The New Pose

Remember all the non-nonchalant, over the head angle pictures that people used to take for their Myspace profile? In Russia, women are doing the "Vilena" pose. A woman named Vilena took a picture of herself in the pose first for a social network and everyone started copying it.

Controlling a Robot with Gestures

Thanks to our newfound hatred of buttons, Japanese researchers have developed a robot that can be controlled with gestures - Minority Report style. The robot is outfitted with cameras that detect human movements. It looks at the movements and detects the gestures that are commands.

Killer Shower Curtain

People waste a lot of water when they shower, so Elisabeth Buecher designed a shower curtain that slowly inflates to let you know when it's time to stop. Pictured above are two variation, one that squeezes you out and one with spikes. Her design philosophy is "design for pain and our own good" which is much different than what's vogue right now.

No matter how much education conservationists use to educate people about reduce waste and consumption, we still have a massive environmental problem on our hands. Al Gore can give the most passionate speech ever and people will still be to lazy to recycle. This design seems to be a reflection of cynicism in our fellow man's ability to change their damaging habits and sometimes we need to save ourselves from ourselves.

via http://hrrrthrrr.tumblr.com/

Microjobs in Africa

Txteagle is like Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk and ShortTask which are online marketplaces for short, uncomplicated tasks that users take up for a small payment. The difference between txteagle and the other examples is that the tasks are sent through text message - it's mobile crowdsourcing. It also means the nature of the jobs are smaller and simpler, like translation.

This idea makes this marketplace reachable for those in Africa especially, where a lot of people have mobile phones but not computers. It's great that they can turn mobile phones into an income source and it brings to life the opportunity cost of leaving a mobile phone idle.

Latrines and Anti-Nostalgia

Check out this blog from an IDEO engineer who is taking a sabbatical to design better latrines for people in rural Cambodia. He meticulously documents the entire design process from the ethnography all the way to the brainstorming session with the locals.

An interesting bit in their research was that some people hated dry pit latrines because that's what they used during the Pol Pot regime. Now this was really interesting because I think this is something that slips us when we think about our relationships to objects and certain behaviors - the historical context around them. Now, I understand that comes in the form of nostalgia, but that's related to positive emotions. This is like "anti-nostalgia."

Anti-nostalgia seems to occur from shared catastrophic events or else they would be too varied to study as a group. Looking at recent America history some of those events can be Hurricane Katrina, 9-11 and the Wall Street Fallout and the scars are pretty obvious. But what I'm wondering is what are the not so obvious scars? Hurricane Katrina for example, it's obvious their trust in the government has waned considerably. But say during that time, did they develop an affinity or hatred for any product or process?

It might as well be a rhetorical question as I can't give an answer. But I think this gives us another wrinkle to try to capture when thinking about people and how they relate to things.

You can download a report of the research here.

What Planet Do You Live On?

A study from Ohio State University showed that conservatives didn’t understand that Stephen Colbert is joking. They rationalize it by saying that Colbert is pretending to joking but genuinely means what he saying. What planet are they living on?

A while ago, my friend was working with an idea about how information creates communities. Before media fragmentation (I know, that concept is so 2000), it would be one or two large homogenous communities because there would only be that many media outlets. Now of course you can bury yourself in own little world because there would be the media to support it.

The consequence is that everyone lives in his or her own self-defined bubble and no one can agree on a shared reality. Isn’t that ironic? The vehicle that brought us closer together is driving us farther apart as well.

Zelda Hip Hop

Remember Zelda from the Nintendo days? Team Teamwork remixed a few songs with sound clips from Zelda. It's sweet. I remember Zelda from the SNES days when he was a little 16 bit dude who was more cute than fearsome. The video game music was the same way for me so it's interesting to hear paired up with a song about cooking meth.

SMS Guerilla Projector

A couple of artists developed a portable projector that displays SMS messages on any flat surface. It can be an interesting mix of displaying very private content in very public spaces. But the way they are demonstrating the product, it looks like the portable feature is good for taking advantage of the context of a situation.

via PFSK

Cute Robots in NYC!

An NYC art student built a little robot that that only moves in one direction. She set it up on one side of a park and attached a flag letting people around it know where it was trying to go. The idea is to see if people will help it along it's course. The video shows that it did.

But what's interesting is that the robot is damn cute. If it was an ugly beast of a machine, would people still be inclined to help? Or if it's intentions were a little bit more complex, would people still help? I think there is something in how people relate to simple, harmless (and helpless) things - like babies, puppies and kittens. this little robot is showing (might be a stretch but...) that we can impart affection and care that's usually reserved for living things on to objects.

via Engadget

Augmented Reality Cube!

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

This is a game called levelHead designed by Julian Oliver. Below is his write up of what it is:

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player's spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

It was just yesterday when augmented reality on paper was an amazing feat, now people are pushing the boundaries so fast. As these new technologies are flourishing, one way to keep one step ahead of the game is to think about interfaces and how we can make the interface interesting instead of focusing on content. Content is a story that we have probably been exposed to at one point or another. What's new and exciting is how we interact with that content. Because a different way to interact with content can give us a new perspective on it.

Posters of NYC

Kenneth Goldsmith has been collecting the flyers and posters that he sees around NYC for the past 25 years. He picked a few of the best and scanned them in for everyone on the interwebs to take a look. Check out his collection here. Some of it is NWS. Some of it is hilariously insane. But it's all good.

From SF to NYC

Two DJs, spinnerty and d.Lo from San Francisco and NYC respectively, created a soundtrack to the respective cities that they live in. The project "san york" takes us from San Francisco's Mission District and Golden Gate in the morning and drops us off in the middle of NYC at night. Click here to check it out.

Knife Combs

Italian designer Lorenzo Damiani created these knife combs for the purpose of self defense. They're apparently light and sturdy, much like a shank that you would make while in prison.

via delicious/di.brost

Wii-Graffitti

WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.

A couple of students modified the Wii controller and turned it into a digital spray paint can. Check out the video, it's pretty self explanatory. First impression is to say that "graffiti is supposed to be a public art form" and doing it on a screen at home kind of defeats the purpose. It's also not very rebellious - you're not reclaiming any space in particular. However, there could be a way to share this stuff online and maybe people will trade reach for context.

A $600 Magazine

Visionaire, a super exclusive high end art and fashion magazine released a pop-up edition featuring the works of artists such as Sophie Calle, Andreas Gursky, Cai Guo-Qiang and more. The whole idea is absurdly cool. Order yours here.