I visited the Austin Makerfaire this weekend. One day (with a late start) was not nearly enough to experience everything, or to participate in any workshops that were going on all around, but I did get a good idea of the makings and craftings going on around the U.S. and the world. Below, I’ve listed the people and projects that inspired me the most.
Things used to be easy and unambiguous. You found advertisements in magazines and on billboards, art in galleries and museums, and people expressing themselves by means of graffiti and defacing of private/public property was thought of as a nuisance by most. This is an oversimplification, but bear with me.
Over the years, as the urban environment got denser, it also got more cluttered with ads, and street art took on a new poignancy and presence. Today, anyone in an urban environment is subjected to thousands of commercial advertisements, but also non-commercial messages per day.
A while back, I made a post about crowdsourcing, an internet buzzword that identifies the productive path of online networking. Recently, I stumbled upon CrowdSpring, a site set up to align creatives with clients. It is providing a great entry for any designer or client that wants to get involved with a creative endeavor.
As a science, creating robotics that are self aware is a field that is on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. Hod Lipson has a great TED talk in which he introduces two robotic experiments that touch on self awareness and evolution. One is a four legged machine that becomes self aware and teaches itself to walk. It is a fascinating and somewhat scary thought that we can create machines that have an understanding of a goal and not only have the means to reach the goal, but have the means to teach themselves to reach the goal.
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.
For a relatively small membership fee, you can be a part of a local maker community with access to advanced tools and a large pool of knowledge. TechShop is “like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…or a Kinko’s for geeks. Started in Silicon Valley in 2006, TechShop is now expanding to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, LA, San Diego, Austin, Orlando, and Durham, some locations opening in the summer of 2008, some later.
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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.
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.
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.