This week an interesting hardware and designware mashup by designer Mikhail St Denis called ILoveLamp combines home automation lamps, a Botanicalls twittering plants type interface, automatic watering, and windowfarms localized apartment-level lighting into a compact design concept that would be interesting to see in distribution. With a named reference to the awesome Anchorman scene “I Love Lamp” how can you go wrong?

I Love Lamp:

I Love Lamp by Mikhail St Denis:

Of course there’s also the “i love lamp” iphone app, which monitors your real-life lava-lamp. But those dont breathe yet.

In other news, prepping a talk on first 10 years of locative games, and running a few Budgetball games at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London tomorrow night

Invisible Pals who’re Fun to Be With

from NYTimes article on Microsoft and Intel today:

“Mr. Horvitz predicted an elevator that senses when you are in the midst of a conversation and keeps its doors open until you are done talking. [...] As for Intel, the company has confirmed that more than 1,000 products are being designed for its coming Atom chip, which is aimed at nontraditional computing systems. Intel views this as a $10 billion potential market that will give rise to 15 billion brainy devices by 2015, Mr. Gelsinger said.”

What will people REALLY want from their brainy objects? We had some interesting discussions about these topics in a few classes from a couple weeks ago in response to questions like these:

Find something non-human. If it had a sensor and datastream, what voice, personality, and intention might it have? What might it want to say to us? Would it use voice, text, or another human communication protocol? What would it want for itself? According to whom? If it tried to appeal to us emotionally, what emotion would it appeal to? How might designers attempt to disguise these as ‘human’?

This talk was from way back in September during Web2.0 Expo, you may want to skip past the intro…and start at 1:33. Botanicalls kits are still available at Think Geek and Maker Shed.

Check out some of these twittering plants:
Ficus Benjamina
Nepenthes – Frank the Plant in Pacifica, CA
Monstera deliciosa in Texas
Pothos, NYC: http://twitter.com/pothos
Jana’s plant in Thunder Bay, Ontario, CA
Botanicalls1, Germany
Spikes Dracaena located in New England
Mr. Ikea Plant, LES, NYC
Archibald Leaf aka Ficus Elastica located in London
Robert Plant, an orchid located in Greenwich, London

“Eightmaps.com is the latest, most striking example of how information collected through disclosure laws intended to increase the transparency of the political process, magnified by the powerful lens of the Web, may be undermining the same democratic values that the regulations were to promote.” Link

“Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation.” Link