Visited the RCA over the weekend to check out the grad shows from Design Interactions and Design Products. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the Design Interactions course drove me nuts. I read what little explaination there was and was still left confused. Why do they have to make it so complicated…. ? surely the whole point of interaction is that it’s easy to interact with. The Product and Furniture design improved my visit with projects that didn’t leave you squinting at the small print. I particularly liked Merel Karhof’s wind powered knitting machine and Il-Gu Cha’s radio for the blind and whiteboard clock that wipes the clock face clean as time passes. See pics below.

On the friday we visited the Cube Gallery which showcased the other exhibitors in the Futuresonic Festival. Really lovely musical hanging plants which made music when you touched them. I’m guessing they used the water in the plant as a capacitance sensor but when I asked the artist she insisted it was the plant’s natural energy flowing through the leaves … electrical energy right? Anyway it was really nice and the plants made a great interface to play with. Another project was Usman Haque’s Natural Fuse. Quite a complex idea but my general understanding of this is that it looked at the idea of creating an online network that connected to real physical plants. Everyone involved has a responsibilty to the network and people’s plants suffered or prospered depending on everyone’s input… Not sure if that’s correct but I do really like the idea of a social responsibility to an online network (might try and involve this in our next R+D project) ….. anyway that description might be completley wrong so maybe check out the website for a proper insight.

We also managed to catch a presentation by RCA design product students who had collaborated with Yamaha to create an exhibition of unusual and innovative interfaces for making music. Projects included knitting music patterns, a ceramic bowl xylophone, an echo chair, d.i.y paper records and a musical mac. Videos of the projects and more info can be found here.

Went to visit the RCA show on friday. Here’s some pics i took ….

This is an avatar suit by marc owens. It has a camera with a wide angled lens that is held out from the back of the suit. This transmits images to the visor and so allows the wearer to see themselves in third person walking around the real world. Pretty cool!

“Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface. The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.” Marc Owens
www.marcowens.co.uk

also for more pics look here

This work is by Alice Wang. The alarm clock hacks the contact list of your mobile and if you don’t wake up on time, it picks out names at random and calls them. The scales allow you to lie to yourself. The further back you stand the lighter you are… the more you move forward the closer you come to reality.

alarm clock

scales