mind chair polyprop (in collaboration with Peter Mariagold)
mind chair polyprop (designandtheelasticmind) (betatank)
This chair is created to enhance and develop the learning process by means of sensory substution technologies. Simply, it allows you to see,when you lean back.

preliminary study of mind chair polyprop is this chair.
“It allows you to receive simple geometric shapes on the back and see these in their mind’s eye.”
this post is very useful in understanding how the system works and how the user recieve, percieve and response in that kind of an experience. I wish I had the chance to experience seeing.

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eye candy (designandtheelasticmind) (betatank)

“Resonators positioned on the surface of an Eye Candy transmit information from the tongue to the brain at the frequency that the eyes usually send visual information to the brain.”

yummie. mind blowing!

USE ONLY IN SINGLE DOSES. NEVER MIX EYE CANDY

RELAX. Tranquil fish swimming through the streams of your consiousness will help you to unwind.
SOCIALISE. The shooting stars will encourage sociability.
ASSERT. A big thumbs is guaranteed to reassure and motivate you.
MEDITATE. The the slowly shrinking circle helps you to meditate.
OVERCOME. Images of spiders will enable you to overcome your fears.
FOCUS. Direction giving arrows help to improve focus and attention.

The technology used in this project is the same as the mind chair but here your tongue is your reciever.
I found wired science video explaining this technology and how it has become a groundbreaking phenomenon for blind people. (this embedded video is like a preview to see the full segment click here.)

Wired Science – Mixed Feelings

All products are available at betatank shop.

An amazing computer-animated 3D open-source film is created with a free software called 3d suite blender. I have watched this short film twice. Despite the fact that I find the environment, characters especially the atmosphere aesthetically and visually very strong ingenious and effective, I’m not a great fan of the storytelling of the film. The movie has become a phenomenon since 2006. The website of the film offers many codec formats of the movie to download and even the script is available in more than 30 translated versions is available.

“Elephants Dream has established the viability of the open-source model even in a production environment by benefiting from the collaboration of hundreds of people who “volunteered 3-D object textures, animation, translations, and… intensive enhancement and retooling of the Blender software”

This open-source movie still allows the user redistribute, remix, remade and repurpose. So, this is almost a cg movement in which series of new interpretations could be done, shared and redone but yet insufficient to collect that kind of interpretations.

director: bassam kurdali

official website elephants dream

design and the elastic mind link

a review of the movie (the content is wide and even covers the open-source limits) by Francisco Athens

A Project exhibited at Siggraph’08:
Sugar is human’s source of retrieving energy and the idea construct this project is to “breakdown organic material with a microbial substrate, to produce an electrical charge strong enough to drive common household appliances”. This theorotical and yet impractical mixed media installation “Life and Death of Energy-Autonomous Devices” was one of the exhibition highlights of Siggraph 2008 Slow Art section.

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Ongoing Project: Objects Incognito

“Objects Incognito is a speculative design project by Anab Jain and Alex Taylor (both members of the Socio-Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge). The project consists of a series of objects and future scenarios related to new and emerging technologies. Specifically, the objects and scenarios are designed to reveal some of the taken for granted and sometimes conflicting positions that underlie our use of the word intelligence…” (Anab Jain & Alex Taylor)

a model for this project: “Living Radio”

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RFID is radio-frequency identification, meaning: “the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves”. (wiki)

Two RFID prototype to be worn done by Anab Jain and Alex Taylor for this project:

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Object Incognito: RFID and Body Readers at MOMA, Design and Elastic Mind:

a further step in the project / a new layer to reality
This is a scenario, an environment of RFID tagged objects, plants and humans, in which you may redesign RFIDs with actual or augmented information.
The installation is online and is not in physical form due to the sufficient development in the project.

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Domestic Gubblins. Jain’s and Taylor’s another project exhibited at Design and the Elastic Mind at MOMA:

Like the other projects, this project also covers the daily life, technology and social interaction.
instruments to engage people in coversation
“… four fictional objects, designed to provoke people to reflect on what intelligence in machines might be like in an everyday, mundane domestic context,” explains Anab Jain. “There are four Gubbins—Mimi, Bee, Pobel, and Snip—and each of them has a specific function. Mimi takes pictures of mundane activities and makes her own comments and stories around these activities. Bee, a split personality, uses his two parts to measure sound, temperature, and such things in the home, and then interprets these measurements in his own way. Gubbin Snip has a unique ability to sniff radio wave emissions in the environment and associate them with strangers in the vicinity. And finally, Gubbin Pobel can sing to dying plants and bring them back to life.”.

The daily concerns, curiosities and actions of us are constructed by means of these objects and actually what Jain and Taylor do in their projects, including this one, is to objectify the intangible and present it by using design and technology and I suppose thats what makes this project interesting.

Anab Jain flickr

looking forward to have them back on the planet.

a new section is added to domus magazine. it’s called the “intersection”: this month the theme is “the new web”

the illustrations of the section is made by Tobias Krafczyk.

editorial interaction: fold the issue to meet miss /mister web2.

brilliant.

Showcase: Beckmans College of Design at Stockholm Furniture Fair
This promotional video is a collaborated work of Beckmans College students.

Objectified trailer
on the official website of the film (one of my bookmarks) there are sections such as musings, design news and objectify me. try them with a cup of coffee at your leisure.

The poster of the documentary is done by Build and I do love it.

for many other innovative designs of ooms click

catchy and desirable

focal length designs. for more.

“transparante” an ad for madrid metro / watch the advert