W.W. Norton & Company is the oldest and largest employee-owned publishing house in the U.S., and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with their college textbook department on a variety of incredibly inspiring projects. One of those collaborations has just been published, and is hitting campuses across the country as we write this case study.
The 8th edition of Introduction to Sociology features a series of 20 full-page information graphics designed by Kiss Me I’m Polish, covering a vast array of topics such as internet connectivity, incarceration rates, and gender empowerment. As an added bonus, a few our initial concepts for a timeline of key sociological works, ultimately led to the design of the book’s cover, the accompanying poster, and a set of promotional buttons featuring prominent sociologists. The poster and cover are, respectively, text and non-text representations of a conceptual map delineating all of the topics and sociologists featured in the textbook.
Social conventions are defined by time and success. Every day, we are pressured to complete many different tasks. This daily rhythm ignores our need to sleep, and yet it is sleep that makes this rhythm possible. We need to pay closer attention to sleep.
By filling the alarm clock with water, we focus our attention on the duration of sleep. The task itself becomes a ritual which positively influences our rest. As opposed to the incessant ticking sound of a regular clock, here time passes silently and purely mechanically. As the drops of water fall, the glass bowl becomes lighter and finally lets the hammer fall. As the tone bounces between the singing bowls, we are gently awakened and a new day begins.
Time is something hard to grasp, but sleep is an experience.
‘Overade’ is a foldable urban bike helmet, designed by Patrick Jouffret of french design studio agency 360 in collaboration with engineer Philippe Arrouart. The device provides as much protection as a standard bicycle helmet but folds up to a compact, easily transportable size when not in use. Small enough to slip into a purse or backpack, the design aims to address the low percentage of urban bicyclists who utilize helmets. First prototyped in 2010, ‘Overade’ is expected to enter commercial production within 2012.
Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Photo Copyright by KMel Robotics.
Japanese based designer Noriyuki Otsuka recently completed the design of a all white shop with a mesh portal in the upcoming neighborhood of Umeda in Osaka, Japan. The design of LE CIEL BLEU is based on his design philosophy “Nothing is everything,” then Otsuka brought the design to life with his other philosophy “Mixtures of transparency.”
With these two concepts in mind, Otsuka and his team built a 2992 sq.ft. space using an array of white and cream hues with a large architectural element with in the space. We caught up with the architect who explained that the “interior space was a cylinder made with a structurally self-supporting mesh.” He noted that “because of the size of the feature I wanted to avoid integrating it too much with the surrounding space, so deliberately aligned it off center from the axis of the building.” By using this layout, the architectural portal became a strong design feature in the shop.
The floor was hand painted with original gold paint, while the walls and ceiling were finished in an acrylic emulsion paint.
Privately commissioned to create a gift for an architect, Daniel Weil created a one-of-a-kind clock that is both simple and complex. Reducing objects to their component parts has long fascinated Weil. The Radio in a Bag he created for his degree show at the Royal College of Art three decades ago is an icon of 20th century industrial design. This clock is the latest demonstration of his interest in investigating not just how objects look, but how they work.
The Clock for an Astronomer follows Clock for an Architect and Clock for an Acrobat as part of the “Matter of Time” series of unique timepieces designed by Pentagram’s Daniel Weil.
“The sun is the celestial time setter, and timekeeping is its terrestrial reflection,” says Daniel Weil.
Understanding where technology is heading is more than guesswork. Looking at emerging trends and research, one can predict and draw conclusions about how the technological sphere is developing, and which technologies should become mainstream in the coming years.
Envisioning technology is meant to facilitate these observations by taking a step back and seeing the wider context. By speculating about what lies beyond the horizon we can make better decisions of what to create today. Envisioning technology is a work in progress by London-based technologist/designer Michell Zappa.
The installation Seeing with Eyes Closed concerns the visual experience of flowing images induced by stroboscopic light behind closed eyes. Being aware that the seen images have no foundation in external reality, one experiences them as hallucinatory. This ‘conscious quasi-hallucinating’ challenges our sense of the real in its alternation and its permeability with the imaginary. Each person’s experience differs from that of others, and each ascribes different dimensions to the perceived space in constant transformation. Communicating the content of this ephemeral flux of unpredictable percepts stretches the limits of acquiring a subjective report to extremes, and challenges the scientific aspiration to precisely measure the timing of conscious phenomena.
With the unpredictability of visual responses to light stimuli, participation in the art installation raises the question of subjectivity and authorship. The final “work” happens in our body and depends on our experience as well as on the boundary between the public and intimate space.
Video documentation of Seeing with eyes closed, 2011
Edit: Luka Goreta, Dominik Markušić
Sound: Mika Vainio “Radio”
Exhibition opening and talk: 14/02/2012 at 19.00 h
Art and Neuroscience in dialogue
Invited speakers: artist Ivana Franke, neuroscientist Ida Momennejad, neurosurgeon Ulrich-Wilhelm Thomale
Moderator: curator Sunčica Ostoić
The talk will be in English.
Welcome to Designing Civic Encounter an initiative by ArtTerritories, engaging in existing and potential forms of urban development and public culture in Palestine. The event which took place between July 21-24, 2011, unfolded through an URBAN BUS TOUR traversing urban locations within and around Ramallah city enabling debates and conversations at different stations, a two-day SYMPOSIUM on questions of urban transformations in Palestinian and Arab cities, and a full day WORKSHOP with visionary social architect Teddy Cruz.
Designing Civic Encounter opened a forum in the real for the inquiry and discussion of the public urban experience under the current trends in planning, financing and building practices. Attracting an active local and international roster of architects, artists, educators, environmentalists, community activists and politicians, this online publication compiles video documentations generated from the events and also features art works and newly commissioned texts and photographs.
You can navigate the web publication through the names of the contributors listed on the right hand column and the listed summaries on the left hand column.
Cooking is a field that has in recent years seen a shift from the artistic to the scientific. While there are certainly still subjective and somewhat impenetrable qualities to one’s cuisine — de gustibus non est disputandum — there is an increasing rigor in the kitchen. From molecular gastronomy to Modernist Cuisine, there is a rapid growth in the science of cooking.
And mathematics is also becoming part of this. For example, Michael Ruhlman has explored how certain ingredient ratios can allow one to be more creative while cooking. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we can go further, and even use a bit of network science, when it comes to thinking about food.
Yong-Yeol Ahn and his colleagues, in a recent paper titled Flavor network and the principles of food pairing, explored the components of cooking ingredients in different regional cuisines. In doing so, they were able to rigorously examine a recent claim: the food pairing hypothesis. The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that foods that go best together contain similar molecular components. While this sounds elegant, Ahn and his collaborators set out to determine whether or not this is true.
Written by Samuel Arbesman at Wired. Continue HERE
To consider compiling an encyclopedia (of any kind) in post-Wikipedia times is an exercise in emotional withdrawal.
From a position of bewilderment and confusion we choose to act by producing and employing another tool from the land of the naive and outdated, represented by encyclopedic work, devoid of all logic and meaning considering current cultural conditions and speed. What the first edition Dubai graphic and visual encyclopedia presents is a reality that acts as a counterpoint to all the excess of attempts to decipher and understand Dubai. Attempts that are mostly unable to uncover items that shed light on the question ‘What’s it all about’?
Organizing scanning devices for the entire physical reality and processing information in much the same way as the early explorers did in order to reach unknown lands. The encyclopedia will be updated periodically so as to provide an authentic (temporal) guide and a database for Dubai and its times. With the suspicion that perhaps behind all this there’s a new grammar, we also need to develop new dictionaries. Brusselsprout
A Study on Pseudo-Scientific Expressions of Metaphysical Awareness
Human beings have acknowledged mental world for a long time, that is, ‘metaphysical awareness’, and endeavored to make it attainable. The purposes of this study are to examine how invisible and abstract figures that people can feel in their daily routine are expressed as art particularly in drawings and how I illustrated them in my drawings.
With a historical consideration of metaphysical expressions in drawings, the research aims at finding that its subjects have been an incantation, religion, eternity, rank, divinity, subjective emotion, and abstract from the primitive age to the present, and proving the metaphysical expressions of mine by pseudo-scientific method on the basis of the previous metaphysics. However, the desire to scientifically express metaphysical awareness eventually becomes mock science at the scientific point of view. This is rather the drawing combined with individual and scientific theories. It looks very dry and scientific but its inner world exceptionally contains author’s own emotional and footloose imagination. Mental world that cannot be scientifically demonstrated is ultimately proved as pseudo-scientific way combined with irrational opinions, and its pseudo-scientific evidence makes another drawings. The collision derived from science and art forms a different dimensional metaphysical abstract drawing. — Minjeong An
‘Bufalino’ by German industrial designer Cornelius Comanns is a small camper which is equipped to meet the basic needs of one person. The concept behind the project is to offer absolute flexibility during periods of travel. The minimalist construction is based on the existing Piaggio APE 50 three wheeled light transport vehicle; a model chosen for its economic and fuel efficient benefits. however, the more complex structural components such as the frame, the chassis, and engine are derived from the original Piaggio model.
For “10,000 Pixels”, artists were asked to create three artworks using a 10,000-pixel “allowance”. The extremely low resolution becomes an aesthetic and conceptual challenge, resulting in ultra-low-resolution photographs, carefully crafted digital abstractions, blocky representations of physical objects similar to early Atari and NES sprites, or other unexpected solutions.
The Aesthetics of Low-Res
10,000 Pixels is about the creative strategies that emerge from limitations. For this exhibition, artists were given an “allowance” of 10,000 pixels and asked to create three images using only those pixels. The results range from tiny geometric forms, hotdogs/shit, tiny animations, and reminiscences of NES graphics and the early web.
We experience digital images in a kind of bracketed time. Current technologies look clean and crisp, whereas images from a few years ago seem inadequate and embarrassing. When looking at a video I made only a few years ago, I noticed the huge differences in quality between the older piece and more recent projects made in HD. Yet as a two-dimensional surface, even a seemingly low-resolution image contains a gigantic amount of information. A crummy YouTube video might have had 320×240 pixels, but even such an unacceptably low-resolution image contains 76,800 pixels [1]. The works in this exhibition explore the limitation of resolutions that are several orders of magnitude lower, having more to do with historical influences than the promise of 4k projectors.
Art Micro Patronage is an experimental online exhibition space enabling you to view and support artwork that is ideally experienced on the internet. Built on the generosity of people like you, AMP is a vehicle for a new generation of art patrons, who are willing to associate their appreciation of great work with actual dollar amounts, no matter how small.
Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.
Each cubelet in the kit has different equipment on board and a different default behavior. There are Sense Blocks that act like our eyes and ears, Action blocks, and Think blocks. Just like with people, the senses are the inputs to the system.
Designed by Bruno Zamborlin. Mogees is a project that uses microphones to turn any surface into an interactive board, which associates different gestures with different sounds. This means that desktop drummers could transform their finger taps and hand slaps into the sound of a marimba or xylophone.
Users plug any contact microphone onto a surface — be it a tree, a cupboard, a piece of glass or even a balloon. They can then record several different types of touch using their hands or any objects that cause a sound — so one sound could be a hand slap, another could be a finger tap and another could be hitting the surface with a drumstick. Users can train the system to detect new types of touch recording them just once.
The different gestures can then be associated with different sounds. Then when the user wants to perform, the Mogees software will recognize which of these types of touch is closest to the one that the user is doing and then enable the corresponding sound engine or synthesizer. The tone of the synthesized sound is influenced by the actual sound picked up on the microphone. So you could use the same gesture — for example a tap — in different places on the surface and it would create the sound in a different key.
Mogees currently uses two audio synthesis techniques — the first is physical modelling, which consists of generating the sound by simulating the propagation of the sound wave through different physical materials such as strings, membranes, or tubes using a piece of software called Modalys. The second technique is mosaicing, where the user loads a sound folder and then the audio coming form the contact microphone is analyzed and the software looks for the closest segment within the sound folder. So if a sound folder of voices is loaded, touching the surface gently would provoke a whispering while scratching it will cause a sound similar to screaming voices.
The idea of using contact microphones comes from the desire to turn ordinary objects into percussive instruments. The goal is to allow musicians and performers to take full advantage of electronic music without losing the feeling of touching a real surface.
Computerized sleeves may soon allow manufacturing bosses to monitor and record workers’ moves and mine them for efficiency data.
The sleeves are just prototypes for now, but the devices are intended to replace stopwatch-wielding time lords hovering around employees to assess their efficiency.
Motion-capture systems (such as those used to animate computer-generated movie characters) might allow Big Brother monitoring on par with the sleeves, but such systems require special computing, expensive video cameras and other impractical elements. So a pair of wearable, breathable electronic sleeves may become the ultimate micromanaging tool.
“The present stopwatch method only allows a process organizer to time five individuals simultaneously, depending on the situation,” said research manager Martin Woitag of the Fraunhofer Institute in a press release. “Our solution makes it possible to record time simultaneously, even at several workplaces, without requiring additional labor.”
Each sleeve has a matchbox-sized sensor in the hand, forearm and upper arm. As an industrial worker goes through the motions of assembling something like a circuit board, the sensors record body-part acceleration, angular velocities and positions, and send them to a computer. Special software then combines the data to assess common movements such as reaching forward and backward, grasping objects and releasing them.
By logging data over several days, the thinking goes, employees will forget they’re wearing Big Brother on their arms and provide a truer reading on their work efficiency.
“The stress factor for employees is extremely high and they might not execute their jobs at their usual speed. For companies, this requires quite a lot of work from staff and thus incurs high costs,” according to the press release.
Although companies may soon have a new tool to never cut their employees some slack, the sleeves’ data could, on the bright side, be used to assess and improve workplace ergonomics.
Text by Dave Mosher. Image: Lintje GbR/Fraunhofer Institute. Via WIRED
Wearable displays have been used to make a high-tech game of tag, and some have been made into tattoos. One tinkerer in Arizona decided to make one that could be worn as a jacket and show his favorite characters from The Simpsons.
David Forbes, an electrical engineer by trade, wanted to build something really cool to wear at the Burning Man festival. So he re-purposed a relatively simple flexible circuit board covered with LEDs. He made the first with 30 rows of four LEDs each and then contracted a manufacturer to build 175 more of them. He attached them to an old coat and was able to build a display with a 160 x 120 resolution, which he notes on his blog is exactly
Part of the set-up is the same kind of chip used to scale down the images for security cameras, and another is the same type of chip used to control the big LED signs used for advertisements. Adding a small set of circuits that convert the video output of the iPod to the smaller resolution, he was able to put together his wearable display.
The only down side seems to be getting through airports. Forbes also noted that he wasn’t able to create a pair of pants, as the curves over the thighs proved complicated. But he has designed vests.
If you want a coat like this it will be expensive, largely due to the cost of the LEDs. For $39,995 Forbes will make you one that is a full wrap-around display; a front-only will set you back $24,995. Wait time is about four months.
Besides creating a walking billboard one idea is to attach a camera that transmits a picture of the scene on one side of the wearer, creating a kind of optical camouflage. On the other hand, it could be great dance club wear — this might be a big seller among trance music and Daft Punk fans. Text by Jesse Emspak. Via Discovery News
The list of Japanese municipal flags lists the flags of municipalities of Japan. Most municipalities of Japan have unique flags. Like prefectural flags, most of them are with a bicolor geometric highly stylized symbol (mon), often incorporating Japanese characters (kanji, hiragana, katakana, or Latin alphabets). Via Wiki. See more flags and where they actually belong to HERE
UC San Diego: In an example of life imitating art, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego have created a living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs.
Their achievement, detailed in this week’s advance online issue of the journal Nature, involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the biological clocks of the bacteria, synchronizing the clocks of the thousands of bacteria within a colony, then synchronizing thousands of the blinking bacterial colonies to glow on and off in unison.
A little bit of art with a lot more bioengineering, the flashing bacterial signs are not only a visual display of how researchers in the new field of synthetic biology can engineer living cells like machines, but will likely lead to some real-life applications. Continue HERE
Recommendation: Mute the video above and play the track below. Satory in Atlantis by Cory Allen. Released on Test Tube
Zen Magnets are small but curiously strong rare earth super-magnets, 5mm in diameter. How powerful? 8 Times more powerful than the ceramic magnets driving your speakers. 30 Times more powerful than the average fridge magnet.
Pull them into a chain, fold them into a fabric, and meld them into limitless shapes: both abstract and geometric, flat or 3D. Use them when you need to massage your mind, practice your patience, relieve some boredom or alleviate some stress.
Head feeling a bit dull? Maybe your brain just needs to get up and stretch a bit. You know, give it some exercise, get the blood flowing; make that gray matter in your skull stronger, faster. If allowed, Zen magnets can be a great workout for both hemispheres of your brain: The left brain – directing the right hand – that is responsible for logic, math and language. The right brain – controlling the left hand – that is responsible for spatial abilities, creativity and visualization. With total creative control, Zen magnets are more than the average puzzle advent, they are an enjoyable means to actual mental development.
ZIP codes have been around for less than fifty years. In addition to allowing future historians to ascertain that the television show “Beverly Hills 90210″ must have been created no earlier than 1963, ZIP codes have become part of our culture, organizing our locations and determining the flow of mail.
But ZIP codes are not created randomly. There is an order and a structure to this mail system. Let’s use this nearly-fifty-year anniversary as an opportunity to examine the quantitative aspects of ZIP codes.
One quick way to look at ZIP codes is by seeing how each part of a ZIP code defines a part of our country. Ben Fry, of Fathom, created a simple visualization called zipdecode to do just this. As you type each successive digit of a ZIP code and see what regions of the United States it describes. For example, if you’re typing in 64110 (Kansas City), you can see what parts of the United States begin with ‘6’.
Marta Bakowski: This self-initiated project comes from a primary research on “Emotional Design” or the emotional relationships we hold with objects. My main focus was on the power of movement and how it can affect our mood or perception of things when applied to an object.
Employing inherently playful materials such as springs, feathers, motors and gears, I created a series of small abstract, often geometrical constructions that I animated with a distinct rhythm and endearing characteristics, almost bringing each ‘creature’ to life.
This series of experiments resulted in a collection of colorful mechanical wooden toys, desirable to children and adults alike, which prove that fantasy is not necessarily a “stage one grows out of”.
This video is part of a research about movement. In this three dimensional brainstorming, each object is animated with a distinct rhythm and endearing characteristics which provide each ‘creature’ with a different personality.
Alex McLeod constructs hyperrealistic 3D environments filled with crystalline mountains, fiery lakes, and rotund clouds, all rendered in a sickly sweet and gooey candy-colored palette. Recalling the wide-open vistas of Romantic landscape painting while at the same time staging otherworldly dystopias, McLeod’s CGI prints act as hybrid spaces that imply an almost infinite recombination of the past and present, the real and virtual. Beneath their seductively polished surfaces, of glimmering fortresses and floating geometric abstractions, lies a haunting stillness that comes forth in the aftermath of cataclysmic events. The cause of destruction remains unknown in these depopulated spaces -there are no people in these images, however much human traces remain in the rickety railways and empty fortresses.
And yet, from the twilight of devastation shown in these strange dioramas lies possibilities for hope and rebirth in our own digital milieu through the artist’s new approaches to concepts as varied as ecological responsibility and the shared intersections between photography and painting. Text taken from his website
Rendering of the Cloud during day and Close-up of the Cloud (Courtesy MVRDV)
Archpaper: Urban design historian Grahame Shane weighs in on the controversial project tracing MVRDV’s explosive imagery to its source in research.
When Ole Scheeren departed from OMA Beijing with the MahaNakhon Bangkok tower to found his own office in 2010, he had the idea to connect tower and urban village, marking a key moment in a very Dutch delirium that moved beyond OMA’s CCTV tower. In the Bangkok tower the developer’s website claims this skyscraper “melds with the city by gradually ‘dissolving’ the mass as it moves vertically between ground and sky.”
An early concept rendering of the Cloud tower and a rendering of the final design released last week. (Courtesy MVRDV)
MVRDV pursued this same research and logic in their Cloud twin tower development in Libeskind’s masterplan for the ex-US base in downtown Seoul. The firm had earlier developed the Sky Village project in Copenhagen in 2008, similar in concept to the MahaNakon project with its spiral upwards. Indeed, this spiral had long been a concern of Ken Yeang, the Malaysian architect in his “Bioclimatic” Malaysian skyscraper projects of the 1990′s. MVRDV pursued this research in their 2011 Vertical Village show in Taipei, Taiwan, that opened at the same time as the announcement of the Cloud. Continue HERE
Rob Waugh: Gossip about the goings-on inside Google’s secret ‘Google X’ lab – the ‘blue sky ideas’ department where the company’s engineers come up out-there products – included the idea of ‘wearable computing’.
Until this week, most had assumed that meant hi-tech watches running Google’s Android phone operating system.
Now it seems the search giant may be working on a much more exciting technology – computer glasses with transparent screens that superimpose information on the real world.
‘They are in late prototype stages of wearable glasses that look similar to thick-rimmed glasses that normal people wear,’ reported Google specialist Seth Weintraub on 9to5Google, reporting information from an unnamed source at the search giant.
The technology is reported to be an ‘open secret’.'However, these provide a display with a heads up computer interface. There are a few buttons on the arms of the glasses, but otherwise, they could be mistaken for normal glasses.’
Weintraub reported that Google had recently employed MIT wearable computing specialist Richard DuVal, whose PhD was entitled The Memory Glasses.
Various prototype transparent screens have been demonstrated by companies such as Samsung, so the idea is not as out-there as it sounds. Continue HERE
Creative Applications: Visual programming languages, languages that create programs by the manipulation of graphical elements, as opposed to specifying lines of text, have seen an increased popularity in recent years both in audio and video synthesis. Some of the more well-known environments, ones that are regularly used for projects that are featured on CAN, include VVVV (real-time motion graphics and physical IO) MAX/MSP (real-time music and multimedia), Pure Data (ostensibly an open source equivalent of MAX/MSP) and Quartz Composer (video synthesis for MAC).
Visual programming owes its many of its conventions for the representation of information and programs from Flowcharts – a lesser used term for these kinds of environments is Data-flow Programming. VPL’s date back to the late 60′s. A good example is the GraIL system (GRaphical Input Language) a flowchart language entered on a graphics tablet developed by the Rand Corporation in 1969.
In Caffeine We Trust: To show our appreciation for our clients and partners this holiday season, we put together a little project to allow them to share in our love for two important staples here at C5: caffeine consumption and data visualization. 150 of our clients, and 50 of our partners received a limited edition print of this interactive coffee poster, which provides a canvas to track consumption data over the course of a month. The instructions outline a few calculations to analyze personal consumption trends. Once monthly tracking is complete, the drinker can use their coffee (or a stronger version thereof) to ‘paint’ their data onto the poster to complete the visualization.
We also included a half pound of coffee from our friends at Lord Windsor Roasters, a local micro-roastery. After each poster is complete with the month’s visualization, clients and partners will send in a photo to put their name in the hat for a year’s supply of coffee. Two clients and one partner will be selected at random for the prize.
If you would like to join in tracking your love for the ol’ cup-a-joe, we will also be releasing 500 limited prints in our Five-&-Dime. Please note that entries for prizes are limited to clients and partners.
鳳凰 / ほうおう / Ho-o by Alexander Peverett
Rendering of the Cloud during day and Close-up of the Cloud (Courtesy MVRDV)
An early concept rendering of the Cloud tower and a rendering of the final design released last week. (Courtesy MVRDV)
DMX-LED Patches – Kalle Karlen
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