Beautifully designed ReadyMade book by Shoshana Berger and Grace Hawthorne.
Written by the cofounders of ReadyMade magazine, this is a book of all original material that revolves around the reuse of six building materials—paper, plastic, wood, metal, glass and fabric. This hybrid of howto, editorial and historical content yielded a design that is simultaneously smart and fun, structured yet chaotic, sophisticated yet accessible.
In the spirit of ReadyMade’s reuse ethos, the book itself is a reusable object, with the spine serving as a ruler—inches on the front cover, centimeters on the back. Since the book’s content swings wildly from doityourself projects and scientific diagrams to lifestyle articles, historical timelines and random sidebar nuggets of information, we deliberately pushed ourselves out of the usual structural comfort zones of contemporary book design—limited typeface use, repetitive grid structure, white space—to see how much variety the piece could sustain and still be coherent. - Aiga
Shoogle, created by John Williamson, Roderick Murray-Smith, Stephen Hughes at the University of Glasgow, UK, is an interface for sensing data within a mobile device.
It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around “inside”. Vibrotactile display and realistic impact sonification create a compelling system. Inertial sensing is used for completely eyes-free, single-handed interaction that is entirely natural.
Download the Shoogle’s paper for Chi 2007
Video of Shoogle
Stephen Hughes was previously a researcher in the Palpable Machines research group with Sile O’Modhrain at Media Lab Europe. The group published key papers on vibrotactile display and mobile multi-modal interfaces.
MESH an iPaq running a simple tilt-driven maze game by the Palpable Machines group
Tern: Wooden blocks shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces
Created by Michael Horn and Robert J.K. Jacob at Tufts University, Tern is a tangible programming language for middle school and late elementary school students. Children connect the tailored wooden blocks to form physical computer programs, which may include action commands, loops, branches, and subroutines.
Download Tern’s paper for Chi’07
Quetzal
Prior to designing Tern, the authors created Quetzal (pronounced ket-sal), a “tangible programming language designed for children and novice programmers to control LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. It consists of over one hundred interlocking tiles representing flow-of-control structures, actions, and data. Programmers arrange and connect these tiles to define algorithms which can include loops, branches, and concurrent execution.”
Also Oren Zuckerman from the MIT Media Lab created Systems Thinking Blocks for children to model and simulate dynamic systems.
Flow Blocks for children “to create 3D structures in space, that look like common structures in life”
The interactive Poster “SuiPo” by Fuminori Tsunoda, Takayuki Matsumoto, Takeshi Nakagawa, Mariko Utsunomiya, East Japan Railway uses a combination of IC card ticket Suica and Internet accessible mobile phone where customers can get e-mail information by touching their IC card ticket on the reader located near the poster.
More on SuiPo
Cute Japanese books I found on amazon.jp!
