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.

NEWS - Long time no blog

I haven't added anything to this blog in ages (although I have lots to write about) because we have recently moved house and currently have limited internet access.

We have moved to a space that used to be a commercial property and consists of four walls, a floor and ceiling at the moment. We plan to build the inner walls to create bedrooms within the next few weeks. I'll document our progress of the construction on this blog hopefully.

MEGA

By BLU

Mike Lemanski

http://www.mikelemanski.co.uk

Dear....

http://www.dearblankpleaseblank.com/

See it here first -

Pierre Vanni

City Swing

Paris's SwinGs from Jerome G. Demuth on Vimeo.

Digital Kaleidoscope?

Seeing in circles from Oscar Lhermitte on Vimeo.

By Oscar Lhermitte who I exhibited with in the KithKin Presents exhibition during design week last summer. I really love this video he made of looking at different ways to shoot videos created for a workshop while studying at the RCA.

Seed Bombing

Seed bombs are little balls of clay, compost, and seeds that you can toss into a vacant lot to try and get some new plants to grow. It's a guerrilla gardening technique and you can see how to make one here. If you just want to pick one up and live in San Francisco you can now buy them from a vending machine. These were designed by Common Studio from LA and repurpose old gumball machines with the benefits going to Project H Design.

- www.instructables.com

Seen on Brick Lane / Roof top view

"I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing – a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the Universe."

Richard Buckminster Fuller

Opera Calling

 
 
         Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss
             Telephone Call - Sunday, 25th of March 2007, 16:28:52

«OPERA CALLING» is an artistic intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. By means of a audio-bug placed within the auditorium of the local opera house, the outside public is given access to the performances on stage. The performances are retransmitted to the public not through broadcasting, but by telephoning each person in Zurich individually.
«OPERA CALLING» is the first of three parts of a six-month-long exhibition at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich called «appropriate – manipulate – feed back!». It stands for the «appropriate»-part so to speak. It’s main aim is to explore the usefulness of  as an artistic strategy of redirection and criticism.
«Opera Calling» is a project by !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK and SVEN KÖNIG

I absolutely LOVE this. More information - http://www.opera-calling.com/about

Seen on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May

I was supposed to be making the bed...

nostalgia

Harnessing wind energy

Flash Anzan

I found out about this after seeing at talk at the RSA called Adventures in Numberland by author and journalist Alex Bellos.

Similar to the 'spelling bee' in America, in Japan kids learn to add numbers really quickly using the anzan method. They do this not by actually adding the numbers but by visualising an abacus in their head and then mentally adjusting it as the numbers are flashed in front of them. This method allows them to add up visually and to give the answer imediately without even really having to take in the actual digits.

Crazy!

EVOL urban interventions

EVOL is a berlin based street artist that transforms banal urban surfaces, into miniature architectural surfaces through pasting. using pasted paper, EVOL transforms electric boxes, small planters and other geometric city forms, into miniature apartment buildings and other structures. each piece of paper is printed with a repetitive pattern of flat gray walls dotted with plain window frames. once applied to a surface, the paper transforms the form into small building that EVOL often adorns with small characters. EVOL performs this process within different cities and has even been commissioned to do installations in galleries, where he was created entire blocks of miniature buildings.

http://www.evoltaste.com

from DesignBoom

Visited: Tim Lewis @ Flowers Gallery, Cork Street

My friend took me to see a retrospective of Tim Lewis' work at a small exhibition space called the Flowers Gallery in Piccadilly.

Tim Lewis makes really cool (mostly) kinetic art / sculptures. Made from a number of different mediums including metal, wood, found objects, paper. Some were controlled by hand others were activated by movement sensors. I really liked his pieces which, when moved, caused something to be drawn or written. They obviously took a long time and a lot of accuracy to work out the shape of the cam that would cause that particular gesture to be made.

I also really liked his sketches (see below).

No more carrots and sticks

The guy talking is a bit annoying at times but it's quite an interesting talk about motivation and how pay based incentives can actually have a negative affect on performance when used in the wrong situation, especially when people are required to think creatively. He talks about how self directed work, rather than have employees tied down to particular tasks can produce far more innovative and exciting outcomes.

Quote - The owner of Skype says 'Our job is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place'.

Seen on Commercial Road

Commercial road is generally quite grey, dull and run down so it was a nice surprise when I discovered these newly installed planters that double as somewhere to lock up your bicycle. And just around the corner from my house!

HA!