Smart mechanics

Nowadays the Word ''Smart'', regarding products, is associated to devices enhanced by electronics in sensitive and responsive ways. It refers to the technology that drive inanimate objects into a more sentient stage of their development. But electronics is not the only way to reach that goal. Through the intelligent use of mechanics it can also be achieve the point on which inanimated objects would recognize key features of their users, helping them with this to perform better whatever task these objects are meant to do.

This is the case of the Cannondale concept bike developed by Priority Design. The C.E.R.V (continuosly ergonomic race Vehicle) adapt its handle bar position to match the most efficient posture for different kind of terrain. Without a doubt a great example of meaningful collaboration between design and engineering.

 

Find more about the CERV bike here

keeping a diary makes you creative

In this talk Teresa Amabile, author of the excellent book: Creativity in context, present her studies on how keeping a diary help to improve your inner work life. What she actually says -and I guess she also writes in her last book: The progress principle- is that giving your self 15 minutes a day to write about the emotions and motivations that you experience during the day (which is the meaning of inner working life) can help you to improve your creative performance, that is, having ideas that work.

The benefits of keeping a work diary would be first of all, celebrate small wins, which is actually the cornerstone of what she named ''the progress principle''. State and recognize small wins will keep your motivation up, your emotions on the bright side and your perspective focus on the relevant aspects of the work that you are doing. The second benefit will be that, based on that small wins, you will be able to plan the next steps in order to keep that small wins coming and building up a better and more fulfilling way to the completion of the project you're working on. The third benefit will be within the personal area; keeping a diary will help you to visualize and nurture your personal growth. You will be able to see in clearer way for example how you behave with you team mates and colleagues, what makes the teams interact in more efficient and creative ways or what are the consequences of your decision process. The last benefit that Amabile states may sound kind of irrelevant but anyone who has worked in a long term project will recognize the importance of it: cultivate patience. One of the most definitive factors in the success of every project  is the emotional attitude to it. If is negative the project will suffer enormously of disdain and lack of interest and if it is positive usually the anticipation and the anxiety of make the whole thing work will play against the decision making process pushing forwards steps that are not yet mature enough to lead way to the next ones.

Amabile is surely one of the most relevant figures in the study of creativity. Her systematic psychological studies on how creativity affects the life of individuals and organizations is widely recognize as huge source of insights in the understanding, improvement and management of creativity processes.

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School and lately the ranked number 18 on the Thinkers 50, the definitive listing of the world's top 50 business thinkers.

source: 99U.com

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