notes on physical interaction, sustainability, networks, simians, cats, and more.
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{ Monthly Archives }
Esquire magazine’s October issue has an E-ink cover. Neat, right? But reading the website notes on it made me realize that if this is the future of magazine publishing, then we might as well give up on environmental sustainability right now. It should be called the E-waste cover. Consider:
This summer I got to assist on a project by artists Matthew Belanger, Sean Riley, Ven Voisey, and producer Marianne Petit on a neat project called Lumens. Actually, they did all the work, I just offered a little guidance to get things started. It’s an installation of 160 networked lamps situated in two galleries in the towns of Adams and North Adams, Massachusetts, and the online arts organization turbulence.org. The lamps in each gallery react to visitors walking through the space, as well as responding to movements in the other space. In addition, visitors online can turn on the lamps as well.
HC Gilje’s wind-up bird(s) is an environmental sound work installed in a forest in Lillehammer, Norway. It’s a flock of mechanical woodpeckers that communicate via XBee radios, spread out through the forest. I love this line in the description: “Initial tests indicate an attraction: it took 15 minutes for a real woodpecker to join a wind-up bird on the same tree.”
Image by hc gilje
Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things
In this book, Norman counters some of the points he makes in his first book, The Design of Everyday Things, by pointing out that we do make decisions about design based on emotional reasoning, and that design affects us emotionally. He describes Human reaction to design on three levels: the visceral, or how it appears; the behavioral, or how it acts; and reflective, or how it makes us think and feel about ourselves through our association with it.
Fashioning Technology
This is a really great book for anyone interested in physical computing. It includes a nice introduction to basic electronics and a number of construction projects for simple electronic crafts. The writing is clear and readable, and the design and layout of the book is beautiful. The images and diagrams are big and helpful, and there are a number of really great construction techniques contained in the projects themselves. It won’t spend a lot of time on my bookshelf because I’ll be using it as a resource a lot.
