lindsay williams’ sensecam is a wearable digital camera with a wide-angle lens that captures time-lapse movies of the wearer’s activities. her team has done a study suggesting that the camera can be useful to help someone with dementia remember events. a woman who watched the recording could then remember events for several months, as opposed […]
Author Archives: leo
the first music videos
we may think of music videos and motion capture as recent technologies, but they were all pioneered in fleischer studios‘ seminal betty boop cartoons of the 1930s where popular musicians were incorporated into surreal and suggestive musical cartoons. Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, a technique whereby live-action footage was traced to make hand-drawn animations. the […]
Posted in animation, livingbreathing, marketing, visualization
Comments closed
design for keeps
in today’s homogeneous product landscape it seems that nothing off-the-shelf can compete with a hand-made gift. but few of us have the time or skill to craft presents for each other, so we leave the personal touches to cards and packaging. instead of useless wrappings, why not design products to be unfinished so that the […]
Posted in environment, fabrication, futurecraft, product design
Comments closed
re-furnish
the best kind of recycling is up-cycling, and there’s nothing better than transforming trash into something more valuable while conserving resources. in the spirit of william good, project 99 takes old chair frames and re-upholsters them with rubber, cow hide, wallpaper(above) or vintage clothes (below). the junk furniture can then be re-sold for 99 euros. […]
Posted in fabrication, fashion, furniture, open objects, product design, upcycling
Comments closed
squishy robots
in the late 1990’s cynthia brezeal pioneered (wrote the book on) ‘sociable robots,’ based on her work with kismet. in reality, robotics was (and remains) far behind special effects houses and toy designers, who for years have been making expressive, emotive puppets specifically for engendering social bonds with animate machines. so it’s no surprise that […]
Posted in evil robots, fabrication, livingbreathing, perception, product design, soft/glowing
Comments closed
sloppy craft
maarten baas has issued a line of mass-produced furnishings based on sloppy clay designs. the industrial clay is hand-molded around a metal frame to reveal the craft behind the product. in exchange for seeing the artist’s hand in the work you can pay $2,000-$8,000 for these pieces.
Posted in fabrication, futurecraft, materials, product design, soft/glowing
Comments closed
robot love
jodi forlizzi conducted an ethnographic study about vacuum cleaners called a ‘product ecology,’ essentially an object-centered analysis of how people adapt to new types of things, in this case robotic vacuum cleaners as compared to conventional ones. she gave some families roombas and others regular stick-type vacuum cleaners, and she observed significant differences in how […]
Posted in evil robots, livingbreathing, marketing, product design
Comments closed
re-style
william good is a new line of fashions designed by nick graham (founder of joe boxer) sold on-line and in partnership with goodwill stores in the san francisco area. an interesting take on up-cycling, these clothes are made from donated garments at the store to which some design elements are added and then re-sold at […]
Posted in blogogracy, conviviality, environment, fashion, open objects, product design, upcycling
Comments closed