When I was in Milan for the Furniture Fair/Design Week I took a break from all the current design talk and looking and went to the Triennale for the inaugural show of the new design Italian museum hosted there, "The Seven Obsessions of Italian Design." If I had more time, there are many aspects of the show I'd like to explore: the excellent exhibit design, the intriguing and beautiful objects, the absurd sexism of a film loop of giant naked women's butts when talking about "comfort," the insightfulness of the theme, the daring of putting a Berretta handgun as the totem object for the "Energy" obsession, the oddness that the exhibit treats Italian design like an art movement that already happened, ending around 1982. Unfortunately, other than to list those, I'm not going to talk about them, but I urge you to go to the show if you're in Milan.

The one thing I'm going to talk about is how the show's curators use animism as the foundation for describing the origins (and presumably the core) of Italian design. And, frankly, I'm not even going to talk about it. I'm going to quote a big chunk of the catalog introductory essay by Andrea Branzi (as translated in the L'Europeo magazine catalog--there were at least two, and possibly three English translations of the text available: one in this magazine-style catalog, one in the book catalog, and one in the exhibit itself).

Italian design (which has never had a single style or sole work methodology) uses technology to express artistic possibilities, and art to express its technological possibilities. Its project philosophy still conserves the deep-rooted influences of ancient Latin animism and pre-Roman mysticism, which attributed a soul to every object, a soul that could be called forth at will and was not just a distant reflection of utility and esthetics. All of this still constitutes the difference between design in Italy and that in other countries, which often interpret design as a function of business guided by marketing. In other countries the history of design consists in a succession of formal styles and typologies and therefore represents a lesser reality, devoid of autonomy, crushed between the Great Histories of Art and Architecture. In Italy on the other hand household objects, work tools or pieces of furniture have always been co-protagonists of a broader history, of "elevated" events connected to cultural anthropology, religion and politics; to the point where Italian design constitutes an integral part of the country's overall history, supplying many precious indications regarding ways of thinking, behaving and being.

The animism theme continues with the first of the show's obsession, "The Animist Theater"

Beginning with the Latin Domus and continuing right up through modern times, there has been an idea of the house as a theatrical place in which household objects are actors participating in a dialogue with inhabitants (like in the Palatine Anthology in which lovers call on lanterns or beds to testify to their oath of love), and, like "household pets," which protect the house from the dangers of fate and evil-doers.

[the description continues and describes the household as the stage in which the "comedy of life" has been played out from ancient times to the present -mk]

In my experience, Italian design has always been held up as the sensual and emotional side of Modernism. Exemplified by folks like Pininfarina, it's held up as how to successfully fuse emotion and desire with functionality to create beautiful and useful objects. That may well be true, but for me what's interesting in this description is that an Italian design critic bases that success on an animist relationship to everyday objects. I don't think that Italian designers consciously thought of their products as alive, but as a cultural phenomenon it seems for me to approach the idea of an implicit design metaphor that has guided Italian design to create objects in a certain (commercially successful) way. As someone who is thinking about magic as a design metaphor for future technological products, it's interesting--and heartening--to see this retrospective analysis as an explanation of a metaphor that worked.

Tangentially: several of the photos at the top of this blog post are from the third major design experience I had in Milan this year, the Milan Monumental Cemetery. If you think that ancestor worship is not a contemporary European phenomenon, you need to go to this place. 100+ years of Milanese money, technology, and competitiveness have come together to create a fantastic, enormous architectural theme park for the dead. I have a Flickr set that would have been even bigger if my camera's battery hadn't run out.

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.

Luxist reports on a new service to help track the provenance of wine. When Tod and I were at NextFest we spoke to some folks at Hitachi who had contemplated using their RFID technology to do the same thing, but just recently two new services have come online that are designed to track wine by the bottle (the other is Great Wall of Wine, a Chinese merchant, who are using RFIDs to stop counterfeit wine).

This seems to be an unnecessarily narrow use of the technology. Counterfeit wine is a problem, but (in my understanding) it's primarily it's a problem with a few very old, very expensive bottles. Old wine is not going to have RFID stickers on it, and if one is applied in such a was as to not damage the expensive bottle, it'll probably be easily moved to another bottle. Moreover, the business plan (as I understand it) is dependent on Metcalfe's Law network effects to work. In other words, it becomes useful if lots of wine has the stickers (the old "if only you have a fax machine, then faxing isn't a useful technology" argument), but initially very little wine is going to have stickers on it. For systems like that to be successful, the technology needs to be useful to just a single user. That's exactly the situation where a rich information shadow becomes valuable, and if you excuse the self-promotion, that's why we made WineM focused on the richness of wine's information shadow rather than just a single application. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the business model. Maybe the people who really need these systems are not end consumers, but dealers, distributors and regulators. Regardless, between these projects, Smartcorq and the Queen's ISETAN experiment, it looks like wine and RFID are going to be mated at some point in the very near future. The question is whether the power of all of the information about the wine will be exposed to end users (to everyone's great benefit, in my opinion) or whether the technology will remain stuck in the realms of logistics and security.

Now comes a company that's trying to combine the two unsuccessful ideas to make one successful one. Wickd is betting that there will be enough people who want to snap shotcode barcodes on t-shirts to find out about someone, and that there will be enough people who wants to wear those (kinda expensive, kinda plain) t-shirts to create a critical mass of urban singles willing to pay for the privilege to make their business model work. I'm pretty dubious of the underlying interaction model (it's more related to first person shooters--where you run up to a target, fire your weapon while they're not looking, and run away--than dating, where you get close, interact face-to-face and ideally stay close), but for me it's another example that people are the most popular object to unify with its information shadow. Having information about the people with you at brunch or at a conference (which is where an adult version of Disney Clickables could be very valuable), and having your intersection in physical space mapped to social networking space opens up huge possibilities for maintaining your social network.

All of these projects point to the inevitability of that unification, it's just that no one has found the right vehicle to move the penetration of the technology to the appropriate place on the Metcalfe's Law curve.

Oh, and two final words of advice to the Wickd people: Hanky Code. Think about it. ;-)

[UPDATE: Several people suggested I should be more clear about why I think that this is a questionable idea. OK, here it is: I think that no woman in her right mind wants to wear a shirt that gives random people behind her back personal information. It's not the quality of the information or the content, it's the coupling of that with anonymity and immediate physical presence.]

When I was kid growing up in suburban Detroit, I always knew that there was a salt mine in the center of downtown. There aren't many mines in the middle of urban areas, but one of the many strange things about Detroit is that it had one, or has one, since it's probably still down there, even though it's been closed for 20 years. I think I was sick and missed the 6th grade field trip that would have been the one chance I ever had to see it, but I saw all the big salt crystals that the other kids brought back from it and knew that the trip to the salt mine (like snowmobile safety classes) was one of the key moments of many Michigan children's childhoods.

What I didn't realize was how the salt mine's operations are actually an interesting example of the kind of negotiation that happen between industry, landowners and city governments when trying to provide a city service based on a low-cost commodity resource. When telling the story to Molly the other day (based on this article), I realized that there are similarities between negotiating the mineral rites for salt and negotiating technology access for municipal Wifi, or any other kind of pervasive technological service. See, radio waves are kind of like minerals in that they don't care about property lines. The pattern of extracting salt in Detroit looks a lot like the pattern of Wifi access nodes. Compare the map above to the one for Spokane, WA:

I don't know if the similarity stops at the look of the maps, or goes deeper into how services that don't stop at property lines work in general, but I think it's an interesting analogy.

The first (found by Liz) is WebKinz which are plush toys that each have a unique code on their tag that brings up a unique play space that's just for that specific toy (randomly generated of course). The idea is "Beanie Babies meets NeoPets meets Cabbage Patch Kids" and although I think the execution of the concept leaves much to be desired (why buy furniture for your toy basset's online "room"?), it's an interesting example of how toy companies are merging offline and online conceptual play spaces in a very direct way.

The second is Disney's Clickables, which I learned about from CNET's Matter/Antimatter blog.

Clickables that we are launching in connection to our new Disney Fairies virtual world. It's a way for kids to take their online world experience into the real world. The core of it is a magical bracelet. By simply clicking their bracelets together, girls become friends in the online environment.

From the press release:

“The future of toys is about connecting online and offline play,” said Chris Heatherly, vice president of technology and innovation, Disney Consumer Products. “Kids and tweens are quickly embracing virtual worlds and, while there are several Internet-related toys in the market today, the play ends when the computer gets shut down. With our new line of Disney Fairies toys featuring Clickables technology, we're bringing the fun of social networking, collecting, and trading into the real world so that girls can extend the fun of the enchanting online world of Pixie Hollow to school, the park, or wherever they may be.”

This system of course owes a lot to Ruth Kikin-Gil's Buddy Beads project in terms of its use of jewelry to communicate social relationship between BFFs, but it also explicitly links the online world to the physical world using magic as a metaphor. It's not surprising that it's coming from Disney thematically, but what's interesting to me is how much Disney is investing in it. This is a sizable product rollout, which typically means that they have done enough research to believe that it'll be successful on their terms, which typically means hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers. It's a project, and a genre, to watch.

You can download the presentation with all the text as a 900K PDF.

(image by MGChan, found on Flickr)

That last reference shows my current interest in the way that digital networked technologies allow for objects to shift from "buy and store" model to a "rent and share" subscription model. Bag, Borrow or Steal, City Carshare and timeshared condos (thanks to Nicholas Nova for reminding me of this) are all occasional use/high price products that technology has changed the ownership model for. What's a high price niche functionality today becomes commodity functionality eventually. Netflix has done it for DVDs. In one of Bruce Sterling's original Viridian speeches from 1999, he brings it all the way don to the most commodified of tools, the hammer:

If all your possessions are network peripherals, then you have a possible LINUX model for objects in the real world. In this world, I don't buy a hammer. What I really want to own is the hammering functionality. I might as well share the hammer with my neighbor == he can't steal it, and if he breaks it, I'll know immediately. A modern hammer in this world comes built around a chip, with a set of strain gauges that determine if it is worn or broke or abused. Let's network that hammer.

Berkeley's famous Tool Lending Library did a low-tech version (the subscription price for it is the cost of owning a house in Berkeley), and Ford, DeWalt and ThingMagic are tantalizingly close with their Tool Link product:

The innovative Ford Work Solutions Tool Link from DeWalt uses RFID technology to track what's in your cargo box and what isn't. Checking Tool Link before heading out to a job site ensures all tools you need are on hand. At the end of the workday, Tool Link guarantees all the gear used at a job site is back onboard.

The Ford version is a kind of personal inventory control system, but once every tool has an embedded RFID tag in it, you can start doing all kinds of things, including the kind of subscription-based resource sharing that Sterling alluded to. Soon, though, more occasional-use products will become dotted outlines that get filled in as we need them.

[Update: Treehugger has an article that says that services like Bag Borrow or Steal are Product Service Systems by the EU. Their definition is "in essence they are a means, by which we get what we want, without needing to own the product that provides that service." I think that the term, and its PSS acronym, sounds too abstract and generic and that the idea would spread if it was called something more informative and evocative--I dunno, "library" for nonprofit ones and maybe something like "thingshare" (riffing off of "carshare" and "timeshare") for the for-profit general class.]

[Update: Phil points to Jeremy Rifkin's Age of Access as a book-length discussion of some of these ideas with the core thesis being "Property [in the age of networked information] continues to exist, but is far less likely to be exchanged in markets. Instead, suppliers hold onto property in the new economy and lease, rent, charge an admission fee, subscription, or membership dues for its short-term use." I haven't read it--it's on order now--but like much of Rifkin's work, it seems like there's an essence of truth to the idea even though the presentation is hyped.]

But once you have decided what constitutes a programme episode then something really significant happens - you can give it a name, make it addressable, you can - for the first time point at it. Better still, you can move from pointing at something to glueing handles onto it. And once you have such a handle, then you can pick up the programme and throw it around and stick labels on it and join it together with other programmes with bits of semantic string. You've moved your engagement with the programme from only being able to look at it to being to manipulate it and do things with it. And there is almost no end to the things you can do once you've uniquely identified a television or radio programme. It's foundational. It's like there are two views of the world - the solid one around us and the Matrix-style flowing green lines one. In this second world, until you give a thing a name - until you can point at it in greenspace - it simply doesn't exist.

[...]

Now I know that the creation of universal and world-unique identifiers for things must seem one of the most tedious concepts or projects known to man. But I believe that it's fundamental to our technological development - and particularly our ability to take our ever-increasing computing power and increasingly interconnected appliances and merge them seemlessly with the environment around us. The greenspace of the Matrix needs to merge with the physical - they need to become indistinguishable. Until we can point at, until we can pick up, until we can handle, we will never be able to use these concepts around us effectively.

[...]

In this future world, all of our discrete objects (physical or conceptual) will be annotatable, or linkable to, referencable. Each 'thing' will be built upon in non-physical dimensions of data. And that final process of merging must start with addressability. It must start with identifiers.

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen of course went on to embody this idea in her ThingLink project soon after Tom's piece, but I'm happy I found Tom's clear and powerful articulation of the idea so that I don't have to recreate it. ;-) Thank you Tom and Ulla-Maaria!

Electronic household organization tools has been around a long time (I took a half-hearted stab at it a couple of years ago). Not counting pre-Cambrian kitchen computer technology, getting into kitchens was an early goal of the first wave of Internet appliances in the late 90s. 3COM's Audrey, one of the classic failures of this first wave, advertises that it "can be the family's nerve-center in no time, handling schedules, phone books, and notes." Cozi's pitch is similar: "Cozi helps busy families manage schedules, appointments, shopping and communications from wherever you are — the kitchen, car, office or even the grocery store."

Timing is critical in technology adoption so there's no reason why these technologies can't work now when they failed 8 years ago. Many people who in WP/Cozi's likely core audience of affluent 30-something new home buyers are probably thinking much more about their families now than they were 8 years ago, because they probably did have them then. However, the repeated failure of the idea is something to learn from and I hope that Cozi has been studying people's habits and the pattern of earlier similar technologies to see why they didn't work out. Is it purely because the value of the service versus the cost isn't great enough (i.e. dry erase boards are cheaper and more flexible, but don't allow you to check your kids' schedule from the road, but that's OK with most people) or is there something deeper? I'll be interested to see where this goes.

First, Indi's book. Although the title says it's a method to construct "mental models" through in-depth task analysis, it's a lot more. In the book Indi documents the many techniques she perfected working with a huge variety of clients. The techniques range from how to structure a cross-functional team, to recruiting people, conducting interviews, analyzing them, and creating effective diagrams that communicate the results. Really, it's Indi's whole rigorous process, which so many Adaptive Path projects hinged on, described clearly and in detail. It's a fantastic resource, a toolbox of highly effective, original tools for doing insightful, in-depth user research. I recommend it without reservation to everyone who does user research. We've all been asking Indi to write this book for years, and I'm so happy she's finally done it. Congratulations, Indi!

[FYI, get 10% off the cover price when you buy it directly from Rosenfeld Media's site when you use the code "FOKUNI10" I recommend doing this, rather than going through Amazon because Lou gets a larger proportion of the revenue, even with the discount.]

Second, Rosenfeld Media. Lou has been a friend of mine for many years. We were both part of the soup at the University of Michigan in the 80s and 90s which led to that school's far-thinking innovations in technology. We were there at the beginning of the Web and although we didn't know each other then, I believe we were influenced by many of the same ideas. When I went to LA in 1994 to design websites, Lou was already thinking and writing about information organization. He then went on to basically invent information architecture as we understand it today. He then went on to found a successful company and, in the process, he managed to write something like 8 books.

When he said he wanted to reinvent publishing based on his experiences writing books and designing information systems, I was very excited. Rosenfeld Media is the product of that redesign process. With it, he's decided to embrace the user-centered principles of site design and applied them to making books. But it's not just books, it's the whole culture of information around the books. In Lou's vision, the physical book is an artifact of a larger process of taking experts' knowledge and matching it to the needs of his company's audience of practitioners. Right now it looks mostly like traditional, if somewhat enlightened, publishing company, but you can start to see some differences in it immediately: books have version numbers on every page and you get the digital copy when you buy the paper one. He's also doing much of his marketing research out in the open and he's beta testing his books. It really is a different way of thinking about how to publish technical books, and I wish him luck and success (frankly, I don't think he needs the luck, but it can't hurt ;-).

The idea is to use Firefox 3's new Places bookmarking and history service to store the location of where a web page was viewed, and to allow users to sort their history based on location in addition to time and alphabetically (the two current options).

Places rewrites the browser's history and bookmark capability as a single database. Being a database, it allows every entry in the database (every "entity"? I don't know my database terminology well) to have additional fields. Places defines two fields up front: Annotations and Tags (Zotro's influence perhaps?), but there's no reason that either location couldn't be squeezed into one of those fields, or defined as a field itself. You could start with the Wifi SSID. Here's a script to extract that on Mac OS X 10.4, for example:


cd /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources
airport -I | grep \ SSID - | awk '{print $2}'


Liz correctly points out that mapping meaningful physical location to either a set of GPS coordinates or an SSID ('linksys', for example) is a significant problem, but I think that SSID-based organization would be an interesting place to start. Moreover, as things like browsers become more portable thanks to dedicated browsing devices and mobile phones, using available information to associate information with location may become increasingly more valuable.

The Site Diet

I would also like to use it to remind me of what I'm doing on the Web as I'm doing it. I get distracted by the Web easily (as I know many people do) and end up spending hours on things that aren't high on my list of priorities. I've tried many techniques to combat this and the best browser-based one I've found is the Stealth Kiwi Greasemonkey script. It's a good way to remind myself to stay focused and it works pretty well, but it's a pretty crude solution, kind of stomping on my web use regularly. With the Places API, I imagine having a Site Diet countdown timer next to each URL. I could in advance define how many times I felt I was allowed to visit a site per day or per week (I suspect it would be a default for all sites, with some exceptions, much as Stealth Kiwi works now), and when that countdown timer expired, well, that was it: no more checking my friends photos on Flickr or reading about embarrassing hometown political scandals until tomorrow.

I think it would be pretty straightforward to write Firefox extensions to do either the location-based history or the Site Diet, but I'm too busy making ThingM go, so here, Internet, you can have these ideas. ;-) And thank you Firefox team!

ThingM's focus on the Henry Ford project was communicating context in history museums, but today I watched how well the Detroit Institute of Arts does the same for art. Liz and I spent the afternoon in the recently redesigned DIA, and it was a surprise and a treat.

The DIA's collection is heavy on the classics and the 18th and 19th European art collected by its original auto company mogul donors. Not all of that art has stood the test of time and some is potentially embarrassing to display without explanation (chinoiserie anyone?). Fortunately, the DIA did not shy away from the questionable acquisitions or keep the "embarrassing" art in the warehouse. This is not to say that they don't have a great collection, they do, but what fascinated me was how they used their secondary pieces to tell stories, to explain and to contextualize the other work. Rather than galleries of dusty numbered Greek vases, for example, they had a life-size rear video projection that explained the social purpose of each of the vases in the Greek wine ritual. This was informative, since the pictures on the vases suddenly made much more sense once their function was understood. Moreover, the rear projection was in the style of the vase art itself, which tied together the artifacts to the people and their rituals in an immediate, entertaining and direct way.

(Flickr image by lisawiz)

Another great exhibit used a bunch of late 18th century French decorative art to tell the story of the life of leisure of French aristocrats, devoting each gallery to a time of the day and the artifacts that would have been found in each situation (implicit in the presentation was that this was the before picture; after the French Revolution, well, that's all different). A great installation in this exhibit was the dining gallery, which had a downward-facing video projection of a formal multi-course dinner, filled with Enlightenment-inspired symmetry, royal pomp and dozens of exotic-to-us dishes (wine aspic, for example). You could sit down at the table and watch as hands in fancy outfits places ridiculous dish after ridiculous dish on the table. Great.

(Flickr image by jtwilcox)

Finally, a much lower-tech technological intervention, but one that was interesting (if occasionally awkward because of its placement) was a set of triangular prism-shaped label spinners. Each side of the prism has a different complementary perspective on a given work from a different, named expert (as opposed to a single view by an anonymous curator). Some have historical context, some cultural. It presents a more nuanced exploration of the ideas.

The parts of the museum where they hadn't implemented all of the changes, where it was more like a traditional museum with vitrines, white cards and only occasional explanation seemed impoverished and bland. But on the whole, the redesign (described in detail [2.1MB PDF] in one of the local papers) is highly successful (and judging from the $180 million the museum raised in preparation for it, its success isn't just measured by the quality of the design) and engaging.

The presentation is available on Slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

And as a 710K PDF where you can see a complete transcript of my talk in the notes.

Also, a bit of total self-indulgence. About a year and a half ago, SMITH magazine held a Twitter-based contest for six-word memoirs. I entered on a whim and mine got picked up (along with this image and the memoirs of some 850 others). SMITH got a book deal based out of the contest and now the book is out. It makes entertaining bathroom reading and I congratulate SMITH and Twitter for making a cultural product before pretty much anyone knew who they were.

ThingM's first product, BlinkM is now for sale from Sparkfun. BlinkM is a smart LED. What's a smart LED? Well, on the one hand, it's the atomic unit of ubiquitous computing: an RGB LED and a CPU. Input, processing, networking, and output in one package. If technology worked like chemistry, it would be analogous to hydrogen; if it worked like biology, to algae. OK, maybe that overstates the point, but it's the simplest device that we could imagine that represents the essence of ubicomp, and it was the one we could, as a self-funded startup, afford to develop and manufacture relatively quickly (development started in November, though it's based on work we did with WineM).

It's designed for hobbyists, designers and artists who want to add low-power colored light to their projects, but don't want to mess with pulsed width modulation or color theory. Give it an RGB number, or select a color from the color picker, and it glows that color; enter two colors, and it'll do a smooth fade between them. Want to simulate the breathing sleep light on a Mac computer but in purple, it'll do that.

Take a look at the description for the full story.

In all honestly, we're really excited that we developed and are selling this (and by "we," Tod really did all of the heavy lifting on the engineering, software, documentation and video). I know, I know, soon we will have to deal with the customer service (we're keeping it in the ex-Adaptive Path family by using Satisfaction, the company co-founded by fellow AP founder alum Lane Becker), but right now it feels pretty great.

We'd like to thank the people who helped us out along the way:

• John Houck wrote most of the Sequencer in Processing and Java.
• Elizabeth Goodman designed the initial UI design for the Sequencer
• Nathan Seidle, of Sparkfun, for advice and for the initial order (placed months before prototypes even existed!)
• Mykle Hansen, for being our first and only alpha tester
• Dave Vondle, for data sheet advice and for the first bulk order, also placed long before they actually existed
• The alumni of the Sketching in Hardware conferences, who gave us a lot of valuable advice in the early stages of the project
• David, Anders, and all of the other beta testers