German carpet maker Vorwerk Teppichwerke and semiconductor company Infineon Technologies have developed an intelligent carpet. Sensors in the carpet enable it to control temperature and detect footsteps and trigger lights, or detect prone motionless bodies and call emergency services.
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Prayer Timer, with 5,000 cities pre-set, to alert the user when it’s time to pray; this can be done with a standard alarm, or with the “azan” voice calling to prayer, with Cairo, Mecca, and Medina variants…. There are some good notes on ethnographic research for culturally specific design in the compilation Design Research (Brenda Laurel, ed.).
Comments closedTwo projects on citizen participation in local government, monitoring and maintenance of urban spaces:Fund for the City of New York’s ComNet:”ComNET, a program created by the Fund’s Center on Municipal Government Performance (CMGP), introduces easily operated hand-held computers to community organizations so that troublesome street level conditions can be recorded and tabulated quickly, easily and accurately.”Then reports are produced electronically for the government agencies and other organizations that are responsible for correcting the problems. Community representatives track how conditions change over time.”And exactly the same project in Connecticut:CityScan”City Scan is a project using cutting-edge technology to empower and involve citizens, of all ages, in local government.”In City Scan projects, citizens prioritize desired improvements to the physical environment of their community and gather information on how well government services deliver results.”On city streets, residents—from youth to seniors—collect data about neighborhood conditions (e.g. graffiti, potholes) with handheld computers, custom-designed software, wireless modems, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers and digital cameras.”
Leave a CommentTurbulence is an organization that commissions and develops net art by emerging and established artists. They’ve been around since 1996, and have sponsored a lot of interesting work.
Leave a CommentThis biographical note from the Getty site, which details the project well, explains it in a nutshell:”E.A.T., an organization devoted to promoting the interaction between art and technology, developed from the philosophies of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller…. Staff and participants explored or experimented with these and the precursors of many technologies that are now commonplace: chat lines, fax machines, lasers, cable television, and digitized graphics.”By the early 1970s, E.A.T.’s artist and engineer matching service, called the Technical Services Program, boasted 6, 000 members.
Leave a CommentFrom their info page:”At the intersection of mobile and social computing, we seek to provoke discussion aimed at understanding this emerging space of computing within and across our public urban landscapes – Urban Computing.”While toting a laptop around a city may seem a like an example of such city computing, Urban Atmospheres research is more deeply concerned with addressing several sub-themes, including (but not limited to):”Place – What is the meaning of various public places?… How will navigation and movement, either throughout an entire city or within a small urban space, be influenced by the introduction of Urban Computing technology?”The single main research challenge of Urban Atmospheres research is to understand how this future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.”Street TalkUrban Atmospheres held a good workshop in the summer of 2004, Street Talk.
Leave a CommentFrom the site:”Parasitic computing is an example of a potential technology that could be viewed simultaneously as a threat or healthy addition to the online universe…. These protocols can be exploited to compute with the communication infrastructure, transforming the Internet into a distributed computer in which servers unwittingly perform computation on behalf of a remote node.
Leave a CommentWindow display driven by SMS messaging by IDEO TopTrack – identifies any song played at a volume loud enough to be picked up by the cell phone” target=”_other”>Blinkenlights – Architectural scale display using a cell phone to control display on the side of a building.The Internet Plug – a net-controlled AC relayCeiva’s net-connected picture framesSelf-Healing MinefieldsRadio taxi-artBitTaxi – The Bureau of Inverse Technology pubished data on how to reverse-engineer interactive taxi advertising banners…. More info is available on the BitTaxi wiki.
Leave a CommentMuniwireless is a blog covering reports on municipal wireless and broadband projects. A worthwhile read if you’re interested in how broadband can be useful for civic projects.
Leave a CommentThis IBM research article describes using the human body as a transmission element in a data network (very personal area networking), and seems to pre-date this Microsoft patent by at least four years.There is more on this topic available at MIT, among others. Olin Shivers’ 1993 presentation on bodyNets is the earliest I’ve found so far.
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