UMESAO Tadao: an explorer for the future

A demonstration video of the three interactive systems I’ve developed for the ‘UMESAO Tadao: an explorer for the future’ special exhibition in Miraikan, the national museum of emerging science and innovation in Tokyo, Japan.

Most of the work is done in Adobe Flash (Actionscript 3.0), with the use of some Arduino’s and electronics, in a timeframe of about 2 months.

The exhibition is open until 2012/2/20. More information is available here: http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/umesaotadao/index.html

Enabling/Disabling Mouse-scrolling with AppleScript

The accidental scrolling of my Magic mouse in Photoshop, Illustrator and other applications was pissing me off, so I wrote a bit of AppleScript to switch mouse-scrolling on and off in the System Preferences. It’s not the most elegant or efficient piece of code, so feel free to comment, add or improve.

tell application "System Preferences"
	activate
	reveal anchor "Mouse" of pane id ("com.apple.preference.universalaccess")
end tell

tell application "System Events"
	tell process "System Preferences"
		tell window "Universal Access"
			click button 1 of tab group 1
			click checkbox "Scrolling" of sheet 1
			set checkboxstate to value of checkbox "Scrolling" of sheet 1
			click button "Done" of sheet 1
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

tell application "System Preferences"
	quit
end tell

if checkboxstate is 1 then
	display dialog "Scrolling is enabled." giving up after (1) buttons {"Ok"}
else
	display dialog "Scrolling is disabled." giving up after (1) buttons {"Ok"}
end if

To launch the script with a keyboard shortcut, I installed FastScripts (http://www.red-sweater.com/fastscripts/) which is free for the first 10 custom keyboard shortcuts. Assign the script to a shortcut and you can toggle your scrolling on and off in a few seconds!

Enjoy.

Digital card cabinet

Demonstration of the Digital card cabinet I’ve created for the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka Japan.

The system is featured in the special exhibition on ‘Umesao Tadao’, the founder of the museum. He was known for drawing and writing his ethnological research on paper cards, providing a rich collection of world-wide ethnological information.

The system allows visitors of the exhibition to create their own cards about parts of the exhibition they liked, and store them in a digital cabinet, either with pen and paper, or digitally with an iPod touch.

The exhibition is open from today, the 10th of March 2011 until the 14th of June 2011. The National Museum of Ethnology is located next to the EXPO ’70 park in the north of Osaka, which makes for a great combination to visit together.

http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/special/umesao/

Calculating Dreams

“I dreamed a thousand new paths. I woke and walked my old one.”

We live our lives, keeping our dreams separate from reality. What if we started to design for our dreams? Can we change our probable future to the more fantastical futures we imagine?

With my project I’m telling the story of a man whose dream it is to leave the earth’s surface and to live up in the sky. He designs objects and conducts experiments to test his equipment, and challenge his assumptions about our way of life.

Time Conditioning

Medical engineers, doctors, cosmetic industries and basically huge parts of our society are working towards anti-aging and life extending methods. Even though it seems great to live for a thousand years, when you think it through, it provides a lot of interesting consequences.

How are we going to deal with our memories? Will we still go to school for only 20 years? What about overpopulation, can we still have kids? Will we have to choose between living forever and having children? What will happen to marriage? The sentence “Till death tear us apart” gains a whole new meaning.

We’ve been looking at different ways to extend the human life-span and decided to explore the adaptation capabilities of our brain. We’re very good at adapting to long term senses. A constant green color to our eyes eventually turns grey, because our brain adapts to the constant input.

We’ve designed a series of ‘handicap objects’ to limit our body’s abilities to a slow motion perception. Our assumption is that our brain will adapt to the slow motion world and when the handicap is removed, we can have a much richer experience of time, extending the perception of our own life span.

Design by Numbers

An old Java project I dug up, that draws randomly shaped ‘animals’ on a pdf canvas.

You can download the full pdf here.

Hello World

Some of the greatest mathematicians and leaders were selected to represent our planet to outer space beings, but no one really thought about the common people. Why would we care about these distant intelligent people, instead of the people and beings around us that we’re so close with?

This video introduces the Hello World service in three stages;

First the event where the New United Nations sends a specific compilation of live DNA into space, selecting the most intelligent and functional people and species to be reproduced.

As response to that the Hello World service is born, allowing common people to compile a collection of DNA samples of the things they love and care about in their lives, sending that out into space to create small self contained eco-systems, giving the things you love a scientific afterlife.

The last part is the Hello World commercial that was aired on television.

The next video is a short documentary about Sarah Johnson, one of the Hello World customers.

Invisible secrets, Interim Show 2009

Data is transferred through wireless networks all around us. Even though we can not see it with our bare eyes, there are ways to intercept this data and make it visible. 

These low-tech objects have been augmented with the ability to capture these invisible secrets and enable people to spy on each other.

Where is the border between voyeurism and anthropology? Can we design for voyeurism without making it mundane? How do we deal with privacy when information is flying right passed us?

Furry presense

Alex the rabbit is a Biological Communications Agent, trained to mimic your social presence when you are gone. Other then artificial intelligence, Alex has a more influenced perspective on recreating your social presence. Not only has he been living with you for a long period of time, enabling him to better understand and mimic your existence, he is also influenced by your old environment, having outside factors influence his decisions. 

What’s your story?

Everyday we have these regular chats with our friends and family about our work or what’s on the television that night, but only on rare occasions we engage in a more private conversation. In this project I focussed on making people aware of the different levels of conversation, trying to encourage them to ask the questions they’ve always wanted to know the answers to. 

A phone that calls to just one person, where you can gather objects and stories about that person makes it more visible how your relation is and in which field your conversations are taking place.

Everyday we have these regular chats with our friends and family about our work or what’s on the television that night, but only on rare occasions we engage in a more private conversation. In this project I focussed on making people aware of the different levels of conversation, trying to encourage them to ask the questions they’ve always wanted to know the answers to. 

A phone that calls to just one person, where you can gather objects and stories about that person makes it more visible how your relation is and in which field your conversations are taking place.

Mind Control

My first project at the Royal College of Art is finished. About 3 weeks ago we started our project with two lectures and a brief on Mind Control. We were to explore and investigate methods and techniques of Mind Control and conduct an experiment in 3 weeks.

I quickly stumbled upon a very influential psychologist of the 20th century; B.F. Skinner. He was one of the main characters in Behaviourism and invented the Operant Conditioning theory. I found his book: “Beyond Freedom and Dignity“, written in 1971. Where he argues the need for a science and a technology of behaviour. Physics and biology have made huge progress in scientifically understanding our world and the human body, but most of our psychology is still based on Socrates and old greek methodology. 

A technology of behaviour brings up several interesting questions. Will humans become robots? What happens to our freedom or our dignity when decisions are made for us by a different entity? And if all this would happen, who would be that entity designing this technology for behaviour?

With these questions in mind, I set out to do an experiment. To see how people would feel having technology control their behaviour and if this could actually work.

This prototype scans for information around you. Radio activity, your location, the time of the day, proximity to other electronic devices and transforms all this information into an estimate of danger and quality of the area. The experiment would be to see how people feel having a device like this with them. Do they change their behaviour knowing more about their surroundings?

Lyndsay used it for several days, which was a very interesting and eye opening experience.

Starting a new project on Monday!

Portable translation interface

This is a first prototype of a translation interface, based on ATR’s translation technology. It is meant to support the communication between foreign visitors and Japanese employees of an amusement park.

Museum Guide, Sayamaike in Osaka

A short demonstration of the Museum Guide I made for the Sayamaike Museum in Osaka. The Sayamaike Museum explains the importance and functionality of the pond in Sayama, together with the irrigation channels throughout Osaka in the History of Japan. The little character in the Museum Guide is Gyoki, a well known monk who did many restorations to the Sayama pond.

MultiTouch Applications and Games

A collection of multitouch applications and games I created for ATR in Kyoto, Japan. In the video you can see me, my boss Machi Takahashi and some of our colleague’s kids we had over to play with the games to gather some feedback.

Multitouch Google Maps prototype

This is actually an old video of the first prototype I made at ATR of a MultiTouch Google Maps interface. The purpose was simply to see whether the odd link between c++, xml, flash and ajax actually worked to control the Google Maps interface with your hands.

Although it was rather fun to play around with it, obviously the controls are still quite limited in this video. Luckily we can now enjoy this phenomenon much smoother on the iPod touch or the iPhone

Royal College of Art

Finally, after quite some time, I got the news!

I’ve been accepted to the MA Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. The course will start on the 29th of September 2008.

Here’s a picture of the Darwin Building at Kensington Gore, where I had my interview and I will be studying for the next coming two years.