Author Archives: leo

angle vision

this 18th century prism mount from the museum of history of science in florence allows you to measure and visualize the angles at which light splits, just like this interface in the luminous room by john underkoffler (1998).

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mirror interfaces

we anthropomorphize a lot of things, from pets to machines – it turns out that we think computer-generated voices have a personality. and the more the computer sounds like us, the more we like it: stanford researchers conducted an experiment in which introverts and extroverts listened to synthetically generated book reviews and were more likely […]

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smile!

malcolm gladwell confirmed the intuition that your face reveals your emotions before you are even aware of them – now it turns out that may work both ways: a small pilot study shows that women injected with botox paralyzing solution around their frown lines showed less symptoms of depression, and not because they felt more […]

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wasteless furniture

you know when you make furniture that material waste is phenomenal. the idea of designing to waste as little as possible has always intrigued me, like this latest effort by d e sellers to make a line of furniture out of 4’x8′ sheets of plywood without any waste or hardware (via treehugger). it reminds me […]

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baby graphics

speaking of simplicity i read in yesterday’s new york times about the first neo-natal channel and was inspired by how successful these simple graphic concepts are for babies and adults alike: watching a drawing being made by subtraction and addition, the simple parallax of a mobile or the put put of a car.

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licking light

in 2001 university of wisconsin researchers Maris and Bach-y-Rita found that people born blind could understand when the visual field was mapped to a gridded array of electrodes worn on the tongue, suggesting that the brain is capable of plastic mapping of images from one sense to another. prior research had shown that vision could […]

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generative furniture

generative design allows computers to play a part in the appearance of furniture – often to make the objects stronger and more functional, but sometimes to allow for unpredictability and complexity that would be otherwise difficult to achieve. these are some of the approaches being used to design furniture through generative algorithms: Aseem Agarwala proposed […]

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inflatable inventions

pneumatic giant festo‘s spin-off prospective concepts is a think-tank for inflatables: projects ranging from inflatable airplanes and gliders (top) to whimsical ideas like an inflatable parking lot gate – reduces the idea of a barrier to a visual note, not a physical impediment. check out this video

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