ARA team et with Dave Hakkens, the creator of Phonebloks.The community he's been building will be necessary for Motorola to turn Ara into a success story. more info

ARTEFACT 999bottles kickstarter campaign

check out what Seattle design firm ARTEFACT came up with, the 999bottles , a water bottle with a manual dial on it , this system helps you track and visualize the positi

ve impact you can have on the environment by drinking from re-usable bottles instead of disposable ones. available with an app that gives you funny and interesting insight about your comsumption as weel as the impact of your choices. Help this product hit the market by pledging on kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/999bottles/999bottles http://kck.st/IaMv5m here :

- kickstarter llink

Zander Olsen

- good old trick, new way of thinking about it, gorgeous
‘This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest. These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.’

more info

l’artisan electronique, a virtual pottery wheel

-

l'Artisan Electronique, Virtual Pottery Wheel from Unfold on Vimeo.

Designguide.tv interview from Unfold on Vimeo.

l’artisan electronique, a virtual pottery wheel, by Unfold
more info

Performer Ipad app from konkreetlabs

-Performer from Konkreet Labs lets you drag and skew the shapes to make music on your Ipad , notice that unlike most ipad application this one is for people with Real instruments , Aka musicians ..you have to actually have musical instruments for Performer to control (it connects to "anything that receives OSC or MIDI inputs," according to Konkreet)
Konkreet Labs

FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS by GESCHOIR

-FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS is a project by Georg Reil and KAthy Scheuring frm the university of applied Sciences Wurzburg-Schweinfurt.
very inspiring interactions schems with object and sounds reactions.
realized with arduino and processing .
From the author:
FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS

The arrangement includes six exceptional exhibits from the world of sounds and acoustics. At first sight looking trivial, each object incorporates a very unique ability.

The magical character of each object is accompanied with a little story, almost completely concealing the existence of technical components such as speakers or sensors. Only small connection ports as well as the uniform black finishing point to thier unusual abilities.

In form and functionalty all these exhibits pursue John Maeda’s „Simplicity“. They are enjoying to use, they are surprising and one wants to explore and investigate them.
more info

Give the gift of water

-I work at Teague, a design consultancy based in Seattle, and water is a daily subject.. i mean, it rains a lot :) , but for once we are trying to be a little bit more deep about water, or especially water usage ..


The Interaction design team started to install an homemade water level on the kitchen tap wired to an ipad , basically a pretty fancy way to check out our water consumption, a month later here is the result, I'm proud of this initiative and gave for the cause , if you have a little bit of time to check out the project and a tiny bit of money to give then we'll definitely thank you, but i'm sure you'll find yourself thanking yourself for doing something actually useful online ;) .Anyway take a minute to go through that project , it's actually interesting .


"There is a water problem on planet Earth. We are running out of clean water to use because we are using up our limited fresh water supply at an untenable rate.

You would not assume this when using the average kitchen faucet: water appears to flow infinitely. We lift the handle, interact with a 13 inch stream of water for a few seconds, and then it’s gone–down the drain like magic.

For most of us, the ease with which we access and use water in our daily lives sits in stark contrast with what we increasingly know to be true: the stuff is scarce. The very unit of measure by which we are billed for its usage, CCF (748 gallon increments), is so generous it makes this vital substance appear cheaply abundant not to mention infinite. Furthermore, while CCF measurements allow us to calculate average usage, utility bills don’t isolate specific activities like washing dishes or brushing teeth, so there is no way to pinpoint where water is being overused–and where it could be conserved.

Recognizing this fact, the interaction design team at Teague decided to make a device that allowed us to take a measurement at points of use. Working with our in-house physical prototyper, the team built a Wi-Fi connected water meter and attached it to the faucet in our studio kitchen...."


more info

Radioball WIP: welcome to the candy shop

-Well , colors are fun, playing with urethane casting is fun too, bright magenta soft radioball structure is even more fun to play with than to look at, Radioball 2.0 visible soon on , stay tuned.Thanks Teague for the opportunity ;)

more info

One Nice experience from Arcade fire

-It's pretty simple, go to this website: http://thewildernessdowntown.com, type the adress where you grow up and close every other programm on your computer, then get ready to be surprised , it's a pretty god experience /music video , pretty much the best thing in Html5 i've seen lately, oh and wait for the end, don't be impatient. .
enjoy
this interactive film as been created by Chris Milk, thanks Brian ;)

more info

Pretty awesome projector/augmented reality interface : Twinkle

-This thing called Twinkle has actually endless possibilities in term of new interactions behavior , it's basically a projector mounted on a camera ,you project, the camera film, the "computer" analyse the visual projected onto and automatically send project back augmented reality contentm, (here a little girl reacting to stairs,fire graphcs or water graphics) , in the futur this technology could be part of any smart phone, objects,remote or whatever you can think of .

Originally created to illustrate a Real-world game interface I can see some kind of a paradigm shift in term of what interactive communication or advertising could be , life is a game for some and this would transform the surrounding environment in an endless quest for projecting support .

In other words i am really excited by this soon to be everywhere little thing created by Tokyo University and Keio University students ...


more info

Gestural interface winners announced

-We juried the competition together with Adam Kumpf and Tad Toulis and the core 77 crew.The winners are online , Go check them out.

-The latest 1 Hour Design Challenge from Core 77: Gestural Interfaces was produced in partnership with Teague(where i work ) ." The contest challenged designers to think off the screen and make interfaces that live in the the objects and geometry of the world around us. In developing meaningful counterpoints to the flatness of all-in-one interfaces, we hoped you would integrate the richness of the physical world with the endless possibilities of digital information, tying together interface, ritual and context."
.
more info

the Radio Ball

-Technological “progression” has reduced what was a magical experience to a throw-away feature included in phones, computers, and coffee-makers as an afterthought. Radio has lost its position of distinction and become just another input. The richness of the original experience including analog knobs and hand tuned reception is poorly captured in digital reception and pre-programmed favorites. The intuitive interface and discovery between destinations are sorely lacking.


Tuning a traditional radio is a rich interaction.
By turning the dial, users hear little pieces of music, voices, rhythms, mood or even news… half a second, sometimes less, but the brain is fast enough to identify interesting content. Discovery is inevitable. Even repeating the same exact movement with the dial often gives the user a totally different experience. The fusion between user, content and interface elevates the radio above a mere audio source.


Tuning a Digital radio is a flat interaction.
Digital radio stations are displayed by name; location on the FM band is lost. Digital buffering creates a delay between channel selection and audio feedback. Breaking the immediate relation between action and reaction provides another barrier to exploration.
Is the transition from minimal, intuitive, and tangible to menus, icons, and bookmarks true progress? Must we trade high discovery for high definition?



ENGAGEMENT CREATES INTEREST:
If the user can affect the experience, then the experience is engaging. Improvisation creates interest and meaning. Products should provide engagement on many levels: Touch, Sound, Sight, Memory, and Discovery.
Our goal was to create an engaging interface that would allow users to navigate through content to a precise destination without sacrificing discovery of new content in the process. What if engagement and fun were the focus? What if we made an interface with a product in it, rather than a product with an interface on it?


As a result the radioball is an exploratory device that encourages discovery through rich spatial interaction.

Thinking back to the days of old analog radios, the magic of finding unexpected stations in the midst of fuzz was both enchanting and evocative. Compare that with today's digital-based interactions of screens and tact switches; they give us exactly what we want when we want it, but leave no room to stumble onto alternative choices.

Teague Radioball from ben collette on Vimeo.

The Radioball prototype was built in short time and is meant as a starting point for conversation about the need for richer, more spatial interactions. All 3D files, schematics, code, and documentation is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 (Attribution, Share-alike, and Remix) and is free for you to download, try out, and improve upon. Enjoy!

teague
Ben Collette
Adam Kumpf

Teague new website and Teague Dslabs blog

-Teague ( where i work ) just got a brand new website here,Teague is an 83 years old design consultancy ; you can enjoy the three component of the brand : product, experience and aviation, the website has been updated with the latest and greatest but contain also some of the products that made Walter Dorwin Teague name.

On the other side the new Teague dslabs website is also online, Dslabs stand for Design studio labs where you'll be able to find sketches and snippets from Teague's design studio.
go visit those two website .. now.


Teague
Teague dslabs

Light Up a Life With a Llama

-Ok it's cold outside it's almost time to go snowboarding, have fun ,celebrate and all that .
I receive today the Heifer International booklet , charity for world hunger .
In their catalogue they have a donation for divers animals, one of them is a llama .
so i am trying to raise 150$ to buy one llama to a family .
help me via this link.
thanks



here is the description :

Llama
Light Up a Life With a Llama

When resources are scarce, it's important that livestock don't use up land reserved for people. At home in rough, mountainous areas of Latin America, llamas are a blessing to families with limited pasture land because they can eat the scrub vegetation that other domesticated animals won't eat. Llama droppings help fertilize topsoil — improving crops and reducing erosion.

Women weave their llamas' fleece into warm clothing to wear or sell. They load them up with goods for market and trek with them across rugged slopes at high altitudes. As they travel, llamas' padded feet don't damage the fragile terrain and their selective browsing doesn't destroy sparse vegetation.

Llamas and their kin, the alpaca, provide Heifer families with invaluable sources of transportation, income and wool, which is prized for making blankets, ponchos, carpet and rope.

And as these handy helpers are passed on to other families through Heifer's model, llamas are helping transform entire communities.


Donate
more info

wonderwall website is just HOT

-look at this insane navigation here, pretty simple idea, great execution, and by the way , check all the interior design those guys did , they are just everywhere, and those interiors are pretty sexy too..
Just visit their website for an awesome experience in flash.
enjoy

more info

3d projection on building

-just amazing... for your eyes only .
check the video at 1.25 for the full 3d effect .

Milano 09 :senseware exposition

-this year at the Milan furniture fair you could see at the triennale an exhibition called senseware

this installation appear to breath , the material is formed by extrusion to leave air between fibers, it is like polyester , its elastic and extra durable, can be used as cushioning..
this installation is just made to l illustrate the propriety of this new material, i saw that in Milan at the triennale in 09


created by Hirro Iwata , the robot tiles incorporate sensors using electrically-conductive textiles .it basically detect foot position by conveying informations about where pressure has been applied .. sweeet .


mist bench , optical fiber that respond to movement , well it's in the title, the only thing is there is sensor in front of the bench that feel the user, and compare to other optical fiber this one can glow by gradient , by knitting thos fiber , gwenael nicolas created a unique and soft experience..



this awesome installation is made of tiny little needle , on top of a water resistant surface , this process is able to create words or graphic, when the drop is heavy enough it just fall down.. super nice.