Since launching BlinkM in February, I've been focused on the potential design uses of LED lighting. This years' Milan Furniture Fair (aka Milan Design Week, since it's branched out significantly beyond furniture to design of all kinds of consumer products for everyday life) was a good place to survey what consumer product companies think of LED lighting as a way of adding value to their products. The short answer is: not much. Since I was there last in 2006, the industry is still more-or-less in a steady state. As I felt in 2004 when I wrote my Smart Furniture Manifesto, the potential of using information processing as a design material is still largely untapped. LEDs are the most basic form of digital information display, and if they're not being used, it shows that the environment isn't embracing the possibilities of smart furniture.

Will it, ever, or will companies making niche products like gaming chairs move to making everyday products like dining room tables and office cubicle systems? In other words, will appliance and consumer electronics makers become furniture maker and take over the furniture industry? Since those industries are, in some ways, equally as conservative and slow-moving as the furniture industry, it's hard to say, but it points to some interesting possibilities.

Let me start with the three things I thought were most interesting.

Interactive projects

Flos' cubo

Flos, the lighting company, launched a wireless remote control cube called, cleverly, cubo. Depending on what side is up, it selects a lighting setting. You program it by turning the lights that speak whatever wireless standard they're using (I asked if it was Bluetooth, they said it was not) to some setting and it associates that setting with the cube face. I think it's a bit large and the colors are meaningless to anyone but the programmer, and you could do the same thing with a remote control with 6 buttons in a much smaller form factor, but they're clearly trying to do some magic here and I wish them luck.

Pega Design's Between On & Off series ironic objects

PEGA Design is a Taiwanese company that did a series of interactive objects they grouped into a collection called Between On & Off. The objects aren't particularly useful, they're more iconic and playful, but they're interactive and Pega uses LEDs for most of the interactivity.
The JustDrawIt! light control lets you use a dry erase marker to draw a lighting schedule on a bar (probably with some kind of IR LED/light sensor combination). The TechTap is a faucet that pours data into an LED-filled "milk bottle." I think it's a whimsical way to show how you can show data transfer between physical objects that let you carry data from one spot to another (I think; I only kinda get it). Embrace is a bedside reading light shaped like a book that dims and brightens based on how much it's opened, is also nice.

Jean Louis Frechin and Uros Petrevski's Interfaces

Jean Louis Frechin and Uros Petrevski showed a bunch of interactive objects grouped into a show called Interfaces: Connected Objects. The include the WanetLight, a chandelier that's a 5x5x5 cube of white LEDs that lets people create different light shapes in the chandelier (and maybe reacts to people's movements? I can't tell from the documentation). The WaSnake, which shows SMS text messages crawling across a curvy shelf (I think an RSS feed to news headlines would be more interesting). The WaDoor, a door of electroluminescent pixels. WaPix YJMM is a pair of digital picture frames where one image slides from one picture frame to the other automatically.

I like these objects a lot for their lyricism and although I've seen variations of these ideas in other formats, it's nice to see designers exploring the space.

[5/11/08 Update: Jean-louis Frechin sent me an email pointing out that WaSnake primarily displays RSS feeds, not SMSes, though those work with it, too. WanetLight is operated with a Wiimote, using its tilt sensor, and can react to people in its immediate vicinity (though that functionality was not turned on in Milan). WaDoor is, to use Frechin's words "a Very Cheap Big Screen, in EL." They're working to make the surface interactive, though that functionality was not operational in Milan]

Noninteractive projects

• Storage lighting
• "Water" lighting
• Appliance lighting

Storage lighting

There were a bunch of pieces that used strips of white LED light inside cabinets and drawers to light up the contents, presumably how the light inside a fridge lights up the food.

"Water" lighting

The bathroom design section had more colored lights, almost always cycling through all of the colors. The effect is nice, but it's not clear what the point is.

There was also white light inside shower stalls, which holds some amount of promise.

This is a faucet with an LED lighting ring.

Appliance lighting

Many companies are putting LEDs in stoves, another extreme environment, which is also interesting for that (if not for how they're actually incorporated). They typically put the lights in between the inner and outer shell, so that the resin of the LEDs isn't directly exposed to the heat, which must have taken some amount of engineering.

Elica, the fancy kitchen hood/purifer people have a whole range of ridiculous hoods, many of which use LEDs. Again, I'm not sure of the point, but at least the rest of the design is also decorative, showing that LEDs can be part of the decoration mix.

Here's another hood that uses LEDs to communicate more:

In general, the steps that are being taken are baby steps, and the applications are still primarily decorative (certainly for anything but white light). It's interesting to watch the evolution of smart furniture from all sides of the process of designing furniture because, ironically, Microsoft's Surface table, arguably the first major technology player's entry into the furniture market, was nowhere to be seen in Milan.

Posted by at 5:38 PM | Permalink

We had another fantastic Sketching in Hardware conference last month.

We've now put a bunch of the presentations from the conference on the site, along with pictures of the folks who were there.

There's also extensive documentation in the Flickr group.

Once again, thanks to my co-hosts Ruth Kikin-Gil and Tod Kurt and to Leslie Cicione, who was of tremendous assistance.

Posted by at 12:40 PM | Permalink

Ruth points me to a voice control Instructable that's Harry Potter spell-themed. Voice commands for computers have existed in the periphery for a long time, and they have always had a kind of incantation quality, but it's interesting to see that kind of macro creation framed as Harry Potter spells. Like my gyroscopic mouse magic wand from last year, I think that the most interesting use would be if the computer is eliminated as the focus and the voice command just used to control the behavior of other devices or to create other experiences (I can imagine that you could issue commands to some kind of Arduino or NADA-based physical computing rig).

Judith points me to the rather unexpected line of "smart furniture" from Pottery Barn. By "smart" they mean that there are iPod and laptop charging stations and cable caddies, but it's an important acknowledgment of people's relationship to technology in their everyday spaces. Moreover, they have figured out how to integrate wires and connectors into the manufacturing process of mass market furniture. Though technically not difficult, like adding wires to clothing it's almost certainly a lot easier to do one-off than to mass produce. That they're mass producing this stuff means that including smarter electronics is conceptually and practically much closer. Now, of course, the next question is what those genuinely smart electronics will be, but that's probably for next years' catalog.

Posted by at 1:50 PM | Permalink

It looks like Sony getting on the innovative game controller bandwagon with their hand movement controller, which looks like it's another attempt at creating gestural interfaces. I think that with the popularity of the Wii, a gestural language will develop for controller usage (check out the names for ways to hold your Wiimote in Warioware:Smooth Moves [thanks Mike and Erika!]) and that new controllers will flow out of that, rather than out of core technologies. Still, all-body gestural commands are becoming more popular. Software invocation through movements is coming.

Posted by at 8:33 AM | Permalink

This has nothing to do with ubicomp, but I just spent 3 hours figuring this out and thought I would share.

I have an ancient Declaser 5100, a laser printer that was made in 1993 and has run continuously ever since. It's a total tank, works great, and, coincidentally, was one of the first TCP/IP network appliances (it had an Ethernet card in it before just about any other printer).

I just upgraded the local network, and the printer, which I had used in its TCP/IP mode, was still stuck on its old internet address. As a first generation product, changing the IP address on one of these printers is ridiculously difficult and I banged my head against the problem for a couple of hours before the solution came to me.

The short answer is AppleTalk. In addition to TCP/IP, this particular printer also speaks AppleTalk, Apple's now-abandoned networking protocol (it also speaks Novell's Netware protocol, another abandoned protocol.

Now the important thing about AppleTalk is that it allows for autodiscovery and autoconfiguration. TCP/IP, by definition, does not. This meant that the Macs in my household, which still speak AppleTalk, had no problem finding the printer, but the nearly as ancient Windows 2000 (which I don't upgrade for fear of bricking an already dicey box) was not so lucky. I struggled with various network configurations for a long time before realizing that it can also speak to the printer in AppleTalk, it's just that the incantation is arcane.

Here's what you do:

1. Go to the Network control panel and open the local network connection that's shared with the printer
   
2. Click on Properties
   
3. Click on "Install..."
   
4. Select "Protocol"
   
5. Select AppleTalk, Click OK. It'll ask you to reboot your computer. Reboot.
   
6. When the computer reboots, open the Printers folder and open "Add Printer"
   
7. Select "add a local printer" (yes, you select "local printer", even though you're adding a network printer--hello Microsoft!). Click next.
   
8. On the next page, it'll ask you select a port. Click on "Create a new port" and select "AppleTalk Printing Devices" from the list. It may have a weird name, but odds are there's only one AppleTalk device on your network, so choose that one. Click next.
   
9. It will then search for a local AppleTalk printer and, if everything is working right, find yours.
   
10. When it asks whether you want to "Capture this AppleTalk device," say no.
    
11. It will then give you a list of printers. Hopefully, it selected the right one (thank you AppleTalk autodiscovery), but if not, scroll through the list to find yours. Click next. The rest is the same as adding any other printer.
    
12. If it asks you about whether to keep the existing driver, say yes. Click next.
    
13. Name the printer and make the default, if that's appropriate on the next screen. Click next.
    
14. When it asks whether you want to share this printer, probably "no." Windows 2K device sharing is dicey.
    
15. Congratulate yourself on circumventing bad configuration UI on the part of Digital and bad device management UI on the part of Microsoft using good protocol design (for certain things) on the part of Apple.
    

I suspect this technique will also work for any number of other AppleTalk network printers, such as Apple's early-90s LaserWriters and HPs printers of the same era. You may even be able to get an old Imagewriter dotmatrix printer working on your network if you have an Ethernet-LocalTalk media converter. Woohoo. Retro "fun," yes. In the middle of a workday, no.

Posted by at 2:37 PM | Permalink

In our ThingM newsletter last month I included a report of our experiences at the Consumer Electronics Show the week before. Here it is:

For most of the consumer electronics world, the Consumer Electronics Show is about incremental change to existing types of devices. The TV's are a little bigger, the memory cards hold a little more, video camera prices have dropped a bit, etc. That's critical for the health of the industry, but we went to CES to look for revolutionary technologies, rather than the evolution of existing technologies. We found several things that we felt were especially interesting:

• Microsoft's entry into software for cars and homes. In his keynote Bill Gates talked about the introduction of technology into cars and homes. As broad ideas, they're not new (not even for MS), but we feel that Microsoft's attention, and Bill Gates' personal management of the development of their product with Ford, is significant. It means that the big companies are recognizing the value of computers outside traditional productivity applications.
  
• We had a great conversation with Helen Greiner, CEO of iRobot. Her company released the Create robotics experimentation platform, which they developed and released in record time. It's a great companion to Tod's book, and makes some of the hacks in that book easier. It's also important, because it defines a tantalizing bridge between the home appliance market and the DIY market. The era of kitchen tinkering and appliance repair largely ended with monolithic, impenetrable electronics. iRobot is recognizing that innovation doesn't just come from labs, but from living rooms, and kudos to them for making it much easier for everyday tinkerers.
  
• Speaking of smart homes, genuine research or thought about how to integrate technology into home life has far to go. There was an embarrassing House of the Future setup that owed more to Disney's 1950s Carousel of Progress vision than how people actually live today. Giant LCD screens attached to walls, glowing with Microsoft blue interfaces is not the way to go, folks.
  
• One class of domestic robot that hardly gets any attention is the massage chair. There are hundreds of brands, they fly below most media radars, and the designs won't win any awards, but they're evolving into genuinely useful and--according to our personal tester--comfortable items. To some extent, this is how it should be: objects shouldn't have to scream "look, I'm technology!" to be valuable tools for living.
  
• WowWee, the Canadian company that made the Robosapien, has a bunch of new domestic robot toys on the way. In our conversation with them, we were really heartened that they're embracing hackability. Although they aren't including a serial port on their new devices, they're labeling all of the internal circuitry and trying to not prevent people from attaching things to their electronics. We even heard that they initially wanted to make their new robotic panda with a WiFi card inside it, so that it could be controllable remotely, but decided it would be too expensive. This means that for the next generation, it won't be.
  
• Possibly the coolest technology we saw was the digital pen by EPOS an Israeli company. Right now it's a pen and small USB receiver that digitizes handwriting without requiring special paper or a special pad (you clip the USB unit to any writing surface). However, the ultrasonic high-resolution triangulation technology they use works either in 2D or in 3D and opens up a whole host of interaction possibilities. Arbitrary flat surfaces can be activated as interaction devices, which is tremendously powerful. The multi-touch interaction on the iPhone becomes possible with just about anything.
  

I've also made a Flickr set of my photos from the show, where you can see what I thought was interesting, including the embarrassing smart house.

Posted by at 11:14 AM | Permalink

I was recently reading Fred Wilson's thoughts on user generated devices:

Yes, the web has brought this power of the user to the forefront of our society, enough to make us the person of the year. That's cool.

But what is cooler is that this is part of a larger revolution in information technology that started back in the early 90s with Linux. It's the open source movement and it's about opening up technology so that anyone and everyone can contribute to the collective good.

And I believe its time for this revolution in information technology to move into the hardware space. It's time for user generated devices.

I think this is right on: as the barriers to entry lower and standards develop, there is a natural democratization of a medium. In the 1970s it was video production, in the 1990s it was the Web, in the 2010s it'll be hardware (well, I hope, anyway ;-). This blog post reminded me of a conversation I had with Rafi Haladjian (of Violet) as part of the research for my next book. We were talking about Violet's Nabaztag and its relationship to other devices, and we agreed that passing everything through the interface of a general-purpose computer is likely to be short-lived. In the long-term, devices will communicate to each other and to do that, they need an open appliance communication protocol that's easy to use, even if it's not perfect. Period.

Let's revisit (a highly simplified for the purposes of this discussion) Web history: they beauty of the HTTP/HTML protocol pair was not that the were ideal, but they were:

• Good enough
• Did something immediately interesting to both creators and consumers
• Open

That's it: those were the seeds. The protocols weren't perfect from the start, but they evolved to be "perfect" in the sense that they're good enough for an incredibly broad range of uses that Berners-Lee didn't think of, and shouldn't have had to. (it should be noted that other standards had these qualities and were not so successful, so these are not sufficient for success, but they may be necessary)

In contrast, phone companies do not believe in opening their services, try to predict everything that can possibly be done, and lock it down. Their closed-system creation may have prevented the use of wireless phone standards as platforms for anything but voice and SMS.

In the appliance communication world, no one protocol has dominated except the hated X10, which suffers from a combination of low bitrate and crappy performance. Protocols like AMX, Crestron aren't really open because they're owned by competing corporations and, as such, suffer from the problems of all such systems: even if they're not intentionally crippled by their authors, there's little incentive to include anything other than what's going to satisfy the company's short-term goals. From a programmer-as-user perspective, none of them provide a particularly good user experience.

Until there's a good-enough (not perfect: never forget the debacle of X.500!) appliance communication protocol, there's going to be no easy way for Fred's user generated devices to talk.

I'm not a protocol designer. I'm sure that people have been thinking about this for a long time, but I bet all the thought has been behind closed doors and not in a public appliance design forum and framework. That said, my vision is of a household full of devices that

• speak to each other over TCP/IP
  
• are explicitly transport-layer agnostic, so any TCP/IP transport works, whether it's Powerline Ethernet, Wifi Ethernet, Bluetooth, GSM, Lonworks or tachyon telepathy
  
• use a Zeroconf address assignment and service discovery
  

In the most basic implementation, for example, a Powerline time broadcast system allows every device to be time synchronized, so you don't have to reset all the clocks after a power outage. More sophisticated systems can advertise themselves as displays, inputs or outputs. To use the tired coffee maker example: your coffee maker thus no longer has to include its own scheduling device; your alarm clock can schedule all necessary tasks, find your coffee maker as an output device with a standard set of services, and just tell it when to start percolating at the same time that it tells your Wifi rabbit to start caching its the news and traffic MP3s. Your pressure-sensitive carpet can just broadcast "turn on 1/10 power" to all lights in its vicinity, which turn on as you walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, they light your way. If you have no such lights, they don't light.

The key, I think, is to stop thinking of all of these things as either giant HVAC control system protocols, automation protocols or media control protocols. The world of everyday appliances is much broader and the functions are much more varied. A house is not a factory, an office building or a TV studio. There's a huge potential here, a huge set of possibilities that's not about "automating" but about "activating" and "augmenting" everyday objects. The communications standards used that need to acknowledge that.

Thoughts on other protocols

• DMX is open, but it's also 20 years old, tuned to work with theater lighting, based on an even-older hardwired serial protocol, and unidirectional.
• HP's JetSend was an early attempt, and had many interesting features (a basic version could run with only 60K of memory, or something), but it's now been eclipsed not just by networking technology, but by the vastly greater capabilities of devices (i.e. we don't really need most things to run in 60K of memory anymore). We need something better, smarter, open (JetSend is covered by a patent, which is no way to create interest in your protocol--serves HP right that no one adopted it, and they themselves abandoned it).
• BACnet is another building automation protocol, but it seems to be mired in the needs of giant building automation, and was initially defined nearly 20 years ago, which makes it about the equivalent of X10 in terms of its programmer- and consumer-friendliness. Appliances geared to individuals need something newer and more extensible.
• What do people think of KNX? It's one of these standards that requires membership to use commercially, which I think is a terrible idea and market stifling in the name of arbitrary bureaucratic control, but it has many of the features that I mention above. If all that membership carries with it is "certification" by some arbitrary standards body, while the protocol is open and documented, then maybe it should just be used and the certification ignored?

Posted by at 4:48 PM | Permalink

(from Engadget)

Not quite using magic as a metaphor, but more traditional stage magic (i.e. a technological assist for what's a sleight of hand deception), Casio's magic watch assists in doing five different magic tricks. Stage magic and technology have a long history of supporting each other. The two movies about magicians this last fall, The Illusionist and The Prestige were, to some extent, about late 19th century society coming to terms with the burst of technology appearing on the scene. Some of the questions at the core of the characters lives (in The Prestige at least), are questions about reality and technology's ability to change it. And if films are like society's dreams, reflecting its concerns back to itself, but obliquely and in coded language, then these films reflect a current set of concerns about what technology is capable of, and what it's not. This watch, although a minor footnote at best, is part of that dialog, part of the grey area.

Posted by at 4:01 PM | Permalink

Another in the periodic intersections of furniture and casemods, here is a Canadian furniture designer's interpretation of high-end wooden PC cases:

The woodworking is beautiful, but these pieces still suffer from the tension between the replacement cycles of furniture (long) and computers (short). Suissa Computer, the company that makes these, claims " Solid, strong and beautiful, able to grow and change with future generations, Suissa Computers are designed to be upgradeable and expandable."

My feeling is that most people buying computers today have seen how quickly technology changes, so the idea of having a piece of hardware "for future generations" may seem like a pretty extraordinary claim, with little to back it up on the site. Saying that it'll "grow" is actually the opposite of what people have seen computers become. Expandability may be something that can justify the purchase of a particularly high-end system, but it's rarely borne out in practice, and I suspect that people may not purchase computers with that as a key differentiating factor more than once.

That said, the idea of making computers for the high-end market is interesting, and the recent purchase of Alienware by Dell and of Voodoo by H-P seems to show that major manufacturers agree, but high-end computer purchases seem to include a very different set of evaluation criteria than high-end furniture purchases. Other expensive furniture that includes technology, such as Ingo Maurer's lighting, are first and foremost furniture, with the technology integrated in support of the role of the object as furniture.

(I originally saw this on Born Rich).

Posted by at 4:14 PM | Permalink

Colors

There's also plenty of green, but it's been greyed (grayed?) down from its most exuberant bright variations last year, which looks fresh at first, but I can imagine start to be too intense when there's too much of it. The interesting thing is that in greying apple green down you kinda get the dreaded…AVOCADO! The revenge of the 70s is now complete.

However, the industry has not totally lost its interest in color. The general concept of "color" however is still pretty popular. Groupings of basic primaries and secondaries appear all the time, not unlike the days following Apple's initial iMac introduction (though this may be an artifact of trying to make a display interesting even though 99% of what you sell is in traditional basic black, white, chrome, grey or whatever).

One of the most interesting manifestations of this multicolor approach was in the office furniture section, which had as its theme "wellness@work". I don't know what they meant by that, and it wasn't obvious from the furniture displayed, which was all pretty familiar, but the idea it seemed to be trying to communicate is that work life is better if it looks more like kindergarten. I'm dubious.

Edra, consistently one of my favorite manufacturers, had excellent, subtle taste in bold colors, something that's hard to pull off.

The Shape

Posted by at 6:13 PM | Permalink

This year, rather than posting a couple of giant posts about what I saw at the Milan Furniture Fair (as I did in 2005 and 2004), I'm going to post a series of smaller notes about the thoughts I had while at the fair. These are not going to be in any kind of priority, but mostly impressions I had as I was looking back at the photographs I took. Here's the first one.

The building

The Fair used to be held in an old warren of buildings that had been built up haphazardly into a complex known as the Amandola Fiere. The new Rho fair building complex, designed by Massimiliano Fuksas, is much larger and cleaner and comfortable in many ways but (and you knew there was a but coming), I think it suffers from classic anti-personal Modernist excesses that I thought had disappeared in the 70s. It is not as desperately human-hostile as the worst excesses of 1950s monumental architecture, but it's definitely built with a good chunk of that kind of Modernist blindness to the user experience.

• It's built around a single enormous aisle that connects all 20-some enormous pavilions, which means that there are crowds and bottlenecks at the single path through the space.
  
• There's no rapid transportation in it, so unless you know how to find one of the shuttle busses that careen through the outer parking lots, you have to walk what seems like miles (the place is huge and it takes maybe 15 minutes walking at a good clip to get from one end of the aisle to the other).
  
• There are no obvious architectural cues for where the entrances are, and in fact the obvious places to enter it from the subway (how most people get there) is actually not an entrance, and guards have to be positioned there to direct crowds up escalators over a walkway and then down again to the real entrances.
  
• Inside, among all of the pavilions, there's virtually no way to tell which one you're in.
  
• The signage is all identically red and the repeating columns and flat perspective obscure any kind of perspective.
  

All this means that you do a LOT of walking, which makes the fact that there's no place to sit down that much more ironic, especially considering it's a furniture fair.

That said, it's not nearly as chaotic as the old Amandola fairground and the facilities seem modern. Plus, I think that the major decorative elements--the giant blimp-like shapes that I think are conference rooms, the glass polygon-mesh roof and the wacky conical columns, are great.

Fabio and I saw Fuksas walking around the fair, by himself, seemingly lost in thought in that "I'm a master architect" kind of way. I think there are some beautiful things about the new fair, but I hope he noticed how people were actually using the space, the trouble they were having, and then fixes it.

Posted by at 3:33 PM | Permalink

Simultaneously with Radio Shack deciding to liquidate their line of Vex robotic poducts less than a year after they were introduced, the Mythbusters team review it positively.

Although much more of a Erector-set style construction kit than a rapid ubiquitous user experience sketching tool, it's clearly from the same universe of ideas, as Grant Imahara, one of the MB team puts it (in copy that's going to end up on a box soon, I'm sure):

With the VEX System, it’s not like you’re sacrificing a lot of time and energy just to try an idea. It’s quick and easy, and it promotes discovery through trial and error, which is what engineering is all about.

(tangentially, who names a potentially frustrating product "vex"--c'mon, marketing department!)

Posted by at 5:55 PM | Permalink

Tod's excellent work hacking a Roomba serial cable and writing control software for it was featured in Makezine today. Despite my co-author credits, I just worked the phones on this one while he did all the heavy lifting. Yay Tod! Yay Roomba!

Posted by at 10:38 AM | Permalink

Car companies in the 1950s figured out that the hotrod culture was essentially a low-cost R&D lab and marketing research division, and that popular modifications could be mass produced and sold to a broader public. Similarly, it looks like maybe computer component companies are catching the same wave made by the casemod folks.

Western Digital has just released (as covered by Slashdot a hard drive with a transparent window, so that you can see the parts moving inside. This is of course the same phenomenon as revealing a hotrod's engine, except mapped to computers:

Various peripheral component manufacturers (of boards, fans, etc), have known about this for a long time, but I'm glad to see the industrial designers at the major component manufacturers figuring it out.

Posted by at 2:52 PM | Permalink

In Red Herring's latest issue on tech trends for next year they talk about flash memory:

By 2009, flash memory will cost just two-tenths of a penny for a megabyte compared to $0.052 today, according to iSuppli.

Although the exact prices don't matter, and (as Red Herring admits) this is still more expensive than hard drives, what it does mean is that lots of fast, low-power, solid-state memory will be available for cheap. More than just for storing MP3s and DVDs, it'll allow for the storage of lots of configuration and preference information. One of the ways to make something react very quickly is to pre-calculate the results of complex calculations and then quickly access the pre-stored calculations. With cheap flash memory, for something to "learn" a behavior (say, a bed that learns your body shape and sleep patterns and adjusts accordingly) and adapt, it may only have to figure out which one of the millions of pre-calculated "profiles" it has calculated (based on everyone's favorite Baysian learning algorithm? [look I used "Baysian" twice in one day!] ;-) and then recall a whole set of patterns of adaptive behavior (for example: when it warms the bed, when it moves your feet, when it rolls you, etc.). That may be good enough for a typical experience and it will be very computationally inexpensive, thus making the CPU requirements for the device (and therefore the battery requirements, the heat requirements, etc.) quite low, allowing for the inclusion of information processing technology into all kinds of devices it previously didn't exist in. In the case of things that react at people speed, memory may well trump CPU power.

Posted by at 12:11 AM | Permalink

I've been frustrated with being unable to watch the M4S2 video format my Pentax Optio s5z (an otherwise nice camera) produces on my Mac laptop. Several multi-hour long sessions trying to convert it into a format that displays under OSX Quicktime met with failure, until tonight, when I discovered that Casio makes a tiny codec for the Mac for their cameras, which also happens to work for mine.

Woohoo! (and, for the record, the complexity of video formats is pretty insane)

Posted by at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's an interesting lesson about intellectual property in the furniture scene (when seen from the outside, anyway). Much of it is driven by fear. The fear that someone will steal a precious idea, the fear that someone will make it for cheaper, that some key ingredient will be stolen, the fear that you've all stolen the wrong idea.
So what happens? The whole business runs on idea theft. Others' ideas suddenly become as precious as your own, maybe more precious because their value has somehow been proven through theft. This discourages actual innovation. All ideas have to pass through the fear filter: "is it worth stealing?" "Is someone going to steal it?" "Has it already been stolen?" Thus, in the interest of maintaining safely stolen--but not literally plagiarized--ideas, the tides of fashion are created, as the same ideas wash over and through various companies who, all the while, are pretending that each owns the whole ocean.

In fact, this model may actually be a decent representation of how people actually choose things: they evaluate what others are doing and, in the name of originality, do the same thing (at least in America, where the myth of individual self-expression, and the neurosis created because that's actually quite hard to do, runs strong). This is probably the engineer in me talking, but that seems a bit, uh, inefficient. Ideas are actually kind of cheap.

Look at the kitsch furniture scene. Because it doesn't have to conform to the internal logic of the Modernist high design scene, it can be a lot more creative. Partly, that's because it has the option of referencing all of history, not just the period between 1920 and 1960, as the Modernist stuff does incessantly. Even discounting that, the variation of kitsch is pretty huge (although not unlimited: it has rules of its own). This is somewhat counterintuitive, since you'd think kitsch would be based entirely on strict adherence to traditional motifs--kitsch is inherently "conservative" and conservative things work by referencing a mythology of tradition--but when you go through the "Classic" section of the Milan Furniture Fair (as opposed to the "Design" or "Modern" sections), there's actually a lot more variety. The fear disappears and is replaced with an exuberant, if occasionally scary, explosion of design ideas. It's also why Phillipe Starck used the visual language of kitsch to present his gun lamp series:

Black, gold, and a traditional form factor allow it to be outside the design mainstream, and thus be acceptable, since the content is clearly so controversial.

Compare that to his other lamp, which firmly stays within the Modernist space:

Kitsch

Trends

Granny apple green

Some people, unfortunately, didn't get the memo:

Flat patterns

Giant lamps

Sphere constellations

Dangly lamp clusters

Plush red

Shadows

Edra

Bonus section: the ultra-knockoffs

Posted by at 5:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Designed by Trans|alpin, Wood.e is essentially electrified wood, pressed with two integrated conducting layers which allow to add electrical conduct. 12V power is fed to the metal layers via one connector, and elements (lamps, spotlights, fans etc.) can be connected via another. NO cable needed.

(from We Make Money Not Art )

I'm glad to see people developing technologies like this which have very little to do with advancing electronic functionality and everything about making it easier for furniture designers to include technology into their furniture. I would like to see them go beyond including a single circuit--currently just power--in the laminate and to include data lines that terminate in standard connectors (maybe elegant small ones).

Posted by at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[...] a light, flexible solar panel that is a little thicker than photographic film and can easily be applied to everyday fabrics. The thin, bendy solar panels, which could be on the market within three years, are the fruit of a three-nation European Union research project called H-Alpha Solar (H-AS).

(from an article in New Scientist)

In the article they're talking about using these in large patches to recharge cell phones and iPods while you're walking around. I think they'll actually be much more useful as ways to create small computational objects that live outside and are always on. Depending on durability, cost, power, and recyclability imagine integrating these into, say, stuff that's destined to lie by the side of the road. McDonald's cups with a solar patch, a small amount of hardware and a tiny transmitter could create an ad hoc trash network from coast to coast.

Or something.

On that note, I wonder if there's a battery that can be made of leachate. That way, maybe technology could have a built-in leachate mode that used the power of the garbage dump to power little computational devices--each dump could form its own computer, making money off of the trash.

Posted by at 3:25 PM | Permalink

Seiko Epson Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in leveraging its proprietary inkjet technology to develop ultra-thin 20-layer circuit board.

(from this article)

Nifty! I've read of inkjets being used for all kinds of stuff and this seems like a particularly clever use. Here's an article on printing injet antennas with conductive ink. The injet antenna piece also has a nice story about how innovation happens by accident:

Carclo was working on a way to customize cell phones by printing personal images on the plastic bodies, when it ran into a problem trying to print Motorola’s silver metallic logo.

[...]

Carclo developed a prototype printer that's about the size of a small photocopier. It can print copper antennas on polycarbonate, polyester, polyethylene and other plastic films used for RFID tags, as well as on paper and cardboard. The copper layer can be as thin as half a micron and is almost as conductive as a solid copper antenna. And unlike bulk metal antennas, the printed antenna is recyclable.

I wonder if any of the check printing magnetic inks have enough conductivity to be usable for home-grown circuit printing...

Between these two technologies and the various other printer-based technologies (such as the polyester rapid prototyping rigs that are another kind of inkjet printer), I wonder how long before whole electronic devices can be printed on demand?

Posted by at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It'll be interesting to see how new technology integrates with people's existing home environments. Here's a nice description of how matching people's expectations with the new demands of consumer equipment, from this article:

The bulky armoires people already have in their homes hide the flat panels' sleekness, the main motivation for investing thousands of dollars in them. As more people are buying these televisions, new options are being designed, including compact consoles.

This is an interesting replay of the tension that happened when radio equipment became small enough that it was not longer necessary to have a big bulky piece of furniture and the popularity of tabletop models took off. People's attitudes of what constitututed an appropriate relationship between the furniture in their homes and the technology shifted in response to both the shifting technology constraints and their comfort level with the new tech. This is, of course, continuously going on--after all, we repurposed armoires from holding clothing to TV's--but it's fascinating to watch.

The article also mentions this amusing product, the In-Vis-O-Track. With a name that's out of the 30s (where it would have been called the "Inviso-Track-ola"), it's described thus:

At the touch of a hand-held transmitter, you can now conceal and reveal a RECESSED TV, or any other item behind your favorite painting.

I'll let all of the pop cultural theorists gnaw on how that reinterprets the shifting relationship of art to media in our culture. ;-)

Posted by at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Herman-Miller has started marketing a cubicle noise cancellation system (PDF) that produces pink noise. Pink noise sounds like white noise to the human ear, and thus effectively masks a lot of the background noisy frequencies of people talking and typing, thus making open office plans feel less open. H-M's solution is as follows:

Small speakers embedded in the “petals” that attach easily to the top of Resolve tall poles broadcast the patented spectrum.

[...]

Quiet Technology™ sound masking attaches to furniture, so efficient
coverage results from targeting only those areas of the space that
require sound masking.

[...]

Quiet Technology achieves these results by delivering an
Articulation Index (AI) of .2 or less, meaning that few words
(20 percent or less) spoken by people 12 to 16 feet away
are intelligible.

Remember the noise generators that used to sit in the corners of conference rooms in the 80s? (Or at least they used to be in conference rooms I was sitting in at the University of Michigan). I find that the reappearance of noise cancelling somewhat ironic, considering how much effort was spent on making open office plans with highly reflective exposed brick surfaces in the 90s, but it's also a recognition that people work differently now and that open office plans and a semblance of privacy need to coexist. It's interesting to see the privacy pendulum swing of office architecture: from 1900s tiny offices to 1920s Taylorized open work plans to 1960s cube farms to 1990s open offices, now back to some kind of privacy-centered idea.

This seems like a great opportunity for active noise cancellation (which is probably hella hard to do outside of headphones, but maybe someone's working on it) and using Bluetooth phone-sensitive cube walls to modulate the level of noise based on the number people in the vicinity, or feedback microphones that measure sound levels and adjust the volume of the pink noise dynamically (if that's appropriate for this kind of noise). And it's also time for someone to start writing pink noise Muzak. As I write this, I'm listening to Königsforst by Gas, which may as well be "music for pink-noise enabled office spaces."

Even further tangentially, H-M PDF starts with an interesting history of the use of sound-cancellation in office environments:

Early sound-masking systems installed in buildings in the 1960s simulated the sound of air moving by electronically filtering random noise produced by gas-discharge vacuum tubes. Loudspeakers in the ceiling distributed the amplified noise signal throughout the office. However, making human speech unintelligible required a volume level so high that the sound masking itself became a distracting annoyance. In the 1970s, electronically generated sound masking using frequency generators that shaped sound to better mask speech became more practical and worked well when installed correctly. Ten years later, researchers began studying 1/f noise, the phenomenon also known as “flicker” or “pink” noise. Targeting “pink” noise to match the frequencies of human speech raised the threshold of audibility just enough to mask intelligibility without requiring the higher volumes used in earlier systems.

Posted by at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Carbon fiber, miracle fiber from the 70s, seems to be making inroads into the furniture industry. I think it's potentially an interesting metric of how quickly this industry can absorb new technology, or maybe it's just that carbon fiber has only recently gotten to be cost-effective enough to profitably mass-produce furniture (though I find that hard to believe, since the markup on furniture has to be at least that on motorcycle mufflers, and those have had carbon fiber on 'em for years).

In the past 6 months I have seen 3 carbon fiber chairs appear:

• The Shuji Yamagata's v2.3 chair.
• The Bertjan Pot Carbon Copy chair.
• And now this, the Bang Design Talon chair (made by the same company as Yamagata's v2.3 )

What does this mean for smart furniture? I think it means that at least someone thinks that there's a sizable market for non-designer furniture that's made in nontraditional ways. A lot of innovative stuff, like in any early adopter situation, is bought purely because it's made in some wacky way or out of some wacky material; it's when things are bought for what the wacky does, rather than for what it is, that things take off.

I feel that information is a kind of material that is manipulated by technological tools and projected into the world as objects, so the opening of the market to new materials is good news. It's an interesting datapoint.

And here's an interesting carbon fiber/kevlar twill material that could be even cooler.

Posted by at 3:02 PM | Permalink

Beds which are more supportive on one side for a heavier partner have been around for some time.

But in recent years Sleepyhead has poured millions of dollars into making beds which can be configured to more exact individual needs. They sell for more than $10,000 each and are proving popular.

In Sleepyhead catches Oz napping.

This describes a market need for custom mattresses which could form the platform for self-adjusting beds, with additional information processing. Right now I think adjustable beds are barely more than the kind of informercial-style taco-shaped bed things that look like they're out of a nursing home, but maybe there's a larger market than that.

Posted by at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rereading that last post, it seemed kinda grumpy. That's not actually representative of my experience. There was a huge amount at these fairs that I liked a of lot. Here are some notes about that.

Continue reading "Two Furniture Fairs (part 2)" »

Posted by at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Since my furniture manifesto was being published, I decided to learn something about the furniture business by diving into the deep end. In April, I went to the Milan Furniture Fair (the Salone Internazionale del Mobile) and then International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York in May. It's hard to distill these enormous fairs into some blog entries, but here are some thoughts/observations. For those who are in the business who may be reading this, excuse me if I state the obvious or jump to conclusions.

The first thing that surprised me was how enormous and fragmented the industry is. Here's a map of the Milan center that hosts the Salone. It's probably half a square mile in area and on multiple floors:

Continue reading "Two Furniture Fairs (part 1)" »

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I will write more about this later, because Molly and I are taking a couple of days off after the craziness of the 2004 Milan Furniture Fair (the Salone dei Mobile in Italian). I'll write some more afterward, but here are some random images from I took.

Some first impressions:

• Orange is still the new red (red is also still the new red)
• Woodgrain is still the new Formica
• Comfort is still nonexistent
• As far as most "mainstream avant garde" design is concerned, it's still 1970
• The Barcelona Chair is the most frequently copied classic chair

Continue reading "2004 Milan Furniture Fair Impressions" »

Posted by at 3:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lantronix has released two interesting products for the embedded hardware market, the WiPort and the Xport. These are tiny Ethernet transceivers (one wireless, the other not) that add connectivity to devices without requiring a whole lot of knowledge about how the connectivity works. Each one has a complete "TCP/IP network stack and OS" and, most usefully, "an embedded web server that can be used to remotely configure, monitor, or troubleshoot the attached device." In the case of the Xport, all of this is in a package barely bigger than the 10BaseT connector that fits into it (not that 10BaseT is going to be meaningful for consumer products for much longer, but it's a cool hack).

It's clear to me that as the market for embedded intelligence matures, plug and play modules like these are going to become more popular, which will further increase the speed at which embedded communicate and intelligence appears in consumer products. I can envision a point, oh say five years from now, when not having some kind of embedded communication in devices will be bad design. There's probably going to be all kinds of interference and interoperability issues at that point, but everything will likely be able to talk on the Net. I'm excited!

Posted by at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was looking at the NetStumber national access point map and noticing that it hasn't been updated in a while. Clearly the excitement of finding WiFi access points has worn off. But it started me thinking. What if there was a way to use that kind of data--the incomplete, potentially erroneous, volunteed-created--data, because there seems to be something interesting about knowing the GPS location of a given access point? I mean, access points don't tend to move and are broadcasting their IDs (in the form of their Ethernet addresses) all the time, regardless of whether you can log on to use the Net. How could that be useful?

It's useful in this way: until GPS hardware gets to be cheap enough to incorporate into everything as WiFi and Bluetooth are now, using Access Point/GPS location databases can create a cheap kind of GPS for WiFi devices. All that has to be done is that a table matching one with the other has to be downloaded to a device, and then when that device sees the Ethernet address appear, it knows (with some rough degree of certainty) where it is. Imagine a busy downtown area, such as the Financial District in San Francisco. There are dozens of visible WiFi access points per block. Sure you can only log into maybe 10% of them, but who cares if all you're looking for is their Ethernet address? Downtown SF is full of history: this giant area here was once the bay, here was where the Niantic Hotel used to stand, here's where that fire raged in 1906, etc. I can imagine creating a tour of downtown San Francisco that would fit on a WiFi-enabled PDA--something that's likely a whole lot more common than a GPS-enabled PDA--and would allow you to walk around downtown, giving you information for which the location was determined by the WiFi access points visible to the PDA.

Would it be super accurate? Of course not. But it would be cheap from a hardware standpoint--it would be expensive from a data-collection standpoint, but not ALL that expensive. One afternoon walking with NetStumbler would collect all of the necessary data, and it could be updated every six months, with the tour cues synched appropriately.

Sure it's a silly stopgap measure until actual geolocation becomes available, but I think that there's a whole lot more opportunity here than just downtown tours.

Posted by at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of my favorite attempts at brand extension (although not altogether a successful one, I suspect) was the My First Sony line of kids technology. Those products were probably the biggest impact that the Memphis Group style of the 80s had on pop culture (apart from the set design in Ruthless People, that is). Now the idea is back, in the form of Disney's new electronics for kids. I can already see a set of these in every designer's house. Hell, if the TV was a little bigger and an LCD, I'd buy one right now.

Oh and thanks to Gizmodo for the link My new favorite consumer product geek site.

Posted by at 11:17 AM | Permalink

An announcement of someone developing a GPS-enabled handheld game system. This is yet more of the conversion of "all electronic objects about the size of your hand" that I'm expecting will be in high gear soon--pretty much until phones, cameras, gps devices, remotes and anything else that looks like that become a single object. The question will then be what to call that object.

But back to the game. First of all, it really underscores the fact that kids don't have nearly the same rights that adults do. An object that let someone else track your whereabouts remotely would certainly be much more difficult to propose and accept if targeted toward adults. And the possible misuses of that information are really extreme. If I was a kid in a group of kids with these things, the first thing I'd do is swap 'em with my friends so that our parents wouldn't know whose kid they were tracking, and then swap those with friends from neighboring towns, etc. Second of all, it seems like they're missing the most interesting part of this: that geolocation can be a critical part of the game, not just as a surveillance device. Sheesh, if you're going to be building the hardware and communication infrastructure into this thing to do all of the tracking, why not make it an actual feature for the user of the system?

Posted by at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Scott sent me a link to a story on the public trials of the DARPA "Smart Dust" project that's been floating around for the last four years.

This is the key idea: "By self-organizing into a sensor network, smart dust would filter raw data for relevance before relaying only the important findings to central command."

In other words, it's a bunch of generic sensor modules that link to form--ant-colony-like--a single sensory entity that uses heurists about data goodness to extract knowledge from a lot of randomly collected data. I see several interesting things here:

• Self-organization (Using TinyOS)
• Small sensors (what's important to sense? how do you sense it?)
• Relevance filtering (how do you pull knowledge out? How do you know what's important?)

The dystopian possibilities are obvious and ominous, but I think that interesting output is possible for home networks without it becoming Demon Seed.

Posted by at 8:56 AM | Permalink

Slashdot posted a story about an embedded HTML renderer being used for creating GUIs for medical devices. The story they point to is written by the marketing director of a company that's trying to sell the technology and, frankly, not all that interesting from a technology standpoint. It made me think, however, that basic Web technology has gotten stable enough and knowledge about it has gotten distributed enough, that including an HTML renderer for GUIs is almost a commodity idea, that it's a no-brainer to make UIs HTML-based, rather than creating a proprietary system. Even just a couple of years ago, the phone industry was trying to introduce WAP, which was a "simplified" version of HTML. Now, there's no need to simplify. From a device creator's perspective, an HTML renderer is nearly as much of a commodity as a clock chip or a serial port.

The effect that this has on device design may not be profound from an innovation standpoint, but from a development standpoint, it could be very big. Once HTML-based GUI rendering becomes as easy as putting a block on a block diagram, it's much easier to include it in engineered objects. It becomes a part of the production process, rather than part of R&D. I can imagine many more things growing rendered UIs because it's cheaper than creating them "in hardware." It's like when plastic backlit signs almost completely replaced neon signs. It not because the technology was any better or prettier, but because they were much cheaper to install, change and maintain.

Posted by at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Tapwave Zodiac looks to be a nifty PDA-like device at just about the right price point to capture the market of 20-somethings who grew up with Gameboys, but have dayjobs. It makes more sense to me than the PDA-phone bricks that were around last year and, if it had a Danger-like mobile Net connection (not to be used as a phone, of course, but just to use the digital phone network) and a thumb keyboard, it would be a truly great device, an adult Cybiko. I'm sure they're working on it, but I hope they converge that functionality to it quickly.

Posted by at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been waiting for consumer-grade easy-to-use GPS-enabled digital cameras to come out since handheld GPS units and digital cameras came out. It seemed like a natural match for documentation purposes, especially if there was a standard for tagging the data. Ricoh came out with the RDC-1700G, an expensive Japanese-only GPS camera last year, but now they've released the Caplio Pro G3, a much cheaper consumer model. It's still only for the Japanese market, but the fact that they made it based on a consumer platform is a good sign that it may be available elsewhere soon. I think that this will be a huge boon to the visual blogging world. I can see services that bring together photoblogging and Indy Junior to make something like GeoSnapper much more acessible. I'm looking foreward to using one, but I can also see the downside: it won't take long for someone to forget to remove the GPS metadata from some picture that really shouldn't have it and then get into trouble.

The next question: when is the GPS-camera-phone going to come out? It only makes sense (as it has for, gee, 5 years?) for these three handheld, plastic, personal information tools to be coupled. Merge the Caplio with the Danger Hiptop with some backend photo management software and you have a pretty serious tool for documenting the world in real time.

Posted by at 2:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I've seen a number of these toolkits (from Lego Mindstorms onward), which promise simple modules that artists (i.e. non-electrical engineers) can use to create real-world electronic projects. I'm surprised that this particular wheel gets reinvented, but it just shows that no really good system exists yet. That said, Making Things looks pretty good and got a good review from Sasha on the puppets list. It also connects with Max/MSP, which I consider one of the most deceptively powerful programming systems around (deceptive because visual programming is only easier than regular programming for very small things--it becomes serious spaghetti quickly; powerful because it looks like more of a toy than it is).

Interesting.

Posted by at 9:59 PM | Permalink

So Cypress has a new Wireless USB technology. I'm not sure how this relates to the whole batch of current wireless standards operating in 2.4 GHz (which includes Bluetooth, the WiFi family and various other consumer electronics devices), but it's yet another choice in the "getting devices to talk" game.

Likewise, I think that it's really cool that Maxim/Dallas Semiconductor have created an embedded processor with a TCP/IP stack built into it. Granted, Java chips have probably had this kind of thing for a while, but having a single, small chip with an IP stack (called TINI ) is pretty nifty.

I can imagine how the combination of these types of technologies--cheap low-power IP-enabled chips plus cheap low-power wireless communication (the key words being cheap and low-power in both cases, since this stuff exists in all kinds of more expensive/higher-power formats already) could enable some interesting new applications.

Posted by at 7:45 PM | Permalink