Axel Mulder’s page on Movement & Music Technorati Tags: art, electronics, music, pcomp, physical computing
Comments closedCategory: interaction design
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.
Leave a CommentPrayer 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 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 CommentNeuroscientists in Montreal, Denmark, and the US have developed a Braille-like tongue display of 144 pixels, that stimulates the visual areas of the brain through the tongue…. It may be impractical now, but it’s an interesting approach to the problem of providing vision replacement or augmentation through technology.More details can be found at this link.Thanks to Howard Rheingold’s Smart mobs blog for the links.
Leave a CommentThe Responsive environments group at MIT has done a number of interesting projects: parasitic power from shoes, various radio-connected sensors, and more.
Leave a CommentApeNetFrom the homepage of Apenet:”ApeNet is a consortium of foundations and individuals who support interconnecting great apes with each other, as well as with humans, through enculturation and technology. ApeNet was founded by British musician Peter Gabriel and American philanthropist Steven Woodruff to provide new living and communication solutions for enculturated great apes.”Mission:”To link enculturated great apes with each other through the internet, establish culture-based great ape preserves, establish an internet-based Journal, and to encourage and support great ape welfare and conservation.
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