It may or may not be practical, but Sebastian Errazuriz's work re-thinks how storage furniture permits us access to their insides. Earlier we showed you his Samurai Cabinet, which brought a bit of ceremony to the act of retrieving clothing, and the visual surprise of the opening mechanism for his Explosion Cabinet, perhaps the most extreme in his line.
Now the NYC-based artist/designer has done it again, with a form more subdued than the Samurai and Explosion but every bit as exciting. Check out his fanciful Wave credenza:
For his part, the NYC-based Errazuriz doesn't care if it's practical or not; as the artist-designer-activist states, "I love the idea of creating beautiful furniture; nevertheless I am much more interested in using the medium as an excuse to trigger people's curiosity and create a connection with them."
"I don't know where the line is between art and design," Errazuriz states in his bio. "It's important to me that a project consist of just a little twist, because I ultimately want people to see the obvious, the everyday differently."
Technology can reconstruct video based on a person's thoughts and even anticipate your moves while you drive. Now, a brain-to-text system can translate brain activity into written words.
In a recent study in Frontiers in Neuroscience, seven patients had electrode sheets placed on their brain which collected neural data while they read passages aloud from the Gettysburg Address, JFK’s inaugural speech, and Humpty Dumpty.
As each patient spoke, a computer algorithm learned to associate speech sounds—such as "foh", "net", and "ik"—with different firing patterns in the brain cells. Eventually it learned to read the brain cells well enough that it could guess which sound they were producing with up to 75 percent accuracy. But the program doesn't need 100 percent accuracy to put those sounds together into the word "phonetic". Because our speech only takes certain forms, the system’s algorithm can correct for these errors “just like autocorrect,” says Peter Brunner, one of the co-authors of the study.
“Siri wouldn’t be more accurate than 50 or 70 percent,” he says. “Because it knows what the potential options are that you choose, or the typical sentences that you say, it can actually utilize this information to get the right choice.”
It is important to record the data directly from the brain, says Brunner, because picking up neural activity from the scalp only gives a “blurred version” of what is happening in the brain. He likened the latter method to flying 1000 feet above a baseball stadium and only being able to vaguely recognize that people are cheering, but not the specifics of what the people’s faces look like.
In this case, the patients were already undergoing an epilepsy procedure where the skull is popped open and an electrode grid is placed on the brain to map areas where neurons are misfiring. The resourceful team of researchers from the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies and the State University of New York at Albany used this time to conduct their own research. However, it means study was limited by each patient’s individualized epilepsy treatment, such as where the electrodes were placed on the brain.
Because every person’s brain is so unique, and the neural activity must be picked up directly from the brain, it would be difficult to create a general brain-to-text device for the average consumer, says Brunner. However, this technology has a lot of potential to be used for people who suffer from neurological diseases, such as ALS, who lose the ability to move and to speak. Instead of using an external device like Steven Hawking to pick out words on a screen for a computer to read, the computer would simply speak your mind.
“This is just the beginning,” said Brunner. “The prospects of this are really endless.”
Finally, a
mobile device you can feel good about—not because it's shiny and new,
but because it's ethically made and built to last.
Bas van Abel wanted a phone that worked well enough, but avoided the conflict mineral issues and harsh working practices built into mainstream devices. So two years ago, he created the Fairphone, a phone that would be adequate in its functionality but exemplary in its supply chain.
Since we last spoke to him, he seems to have succeeded. The Dutch company has sold 60,000 units and established a string of direct and traceable relationships with mineral suppliers around the world. Now it's launching a wholly new version, one that considers not only the phone's pre-life but its longevity and afterlife as well.
As you can imagine, building a phone from scratch isn't easy, especially when you have ethical expectations. "We had a lot of people expecting us to kind of create world peace at the same time as making a phone," Van Abel says. "I felt a little bipolar. Sometimes I felt like dying. At other times, I felt on top of the world."
The new version is different in that Fairphone designed every aspect itself. The previous version was mostly licensed, with Fairphone concentrating on the supply chain relationships. Designing from start meant the company could look more deeply at how that design affects the supply chain. "With Fairphone One we had to reverse engineer the supply chain and we got stuck at a certain point. Now we can use certain materials and we can choose the partners we want to work with," Van Abel says. On top of the fair-trade relationships it had for tin, tantalum, and copper, the company now has new ones for tungsten and gold.
At the same time, it has thought about how to make the phone last longer, so there's less need for a constant stream of new materials. The new version is made to be durable (with a hard, integrated case) and repairable. The back comes off easily, revealing a transparent layer of components, each of which can easily be taken out and swapped for others. And the screen is a separate piece, so you can source a new one without buying a whole new model.
"We made a phone that people can open, so they can change parts themselves. If they can take care of it, they are probably going to use it longer and that means they're probably going to use it longer," Van Abel says.
The new model will sell for 525 Euros after tax and launch in Europe this summer. The U.S. version is due out next year.
Fairphone is a social enterprise that doesn't make a profit. It's privately owned by its original investors and has funded its operations from crowdfunding (it pre-sold 25,000 phones without ever making anything, generating $7 million) and other sales of the first phone. On top of that, it also took out a $2.5 million bank loan to develop the second version.
The long-term goal isn't to get rich, or even to sell millions and millions of phones—it's to bring change to the cell-phone industry. "We want to attract people who understand that you have to be an active player to make something like Fairphone possible. If we can make fairer products, we can create space for the big guys to scale their ethical business as well," Van Abel says.
In a sense, Fairphone is like a protest company. Its phones don't just make calls and send texts. They're also tangible and provocative proof that things can be done differently in the phone industry.
A conversation over coffee often leads to instant connections, but in Berlin, Nescafe wanted to test how many strangers it could turn into friends with the help of this warming beverage.
The stunt involved setting up a special machine at a traffic light, equipped with cameras and a button that challenged people on opposite sides of the street to push it at the same time. When the pairs were able to work in tandem, they were each treated to a cup of coffee from the machine on their respective sides of the street.
In a world where technology often inhibits face-to-face connections, Nescafe goes to show the power of a simple interaction. In total, Nescafe reports generating more than 33 high fives, 285 waves, 839 smiles and even more conversations started thanks to the Instant Connections coffee machine.
Designs of the Year 2015 winner announced Emily Gosling,
Human Organs-on-Chips has been announced as the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2015 winner. Designed by Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, the chips are devices that carry “living human cells that mimic the complex tissue structures, functions and mechanical motions of whole organs,” says the Design Museum.
“The team of scientists that produced this remarkable object don’t come from a conventional design background. But what they have done is clearly a brilliant piece of design,” says Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic. “They identified a serious problem; how do we predict how human cells will behave, and they solved it with elegance and economy of means, putting technology from apparently unrelated fields to work in new ways."
Microdevices that replicate the functions of human organs have beaten Google's self-driving car and a concrete innovation centre to be crowned Design of the Year 2015 by London's Design Museum. The Human Organs-on-Chips project was announced as the overall winner of the annual Designs of the Year awards during an event at the museum's Shad Thames building this evening. Developed by Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh from Harvard University's Wyss Institute, the tiny microchip-like devices are lined with human cells to mimic the complex tissue structures of human organs. The Organs-on-Chips are designed to be used for purposes including drugs and cosmetics testing, as well as for the treatment of infections and inherited diseases.
"The team of scientists that produced this remarkable object don't come from a conventional design background. But what they have done is clearly a brilliant piece of design," said Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic.
"They identified a serious problem; how do we predict how human cells will behave, and they solved it with elegance and economy of means, putting technology from apparently unrelated fields to work in new ways. They have perhaps unintentional created something that for a lay man seems to symbolise the essence of life and also happens to be beautiful to look at."
MoMA's senior curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli, who put forward the project for the awards, called it "the epitome of design innovation – elegantly beautiful form, arresting concept and pioneering application".
Human Organs-on-Chips, which were nominated in the product category for the awards, triumphed over the shortlisted projects from the other five award categories: fashion, digital, architecture, graphics and transport.
These included Thomas Tait's Autumn Winter 2013 fashion collection, a proposal for clearing waste plastic from the oceans, a concrete building for a Chilean university, a campaign to promote misshapen fruit and vegetables, and Google's self-driving car. The shortlist and overall winner were chosen by a jury made up of fashion writer and stylist Hilary Alexander, ÉCAL director Alexis Georgacopoulos, architect Farshid Moussavi, Land Rover design director Richard Woolley and jury chair, artist Anish Kapoor, who called Human Organs-on-Chips "a really big idea". "It incorporates technology and design to eliminate the problem of having to use animals to test a product," Kapoor added. "It feels like one of those questions of the future."
All 76 of this year's nominated projects are on show as part of an exhibition designed by Benjamin Hubert at the Design Museum, which runs until 31 August 2015. The winner of a visitors' vote will also be announced at the end of the exhibition.
Last year's Design of the Year award was controversially won by Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Center in Azerbaijan – a decision that was questioned by critics due to the country's human rights stance.
Other previous winners from the award's eight-year history have included the UK's Gov.uk website, the energy-saving Plumen 001 lightbulb and the London 2012 Olympic Torch.
It’s a fascinating blend of the old and the new: robots in the heart of Amsterdam 3D printing a graceful steel bridge over a 17th century canal. That’s the vision behind the collaboration between Dutch startup company MX3D, construction company Heijmans, and designer Joris Laarman, who hope to begin work on the pedestrian bridge in September of 2015.
“The symbolism of the bridge is a beautiful metaphor to connect the technology of the future with the old city, in a way that brings out the best of both worlds,” says Laarman.
Unlike other construction projects which assemble pre-manufactured parts to create a new structure, MX3D will use industrial robots to print the elements of the bridge in place, so that the span will appear to grow from one side of the canal to the other in strong, complex curves of steel not seen in traditional bridges. MX3D CTO Tim Geurtjens says, “By printing with 6-axis industrial robots, we are no longer limited to a square box in which everything happens. Printing a functional, life-size bridge is of course the ideal way to showcase the endless possibilities of this technique.”
Getting robots to “draw” with steel in midair took some doing, and there were many setbacks and false starts as the project developed, and the team expects more as bridge is built, but they also expect to learn new things every step of the way.
“During the course of the project, we will undoubtedly encounter many things we have not catered for at this moment in time,” Laarman says. “It feels like uncharted territory where a whole world of innovation could still be discovered.”
In addition to the main partners, the project has received vital assitance and support from many other sources, including Autodesk, ABB, Air liquide and Lenovo.
Have you ever been misfortunate or clumsy enough to drop your phone, leaving a spiderweb of cracks that, at best, serves as an embarrassing conversation starter or, at worst, turns your phone into an expensive paperweight? Within five years, our smartphones could all hold the technology to self-repair cracks completely on their own.
Duncan Wass, professor at the University at Bristol, has been at the forefront of developing a carbon-based “healing agent” that is hoped to have multiple applications, most notable for consumers being saving our phones from ourselves. Microspheres containing these healing chemicals are designed to burst when cracked, releasing the solution, which hardens instantly and almost invisibly. Initially, this compound was designed solely for aviation applications, so that airplane wings that develop small cracks can begin the healing process midair. This will be the main focus moving forward, ensuring quicker and cheaper safety controls.
This idea is a game-changer for all sorts of different industries, however. While carbon-based solutions have been used for performance and Formula One cars for some years, L’Oreal is considering using it to develop a self-repairing nail polish and there is chatter of using it to improve sports equipment, such as bike frames. This technology is moving quickly, but, for now, all the butter-fingers out there should still try and keep it together.
References: just.net.au & ambalaj.se
The earth is the best supplier of natural care products, but
it's up to consumers to implement and advocate the use of these
alternatives to store-bought goods. Although there are many brands
producing eco-friendly cleaning and care products, there is hardly
anything better than completely making your own from scratch using
simple ingredients like lemon and vinegar. In order to show what good
nature can do, WWF created an initiative called 'just.'
just showcases a range of natural alternatives for cleaning and
self-care, using recycled and biodegradable packaging to encase goodness
that is supplied by nature.
This WWF initiative is also supported by a microsite where conscious
consumers can pick up a few tips for making their own shoe polish using a
banana, insect repellent using an orange and pleasing laundry scents
using baking soda and basil.
Thanks to creative studio Field,
you can see an Oculus Rift VR helmet that makes you feel like you’re in
a sci-fi movie, or at least a member of the band Devo. These sleek
headsets, of which they have three models, put an ultramodern carapace
over the components of the Oculus Rift headset, making a bold statement
about how close to our collectively imagined future we have already
come.
Building the helmet was a multi-step process, which began with taking
a foam mold of a person wearing an Oculus Rift and headphones. They
then built the artistic aspects of the headwear out of multiple layers
of fiberglass, resin, polypropylene and similar synthetic materials.
Once the outer shell was finished, the builders could insert the VR
components with room to spare for a wearer’s head.
From the outside, Field’s headsets
represent the close link between the future imagined in past decades and
the capabilities of our present society. The designs for their Oculus
Rift headsets call to mind the clean-lined, shiny sets of Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica.
Though these are less like urban-apocalyptic visions of more recent
stories, they still represent our collective idea of “the future” more
than other imagery.
The interior similarly plays with the blurring lines between
imagination and reality, allowing the wearer to interact with a virtual
reality program via the motions of his head and wrists via
accelerometers and wrist controllers that connect with the Oculus Rift
console. Field custom-wrote all software required to connect the Oculus
Rift to the custom hardware components of the helmets.
Field debuted the headsets at the
Violescence art expo, which took place at The Hospital Club in London’s
Covert Garden between the May 29 and 31.
Amazon is using artificial intelligence to combat fake product reviews and inflated star ratings.
It is employing a new AI machine-learning system that the online retailer built in-house to boost the prominence and weight of verified customer purchase reviews, those marked as helpful by other users and newer, more up-to-date critiques on its site.
The system will bring what Amazon thinks are more accurate reviews to the top and use them to create a star rating.
Previously star ratings were simply an average of all reviews, which allowed fake reviews to heavily influence the first-glance rating even if verified purchasers had slated the product. Related: Astroturfing: what is it and why does it matter? | Adam Bienkov
The algorithm will improve over time, Amazon told technology site Cnet. Its first effects may not be visible for some time as the work only began on Friday.
Customer reviews have become the cornerstone of trust in the online shopping world. Where users cannot see in person what the products are like before they buy them, the ratings and reviews of users who have supposedly bought them before can make or break a product.
Can you trust that five-star review?
That means marketers have taken to attempting to influence star ratings, especially in the initial stages of a product going on sale on any particular site. They post fake, inflationary reviews or pay users to do so on their behalf.
The practice known as “astroturfing” – fake grassroots campaigns – is widespread across a variety of sites and services. Amazon, as one of the world’s largest online retailers, is a significant target.
But Amazon also indicated that its system will be capable of differentiating between original products and those modified to fix issues or customer complaints sold through the same listing.
The reviews of the fixed product will be used to outweigh older ones of the broken product to create a more consistent and useful rating of the product users would receive now.
Astroturfing is not confined to retailers. TripAdvisor and other travel sites are also heavily affected by the practice.
“We have a whole team dedicated to the problem of fake reviews,” James Kay from TripAdvisor UK told the Guardian. “We use both automated systems and a dedicated team to review reviews and weed out fake entries.”
To maintain user trust, more and more sites that host user reviews will have to implement smarter and smarter systems to prevent abuse.
Amazon’s AI-based system will be closely watched by both competitors and creators. If it works it could end astroturfing as we know it today.
An overview
of this report can be viewed in the frame to the right. For download and
embed options for our summary decks, please visit slideshare.net/psfk.
Vienna Summer Scouts
are seven sensors designed to smarten up a city by measuring various
environmental factors and resources. While many of these sensors already
exist in some way, these mini “scouts” aim to capture and explain data
in a way that explains emotions, community sentiment, and social
phenomena.
The concept, developed by design students Mia Meusburger and Johanna
Pichlbauer, is meant to “catch the summery vibes” of Vienna. The sensors
are placed around the city and collect information on activity levels,
air and sound quality, and wild-life vibrancy. After the information is
gathered it’s sent to a central headquarters, which then determines
whether summer-time has arrived. The design explains to PSFK:
The dynamics of emotions in a city are very
powerful—positive as well as negative feelings can infect a house, a
neighborhood, the whole city. We thought about moments where we felt
that we as citizens were part of something much larger—and came to
choose the arrival of summer as a charming case study.
Simple and playful in design, the scouts are fairly small and are
placed throughout society. They don’t stand out as technological
devices, they blend into their environments and envision a future that
embraces tech-integration in public spaces. This is an important aspect
of bringing communities together:
Data collection should not be invisible. It doesn’t have
to be something we’re afraid of. The sensors are designed to attract
attention, and with their special shapes and behaviour they communicate
what it is they measure. We want citizens to be involved in the
measuring process, and we think that the results should also be visible
to them.
The pool scout sits in the community swimming pool, and reports
whether sunscreen levels have reached the pre-determined “summer
threshold.”
The pool scout sits in the community swimming pool, and reports
whether sunscreen levels have reached the pre-determined “summer
threshold.”
The movement scout is placed in an ice-cream parlor, where it reports
to the headquarters if scooping movements are up to summer-time levels.
This scout sits by a pond. If there are enough mosquitos, the summer-time test is passed.
Instead of just measuring air temperatures, the air-stream scout
measures the wind inside of a public bus. If the scout experiences a
high rpm, it means that people are getting hot in the transportation
system.
Intelligent cities can be collaborative, emotional, and inspiring.
Visible technology and data collection can encourage these qualities,
and the Summer Scouts represent this concept.
If we place the new antennas in the right spots, a smart
city can be so much more than an efficient machine. A city with a sense
for its emotional layers is a place where people are aware of the social
dynamics of their environment—a place where one citizen’s actions make a
difference and where people understand the consequences of their
behavior.
The BBC's Mind Control TV Offers Enhanced Accessibility
Published: Jun 23, 2015
The Mind Control TV is a prototype device, developed by the BBC's Digital division, whose workings can be controlled by the mind -- meaning users don't even have to lift a remote control. The device uses an EEG brainwave-reading headset that measures electrical activity in the brain. An experimental companion app allows for two modes of control, 'meditation' and 'concentration'.
The app displays an on-screen bar that measures the user's concentration, and can be used to carry out actions once a certain level of concentration has been reached. Users of the app are presented with five popular BBC shows which are highlighted in turn every 10 seconds. When the user wants to select the highlighted program, they have 10 seconds to concentrate and trigger the program.
The Mind Control TV is admittedly still a rudimentary system, but shows a lot of promise and could be used by individuals suffering from disorders like locked-in syndrome to better access digital media services.
Since the days of the disposable razor, more than a few companies have taken a system-based approach to product design. In other words they create a product whose accessories are proprietary. Whereas the original driving motive behind this approach may have been profit, today products are complex enough that consumers can actually benefit from a system-based design.
Cynics will say that system-based design approaches are meant to lock consumers into a particular manufacturer's ecosystem; advocates will point out that those ecosystems—think of Apple's or Festool's—make things more convenient for the end user.
Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a biannual report about coffee, which maybe seems it wouldn't have anything to do with this website. But in fact it has everything to do with industrial design, and now we are seeing the environmental impacts—both positive and negative—of a particular system-based product design.
Reuters nutshells what the USDA report discovered:
Americans are spending more money on coffee than ever before, but for the first time in six years, they will be [consuming] less of it as the single-serve revolution transforms the brewing habits of the world's largest coffee-drinking nation.
To be clear, that doesn't mean that we Americans are putting less coffee in our bodies. It means that we are no longer brewing full pots of coffee at the office and dumping out what people don't drink. The rise of single-serve coffee makers designed to use individual pods, rather than drip filters and user-poured coffee grinds, allows end users to avoid overestimating how much coffee to make. And we are apparently willing to pay more for the convenience.
The increased efficiency enabled by product designs like Keurig's K-Cup and Nestle's Nespresso line of single-serve machines means we are wasting less coffee—and crucially, less water. It also means that as the dip in demand reaches the coffee cultivating industry, less resources will be used at the farm level. And circling back to the consumer, single-serve coffee machines do not have hotplates they need to feed electricity to, keeping warm a pot that no one will finish drinking.
Sounds like a win, right? Brilliant product design that aligns the amount we actually consume with the amount that is actually produced, and reduces resource consumption from farm to table?
Well, not quite. The problem is in the pods. As has been known for several years, Keurig's plastic K-Cups are not biodegradable nor practically recycleable, as explained in articles from Mother Jones and The Atlantic. Nespresso aluminum pods are recycleable, but require specialized machines and processes to separate the coffee from the metal prior to recycling; because of that, the company has set up collection points at retail partners and even a mail-in service for consumers to return the pods, so they can be shunted to a suitable facility.
Nestle's recycling program is laudable, but how many Nespresso users are taking the trouble to actually return the pods? This article from several years ago points out that Nestle trumpets their pod recycling capacity but not the actual rate at which it's being done. So they deserve praise for having had the foresight to set up a recycling system, but it's not clear that that system has taken user behavior into account. If they were to release some concrete figures, it would go a long way towards assuaging skepticism.
Keurig, meanwhile, really has egg on their face. They say they'll have a sustainable solution in place for their pods in five years' time, in 2020. But Rogers Family Company's OneCup—which is compatible with Keurig's K-Cup machines—is on the market now and 97% biodegradable, as it's made with bioplastics.
I purchased a Nespresso machine last month and I love it, using it at least twice daily. But prior to reading the above-linked articles, I had been heedlessly throwing the aluminum pods into my regular recycling, unaware that they fall through the collection grates at regular recycling facilities. Henceforth I'll be collecting my pods and trekking them to the Nespresso facility in my neighborhood. But that is easy for me, as it's only six blocks away. I wonder what other Nespresso users do.
PSFK Labs is excited to present The Desktop Debrief, a comprehensive lowdown of trends in the modern office that inspire happier, more productive workers.
In this report available to purchase here, PSFK Labs showcases the findings of #onmydesk,
a research initiative in which we asked readers to share images of
their contemporary workspaces on Twitter. PSFK awarded the top entries
with $100 gift cards over 10 consecutive days.
PSFK Labs
segments trends of items—carefully and thoughtfully arranged items—that
people keep near to them each working day, and illustrate why they’re
conducive to better working habits.
The Desktop Debrief illustrates how a ‘superior’ work environment is
dependent on a range of variables that shift from company to company, or
employee to freelancer. Office space architecture, desk layout and
employees’ musical and design preferences each play a role in
determining the company culture, therefore impacting the happiness of
the employees.
Trends also illustrate a shift in the landscape of the workforce,
with 53 million Americans in 2015 working in some type of freelance
capacity. With that, the settings in which we take meetings, interact
with clients or brainstorm with a teams are also evolving.
PSFK Labs researchers found that design
agencies keep stacks of magazines scattered around for visual
inspiration; CEOs and writers carry post-it notes and analog calendars
for meetings and ideas; most everyone has drinking vessels to stay
hydrated. While these commonplace objects might carry less meaning
standalone, their placement on the deskscape hold significant meaning
when adjacent to screens and devices. A family photo provides us with a
sense of purpose on a particularly busy day, or a small plant might
offer a moment of serenity in a tech-heavy environment.
The Desktop Debrief provides original insight into how office layout,
personal style, placement of devices and desktop design positively
impact workplace well-being. To learn more, buy The Desktop Debrief here.
