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!
Check out MAKE issue #18 for Andrew’s article on his Bloog project, a “blog post synthesizer” that pulls in RSS feeds from the internet and allows the user to scramble them to create new paragraphs. The machine was built using Tellart’s Sketchtools NADA project.
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.”
