Plato has landed
To get around a noise curfew, organizer's of the
Glastonbury music festival in the UK are organizing a 'Silent Disco'. They will be handing out wireless headsets that are connected to the stereo system. The headsets will have
bass, treble, and volume controls, and will be handed out in the dance tent only after the main music curfew (12:30 AM).
This is the first I've heard of this kind of thing, though the article suggests that it has been done before in the Netherlands.
This is exactly like a Sony commercial from a couple years back for their MD players, featuring a
blue alien named Plato. In the commercial, a couple police officers walk on to a beach filled with dancing teens. Plato is up on a lifeguard tower, DJ'ing the silent rave. As the cops walk through the crowd looking very confused, a girl pulls an earbud from her ear and passes it over to one of the cops. He puts it in his ear, the music kicks in, and he nods and smiles in understanding...
So now this is reality, and potentially something that could become increasingly common. What does this mean for social interaction? This is obviously a very clever solution to a real problem for the Glastonbury organizer's. On the other hand, though the participants would be physically co-located, their experience is virtually mediated. How do they know they are listening to the same thing? Trust, and by gauging eachothers reactive movements (i.e. dancing) to the music they are listening to. (It would really be fun to try piping in different music to all the different listeners) In a sense, all of these kids could just as well stay at home and listen to the music streamed to their home PC (or radio, remember those?). Of course, these kids would prefer, like most of us, to be physically surrounded and connected with others. But, just because we're gathered in the same location, are we having the same experience? Maybe the iPod generation will tire of isolating themselves completely in their music. How soon until a completely democratized party whereby everyone gathered brings their iPod and DJ's their own evening to their individual taste? Neighboring islands sharing and seperated by the sea.
Upcoming Lectures at Art Center
Unfortunately I won't be able to make it to
CHI this year in Portland, but the consolation is that I'll be around LA next week for Bruce Sterling and Erik Spiekermann's
lectures at the Art Center.
Bruce Sterling, the "Visionary in Residence" (that's such a great title) at ACCD will be speaking next Thursday evening, April 7th, as part of the Toyota lecture series.
Erik Spiekermann, one of the co-founder's of
MetaDesign, will be giving a lecture titled "You Don't Do Design, You Live Design" on Friday, April 8th.
Open Source Design
One of the most interesting presentations from
eTech this past week was from Saul Griffith from
Squid Labs and
Howtoons, who has built
iFabricate.com
iFabricate is a community site that makes it easy to document and record projects, which are then available for others to use. Photos, illustrations, and even CAD data can all be uploaded with step-by-step instructions. Collaboration is a big part of the site, which allows you to link to descriptions of tools needed for a project, detailed sub-processes, and get information about the materials you'll need and use for a project. You might think of it as
Flickr with an added storytelling aspect, for the purpose of DIY projects. I don't know if it will have the same mass appeal to become 'this year's Flickr', but I'm sure it will soon gather a big following. Projects already available include descriptions of how to build an
Air Powered Bicylce, a
disco helmet, and a
home made fart machine (you know you want one!).
The design community has been slowly catching on to the idea of Open Soure, and maybe wondering how it could be used to the benefit of the design world (and the rest of the world of course). I've seen a couple sites recently that attempt this. One is
ThriftDeluxe, a site that provides non-commercial do-it-yourself projects, based in London with projects uploaded by a select group of designers. It's been around for a couple years now, but to be the biggest downside to it is that it is infrequently updated, and the fact that projects only come from a select group. It's open yes, but lacks the communal aspect that drives the creativity of a true open source movement. Another is
Ronen Kadushin's site. Ronen is a designer that has dedicated a part of his site, called
Open Design, to designs that are under a
Creative Commons license, so they are free to use by most DIY'ers. But again, it suffers from the same issues as Thriftdeluxe, in that the designs come from one (or a select group) of designers, rather than being a project of the entire design community at large. As well, most of Ronen's projects require that the whoever wants to use his designs have access to a laser-cuter, which is probably still a rare thing for most. iFabricate.com solves a lot of these issues, and though it wasn't built for 'Designers', it is perfect for those designers that like to spend their weekends building furniture for their home, and designers that like to share their ideas but don't care so much about a profit. Though most of the projects currently on the site aren't 'design' or fashion projects, there is no reason why they couldn't be.
With the iFabricate presentation, the Hack Sci-Fi Features in to your car presentation, the Neil Gershenfeld talk, and the Make reception, a clearly recurring theme throughout eTech was that this year will be a big one for physical hacking, otherwise known as Do-It-Yourself. I'm really excited to see some of the results throughout the year.
Finally really done this time
After a couple weeks of picking at it here and there, my new site is (for the most part) done. It seems to work in all the different browsers now without any problems. Now I can concentrate on actually putting up some posts and stop talking about the site itself.
I guess I could also start a rebuild of
my portfolio site, but there's probably better uses of my time right now...like getting out and enjoying the California sun maybe?
I was at the
O'Reilly eTech conference this past week in San Diego. I'll have a post or two about that soon.
Already some issues
Looks like the sidebar isn't quite aligning properly in Firefox and Netscape, and the formatting is
horribly wrong a mess in Internet Explorer. I'm not sure whats causing that, but i'll have to fix it later; it's time for bed here.
Update, March 09 2005: I don't have a lot of time this week to work out the bugs that are messing up the layout in IE, so I've gone back to a Blogger template for a couple days. I should have everything worked out by Saturday.
And done...
After a long break from the web, I'm finally back online with a new site. As you can see from the last post, pulled from my old site, it's been a while. "More to come soon" never did, and I apologize. The ellipsis in that post were followed by several busy months whereby fixing up my website was put on hold.
A quick summary of my life since my departure from the web: I did indeed present (and pass!) my Master's Thesis at the end of May 2004. The
Umeå Institute of Design grad show opened in Umeå soon after, and the Stockholm show opened a couple weeks after that. My parents came out to Sweden for my grad, and just before the Stockholm show we took a trip to Helsinki, Tallin, and Copenhagen. In mid-June I moved down to Munich with my girlfriend, and for the first time that I can remember, I took most of the summer off. Most of that time was spent reading, sleeping, travelling around Bavaria (and a bit of Austria), and preparing to move to the U.S. Near the end of August, I headed back to Umeå to pack up the rest of my things, then moved back to North America. I've been living and working in the Los Angeles area ever since. I've been over to Europe a few times this fall and winter, and have been lucky to be able to meet up with many of my Umeå friends now scattered around Scandinavia.
My old portfolio site is still up, but it served its purpose and it was time to do something new with selfconstruct. It's mostly done, but I'll continue to tweak it and add to it in the coming days, then get back to posting as often as I can. Like my old site, you can expect to find posts here related to everything interaction & industrial design related, emerging technologies, the internet, fashion, business, art, business, culture, and anything else that happens to be on my mind. Unlike my old site, this
should will be updated more frequently (Flash does not a good blogging environment make). Please feel free to post any comments to let me know if you like the new look, have any questions, or just to say hi.
I've left the very last post from my old side on here to have somewhere to start off, but if you're looking for anything from my old site, again, you can find it
here.It's good to be back.
