Building on the work of kinetic installation artists such as Fischli & Weiss and makers of Japanese educational TV show Pitagora Suitchi, ClustaRack advertise their print media stacking product with a witty and slightly unbelievable video of a printshop Ruby Goldberg machine.
Every day, the millions of people that are connected to the internet confess their feelings and emotions to an unknown audience. It provides a forum where you can feel as though you are talking to no one yet speak your emotions like you could be heard by everyone. In 2006, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar created We Feel Fine, an interactive exploration of peoples feelings through blog posts. The application filters the plethora of information that is posted on blogs and shows you real time posts that relate to a specified emotion. It then gives different methods to visually search and sort through that information.
Yesterday I came across twistori(by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs). Drawing on the same idea as We Feel Fine, twistori searches twitter posts and filters them by the emotion written in the post. The interface is pretty, and it is interesting to watch what people are saying for a while, but I find that the project lacks meaning. I maybe shouldn’t say that, I guess what I mean, is that I would like more meaning out of it.
Today, I was invited to a design charette hosted by SIAT’s Ron Wakkary. It was a 2.5 hour gathering with about 15 talented designers and thinkers from SFU. The goal of the charette was to come up with interaction design concepts for a solar powered house. The focus was partly on raising occupant awareness of their power consumption habits, but most importantly to enrichen the experience of living in the house.
The project is a big one, with 2 other universities in Canada joining SFU to form “Team North”. The concept house is called “North House”, and will be one of 20 entries to the 2009 Solar Decathlon, put on by the US Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Nastypixel is a design collective, composed of people associated with Interaction Ivrea in Italy. As a contribution to open-source learning, they have published a a series of excellent step-by-step tutorials, or “recipes”, on how to make various DIY interactive projects. The first project, Soundpad, teaches you how to take apart a computer keyboard and appropriate the internal logic to your own needs. This way you can connect four button pads to your computer, where a Flash software component plays different sounds depending on the pad you press.
As a note on gestural interfaces, previously mentioned on Intwo, SmartRetina is a platform for computer gesture recognition, developed by Yaniv Steiner of Nastypixel. It has a camera component and a software component, forming the base for touchless gestural interfaces.
As you may notice we shifted things around a bit on you. Now no matter what your browser window size, intwo will still look good. And please re-size your fonts if you find the text too big or small. Enjoy!
Most of you may be familiar with In Rainbows, Radiohead’s latest album. Less of you might be familiar with how they distributed it. The first three months of the album’s availability was accessible via the internet only. Anyone could come to the albums website and download the album for whatever price they saw fit. The band hasn’t released any financial numbers on their profits from the endeavor, but financial success or not, they introduced a new method for mass distribution of music. Until the end of this month, they are experimenting again.
The have separated the song nude into five separate tracks: vocals, guitars, bass, drums, and string. Anybody has access to download these tracks and import them into whatever audio mixing software they have. People then have the ability to upload their remix to a website that users can vote on.
Cati Vaucelle [blog, Interview], Researcher in the Tangible Media Group at SFU Media Lab, is scheduled for a talk at SFU Surrey, May 2nd at 10.30 a.m. Sign up here ($25, free for SFU students + Alumni). This is going to be a really interesting event!
Vaucelle proposes a new genre of human-computer interaction: Gesture Object Interfaces. Gestures promise the potential for a person to interact with technology using her entire body and spectrum of movement, rather than being limited by the ‘traditional’ human-computer interaction paradigm of keyboard and mouse.
For those of you who don’t know Pitchfork, it is the largest online independent-focused music publication. They receive around 15 million daily page views and over 300,000 visitors daily. On April 7th, the Chicago based company released Pitchfork.tv, their attempt at the every growing audience of online tver’s. The best thing about what they are doing, is that they are producing a lot of the video’s.
As a visual extension of the music coverage Pitchfork has provided for more than a decade, and a means of updating and advancing the music television format, the online channel will bring you closer to the artists you love, through original mini-documentaries, secret rooftop and basement sessions, full concerts, exclusive interviews, and the most carefully curated selection of music videos online.Read more…
Hobnox is yet another social networking site trying to find its niche in the broad range of online social network users. Their platform is is to connect through creatives and give an outlet for them to express their creativity. If you are familiar with sites like this, this, this, or this you know that this idea isn’t new. But there are some interesting things about hobnox. The most prominent being their integrated tools for creating music and video. The tools are pretty impressive flash interfaces that you should check out.
The effect of the rapid growth of social networking sites audience seems to be flooding the market of social networks. Though there seem to be useful tools that have a great potential application, persuading users to join these sites seems to be a daunting task. Ultimately, the tools/sites are only useful if they are used in conjunction with a thriving community. So I guess the question is, what creates community?
This is a really genius pop-up book. It is amazing to see where these have come. What is also amazing, is how viral marketing can promote a product. This book won’t be released until October of 2008, and without hitting a shelf and with nearly no money close to 400,000 people have been impressed by this video.