Category: Links

A puzzle game designed by HKU and USC students, nominated for an IGF. The project’s secret origin is the second edition of This happened – Utrecht, which was sponsored by Wacom. We connected the company to the HKU, which lead to them commissioning this game.

Since I’m in the planning stages of a research project where some of the main collaborators (and client) are scientists, the book that Nicolas discusses here sound very interesting.

Even though I don’t speak a word of Japanese, this video is irresistible. Otamatone is a musical toy designed by Maywa Denki which clearly has some carefully considered physical properties. Watch to the end for a rocking finale. Via Tom at BERG.

It’s easy to criticise AR; there are a lot of bad, gimmicky applications out there. It’s harder to talk about what it is good for. Chris O’Shea rounds up a few AR projects that he finds useful or interesting.

Karel Millenaar (game designer and artist at FourceLabs) is posting one illustration a day, each made in one hour. Lovely slightly weird work.

In this short presentation Alexandra focuses “on what makes my experience of cities (having lived in large ones like Amsterdam, Paris, London, Milan, Montreal) unique and enjoyable. A user’s experience. [She] quickly realised that most of it had nothing to do with anything technology related.” I love the “koffie verkeerd” bit in there, as well as the fact that Alex gets at what truly makes cities wonderful places, the ordinary day-to-day things, the human things.

The Dutch Wattson, with industrial design by Marcel Wanders. I ordered one, to see if a device like this actually makes a difference for me.

Wonderful iPhone app, website and desktop app that allows you to record and play back graffiti tag motion data with eye-popping 3D graphics. This is a great example of a creativity-based toy for grown-ups.

“Designing Devices is a series of articles on how and why to create devices, written by me, Dan Saffer, principal designer at Kicker Studio. This is a place for essays that I hope to eventually collect into a book in 2011. Like drafts, the articles will be constantly evolving, hopefully with your feedback.” Something to keep an eye on.

Saw this designer toy at an exhibition on the dynamics between Dutch and Indonesian art. Quite lovely.

“A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.” Schneier is one of the few people I know who consistently has sensible things to say about privacy and security issues. He rightly points out that often, the the most effective physical response to a terrorist attempt that is invisible, making it politically undesirable. A Catch-22.

This talk by Timo Arnall, mainly about his work with RFID is mind-blowing, particularly towards the end where he starts to show permutations of tag and reader form and field shapes. This stuff is useful and inspiring for designers as well as users of what is essentially an invisible technology.

Could have benefited from some editing (quantity, not quality seems to have been the main aim, here) but still, some interesting thoughts on where mobile tech might be headed in the near future.

One of the craziest toys I’ve seen in some time.

Glad to see Miegakure in here, as well as A Slow Year and Today I Die.

“…a growing selection of useful classes created for mostly computational design projects”. Might come in handy the next time I play around with Processing.

A look behind the scenes of the Christmas decorations generated from data that RIG has made for their friends.

“Folded correctly, the maps reveal how Stewart breaks the margins of the map to travel, invisibly, through space and time.” James Bridle on the newspaper he created about Walking Stewart.

Photos of shopping malls fallen into disuse. This should serve as a nice example of adaptive design, city diversity and non-places at some point.

It’s like a modern-day Hobbit shire. A very cool home.

“The new technique developed by computer scientist Jack van Wijk at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands uses algorithms to ‘unfold’ and cut into the Earth’s surface in a way that minimizes distortion, and keeps the distracting effect of cutting into the map to a minimum.” Pretty, pretty maps.

Congratulations to my friends at 31Volts for writing the first Dutch service design book. Can’t wait to leaf through a copy, soon.