© Yamaha (via YouTube)
Winder (Stepping Out of the Slate #2)
A key, dedicated to just one song, like a music box. When the key is wound up, the song from the connected smartphone begins to play. Sound movements are generated according to the flutter of the spring, allowing you to enjoy the unique sound texture. The joy of interacting with the clockwork object may lead to a more intimate musical experience.
© Yamaha (via YouTube)
RhythmBot (Stepping Out of the Slate #4)
This is an evolutionary form of metronome that supports your performance with rhythm. Each of these four small robots play a unique acoustic sound. They can be linked to your smartphone to play rhythms to the tempo you are playing, and they can even join in and accompany you in real-time. Creating a rhythm through a session-like style is a great way to enhance the experience of playing music.
I absolutely love those quirky totems Yamaha created for a series called Stepping out of the slate which aims to give music applications and sound software a more tactile layer. Curious if they manage to make more out of those little accessories than just the prototypes.
yamaha.com/en/about/design/events_topics/stepping_out_of_the_slate/
The Etsy Strike raises essential questions about our relationships with the platforms we use to run our businesses. Are they service providers? Are they tools? Are these platforms our bosses?
There are some interesting thoughts about the relationship between our online platforms –in this case, especially Etsy– and the (small) businesses using them to make a living in the article Always On: The Hidden Labor We Do Every Day by Tara McMullin. Interesting regarding the role of the internet for modern work culture, but even more so if you plan to sell your craft online yourself.
We can determine what kind of human our technologies can help us become, and build technologies that enable that. In fact, we should directly tie the success of our technologies to how much they enable our humanity (as in, our positive human characteristics), and use this criteria to evaluate past, present and future technologies.
Letters to a Young Technologist is a great online collection of (at the time of writing this) five essays about technology written primarily for soon-to-be technologists:
1. What is Technology? / 2. Value Beyond Instrumentalization / 3. It’s Time to Govern / 4. Study the Past, Create the Future / 5. To be a Technologist is to be Human.
If you’ve followed this blog for a bit already –and noticed the quote above, you are probably able to guess which section I might like the most.
Not long ago, it was the job of human brains. But brains required more: An original idea, a twist, a punchline, a strategy, a journey, a hero. The program humans previously ran on – powered by emotion and imagination and taste and individuality – is now antiquated, rendered obsolete by The Algorithm.
This article about social media and The slow creep of mediocrity by fellow designer Tobias Van Schneider reminds me of an interview with Bo Burnham –I, unfortunately, can’t find anymore– in which he talked about how social media and the high-speed culture of today prevents people from crafting complex art and following through with long-lasting projects. This is very much in line with the initial sentiment this blog is based upon.
© ZDF
Was passiert hinter den Kulissen, wenn wir klicken, swipen, bestellen, matchen? Wie funktioniert die neue digitale Welt? Wer zieht hier die Fäden? Wer sind die Gewinner und Verlierer?
German television station ZDF recently started a documentation series about the digital world called Digital Empire. The first episode was about AI and the bias it might come with —based on its originators and their worldview, thus fostering inequality.
An important theme to start with, I’m curious about which topics the team is covering in the upcoming episodes.
© Vox (via YouTube)
Beginning in January 2021, advances in AI research have produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts, effectively extending the human imagination. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed text-to-image tools that they have not yet released to the public, and similar models have proliferated online in the open-source arena and at smaller companies like Midjourney.
Vox not only does share this interesting video on how AI is able to create imagery based on a short descriptional text —and some of the implications this technology has, but they also include a list of current free AI Art tools in the video description for anyone willing to dive deeper;
© Wired (via Youtube)
Industrial designer James Dyson took over Wired’s Twitter account to answer some questions and share some design knowledge along the way last year. Notes taken.
Self-publishing on the internet is a rewarding and powerful experience – you can very quickly produce work that is accessible to billions of people for very low cost.
Building websites is often seen as an uncreative, mathematics-based task undertaken by coders. This library encourages you to learn how to design and build interactive experiences and to consider this a tool in your design toolkit.
If you want to publish something online for the first time, this website is a great starting point. As a matter of fact, even if you’ve been building websites for a while already you might discover one or the other nugget –like the already linked idea of Web Design as Architecture– to pick up.
© Google (via YouTube)
Each object has its own communication method, like puffs of air or ambient sounds. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and respond to changing surroundings and needs.
Usually I’m not interested in smart home devices –I’m more in line with the sentiment of Internet of Shit, but this Google experiment called Little Signals shows some wonderful fresh and humane solutions for some rather common notification needs.
And the best thing of it all: There are free instructions available to rebuild the technological side of those unusual objects yourself with widely available, affordable parts.
The philosophy is rooted in the idea that computing systems should “simplify complexities, not introduce new ones.”
The idea outlined in this essay reminds me of the wonderful concept of Shikake –”the Japanese art of shaping behaviour through design”– as well as the beautiful approach to tech displayed in the fantastic movie her and I wholeheartedly agree with its central claim; We need more Calm Design.
It’s curious that change is so fast technologically and so slow socially.
The results seem to show PowerPoint is failing you in two key areas: increasing information transfer to your target and improving what people think of your brand (and you).
Using a real-world business scenario, PowerPoint was rated (by online audiences) as no better than verbal presentations with no visual aids. Ouch.
I haven’t used PowerPoint since back when I was at school presenting papers to my classmates and according to a recent Harvard study cited by Forbes, that’s apparently a good thing.
I am curious what iA is able to contribute to the field of presentation applications when they release iA Presenter, though. iA Writer is a great piece of software that remains to be by far my favourite writing tool —an usually rather unglamorous type of app, too.
© nomena (via Vimeo)
© nomena (via YouTube)
nomena is investigating new types of space perception. research and practice, academic and commercial, technology and aesthetic.
As mentioned in the about section of this blog, I love projects which cross-scale in media and studios (and creatives) who work interdisciplinary. Japanese studio nomena by Shohei Takei is such a studio, working at the intersection of art, design and science to create amazing tactile projects.