Plastic Bag

Short film by American director Ramin Bahrani traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it.

Dream recording device

"A US researcher has said he plans to electronically record and interpret dreams.

Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said they have developed a system capable of recording higher-level brain activity. "We would like to read people's dreams," says the lead scientist Dr Moran Cerf."

Read more - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11635625

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

A friend posted a link for this video created by the RSA. Talks a lot about education and creativity and changes that need to be made to make schooling more effective and more appropriate for today. Also the animation is pretty cool.

Homemade Spacecraft

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Today

Eric Baker - images for TODAY

@DesignObserver

Yellow Chair Stories

Yellow Chair Stories was a live service design intervention, where Anab opened her personal Wifi to her neighbours and passersby. This approach illustrated how wireless technologies could become interfaces to recreate transient spaces for conversations at the threshold of the public and the private, the physical and the electronic.

The project won a UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2005, and was presented at Ubicomp 2005, ISEA 2006, DesignEngaged 2005 and various other conferences. It has also been successfully replicated in different parts of the world. - from Superflux

An interesting project looking at how get to know your 'WiFi neighbours' in real life and encouraging interaction with people who perhaps pass your house everyday or live in your area. I like how she created a shared folder on the network so that this became an online space to share, leave or receive information from the other people who had sat in the yellow chair or who had used the open WiFi network.

Listening to:

Serious Games

NESTA recently ran a talk called 'Serious Games' which I've been reading about. Shame I missed it as I would've liked to have gone but read about it here and read the review by Creative Futures here.

OR watch the video of the talk here.

Kickstart

http://www.kickstarter.com/

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film,art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

Distracted but still related.

"We’re living in a new world – a place where our audiences see their own lives broadcast to friends across networks like Facebook and Twitter, and where jokes, arguments and love affairs are conducted through comments and responses, likes and retweets, friending and tagging. Broadcasters have probably been a bit slow to create formats fast enough and open-ended enough to reflect the way we live our lives now." – Matt Locke (Head of Crossplatform at Channel 4 / Really Interesting Group)

His blog here.

Phonoaesthetics

Thomas James Niblett’s extraordinary final year project has seen him awarded the Top Art, Design and Media Graduate prize at the British Graduate 100 Awards this month. The awards celebrate the most outstanding undergraduates and graduates in Britain.

Thomas James graduated from Chelsea’s BA Graphic Design Communication this summer. He explains the vision for his incredible work: “My final project at Chelsea allowed me to research and produce an interactive publication based on Phonoaesthetics, and the cross over between sound and image. The book was printed in conductive inks, and when touched allowed for varying circuits within the book to be completed and produce noise directly generated by the printed forms. A medium which reflected the books topic – the dialectic relationship between image and sound.”

More info on his website.

Two interesting websites

http://www.ecomodo.com/

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"welcome to ecomodo, the marketplace of good returns .. Lend and borrow each other's everyday objects, skills and spaces with confidence"

http://schoolofeverything.com/

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IKEA's Visual Cookbook

Swedish furniture and homeware brand IKEA have released this 140-page cookbook featuring photographs of ingredients laid out in patterns. Called Homemade is Best, the project was a collaboration between creative agency Forsman & Bodenfors, stylist Evelina Bratell and photographer Carl Kleiner.

More info on Dezeen.com

Kjen Wilkens

STATISTICAL FORTUNE TELLING

This application provides ‘predictions’ based on personal data, giving a glimpse at what might appear if we start feeding our personal data streams into predictive computer models. It connects to a users Facebook account and utilises real data to generate a personalised ‘future report’ which can then be posted back to Facebook or (in the show context) be taken away as a printout.

SENSOR POETICS

WHAT IF WE WOULD USE A WEATHER ‘CAMERA’ INSTEAD OF A PHOTO CAMERA TO CAPTURE SPECIAL MOMENTS?

Two fantastic projects by Kien Wilkens. More info here.