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).
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 to buy the book and to find the reviewer likeable if they spoke in a similar way to them (loud and fast for extroverts, slow and quiet for introverts). narcissism is at the heart of anthropomorphizing, and it paves the way for individually targeted interfaces that make us like what we hear because it sounds just like us.
Posted in human2.0, perception
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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 beautiful but because of a feedback loop that directly connects facial muscles and emotions in the brain. think of all the other possibilities: if you can’t yell, maybe you won’t get angry; if you can’t stick you tongue out, you can’t be disgusted; if you can’t pucker your lips, you can’t fall in love… no doubt more studies are needed, but it’s confirmation that radiating happiness is good for you.
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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 of the award-winning line of blue dot sheet steel accessories that arrive flat and can be folded along perforations. they may not be quite as efficient, but they are far more beautiful.
Posted in fabrication, possessed products
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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.
Posted in human2.0, perception, visualization
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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 also be mapped to the skin or to hearing, but this marks the first time such a translation can be achieved in an inconspicuous place – the mouth.
via science news
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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 a system to generate a chair based on the image of a person’s silhouette through deformable models – you can read about this approch in his undergraduate thesis.
swedish front design uses novel methods to generate furniture – from explosions and footsteps in the snow to the tracking of a fly’s path around a light bulb that was 3D printed to achieve the fly lamp (pictured) – via generator.x
kram and weisshar designed these breeding tables that are each generated uniquely by an algorithm that cuts the legs from randomly folded planes that are then cut from sheet steel, welded together and painted.
Posted in fabrication, product design
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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
Posted in soft/glowing
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