Another ashtray espousing the evils of smoking. (via Joshy R)

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Smoker’s Accoutrements
Sawaya Moroni

American Designer Philip Madden has a solution for people who have a hard time breathing in cold weather – A scarf that takes in air around you and processes it, purifies, warms and even possibly medicate it, before releasing it front of your mouth and nose for your consumption.

Possibly a good solution for rescue workers in situations where the air is full of toxins. No word whether this will ever be released as a commercial product.

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Philip Madden

This is where I would’ve written a clever thought provoking comment about the speakers while conjuring up words like funktastic or curvetastic that would’ve made you question your sexuality.

But I won’t. Sorry. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

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Curve 88

Nothing to write home here except clever use of snow metaphor – The snow table comes in two sizes and is made of white lacquered “snowflakes”.

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Swedese

Aije is a cheeky project by Tov Design where they graffiti or infect upcoming and established designers with their “aije”, a symbol of a man that once added to the existing designer object, will transform it or create an interesting fusion. i.e. The Aijes Mixes above, that covers the Philippe Starck basin mixer (pictured on the left) and create the cheeky object on the right.

Very similar in concept to the Parasite.

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Tov Design

Hotspot Bloom is a functional wearable flower that glows and changes color to indicate the signal strength of a nearby wireless network (802.11b/g) thus allowing you to immediately identify hotspots that are often overlooked, while walking through a public space.

The design is derived from the metaphor of nurturing a flower and emblematic for the growth and robustness of information that is steadily becoming more ubiquitous in our daily surroundings. The robustness of plant life and the vibrant colors of nature are simulated through full-spectrum LEDs controlled by a PIC microcontroller monitoring the location for wireless access points.

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Hotspot Bloom

The Remote Furniture by Noriyuki Fujimura is an experiment in creating new direct, tactile touch. What you have is two chairs that have a tilt sensor and a linear motor and are connected to a PC running control software.

When someone rocks one of the chairs, the sensor detects the inclination and transmits the data to the other chair where the motor will kick in and cause it to rock as well.

When exhibited in public spaces, the artwork seemed to help remove people’s shyness and triggered new funny and tactile ways to communicate. via Régine Debatty of Turbulence.

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Remote Furniture

More flexibility coming your way, this time courtesy of DuPont. They’ve created a digital printer for fabrics that promises to transform the way people make swimsuits, purses, slipcovers and curtains. All they would ahve to do is create an archive of fabric patterns and should they require a certain fabric, they could use the printer to print one to order. Saves time and money.

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Printer a revolution in Fabric Design

This makes me wish I owned a cafe because if I did, I’d be bribing Steven Blyth and Matty Sallin to install their Chit Chat installation in there. So if any of my customers were talking with each other, a speech bubble would project above their heads as they talked. The bubble would swell with the text “blah blah” as they continued to talk and the text would reflect the volume of your speech by changing size and attributes (bold, italic).

All of this would take place in Flash. A script would read the amplitude recorded and generate the proper “blah” graphic. And if one of them remained silent, they would eventually get a corresponding thought bubble.

(more…)

bOING bOING points to a funny story by SF writer Paul DiFilippo called “And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon” about “blebs” – a composite gadget made by spontaneous merging of smart house objects:

“The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses—both hardware and software—were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers.
If this “Consciousness Wavefront” had occurred in the olden days of dumb materials, blebs would hardly have been an issue. What could antique manufactured goods achieve, anchored in place as they were? But things were different today.

Most devices nowadays were made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces were interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible actuators, the better to sample the environment and accommodate their shapes and textures to their owners’ needs and desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like the paws of geckos, these MEMS surfaces could bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko could skitter across the ceiling.

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The Story