Innovation Award to Amazen' Hat Commander video game

Last Weekend in Stuttgart took place the first GAMEDEV HACKATHON, a competition about making a computer game within two days. Me and Raphael Lang attend and in the place we team up with Guz Gutmann from ambient robotics. The game we develop for this competition explores new ways of interaction, giving the players not only the chance to control the character (which in our case was a little red spherical starship) but also the environment on which the action take place. The goal of the game is go from one end of a linear maze to the other. Pretty simple isn't it, well the things get trickier when that line is magnified 100x by a microscope and shown in a TV, then the picture is recorded by a web cam and processed by Grasshopper which renders it now in a Rhino environment as a tridimentional landscape. The Hat, by another hand, controls the little red spherical starship through bending its vertical antenna. The antenna consist in a flex sensor which signal es processed by Arduino and sent to the PC, where the serial output is taken by Grasshopper to control the left or right direction of the starship.    

Unexpectedly, we receive the award for the Most Innovative Game Concept. Among the judges appreciation were statements like: 
"When I enter the room it this weird stuff call immediately my attention, so i had to go and check what it was"
" It looks fucking awesome!!"
" I could play it for hours"


Now i leave this demo video so you can check what is it about.

you can also check the event facebook:http://www.facebook.com/HackathonStg
or Website at:http://www.hackathon-stuttgart.de/

Stretchable light and the lost of shape

This short demo shows a prototype of a LED that can be stretch. Now, that doesn't sounds like much but think for moment in the sources of light that we have today. Since we tame electricity we've been able to make vessels that contains light. From the light bulb to the pixels that you are looking at right now all our light emitting sources have a discreet shape, its shapes are define by manufacture. Since the commercial introduction of the first light bulbs back in the 1880's the shape have been pretty much the same from the glass balloon to a ''pear'' shape (the German word for light bulb is Glühbirne which can be translated as glowing pear) then to a almost any possible variation of that.

Then the fluorescent (as different as the previous incandescent) lighting technology came and also the halogen and then neon and all of them were confined either to a bulb or a tube. All of them constricted by the formal possibilities of glass. And this kept going up to the introduction in the early 60's of LED (light emitting diodes) which change the electrically powered reaction within an micro atmosphere full of specific elements ( as the Incandescence, Fluorescence, Halogen or Neon technology are) for the convenience of the electroluminescence effect in a Semiconductor, and also change the glass by epoxy. This change, the glass by epoxy, brought a whole new set of formal possibilities to the design of light sources starting for the radical decrease on size, and -for what it matters- the first squared lights.

  

But even after all these technology leaps the initial shape of the light source will be its definitive shape. The form of the light will be still the form of the mold. Until now the only source of light with the possibility of change its shape was the fire, and we couldn't control it. That change with the arrival of OLED ( organic light emitting diodes) on which the traditional semiconductor layer was replace by an organic semiconductor. The OLED technology has already proved to be flexible, which is already a great step forward. But now this little light emitting plastic sandwiched on each side by carbon nanotube-polymer can change -by being stretched- its shape, which means that its structure can be adapt in three dimensional ways. Why this is important? because of socks. Can you think in something more finely adapted to another shape than a sock wrapping you foot? a very basic shape surface that adapt to all the complexities and nuances of another intricate surface such as it is the foot.Well, when was the last time you worn a rigid sock? stretchability is the the most defining feature not for customisation, but for active adaptation. Stretchable light means that light is now is not only parts of the object but an object by itself.     

Norddesign paper approved

These are good news, I will be presenting my paper: Emotional prosthetics: Artificialy replace physical manifestations of emotions with the purpose of enhance the Mother-Son multisensory bond inside the intensive care environment. Next August (22-24) in the Norddesign conference in Aalborg University in Denmark. Here I left you the the abstract.

Collecting the mother’s emotional physical manifestations (EPM) and replicate those into the incubator machine environment can help preterm baby’s self regulation. Here’s presented a method to assess mother-child emotional care situations and  extract the right stimuli (EPM) from them that could  produce in the baby a emotional response that help him to improve his health condition as well as a mediation interface that harvest the stimuli from the mother and deliver it to the baby

 

what comes first: the innovation or the change

Today I just wanna to share convergence rather fun/weird that happens me today. I'm now reading a book call "the rational optimist" by Matt Ridley, who is talking about how ideas and innovation is the motor behind the progress of humanity and how the exchange is the fuel for this to happen, when I came across with the column from Johan Lehrer in Wired magazine which is talking in this post (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/cultivating-genius/) about how throughout history geniuses had cluster in specific times and places. He bring the notion of meta-ideas, propose by Paul Romer, to solve the riddle of why this clustering -or clotting how he calls it- happens. By another hand Ridley go through the same issue discarding: government, intellectual property (a meta-idea propose by Romer), capital and science, only to set the "clotting agent" on the exchange. Information exchange. Were there is ideas being exchanged -or having sex as he stated- innovation, hence innovators, will happen.
Both authors state that innovation is needed urgently nowadays -to reactivate the economy, dodge the environmental collapse, fight the totalitarianism or corporatism or anarchism, or just change the world for better in some way- but even when they don't really agree in the essential factor, or factors, which detonates the appearance of innovation, the same question remains in the backstage of both arguments: to make a better societies -or world for what matter- we need more innovation; but for having more innovation, isn't that we need first to change ours societies?

Revista Chilena de Diseño » Tres cosas que se deberían saber antes de recibirse de diseñador

Finally after several month of delay my article was published on RChD (in spanish)

Revista Chilena de Diseño » Tres cosas que se deberían saber antes de recibirse de diseñador

The personal mobility turning point

This video is a quite interesting trip through the personal mobility history focused on describing how we found ourselves in the turning point of this industry. The arguments for this claim are the upcoming electrical technologies and material that are now being introduce in the develop of personal mobility devices, the longer performance of electrical batteries and the reduction of their sizes as well as the incorporation of high sensitive capabilities have opened broadly the spectrum of possibilities for imagining and realize new ways of interacting with the vehicles, new uses for them and, the most relevant issue, new categories of vehicles. Since the foundation of this industry both the morphology and the configuration of personal mobility vehicles has remain pretty much the same until recently devices like the SEGWAY and the Honda's U3-X (the main character of this video) have overlook the the idea that a personal vehicle has to be a car or a bike or, if you are an eccentric driver, a tricycle to bring a new category of self-balancing vehicles, and altogether opening a hole new branch in the mobility industry.

The proliferation of new devices in this area has already begun, and we can count now with transitional hybrids like one-wheeled motorcycles or Segway like devices for off road but the disruption of personal mobility it is far from being exhausted and I guess we will witness the arise of other new categories on which the power storage technology and the active sensitive capacity as well as the new ways of human vehicle interaction will have a main role.

From the Design point of view, being involved in this turning point means a bit more than just to make these new devices more aesthetically appealing or user friendly; it means also to imagine, research and prototype new ways to communicate the human will to an electromechanical device so the relationship between them can become more intuitive and responsive.

That's it for now, by the way, this video is produced by Gizmag and you can read the hole article here.

Enjoy

Work vs. Play

Yet another talk about how IDEO work. This time related to the value of Play at work, with good examples of how a relaxed but focused environment where failure is tolerated can drive design teams to a successful delivery of solutions in complex situations.