Dana’s work is always so delicate, inspiring and challenging. Here is her WildUrban Radio. My take on it is that you just need to turn the knob to listen to a variety of birds from your area. The radio is mapped directly to your location and you can hear the smallest species directing you closer to them whether you are going North or South ….
I have ordered one of those from her and will update on my productivity level asap.
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… people interacting FULLY with the WOW Pod at the Mixer event in New York. Project I am doing with Shada/Jahn! More about the project ->here –<
Visitors playing with WOW Pod
Inside the Pod
The WoW Pod is an immersive architectural space that provides and anticipates all life needs of the World of Warcraft player. Outfitted with toilet throne, hydration system, and meals at the ready, the WoW Pod makes daily human function possible without ever stepping away from the game. In addition, these tasty meals are cooked via a cookset that connects a hotplate to the computer, allowing the player to let their World of Warcraft avatar know when the meal is ready to eat.
The AFK cookset within the Pod is designed for the hungry role playing gamer who can connect her food items, e.g. Spicy Wolf Dumplings, to her online cooking habits. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: “O la la my roasted raptor is about to be done!” “Better eat the ribs while they’re hot!” etc. When the food is ready, the system automatically puts the character in AFK (‘Away From Keyboard’) mode to provide the gamer a moment to eat. When the player resumes playing, he/she might just discover his/her character’s behavior is affected by the food consumed in real life — sluggish from overeating or alternately exuberant and energetic.
Here is a short movie-clip that shows what can happen to your avatar when you eat in the Pod!
More photos on flickr!
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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This is a strong reason to be nostalgic of the past! According to Wikipedia, Vac-u-former was a toy made by Mattel in the 1960s. Based on the industrial process of vacuum forming, a square piece of plastic was clamped in a holder and heated over a metal plate. When the plastic was soft, the holder was swung to the other side, over a mold of the object to be formed. Then pressing a handle on the side of the unit created a vacuum, sucking the plastic down over the mold and shaping it to it. When the plastic cooled it solidified, making an impression of the item. Various molds came with the kit, but almost any small object could be used as a mold.
Because very hot surfaces were easily accessible to a child (or adult) playing with the toy, it probably could not be sold today …
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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I am currently working towards my General Exam, including the qualifying exams from MIT. I will be back on the blog right after! In the meantime, enjoy a beautiful last moment of Indian summer –taken with my camera phone…
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I am working with my friend Marisa Jahn on a new project. It will be super fun, artistic and hopefully design noir! More soon… but in the meantime I want to share her latest creation with Steve Shada, “Pleasurecraft“.
A kit for any klutz who wishes to woo a potential lover, ‘Pleasurecraft’ is a vehicular kit that choreographs gesture and landscape to produce an outting full of splendor and romance. The potential lover wil find PleasureCraft’s luxurious pullows and easy-to-reach champagne cooler irresistable. Suitors will love PleasureCraft for its easy-to-use instructions that make Romance easy – one, two, three!
The suitor begins when he/she steps in the boat and first begins to read the operator’s manual. Pictures indicate what to do next–comb the moustache, don the bowtie, bust out the TicTacs — then uncork the champagne, what tempo to follow, etc.
Often, a clumsy serenade can be attributed to an overwhelming amount of details and a failure to attend to the right ones in the right order. But PleasureCraft solves this problem through its built-in water wheel, perfectly callibrated to the RPM of the River Seine. By listening to the music and glancing at the operator manual, the suiter knows what cues to follow and when.
(‘Pleasurecraft’ questions the human agency in constructing the pictoral imaginary and an ethnographic examination of our species’ mating rituals.)
“Stelarc Ken” by Zoe Khamsin.
Now children can play with cyborg toys!
Stelarc is a poet and scientist of contemporary times and his body, that he himself defined as ‘obsolete’, and others has defined as ‘posthuman’, is the end of the religious principle of body’s inviolability. Moreover he made a mutual correspondence between his body and his art, and this led to his iconic definition. The artist creation – ‘Stelarc Ken’ – builds upon the idea of iconic individuals being replicated in toy form.
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DIY is the new black for the gaming industry which has adopted not only the DIY but also the craft culture in its new game for Playstation 3, Little Big Planet. In little big planet, users create their characters (their mascot) with textures, zippers, colors, attitudes and their own levels, events, design their difficulties and can then share their designs with their peers and play online.
The level creation is the most intriguing, because you got to design triggers and events like switches and buttons. It can be pretty simple if it is just to open a door to the next level but pretty rad 😉 when designing a multi-phase boss fight against millions of tech spiders! Also the sharing component is pretty elaborate as other users can rate your game and offer descriptive keywords to your creation, from “brilliant” to “repetitive”. So be sure to invite the right friends who can understand your style!!! You can also invite guest mascot stars! Isn’t that amazing?!
You are only allowed to create 3 levels that you share on the server side. If on the server the company deems that you are good at creating levels, you can then create some more. If the company decides that your levels are not good enough, then you are stuck and you need to cancel these levels until you are being granted the right to create some more! So that is interesting because it shows that the company is afraid that users aren’t gonna design levels good enough and that this game relies heavily on people’s ability to create neat levels. If users are not gonna create brilliant designs, then this will be a failure because it only comes with 3 small levels … This is like a creation suite for gamers that welcome creative individuals into playing, creating and sharing! I cannot wait to try it. If only they would send a free copy to designers, they would have great levels designed!!
In the meantime, here is a video of the trailer:
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
Technorati Tags: animation, video, culture, media, DIY, craft culture, video game, playstation, Little Big Planet, mascot
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I recently read a book, depressing and fascinating, Strangers to Ourselves, by Julia Kristerva. This book is a journey through the notion of the stranger (the foreigner, outsider or alien in a country and society), and explores the idea of strangeness within the self (a person’s deep sense of being). In this book Julia Kristeva distinguishes the inside from the outside appearance and the conscious idea of self. She explains mostly the point of view of the foreigner, how he feels and perceives others in his welcoming foreign country. She attempts to analyze him and shows how this exile is nurtured by a deep inside exile. I share my notes because I know many foreigners who will resonate with this book.
In the first chapter, “Tocata and Fugue for the Foreigner”, the author explains her attempt to not turn the foreigner into a thing, but rather to “brush it” with no permanent structure. She presents a happy foreigner to the eyes of others, while the foreigner is actually away from his homeland because most probably he has lost his mother. As in Camus, his Stranger reveals himself at the time of his mother’s death: “One has not much noticed that this cold orphan, whose indifference can become criminal, is a fanatic of absence”. The foreigner is a devotee of solitude.
In the eyes of the foreigner those who are not foreign have no life at all: barely do they exist, haughty or mediocre. In contrast, the space of the foreigner is a moving train! As for confidence, the foreigner has no self. An empty confidence, valueless, which focuses his possibilities of being constantly other: “I do what they want me to, but it is not me. Me is elsewhere, me belongs to no one, me does not belong to me, … does me exist?”. Julia Kristeva concludes that the foreigner is a dreamer making love with absence, one exquisitely depressed. Happy? No one knows better than the foreigner the passion for solitude. “The paradox is that the foreigner wishes to be alone but with partners, and yet none is willing to join him in the torrid space of his uniqueness”.
The author proposes two categories of foreigner. The one who agonizes between what is no longer and what will never be, the advocate of emptiness, usually the best ironist, and the one who transcends, living neither before nor now but beyond, a believer and sometimes ripens into a skeptic! She explains how meeting balances wandering for the foreigner. The banquet of hospitality is the foreigner’s utopia with the brotherhood of guests who soothe and forget their differences … the banquet is outside of time!
The author shows how the foreigner constantly feels the hatred of others and how living with the foreigner (with the other) confronts people with the possibility or not of being an other, as in being in his place. Rimbaud’s psychotic ghost Je est un autre (I is an other) is the acknowledgment of this exile: to be foreign and live in a foreign country.
“Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking, the impetus of my culture.” Split identity? Should we recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because he is already a foreigner from within?
How strange is Camus’ Meursault (The Stranger, 1942), so anesthetized, lacking emotions, all passion having been eradicated, and not a scratch to show for it. One could easily take him for a borderline case, or a fasle self, in short for a quasi-psychotic, rather than for a prototype of the foreigner.
Julia Kristeva brings language into this exile. The foreigner does not speak his mother tongue nor he is filled with resonance from the body’s memory! The resurrection through a new language slowly appears superficial and meaningless. This new language appears like a prosthesis, it is superficial.
Apparently, nobody listens to the foreigner, because the foreigner is only tolerated. As the author explains: “Those who have never lost the slightest root seem unable to understand any word liable to temper their point of view”. And the foreigner’s friends, aside from bleeding hearts who feel obliged to do good, could only be those who feel foreign to themselves.
Nowhere does one find better somatization than among foreigners, so much can linguistic and passional expression find itself inhibited
The realm of the foreigner slowly becomes silence. “It is the silence that empties the mind and fills the brain with despondency, like the gaze of sorrowful women coiled up in some nonexistent eternity.” Instead of approximating words, the foreigner no longer says them. The foreigner has lost his own language in a foreign land …
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
Technorati Tags: book, culture, perspective taking, PhD, psychology, research, theory, foreigner, stranger
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Jabberstamp earned an honorable mention as one of the 23 finalists from over 2,500 entries to I.D. magazine’s 2008 Student Design Review! Working on Jabberstamp with Hayes Raffle and Ruibing Wang was exceptionally fun and inspiring, I am glad it won an award!!
-> The I.D. review <-
A child playing with Jabberstamp and me in the background blurred by the magical photoshop touch!
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
Technorati Tags: product design, culture, children, media, project, MIT, MediaLab
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This summer is the perfect period for yard sales! I have a few secret collections that are building up! All of them related to my research of course. One of my recent find is this vintage electronic kit for children, “discover the magic and mystery of electronics in minutes”. Working in a group that researches on a seamless and tangible relationship to digital information, I find this child’s game particularly of interest.
Each block represents an electronic component. As the child assembles the blocks together, the child designs a circuit. All the pieces have a magnet underneath. They can be assembled on a metallic large plate, plate that works as the circuit ground. The game is about electronics, analog electronics, but the iteration process of electronics discovery is “tangible”. The child can relate to the kit like a puzzle and by this is invited to experiment with each piece. Many authors have claimed that the understanding of electronics is hands-on. Making this process connected to the learning of electronic symbols + offering a puzzle based interaction to circuit design is very exciting! Now there is a consequence to the connection of the pieces, where the electronics knowledge starts and the children are empowered in the design, focusing essentially on their component and how they spatially fits. Later on they can move on to working directly with the components …
I have a more recent version of an electronic kit that shows directly the components, not the symbols. The connection is made by inserting wires between each component. I much prefer the puzzle based approach that welcome easy improvisation and experimentation with circuit design.
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
Technorati Tags: children, electronics, PhD, game, collection, research, tangible, interaction design, toy