SNS Object

SNS is prominent, because it offers us with where we can always get in touch with someone else. The good thing of it is that we don't have to be bothered with intrusive communication. We can simply being a part of network and feel someone's existence, which help us to get rid of loneliness. So basically we are passively active on SNS.

Thus, if you don't have accessibility to these services, you are out of the network. For example, homelessness is one of the biggest social issue all around the world. And these homeless people doesn't have access to the internet, that means they are physically alive but socially dead.
Then I thought about what's the idea of "Socially Alive"? I think so far that means being a part of social network, passively exposed to information communicated on its network. Then we react to some of these information based on our interests.

So I came across this idea of SNS Object which is physically dead but socially alive. It lives in twitter, and reacts to some tweets on public time_line. It has its own interest, and choose the tweets to react based on that interest.
It's also important to have some follower or someone following, since the point is to be a part of network, having at least trifle influence on the network which the object belongs to.

My plan is below;
* the interest: Homelessness
* what it does: React to the tweet containing the word "homeless", and post a tweet such as "@####, I think we have a similar interest. Would you follow me?"


I think "@####" is essential to attract people's attention to SNS Object, aiming at having some followers. And also, this might be a bit too ambitious but I want to get SNS Object to be a hub of people who's got a similar interest.

I don't know how to realise this yet. But I will give it a try. Realistically, I would better start with getting object post "I think we have a similar interest. Would you follow me?" without "@####" because I don't know how to do it yet.

Ambient Intelligence

I've been researching about playfulness and prank.
One of the important aspects of play and prank is to encourage people to explore joyful potentials of mundane life.

The society put the grid of banal behaviors, blinding us by its banalisation. Both play and prank are means to go beyond the current norms, or systems, and make a positive shift to the next civilisation.

In 50's and 60's, Situationist tried to use play in a city as a tool to build the next civilisation. For them, manipulating the existing context of objects and architecture and creating some new meanings out of them (detournement)would lead people to realise the next civilisation which is based on the new norms.

I'm aware that the play in terms of playfulness, and play in terms of situationist are slightly different. Essentially, however, both play is the same in terms of observing things from the perspective which is free from the established way of seeing things.


Then, what's the difference between play and prank? Simply speaking, the difference is if it needs victims or not.
For me, prank needs victims as it's called "Practical jokes" in other words.

One of the historical pranksters, Abbie Hoffman, was an American social and political activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies"). His aim was obviously to be against the conservative social systems of America in 60's to 70's.
An American media artist Joey Skaggs is famous for his hoaxes, aiming at screwing up the media and reveal mass-media's manipulation on people.
At this point they need someone to be embarrassed or even sacrificed to show off their stupidities.

However, there is exceptions. For example, in the manifest of the company called Improv Everywhere, they stated that "Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places."
Although they mentioned "Long form improvisation troupe which executes pre-planned "missions" which usually involve socially awkward or unusual situations", what they do is basically to encourage people to get involved in their lovely pranks and cause enjoyable mess in public.




I would love to encourage people to be more playful, but I don't want to cause any victims, so I gave up pranks. So there was playfulness left. Then I asked myself again that do I really want to design toy or games? Well, could be, but if I can intervene more ordinary aspects of daily life, I would be more motivating for me.
Then I looked back what I've done in the past, such as this.




And I found this.


[source: http://dkds.ciid.dk/idp09/students/mayo-nissen/]

When I found this, I felt like less-motivated to complete my sort of knock-communicator, but it gave me the interesting words "Ambient Sociality".
This device is for "people who work isolatedly to experience the presence of other, geographically dispersed people in a way that is at once playful and non-intrusive. "
This work really helps me to realise Why I prank.

My pranks are not aiming at annoying people or even anti-{insert your words here!!}
Since I'm not a native speaker of English, especially when I speak to someone whom I didn't talk much, I'm so afraid of annoying them that end up being less-speaking.
However, I DO want to communicate with people a bit more, then I try to do something playful in order to attract people's attentions, or even communicate by these playful behaviors.


In that sense, I tried to achieve nonverbal communication which aims at, for me, confirming that I'm connected to someone.


I think that the desire to stay in connections with others is one of the essential desire of human-being. That's why these social networking services, and GPS apps such as Foursquares are so popular.
But for me, these social networking services are still deeply relied on verbal, or linguistic communication.
As you can see in the example above, sometimes people want to confirm that they are not alone but can't be bothered with too intrusive verbal communication.


I think that is the place where I can match myself as a designer with the social contexts.
As an international student here in London, I do know the demands to get rid of loneliness, the difficulty of verbal-communication, and the importance of playful, or I would say emotional, communication.

I think Ambient Intelligence is the issue for me. But Ambient intelligence as encourage smooth, playful, and emotional communication among those people who are in need.
As expressed in the term of "Ambient", they are not like the feeds on facebook or tweets on twitter.
They are merged into the environment, and being as a possibility for people to interact with someone when they are in need. Also, sometimes they positively sense the people's need and modify our environment in order to smooth our communications.

Loop object

Laser + LDR = Loop object



The Laser from object A shoots the light sensor attached to the object B on the other side, activating its laser. Then, the laser from object B shoots back to the light sensor of object A, activating its laser.
This process repeats continuously.

Midi Gun

This is sick.

Flatland

I've read "Flatland" written by Edwin A. Abott in 1884.

I've been struggling to somehow visualise 4th dimensional world in 3rd dimensional way in terms of design, but always ended up facing with the aporia that 4th dimensional world is 4th dimensional world because it's beyond 3 dimensional perceptions.
There are some intersting insight about 4th dimensional cube saying the net of 4th dimensional cube must consist of 6 cubes, as the same way as 3D cube. But we hardly imagine how it would works.

In Flatland, the main character (square) had a hardship to understand 2nd dimensional representation of cube, since they don't have a sense of depth, or height (so there's no shadows) in Flatland. A drawing of cube is merely a hexagon for them.

In exactly the same way, it's difficult to visually understand how 4th dimension are, but in 'Thoughtland', as expressed in the book, we can grab a bit of conception of 4th dimension.


On the other hand, Some physicists say (forgot the title of book) the different factors are represented as different dimensions. For example, when you ride a bike, your body conducts 10 different movements. That means, there are 10 dimensions when you ride a bike.


If you think in that way, 4th dimension of objects can be extra 1 factor added to (x, y, z).

I randomly chose book to start thinking about this issue. Apparently, book is 3D object, consists of a pile of 2D papers (if you ignore the thickness of a piece of paper). If decided to add 'Frequency' as a different dimension (don't ask reasons). What's the frequency of a book? This is a part of my brains storming.

Frequency →　waves of air　→　sounds → vinyl records
This get me imagine the utopia where people use noises instead of letters, to signify something.
It could be one of other possibility of human development in terms of many world interpretation, isn't it? (I know this isn't too logical, but wanna make it more fun to think about, for myself)

At this phase, I realised that 1 extra dimension wasn't frequency, but a history of books. We can't go other worlds even if many world interpretation was right. However, we can have an insight (not eyesight) into it.

I don't think it's too bad to take history as a dimension, because the time space is taken as 4th dimension in Relativity Theory.

White noise

So, the white noise is caused by photons emitted by Big Bang.
These neutrons and electrons have been cooled down throughout eras, forming atoms. But these photons are still too hot to settle down, moving randomly in the air. Thus, TV aerials catch these photons and show white noise on the monitors of TV.

In terms of it, TV is the machine to translate the random movements of photons into a graphical representation.

It's quite interesting that this mundane object shows a small segment fascinating history of the universe.

white noise

White Noise Machine from Yuri Suzuki on Vimeo.

"white noise"
White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise draws its name from white light in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible band in such a way that the eye's three color receptors (cones) are approximately equally stimulated.

---Applications---
It is used by some emergency vehicle sirens due to its ability to cut through background noise, which makes it easier to locate.

White noise is commonly used in the production of electronic music, usually either directly or as an input for a filter to create other types of noise signal. It is used extensively in audio synthesis, typically to recreate percussive instruments such as cymbals which have high noise content in their frequency domain.

It is also used to generate impulse responses. To set up the equalization (EQ) for a concert or other performance in a venue, a short burst of white or pink noise is sent through the PA system and monitored from various points in the venue so that the engineer can tell if the acoustics of the building naturally boost or cut any frequencies. The engineer can then adjust the overall equalization to ensure a balanced mix.

White noise is a common synthetic noise source used for sound masking by a tinnitus masker. White noise is a particularly good source signal for masking devices as it contains higher frequencies in equal volumes to lower ones, and so is capable of more effective masking for high pitched ringing tones most commonly perceived by tinnitus sufferers.

White noise is used as the basis of some random number generators. For example, Random.org uses a system of atmospheric antennae to generate random digit patterns from white noise.

White noise machines are sold as privacy enhancers and sleep aids and to mask tinnitus. Some people claim white noise, when used with headphones, can aid concentration by masking irritating or distracting noises in a person's environment.

Pitagola Switch2

A cause makes a way for another event to be happened.

Clockwork & Fractal

The people in medieval era think of universe as like clockwork, machinery structured.
Thus, everything is programmed and predetermined. Pierre-Simon Laplace said;

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

(1814)

The recent science follows a different theory, that is chaos theory.
In chaos theory, the world DOES have order, which is the loop of cause and effect, or feedback.
However, a tiny error or difference causes huge effects in this loop, and these errors occurs irregularly.
Thus, the world has a pattern, but at the same time, totally unpredictable.

Pitagola Switch

There must be loads of ways to go from point A to point B.
It doesn't have to be the shortest one.
Process, is important.

Toys

Roland Barthes says;

"All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world".
And that for instance, a girls doll is "meant to...'condition' her to her future role as mother" (Barthes, 1972).

So toys are for educating children to make them fit in the current system of society, in one sense.

I used to think that toys were tools to train creativity of human being, and I think that's also true.
When I went to V&A, I saw the old brick toy made in Britain exhibited there and found the caption, saying;

'various systems of building blocks were available after the war. The image of domestic blisson the lid of the Bayko (the company’s name) set contrasted sharply with the reality of bomb-damaged Britain.'

It could be taken that these brick toys appeals the mind of D.I.Y of children, encouraging them to be productive in order to develop the nation towards the next generation. In terms of it, toys are to be used to promote creativity.

I just like these toys, however, because they can have a pure function of amusing people, which can prompt communication among them.

I found the chair with a scanner equipped on its seat, scanning the images of visitors' butts.
It seems to be useless at a glance, but it's a lot fun and makes people laugh.

I don't like to sum up to say that toys have a function of amusing people, enriching their lives, or function is to generate communication.
I'm purely attracted by it's meaninglessness, but strong sense of existence as object which definitely have some influence on people.

Time

What is time?
It's hard to define or feel it as an actual existence.

There are some opinions about time.

1. The time exists as physical movement, and it goes one way with the same speed.
Since it follows physics, it CAN reverse backwards.

2. Time increase, following the entropy of physical phenomenon. Thus, time is relative existence.

3. Time is a parameter of a phenomenon happened in a space. Thus, time can't be separate from space.
That means time is the measure of phenomenon, not physical material. In that sense, time is one of the information that
belong to phenomena.

4. etc..

To visualise time, we invented the variety of clocks, such as water clock, sand clock, sun dial, analogue clock, digital clock, and so on.
Now we live in the community time, which is fixed by community. That make us a member of a organised community.
However, what if we could have a personal time?

Pin-hole camera

I love low-tech, analogue stuffs.
Specifically, the pin-hole camera is really fun because it feels like catching the lights, revealing the potential images hidden in the air.

Data on the internet

wind speed project 3 from Daiki Ichikawa on Vimeo.

There are data on the internet, they are merely the sequence of numbers on the net.
If you can translate these numbers into experience, which means that revive the data into physical life.
It's got so much potential in it.

Rules

There are natural rules and artificial rules,
Natural rules is based on the fact, such as math, physics, science and etc.
Artificial rules is based on the arbitrary decision of some human-being, such as law.

I used to study political science in Keio University in Japan, and especially interested in international politics.
I read the book written by Hedley Bull , "Anarchical Society" (1995).
He insists that the international state is basically anarchy, but the world order is maintained by the common benefit of each nations in the world.
Thus, we have a nature of trying to generate the order in the state of chaos, and the order is maintained by rules.

It's interesting that people started to believe in these rules as granted, and sometimes obsessed with them.
Artificial rules are essentially fiction and based on nothing.

On the other hand, natural rules are based on fact.
I found it interesting when I noticed that our body is ramified, same as trees.
The nature apparently have the order, and the order is not arbitrary. It's absolute, no exceptions.
I'm so attracted by its mystique.

Japanese artist Hitoshi Nomura observed the orbit of the moon throughout a year and found it forms the sign of infinity.
When I saw this work, I was so impressed to the extent of getting my skin crawled, because I felt that some god-wise figure exists behind the order of nature.

Invisible rules sometimes reveal a part of them.

Life

I talked a little bit about life in the last post.
I will try to leave a few comments to help me remember some thoughts about life.

The environmental issues, national issues, are one of the most common topics in our era.
These problems are to be solved in order to realise the better life for more people. That's great.

But if you push forward the benefit as a community too much, it's easy to ignore the importance of individual lives.
When your grandma is suffering from bad disease, you wouldn't care about environmental issues, or national health.

Being objective, and being critical may be important in design process.
Being subjective, and being emotional may be also important in living process as an individual.
And design is for better life.

Optical Illusion

I almost love optical illusion, either 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional way.
I Designed the sticker and was going to sell it somewhere, but I didn't.
Anyway, this sticker project is spin-off of my anti-social project in Goldsmiths College.
Because i was purely interested in the visual side of this project, then tried to utilise the aesthetic side of it.

These illusion helps us to escape from mundane visual life.

It's almost like having a dream while you're awake.

Some people insist the importance of better life, but not individual-level but national, or even earth-level.
We sometimes need to have small dreams in our lives, which make us aware of the benefit, or joy of being here.

Radio eats food

I got a present of radio from the colleagues in Sidekick Studios.
It looks cool, made of bamboo, sustainable material, and it's made by my favorite product studio, LEXON. The solid and simple shape, smooth surface, nice r curve.

This is the radio which you have to charge power by rotating the handle by yourself.
When I was rotating the handle really hard, I suddenly realised that THE RADIO IS WORKING BY FOOD POWER, or calories.
Because I'm moving on the power from foods, and I was rotating the handle based of that food power.
And this food power transformed into electric power, get the radio work.

I got sort of weird feeling because in that sense,the radio eats food, and moving.
Apparently, energy is invisible. But the experience of charging battery let me feel, or experience energy.

MAKE INVISIBLE VISIBLE.

This theme can be worth working on this year.

Sneakers

I like sneakers. I owned about 20 pairs of sneakers now.
I like it not only because of design but also the culture behind them.

Adidas is apparently get extremely hip since after Run DMC started wearing it.
it could be said that the sneakers are almost signs, signifying the status, sense, attitude of wearers.
It sounds too general since that's just all these fashion brand do.

Specifically, sneakers is one of the parts which is not often paid attentions.
It's almost like the secret self-satisfaction, or pleasure.
Because only the people who have the knowledge about the context of sneakers understand
how cool you are based on your choice of sneakers.

Sneakers are almost secret codes.

Surrealism

I like the dream, it's surrealistic.
The story is so random, and irrational.

The surrealism artists in the past are often inspired by dreams, and made art.
I'm surprised how creative we are in dreams. There's no limits of logics.
There's only thoughts, emotions and visuals.


ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii
ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii
ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii
ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii
ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii
ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii!!ii

The Real Macoy's

I eat at least 1 packet of The Real Macoy's per day for these weeks.
I love it's hardness thank to its ridge cut. Favorite flavor is salt and vinegar as it's the standard.

I also like it's package since it's pop, like the art of warhol
I looked up it's website and found that they promote the brand as "man's crisps", like the crisp which always comes with a
pint of beer in nice and old british pub.

I also like the shape of crisps as well. Packages are same but the contents inside have different, unique shapes.
Sometimes you can find a heart, It's like finding the clover with 4 leaves on clover field.

Techno

I've suddenly got into making techno musics for these weeks.
I don't know why, but probably because it's easy, cheap (basically free), and really killing time.
And perhaps because it enables to create original-ish thing with less amout of effort, by using pre-made sounds.

I dealt with music in my past project, death, and came across these phrases basically saying music is like life,
because they are essentially meaningless.
It's quite interesting that human-beings feel happy, excited, and happy when they listen to a certain song,
even though music is merely chunk of noises.

Generalist vs Specialist

I had a talk with the director of Sidekick Studios.
The chat made me think about generalists and specialists.

For me, designers are generalists. They research, think, and come up with ideas.
These ideas are discussed and passed over to specialists in order to realise them.

I think I'm a designer who always long for being a specialist.
What I do at Sidekick is pretty much about bridge specialist and designers.
I discuss ideas, and visualise it by drawing, rendering, and rapid prototyping. Then pass them over to specialists to
produce them in a proper industrial way.

I love prototyping because of the fact that we can discuss ideas forever, but these prototypes clarify actual issues, and at the same time, develop or even expand ideas.

When it comes to taking a job, however, there are a binary perception.
Designer, or Specialist. There seems to be nothing in between them.

Twitter_LED project

Since I'm interested in connecting the internet with physical objects. I want to figure out the way to on/off a LED by
a certain kind of twitter's comment. (like "on" for turn on a LED.)

This is probably easy, for others, but since I'm new to Arduino. I'll start with basic stuffs ( like serial.read()).

And this is what I've done today;
On/Off a LED, by typing a word "d".


But in this program, Arduino only reacts to one letter, not a word(a sequence of letters).
In the next step, I'll try to how to get Arduino react to a word.

Sidekick Table, 2001

Made a film for Sidekick Studios in London, just to show off their amazing massive 12 seater table with random open drawers.
Switch the button, then open the drawers randomly.

And obviously, this is represented in Kubrick's style.

http://vimeo.com/13189496

This is me, director's cut. Yes.
But the formal one is on their website.

http://sidekickstudios.net/blog/

Enjoy.

Technology + ?

Craft + technology = this

This is a good stuff.

Internet + craft = ?

Mood visualisation

Now that most of us have a mobile phone, we can update our mood from wherever and whenever.
Pachube supplies these datas as a feed so that we can share these information all around the world.

However, these data's are merely numbers (visually), or variables (if you convert it into electricity.)
It's just interesting to visualise these data because they are real-time, and come from bloody far away.

Since I've been working on people's mood, I picked up some people's mood data on Pachube, and visualised it, using processing.




The size and color of each rectangle represents the mood (bigger = better, clearer = better).
The red dot corresponds to the latitude and longitude where a person at. (the left person is from London, and the right person is from Glasgow.)

Rhinoceros

This is amazing.
This is only for browsing 3D files so far, but I can imagine in the future, we render on the touch panels, using our fingers.
It will be sort of digital sculpting... amazing.

I got the port open today

Been thinking about the interface, I'm getting a bit aware of the different way of design.
Was aiming at making more interactive, or customisable interface, but maybe it's not the right way in this case. (I don't want it to be too gadgety)

The product is a medical device, then it should be 1. Simple, 2. easily fitting to daily routine, 3. sustainable (something you want to keep for long time).


Then I looked up the Dieter Rams again. His design is simple in terms of 1. easy to find how to use, without manual, 2. not too expressive so that the product can fit in daily life.




Fitting in daily like, like melting down into the daily environment. But it doesn't mean it's invisible or not having any effect on life.
He said 'A little touch of colors is even more colorful than using too much colors'.
Maybe just a little use of colors can make a subtle but positive impact on the environment. Also, the subtle use of colors keeps product simple, which means it's not gonna be eaten away by the surge of fashion.

Since I've been thinking about using colors to bring about positive effect from the product on people, his thought may be helpful.

I also want to take professionals needs into consideration. The current 3 measures (anxiety, depression, optimism) are established measures to rate mood, so it would be better to include these 3 measures to avoid making a mess in the current service system.
That means, we likely have to includes these 3 words,(which I was trying to avoid).


Then I researched about typefaces. Then found some characters of different types.
The type has to be 1.neutral (not expressive) , 2. light, 3. good readibility. I want it to be as ordinary as almost invisible.

Then i decided to use Helvetica Neau-Light. Because Helvetica is most commonly used typeface in our world so that it's supposed to be well melted into our society. In terms of it, it's invisible but still has good readibility.

I'm very aware that the design getting kind of as boring as mundane objects, with normal shape, few colors, helvetica.
But it's the aim. I want it to look as normally as kettles, phones, or so.

Also, we've already got amazing function and cool ID. I don't need to mess around it.

Pirate radio

Now that we have the internet streaming services, we can do our pirate radio legally.
There are some softwares for setting up your own real-time internet radio station.

I chose Nicecast to do it.
Here is the URL;

http://86.14.121.13:8000/listen.m3u

You would download the podcast, and then you can listen to the sound on my laptop real-timely.

I was tasked the project in which I have to make a jukebox connected to the internet, and people can listen to the
songs playing at real-time.

But I quite like the idea of pirate radio, so it may be a set of turntable and microphone, ideally in a retro suitcase?

How to measure your mood?

Well, I've got many answers for my questionnaire about how to measure mood.
I appreciate it, really.

Since ever, I've been thinking about what is the best measurement, or units, to rate your mood.
Then stuck, so I looked back the research booklet (116 pages!!) that I got from Sidekick Studios.

There is a quote from the service users, saying

All the service users we spoke to liked the idea of a device like a mood barometer and the fact it could allow you to register ‘in-between’ moods. Its difficult to decided just one word to describe how you’re feeing.

Also,

One service user commented that when you attach a word to the way you are feeling it can compound your mood rather than help you change it.

Probably there is no only one best unit to rate mood.
We are different, we have different perceptions, and we must have our own ways to rate our moods.

Now I'm thinking that we sometimes need the products with BLANK, the room for being personal, especially when the product is for personal matter. So that people can interactive with them in their own way, which can be taken as PLAYFUL.

The difficulty here is that when we deal with very sensitive subject (such as mental disorder), we should be very careful about what kind of messages we would send to users by products. The playful object might send the message, saying we don't take your problem seriously.






Yes, it's time to go bed!!!!

Body, and Mood

Started the internship today and working on how to represent the mood by some means.
There are some basics (and might be the best way to represent mood?) that has been done.



Currently moods are represented by words, and words are merely a sign which is arbitrary.
But mood is already quite subjective, and arbitrary. That means we represent the arbitrary subject by the arbitrary mean.

I've sent a quite few questionnaire about how to measure your mood, and so far I've got some answers referring UNITS.
(and also ICE CREAMS... for some reasons, interesting indeed!!)

Originally, units come from the dimension of human body and used to be varied by persons, or regions. Then the authorities has started to standerise them.




Could we have the emotional 'metric system'?

Maybe too ambitious? or ending up using the emoticons perhaps?
As long as the units mention the physical quantities, such as length, weights. tempreture, and so on, we might be able to set up the main subject to be measured (length of music? this is also one of the answer).

However, the thing is the measure has to be simple and easy to be understood by every users. In that sense, the combination of words and numbers seem to be a logical consequence. (I know it might be a bit boring though.)

So far I'm pretty much messed up, might go for this 'ice cream' idea, which is gonna be AMAZING!!

One Show student award 2010

Me and my fellow went to New York in order to attend the Award ceremony for One Show college competition.
And the result was...Bronze!!
That was also a great opportunity for us to get to know and talk with professional designers. They are really nice.

And also big thanks to my bro to let us stay despite the exams!!

strained back and nail clippers

Yes, finally I got back on the right track again from awful strained back, caused by my successful attempt to save a child from an evil tanker truck.
I've been on the bed for 5 days with nightmare-pains, wanting to cut my long finger nails.

Now I've just cut them, and ready to start my blog here, or going to my very first internship starting day after tomorrow. It was very nick of time. Thanks my load.

I feel like this blog is gonna be pretty random, but still me, hopefully.