i left out something about the solar and wind-powered streetlights at the panasonic center in tokyo: the company sells a modified version that contains a security camera, with the aim of tracking children on their way to and from school. the ‘Neighborhood Security Sensor Network System‘ detects children carrying an active RFID tag and takes […]
Category Archives: possessed products
sinister streetlight
Also posted in children, energy, environment, product design, surveillance
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eco-corpse
jae rhim lee showed the infinity burial suit at the seamless fashion on wednesday: an outfit for an eco-conscious corpse, the suit contains mushroom spores that feed off nutrients created by the decomposing body.
Also posted in environment, fabrication, fashion, livingbreathing, materials, product design
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sociable cookware
recently it’s been theorized that robots are easier to get along with if they have real faces, so what if cookware could do the same? maybe cooking would be more fun, and food might taste better… i spotted a number of sociable pots, pans, cups and bowls in tokyo this week: a sign of things […]
Also posted in livingbreathing, product design
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robot co-pilot
strolling past nissan’s showroom in ginza today i saw an interesting concept reminiscent of the R2D2 + X-wing co-driving model: a ‘future car’ with a robot (similar to papero) embedded in the dashboard as a kind anthropomorphic GPS, a co-pilot, and in any case better than a totally self-driving car because it has a face […]
Also posted in evil robots
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ipods cause cancer
i first saw japan tobacco’s surreal ‘tobacco etiquette‘ advertising campaign five years ago in the tokyo subway, and i thought it was just a unique and japanese way of discouraging smoking by appealing to a sense of communal responsibility. only yesterday did i see that the anti-smoking vignettes are interspersed with totally unrelated advice against […]
Also posted in 2d, marketing, visualization
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dinner demons
do you ever feel like things are out of control? the virtual reality laboratory at tokyo institute of technology (no acronym) have discovered one reason: tiny ‘brownies’ called kobito are pushing stuff around. you can finally see them at work through the newly developed “kobito window,” a screen that shows them pushing your tea around […]
Also posted in evil robots, furniture, livingbreathing, product design, tangible
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consumers and the machine
alex rosenberg makes blown glass objects the old-fashioned way, and he made a video comparing his slow, hand-crafted process to industrial mass-production. whereas his objects are hand-crafted and locally made, retailers sell cheap, machine-made glassware at a fraction of the cost of real blown glass. the machines are faster, but not necessarily better. blow-molding leaves […]
Also posted in conviviality, customization, fabrication, futurecraft, marketing, materials, open objects, product design
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mini-martians
few human artifacts have traveled beyond the earth’s gravity, and even fewer were designed to carry a message to those beyond. compared to the elegance of the messages included with the pioneer and voyager spacecraft, our latest extraterrestrial broadcast seems a little immature. on the other hand, it’s very very small. mark wadsworth and tom […]
Also posted in 2d, fabrication, guerilla, visualization
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