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’?

things i’m thinking about…

recycling urine,  “ISS gets new recycling gear that transforms human waste to drinking water. Some of the water will be used to get Oxygene, too. This way it will soon be possible to host more crew members.”

air purifying concrete

fiscal game

Locative Lab at Picnic08

predicting national grid problems:
“The Visualizing Energy Resources Dynamically on Earth (VERDE) system, announced this week, mashes together images and stats of everything from real-time status of the electric grid and weather information to power grid behavior modeling and simulation.”

Nerds At Night

Shout out to Botanicalls Research Crew!

Big shout out to Phil Torrone, Make Magazine and Limor Fried, Adafruit for her ethernet shield for arduino!

In a nutshell,

Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.

Presenting The In(ter)ventions Festival at ITP

Here I am invoking Political Scientist Michelle Micheletti’s quote: “We Must Shop to Survive,” in a video of my ITP presentation of The In(ter)ventions Festival proposal, a festival designed to provoke critical inquiry on the part of consumers about the impact of their behavior. It’s about connecting mundane tasks to their impact on the greater systems that we facilitate, enable and support. I’m still working on this project which will hopefully take place in the Fall of 2008 in New York City.