For centuries artisans have had the ability to sketch with wood and hand tools to craft high-quality, precious objects. With digital technology the functionality of objects became less tangible and visible, and their making fell almost exclusively to engineers and computer scientists. It is only in the past decade or so that the community and tools have evolved to the point that designers can sketch with hardware and software. This project seeks to combine seemingly dissonant elements, natural, material and virtual, and explore how they can be crafted to feel as if they were born together as parts of a unified object anatomy that is both singular and precious.
The talk has received some great attention online, from diverse places such as MAKE:blog (who did a great synopsis):
The product: Blu Dot’s Real Good chair, a slim metal seat that comes in several colors and normally costs $129. Twenty-five were placed on sidewalks. They stood out visually, and about half of them came with something extra: a hidden global-positioning-system device. This allowed the object’s movement to be tracked and its new owner located and, ideally, interviewed for a video that will be shown in Blu Dot’s SoHo store on Dec. 14, marking its one-year anniversary in New York.
John Christakos, one of Blu Dot’s founders, liked the sound of all this when Mono, a marketing agency, suggested the scheme. “We thought it was cool,” he says. “To me, it felt almost like a performance piece.”
One of our favorite projects has officially launched this week: the Blu Dot Real Good Experiment.
Blu Dot and Mono, a branding consultancy in Minneapolis, approached us and Supermarche to help with a project to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their showroom in SoHo, NYC. They would do an experiment on “curb mining.” 25 Real Good Chairs would be placed around New York City. 10 of them would contain concealed GPS tracking technology. Each would be picked up by a random passerby, who in turn would be pursued on foot and on an interactive online map – all the while being filmed for a documentary to premiere at the anniversary celebration.
Well, who are we to turn down a design-related and secret-agent-like challenge? We created a website and outfitted 10 chairs with GPS tracking technology, cleverly concealed beneath the seat (along with a notice to defuse potential suspicion regarding concealed electronics). As each chair was taken by a pedestrian, its journey was tracked live on the website and via hot pursuit – all the while being filmed, stakeout-style, for the documentary. Chair-taker interviews will be happening this weekend.
Topping things off, this project has been receiving alotofreallygoodpress in the last couple of days. Yes! We had a blast working with Blu Dot, Mono and Supermarche and can’t wait to see the film!
Greg Matthews, Director of Consumer Innovation at Humana, recently gave a great talk at the BIF-5 conference in Providence that is now available to stream online. We’ve done a lot of work with the Humana Innovation Center, which Matthews directs – including the Horsepower Challenge, above. Thanks for the shout out!
We thought we’d share some pictures from last Thursday, when Tellart popped over to Hasbro HQ in Pawtucket, RI to participate in their 2009 Inspiration Day. This was a great afternoon of eating, meeting & greeting with folks from creative industries across New England, all set to the tune of some interesting live performances and speakers. It is designed as a fun, science-fair-like event that lets Hasbro and others explore new technologies and inspire innovative thinking.
We were there displaying our delicious augmented reality cookies, AR memory game, a control-things-with-your-phone NADAmobile demo, and movies of the things that were too big (or too virtual) to bring in person.
One of our excellent summer interns, Mike, baked us up a great end-of-summer treat: augmented reality fiducial cookies. These ones throw up a 3D virtual Tellart logo when on webcam – luckily, the cookies themselves are real-life and delicious.
If you’d like to bake your own, Mike has made an easy-to-follow recipe/tutorial that you can check out here. If you’d prefer to just print out a cookie using paper (less delicious), you can do that here and then proceed directly to the demo!
Over the weekend Tellart hosted a couple of great events at the first-ever Rhode Island Maker Faire in Providence. We kicked things off with a workshop on WiiMote hacking, where we taught folks how to write applications controlled by WiiMote gestures. After that, and then again on Saturday at WaterFire, we installed our special interactive pong game – like the one from your childhood, but projected life-size on the floor and controlled via infra-red LED’s on your head. Who says video games cause laziness?
On March 9, Matt traveled to Mountain View, CA to give a “Tech Talk” at Google:
What is a switch? Is there a place for the Army at an art school? How do physical and ubiquitous computing fit in the industrial design curriculum? Is interaction design just 21st Century industrial design? Can designers and engineers play nicely? And what do high altitude and disaster medicine have to do with any of this? In a fast-paced and highly visual presentation, Matt Cottam will discuss these ideas and others, sharing work from his professional practice as a designer and medic, and drawing from experiences as student and teacher.
Monday saw the successful launch of a new Horsepower Challenge UK, with 90 thrilled students and one Olympian athlete participating in the opening day’s run. By the end of the day each team had accumulated thousands of steps – one nearly reaching 85,000!
An article in today’s MarketWatch outlines the growing importance of interactive games for health – mentioning dance games, the Wii Fit, and our very own Horsepower Challenge for Humana:
“Video games aren’t just for kids and couch potatoes anymore. They’re increasingly being used to motivate people of all ages to move their bodies and manage their chronic health conditions more effectively. …
The Horsepower Challenge gives each student a pedometer, which tracks their movement and sends wireless updates to the HumanaGames.com Web site. Students also receive animated horses that represent them online, where they can see their progress. Teams of school systems compete against each other, and kids who accumulate activity earn rewards they can use to accessorize their horses.
“Our mission is basically to help people play their way to better health,” Darst said. “We want to make it fun for people to get healthy.”
A sneak peek at the newest generation in the Sketchtools line…
*Update: Check out a full demo of NADA Mobile in this blog post or just skip right to the 1/8″ Jack demo. You can also download the source code for the project at the NADA Mobile Google Code page.
Our favorite new iPhone hack, the duiPhone, will let you know for sure whether you should hand the car keys to a friend after a long night in the bar…
Once you blow into the mouthpiece, the application will determine your blood alcohol level – either telling you you’re good to go, or that you should consider calling a cab.
We built this from a store-bought-and-hacked breathalyzer attached to a 3G iPhone – our first experiment with Tellart’s newest Sketchtool: NADA Mobile.
Yes, this video was taken at our office. Yes, those are real 40s on the table.
No, Jasper was not allowed to drive home. (no Tellart employees were harmed during the filming of this video. Photos after the jump.)
[ed: Yes, the video shows an iPod Touch--which is a lot less expensive to test with than an iPhone--but the demo runs over WiFi and works on any device running iPhone OS]
The “What is a switch?” project is a Tellart classic.
It takes the form of a workshop or a longer course, and, by using low-cost materials and familiar design tools, is meant to demystify electronics for design students and artists – expanding their conception of what it means to design with embedded electronics.
A switch, after all, is just a connection made or broken between power and ground.
When you begin to think about it that way, the “what is a switch” experience goes beyond a simple electronics lesson. What happens when you take the switch away from the wall, out of the plastic casing?
What kind of interactions can you create when you start experimenting with other materials, quick prototypes of your concepts, and new ways of connecting?
Tellart teaches Physical Computing/Interaction Design workshops yearly at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden – in this particular two week long workshop, the students were asked to conceive of ideas that would encourage a more energetic “desk-job” experience. “Repetitive strain injury”, or RSI, is the name for a group of conditions common in computer workers and assembly line workers – carpal tunnel syndrome is a well known example. The conditions arise from too much time spent in a poor posture position or too much repetitive muscle activity.
The students, who came from a variety of different undergraduate backgrounds ranging from Computer Science to Psychology, were taught some basic physical computing concepts, and given an introduction to our Sketchtools platform.
Check out the Offsite section on tellart.com to see more videos of our workshops and courses…
