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

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.

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/

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.

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.

You can download the full pdf here.

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.

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?

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.