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.

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.

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.

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.

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.