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Posts Tagged ‘Feed-Back’

When Siri met Siri…

Like with pets and babies, we seem to like it when devices mimic our behaviour and social patterns. In the process of domesticating technology, we teach products to behave like ourselves. But we all know that almost every learning process starts with copying…

Earlier this year we have written about Siri, a relatively new feature in Apples iOS that allows users to control their iPhones with their voices in a quite convincing way. Especially the ‘intelligent’ answers Siri gave to questions stole many users hearts.
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Hendrik-Jan Grievink
on 08/12/11 Comments »
Tags
- Anthropomorphobia | Feed-Back | Suburban Utopia | Toys-are-Us | Wild-systems
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Afterlife for Atheists

Where religions promise their believers a life after death and cryonics also needs a kind of belief in future technological development, designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau are working on a project providing reassurance on life after death.

After death the human body is assimilated back to its basic building blocks: the elements. The Afterlife concept intervenes in this process by saving the energy that is released during the assimilation. This energy is contained in an ordinary dry cell battery which can be used according to the last wishes of the deceased.

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Lisa van der Voort
on 18/11/11 Comments »
Tags
- Anthropomorphobia | Design-for-debate | Feed-Back
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Unboxing Artificial Intelligence

Did you know that phones were once used for calling up our (human) friends? Researching the beginning of it all, we came accross demo video’s on the cloud called “internet” where people showed off how they tricked the first Siri-AI-devices into saying epic things like: “I don’t do knock knock jokes”. But the reason why this technology took such a leap, has everything to do with human “features” like personality, compassion and trust. From that moment in time, objects made from steel and glass have become our soulmates… our friends… our personal assistents… our pets… our slaves… Or were we theirs? Were we the ones being tricked?

Yes. We came to trust them because they were made to our image. They talked like our mothers and shared our brains and limbs. They could sense it if we were lonely and then played us music or said nice words. They tucked us in at night and woke us up the next morning.
Knock, knock! Species of the world, you are not alone. Matter is alive and there is plenty out there.
Arnoud van den Heuvel
on 12/10/11 Comments »
Tags
- Anthropomorphobia | Artificial Intelligence | Feed-Back | Humane-Technology | Made-to-debate
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So that’s where blackberries come from

Peculiar image of the week, by Arnoud van den Heuvel.

Related: Children’s dictionary dumps ‘nature’ words, Crackberry addicts are suing their employers, handset gets taken to the grave.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 09/10/11 Comments »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Feed-Back | Officegarden | Symbolic-Overdrive
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Brainscan App

By hooking up a commercially available EEG headset to a Nokia N900 smartphone, Jakob Eg Larsen and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby have created a portable system to monitor neural activity of the brain. Wearing the headset and booting up an accompanying app, creates a simplified 3D model of the brain that lights up as brainwaves are detected. The brain-image can be rotated by swiping the screen. Furthermore, the app can connect to a remote server for more intensive data-processing, and then display the results on the cellphone. The system might assist people with conditions such as epilepsy, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and addiction. One small step for science, but a giant leap for health care. Source: newscientist.com
Arnoud van den Heuvel
on 17/09/11 2 Comments »
Tags
- Calm-technology | Digital-Presence | Feed-Back | Humane-Technology | On-the-Road | virtual-for-real
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<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/14221747">http://www.vimeo.com/14221747</a>
The Majestic Plastic Bag

Behold the heroic journey of one of the most illustrious creatures on our planet.

Created by the good people of Healthebay.org.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 10/09/11 3 Comments »
Tags
- Feed-Back | manufactured-landscapes | Plastic Planet
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Humane Technology #4: Resonate with human senses

Principle number four: Humane technology should resonate with the human senses, rather than numbing them.

If you’re an office worker or a video game fanatic, you may spend most of your waking hours staring at a screen, and not tasting, touching, or smelling much of anything. How much more engaging would the constructed environment be if we had squishy computers or scented information? This is the basis of information decoration, which attempts to expand the digital interface beyond the flat screen of a computer or cell phone.

Humane technology recognizes that humans are sensory organisms, made to live in a rich three-dimensional environment. Neurologists have counted between 9 and 20 difference human senses. It’s time we engage more than just the ones required to operate a computer. That blaring 7 AM alarm may be the norm, but it feels better to be awoken by the gradual glow of a sunrise-style lamp or pillow.

Photo
Allison Guy
on 17/05/11 Comments »
Tags
- Calm-technology | Feed-Back | Humane-Technology | Sentient Spaces | Technorhetoric
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Remote kissing device

Nobuhiru Takahashi, student at the Kajimoto Laboratory of the University of Electro-Communications in Chofu City, Tokyo, invented this Internet French kissing device. When a bended straw is touched with the tongue on one end, the motion-parameters will be transferred to a similar device on the other. This invention taps a new market; the storing and trading of famous-idol-kissing-data. Takahashi, notes that “the elements of a kiss include the sense of taste, the manner of breathing, and the moistness of the tongue”. With tongue movement down, these properties have his attention now (let’s hope for Takahashi he gets to do some actual research). The device could also palliate more fundamental issues: “love miles” for instance (the miles we must travel out to people we care about).

Though the technique is not as proficient as f.e. robotic surgery; remote kissing could herald a new compassion-through-internet era!
No harm done yet… Lady Gaga is the best coffee-stirrer I know.
Arnoud van den Heuvel
on 04/05/11 Comments »
Tags
- Calm-technology | Digital-Presence | Feed-Back | Humane-Technology | Intimate Technology | Manufactured-Bodies | Physical-computing | virtual-for-real
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Jewels from the Ocean

Designer and former fashion model Barbara de Vries was cleaning plastic litter off her favorite beach in the Bahamas, when she noticed the plastic fragments were all uniquely tinted and molded after years tumbling in the ocean. The beauty of the litter inspired her to create a jewelery collection. ~~Diamonds~~ plastics are forever!

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 06/04/11 Comments »
Tags
- Designed-by-Evolution | Feed-Back | manufactured-landscapes | Plastic-Fantastic
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Exploring the Oceans of Plastic

Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he’s drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 18/02/11 Comments »
Tags
- Feed-Back | manufactured-landscapes | Plastic Planet | Wild-systems
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Not So Horseless Carriage

Sometimes next nature breaks down and things fall back on an older nature. Luckily, this guy still had a horse around. Peculiar image of the week.

Via Kottke.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 05/01/11 1 Comment »
Tags
- Feed-Back | Made-to-debate | On-the-Road | Remediation
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Medicinal All-Salt

Do you suffer from small health inconveniences and do you like to put salt on your morning egg? Why not combine the two? Medicinal All-Salt provides a low-dosage solution for things like headaches, depression and low libido. You refuse to pay insane amounts for birth control pills? Just season your dinner with the hand-harvested and sun dried salt. Or make it yourself for that matter. Via the site of All-Salt you can find a small guide that will help you to create your own medicinal salt out of the waste-water of your local water treatment plant.

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Michael Kluver
on 01/11/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Feed-Back | Hypernature | manufactured-landscapes | Suburban Utopia
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Are Mushrooms the New Plastic?

Mushroom based plastics? Designer Eben Bayer must have eaten too much of the wondrous chanterelles perhaps? No seriously, the man is turning his vision into a reality with an utterly–innovative–fungus–grown–plastics–packaging–material.

Welcome in the 21th century folks! Yet we couldn’t help noticing that Eben in his TED talk presents a very traditional, static idea of nature. Amazing that a guy who grows plastics from mushrooms gives a talk so deprived of next nature thinking (rather than seeing nature as static, we should perceive it as a dynamic force that changes along with us).

Hence, we can’t help but wonder what Eben thinks of the bugs that eat plastic – rest a sure, we applaud him nonetheless for his innovative mushroom material.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 13/10/10 Comments »
Tags
- Designed-by-Evolution | Feed-Back | Officegarden | Plastic Planet
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Meet the Cellphone that drinks Coke

Chinese designer Daizi Zheng created a conceptual mobile phone for Nokia that could be powered by cola. The idea is the phone could run on a battery that uses enzymes to generate electricity from carbohydrates.

A bio battery is used instead of the traditional battery to create a presumably pollution free environment. Unfortunately the idea bounces back in your face once you calculate the energy required to produce a can of cola. But there is hope, as it won’t require ‘the real thing‘ to charge your phone. It will also charge on sugar water.

Besides the benefit of having a fully biodegradability battery, the notion of having your electronic appliances run on the same energy sources as yourself is stimulating, to say the least.

Via Dezeen.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 22/09/10 Comments »
Tags
- Feed-Back | Food Technology
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The Buttons

Nowadays buttons are completely mundane and natural objects in our environment. You find them on phones, alarm clocks, keyboards, elevators, dishwashers and of course on the computer screen. You press buttons countless times throughout your day, but hardly think of them consciously.

The little symbols of control are so omnipresent, it is difficult to imagine that buttons did not always exist. Certainly people in the stone age did not press them – taken that nipples do not count as buttons – but we don’t know exactly when we started pushing buttons and who invented them.

Apparently buttons were unknown until the early 20th Century, with the possible exception of valves on wind instruments. When small controls were needed, for example on camera shutters, they were usually styled after latches or triggers.

<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/5313148">http://www.vimeo.com/5313148</a>Recent RCA graduate Nitipak Samsen, took it upon himself to re-investigate and re-design the concept of the button altogether, moving from the button as a symbol of control, an extension of the human desire to harness the planet, to inter-control.

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 03/09/10 3 Comments »
Tags
- Design-for-debate | Feed-Back | Officegarden | Sentient Spaces | Technorhetoric
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Twitwee Clock

Haroon Baig from Germany has figured out a way to key up the amount of 50+ Twitter addicts.

This progressive nostalgic cuckoo device displays new tweets from any twitter stream or search on the built-in display, “accompanied by the charming yet obtrusive call of a mechanical cuckoo popping out of the clock”.
<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/10394638">http://www.vimeo.com/10394638</a>
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Arnoud van den Heuvel
on 17/08/10 Comments »
Tags
- Boomeranged Metaphors | Feed-Back | Information Decoration | Manufactured Animals | Progressive Nostalgia | virtual-for-real
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Save the Coral: Dump a Tank

Our peculiar image of the week learns us that what is good for the environment doesn’t always look good for the environment.

The adieu of this disused tank into the Gulf of Thailand last week looks like a blatantly disgraceful act of dumping waste. Yet all was done in the name of ecology. Trucks and 25 old Army tanks were dropped into the ocean to form artificial corals hoped to improve the ecosystem’s fish stocks.

Now lets hope some future archeologist that might find the tanks won’t mistake the site for an ancient war zone flooded by the trenches of global warming.

Via the Mirror.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 13/08/10 5 Comments »
Tags
- Feed-Back | Green Blues | manufactured-landscapes
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Urban Mining – Gold digging in the Sewers

Resource-poor Japan discovered a new source of mineral wealth: sewage sludge. In its first month of operation, a sewage plant in Japan’s Nagano prefecture has mined 5 million yen ($56,000) worth of gold from sludge.

Sewage plant operator Nagano Prefecture Suwa Construction Office announced that approximately four pounds of gold can be mined from each ton of molten fly ash generated when incinerating sludge at its facility in the town of Suwa. That is better than the 20 to 40 grams of golden metal retrieved from each ton of ore at Japan’s Hishikare mine, according to Reuters.

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 22/07/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Feed-Back | manufactured-landscapes
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