72 Hour Urban Action is the world’s first real-time architecture competition, where 10 international teams have 3 days and 3 nights to design and build projects in public space in response to local needs.
The teams design, build, sleep and party on site to generate interventions in public space within an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space. 72 Hour Urban Action invites professionals and residents to become active agents of change, from the bottom-up, and to leave a lasting impact on the urban landscape.
WHAT IS URBAN ACTION?
72 Hour Urban Action is an upcoming voice in the global movement of participatory tactical urbanism, or as we like to call it, Urban Action.
Urban Action is a civic design practice that involves residents, decision makers and professionals. It harnesses creative thinking and existing resources within a community to rapidly make places. Through the power of temporality and experimentation, it encourages participation and a lasting change of perception. Through an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space, Urban Action sets the imagination free to allow for new possibilities and players in public space.
In July 2012, 72 Hour Urban Action is coming to Stuttgart to work together with local cultural activists. The world’s 1st real-time architecture competition will be the kick-off of a series of major urban interventions. All around the site of the largest urban redevelopment in Europe – Stuttgart 21 – the center of a 30 year heated public debate.
The Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type on its own, as well as detect what you type on it. By reading what it types to you and responding, it can be used interactively to play a game or participate in a story (in this case, Zork).
Antonio De Rosa’s Instagram Socialmatic Project concept.
In the age of cell phones and other mobile devices with network and photographic capabilities, the art of taking photographs has become as daily a process as brushing one’s teeth or walking to work or school. In a sense, the art of photography has been lost in the phrase “everything that can be made, can be made social.” The ubiquity of the camera, assuming the form and shape of objects that we carry with us daily, has turned the act of taking a photo into an everyday duty rather than an artistic rendering. In addition, the advent of 80% of a global population carrying around a video and still image recording device with them daily has led to an overabundance of information and media gathering.
Responding to the challenge of transforming the traditional act of photography into something new that utilizes the strengths of the internet, artists are creating projects that not only question what it means to take a picture, but also to share and collaborate on the meaning of photography as it’s evolving in the world of Web 2.0. Within the context of crowdsourcing, two projects take advantage of the multitudes of human thought and expression circulating through the internet.
In this talk, Dries Buytaert (original creator and project lead of Drupal) shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years. Today, the Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects in the world, powering 1 out of 50 websites in the world. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Volunteer networks and communities exist in many shapes and sizes. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. For example, the first trade routes were ancient trackways which citizens later developed on their own into roads suited for wheeled vehicles in order to improve commerce. Transportation was improved for all citizens, driven by the commercial interest of some. Today, we certainly appreciate that our governments maintain the roads. However, we still see road signs stating that a particular section of a highway is kept clean and trim by volunteers — at least in some countries. When new ground needs to be broken, it’s often volunteer communities that do it. But a full-time, paid infrastructure can be necessary for the preservation and protection of what communities begin. In this presentation, Dries wants to brainstorm about how large communities evolve and how to sustain them over time.
Some questions to think about ahead of the presentation:
Do you know examples of large organizations that have grown out of volunteer communities?
Why do some communities keep growing while other communities come to a halt?
Is the commercialization of a volunteer-driven community part of a community’s natural life-cycle?
Is it inevitable that over time the operation and/or leadership of volunteer communities are transferred to paid personnel?
Tuesday, May 29, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form below
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf — a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy — appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes.
Excerpt of an article via Science Daily. Continue HERE
Drama, by Timo Kahlen, is generated as the viewer plays and re-plays the film, to create individual and always different endings based on chance outcomes of the film’s miniature drama, a struggle of life and death, always different, again and again.
Molleindustria aims to reappropriate video games as a popular form of mass communication. Our objective is to investigate the persuasive potentials of the medium by subverting mainstream video gaming clichè (and possibly have fun in the process).
According to founder Paolo Pedercini:
We can no longer consider videogaming as a marginal element of our everyday lives. In recent years, the turnover of the videogame industry has exceeded that of cinema, and there are a growing number of adult and female players. There are more frequent overlaps with other media: there are videogames for advertisements (advergames), for educational purposes and for electoral propaganda. space invadersHow did videogames become such a central element of the mediascape? During the second half of the nineties, major entertainment corporations extended their activities in this sector and extinguished or absorbed small producers.
Now videogames are an integral part of the global cultural industry, and they are in a strategic position in the ongoing processes of media convergence. These developments inhibit the political and artistic emancipation of this medium: every code line is written for the profit of a big corporation.
According to the spoofy urbanism of Hipcescu:On the sunny shores of the Caspian, a mere four hour flight away from Western Europe, the City of a Thousand Suns awaits you. Hipcescu, a thriving 21st century metropolis, home to the world’s highest building, the iconic Hipcescu Tower (850 m).
Visible from every angle of the city, it is a monumental tribute to comrade V. Hipcescu, our Secretary-General. And while a highly efficient state-security apparatus ensures your safety at all times, you will thoroughly enjoy our eco-friendly beaches, exciting nightlife, tax-free shopping, reliable nuclear energy sources and excellent real estate investment opportunities.
A film produced by the NPL Film Unit in the 1950s explaining the principles behind the first accurate atomic clock, designed by Louis Essen and built at the National Physical Laboratory in 1955.
We are very grateful to Ray Essen, Louis Essen’s son-in-law, for unearthing this piece of NPL’s history.
GLOBE / HEDRON is a bamboo greenhouse designed to organically grow fish and vegetables on top of generic flat roofs. The design is optimized for aquaponic farming techniques: the fish’s water nourishes the plants and plants clean the water for the fish.
Using this farming technique, GLOBE / HEDRON is optimized to feed four families of four all year round.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed to be manufactured and retailed at a low cost. Easy-to-set-up units can be combined to scale up food production capacity.
Using a geodesic dome, the load of the fish tank rests on the frame of the greenhouse and is redistributed to a larger surface. Because of this design, the aquaponic farm can be housed on more roofs without any structural building adaptation. The dome structure is designed to be built with bamboo, so that it is biodegradable and organically farmed.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed by Antonio Scarponi / Conceptual Devices in collaboration with UrbanFarmers. They are fundraising the first prototype with indiegogo: help them build it.
“What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended anywhere in mid-air? ZeroN is a new tangible interface element that can be levitated and moved freely by computer in a three dimensional space. Both the computer and people can move the ZeroN simultaneously. In doing so, people and computers can physically interact with one another in 3D space.
Users are invited to place or move the ZeroN just as they can place any other objects on surfaces. Once levitated, ZeroN’s behavior can be digitally programmed. For example, users can place the sun above physical objects to cast digital shadows, or place a planet that will start revolving based on simulated physical conditions.
ZeroN can remember how it has been moved. Physical motions of people can be collected in this medium to preserve and play them back indefinitely. When the users move release the ZeroN, it continues to float and starts to move along the same path. This allows a unique, tangible record of a user’s physical presence and motion which will continue to exist even after the death of the person.”
TOUCHY, by Eric Siu, is a phenomenological social interaction experiment that focuses on the relationship of giving and receiving by literally transforming a human into a camera. Touchy, (the person wearing the device) is blind most of the time until you touch his/her skin. Once vision is given to Touchy, he/she can take photos for you. This human camera, with its unique properties, aims at healing social anxiety by creating joyful interactions.
Social Concern
It is common for humans to be separated into social bubbles, to avoid sharing social space and to connect to strangers. However, technologies like Internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. To a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the “Hikikomori” and “Otaku” cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. The Touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth.
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
The interpretation of anatomy with a mechanical vocabulary reflects strongly on the Western perception of the body.
Defining the body as a machine – where dysfunctional parts can be replaced by mechanics – speaks of how we understand life.
These objects encompass social debates about the ethics of euthanasia, the quantification of both the value and quality of life, making physical a poetic desire to conquer our own mortality.
The medical machine – whether in use or not – is an object which transcends its materiality. Designed and created to perform a single, most meaningful function, we never subject these devices to a critical investigation as industrial products within the context of material culture.
This work aims to explore the nature of these devices as objects of our times, liberated from their restrained purpose while still charged with its resonance.
Revital Cohenis a designer who develops critical objects and provocative scenarios exploring the juxtaposition of the natural with the artificial. Her work spans across various mediums and includes collaborations with scientists, bioethicists and animal breeders.
Casey Reas: This is a 2x time-lapse sequence from software that constructs images from protein relationships within a cell. The image was translated into a mural for building 76 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Cell behavior is controlled by interconnected proteins operating in a network to actively transmit instructions. These networks become dysfunctional in cancerous cells. In this image, each graphical cluster represents signals between networked proteins in a cancer cell as they change over time. Individual arcs are signals from one protein to another; the size of an arc corresponds to the magnitude of the signal. Signaling data provided by the laboratory of Professor Michael Yaffe.
Casey Reas is an artist and educator. His software, prints, and installations have has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He is a professor in the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA and the co-founder of Processing with Ben Fry.
A three-week old robot at the MIT Media Lab is weaving a cocoon-like structure with a little programming help from humans. Eventually it will be autonomous.
The Descriptive Camera, created by Matt Richardson, works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.
As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don’t yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.
Gestalten Books: Thanks to the omnipresence of computers, cell phones, gaming systems, and the internet, a broad audience has traded its past reservations against technology for an almost insatiable curiosity for all things technical. Against this background, unprecedented new tools and possibilities are opening up for the world of design. In addition to sketchbooks and computers, young designers are increasingly using programming languages, soldering irons, sensors, and microprocessors as well as 3D milling or rapid prototyping machines in their work. The innovative use of powerful hardware and software has become affordable and, most of all, much easier to use. Today, the sky is the limit when it comes to ideas for experimental media, unconventional interfaces, and interactive spatial experiences.
A Touch of Code shows how information becomes experience. The book examines how surprising personal experiences are created where virtual realms meet the real world and where dataflow confronts the human senses. It presents an international spectrum of interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of laboratory, trade show, and urban space that play with the new frontiers of perception, interaction, and staging created by current technology. These include brand and product presentations as well as thematic exhibits, architecture, art, and design.
The comprehensive spectrum of innovative spatial and interactive work in A Touch of Code reveals how technology is fundamentally changing and expanding strategies for the targeted use of architecture, art, communication, and design for the future.
Developed by international ad agency I&S BBDO for the umino seaweed shop, ‘design nori’ is a series of intricately laser-cut seaweed for rolling sushi. each sheet of five designs– ‘sakura’ (‘cherry blossoms’), ‘mizutama’ (‘water drops’), ‘asanoha’ (‘hemp’), ‘kikkou’ (‘turtle shell’), and ‘kumikkou’ (‘tortoise shell’)– is based on an element of Japanese history or symbology, meant to bring beauty, good fortune, growth, happiness, and longevity.
A rare fisheye Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 lens, which offers the “world’s most extreme wide-angle” and is worth £100,000, has gone on sale at Gray’s of Westminster in London.
First introduced in 1970 at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany, the Fisheye-Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 lens offers an angle of view of 220º making it, at the time, the “world’s most extreme wide-angle lens to cover an image area of 24x36mm.
What happens if a designer within the world of fashion encourages political activism? Otto von Busch describes a designer role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. On Friday October 24th 2008 he defends his thesis at the School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg.
Otto von Busch’s thesis, with the title ”Fashion-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion Design”, consists of a series of extensive projects from fashion which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. A role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism.
This social design practice can be called “the hacktivism of fashion”, an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship.
‘INTIMACY′ is a fashion project exploring the relation between intimacy and technology. Its high-tech garments entitled ‘Intimacy White’ and ‘Intimacy Black’ are made out of opaque smart e-foils that become increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people.
Social interactions determine the garmentsʼ level of transparency, creating a sensual play of disclosure.
INTIMACY 2.0 features Studio Roosegaardeʼs new, wearable dresses composed of leather and smart e-foils which are daringly perfect to wear on the red carpet. In response to the heartbeat of each person, INTIMACY 2.0 becomes more or less transparent.
Currently Studio Roosegaarde is selecting haute couture designers to develop the next INTIMACY 3.0 fashion line for men and women.
Specifications: 2010-2011. ʻBlackʼ and ʻWhiteʼ dresses, length 100cm, width 40 cm. Smart foils, wireless technologies, electronics, LEDs, copper and other media.
Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. See highlights from his tour of the assembly line and the Foxconn facilities and connect to his full audio reports on your public radio station and at http://www.marketplace.org. Marketplace is produced and distributed by American Public Media.
Source Credit – American Public Media’s ‘Marketplace’.
Reporter Credit – Rob Schmitz, Shanghai Bureau Chief
Reliable Internet access on the Moon, near Mars or for astronauts on a space station? How about controlling a planetary rover from a spacecraft in deep space? These are just some of the pioneering technologies that ESA is working on for future exploration missions.
What do observation or navigation satellites orbiting Earth have in common with astronauts sending images in real time from the International Space Station? They all need to send data back home. And the complexity of sharing information across space is set to grow.
In the future, rovers on Mars or inhabited bases on the Moon will be supported by orbiting satellite fleets providing data relay and navigation services. Astronauts will fly to asteroids, hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, and they’ll need to link up with other astronauts, control centres and sophisticated systems on their vessels.
All of these activities will need to be interconnected, networked and managed.
“Wifi Camera,” Sjölén, Haque, Somolai-Fischer, 2006.
Antonio De Rosa’s Instagram Socialmatic Project concept. 
Electronic Instant Camera,” 2011.
D-Fibrillator.
Holy Smoke
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