Emily Chang – Designer

Happy Chinese New Year (vegan) wonton noodles for long life!

Yesterday’s inauguration of President Barack Obama was significant in so many ways. For web geeks like me, it’s the first time citizen media played such a significant role during an inauguration. Given Obama’s grassroots campaign and his message of citizen responsibility, this is only apropos. Numerous netizens, web sites, blogs, video sites and social networks provided coverage and conversation (eg. Twitter, Flickr, Ustream, Current.tv, and others). It was also the first time during an inauguration that citizen media was so promoted and integrated into mainstream media.

I woke up at 8 a.m. PST to the sound of crickets (my iPhone alarm) and tapped on the Ustream iPhone app (iTunes link), which had just become available in the iTunes store the day before. Seconds later, while still in bed, I was seeing live AP and CNN video of the inauguration events on my iPhone. That’s a first.

When I got to my desk, I opened up some tabs in Firefox and launched Twitter to see what my friends were saying. I also opened Twitter search and Tweetdeck with the terms “inaug09″ and “inauguration” specified to see public opinions. For video, I went to Current.tv‘s stream and the CNN video player, which included a Facebook panel integrated into the right side of the page. Right away, I was seeing commentary from my Facebook friends, automatically refreshed. This was particular intriguing since I have friends in Facebook that span from high school to college to grad school, NY to SF, to eHub and Ideacodes contacts and tech clients. It was fascinating to see such a wide array of opinions and conversations around this one event from people I knew in such diverse contexts.

Photo of my iPhone with Ustream and my monitor:

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Ideacodes co-founder Emily Chang has been nominated for the prestigious Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards 2009 program for excellence in Interaction Design. This is the first year that they will be giving an award in Interaction Design.  The National Design Awards were conceived by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum ten years ago to honor the best in American design. “First launched at the White House Millennium Council in 2000, the annual Awards program celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement. To qualify for the awards, you must be nominated by one or more members of a distinguished nominating committee, comprised of more than 2500 leading American architects, designers, educators, journalists, authors, filmmakers and other professionals representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia.” You can learn more at last year’s 2008 National Design Awards site.

QuadCamera is the the 4th release by Art&Mobile of their ToyCamera series and features continuous shooting. Just press the button, and it takes 4-8 serial shots to create one image in multiple dimensions and repetitions: a 4×2 portrait, 4×1, 2×2 landscape, and 8×1 landscape (as shown below). This is great for fast action and motion shots, as well as static images and creative portraits.

Me in 8 autoshots

The app is available for $1.99 in the iTunes app store.

See below for a demo from their site:

As I’ve mentioned before, I love taking photos with my iPhone, partly because of the low-res 2 megapixel quality, and mostly because it offers a different type of photograph. Every device has its own quality and exploring these has always been one of my hobbies, from Lomo cameras, to Polaroids (miss them) to my old Nintendo Game Boy camera and sticker printer. With the iPhone, the ability to add features and effects with apps makes it all the more enjoyable.

What if we could generate electricity just by walking? Kohei Hayamizu, a Japanese engineer, has been working on this idea beginning with a technology system he developed in graduate school. The system makes use of piezoelectricity, “a property certain materials have to generate an electric current when they are squeezed or pressed.”

His first experiment took place in Japan’s Shibuya train crossing last month in which he converted one square meter of the ground into an electricity generator. Each time a person walks over the area, electricity is generated. Over 20 days, with 900,000 people passing through Shibuya each day, he was able to generate enough energy to power 1,422 televisions for one hour.

Hayamizu thinks that similar systems could be installed on a wide range of scales, from small systems embedded on mobile phones, to huge systems installed on highways that would harness the electricity generated by the movement of cars and big trucks.

A quick Google search on this topic brought up some other related projects. A post at Inhabitat from June 2008 describes a proposal by David Webb to do something similar on the stairs of the Spinnaker Tower viewing platform in Portsmouth, UK.
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From The Rise of the Machines By Erico Guizzo

There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10 000 manufacturing workers – a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).

Although the top three countries are in Asia, Europe gets the regional title as the epicenter of global automation; it has a robot density of 50, compared to 31 in the Americas and 27 in the Asia/Pacific region.

IEEE Spectrum computed the robot density for 67 nations in all, using data from the International Federation of Robotics and the International Labour Organization [see http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec08/robodata (to come) for the complete list].

By 2011, the world’s industrial robot population is expected to rise to 1.2 million. Which countries these new robots will call home–and how the machine-to-human balance will change – remains to be seen.

[via tokyomango]

The Cielos modular lighting system designed by Billings Jackson Design for Zumtobel “provides a simple method of designing, installing and maintaining luminous surfaces. The shallow profile plug-and-play units are elegant with colored light and video-compatible LED models.”

From Architonic:

Implementing a luminous surface that provides uniform light distribution doesn’t get any easier than this. The CIELOS modular Plug & Play system provides boundless creative scope and a wealth of ideas when it comes to using light for interior design. Square lighting modules can be used to form any surface area as required. They are an attractive alternative to conventional lighting for smaller applications such as conference rooms, reception areas, wellness facilities, shops and showrooms in particular. Whether using one, two or three colours, CIELOS blends light and colour into a single unmistakable entity, thereby creating a cosy, pleasant atmosphere in any interior.

The lighting squares are available in two different standard sizes: with a side length of 600 mm or 900 mm. A glass diffuser lends the luminous ceiling its sophisticated look. Its low mounting height of just 80 mm (unicoloured white light) or 50 mm (coloured light) is unique. A large number of installation options – on the ceiling, on the wall or as a freestanding unit – provide scope for individual design preferences. When attached to the ceiling, the modules can be installed flush or suspended. The system complies with the DALI standard.

“Luminous surfaces are an emotional means of creating an atmosphere in a room…” – Nicholas Grimshaw

I pledge that for Ada Lovelace Day I will publish a blog post on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 about a woman in technology whom I admire.

Details:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009.

At the time of this posting, 989 people have signed up, 11 more needed. Why not make that you?

For ongoing updates about Ada Lovelace day:

http://twitter.com/FindingAda

http://findingada.com/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/findingada

Who was Ada?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software. More about Ada Lovelace at Wikipedia…

I had the pleasure of going to Macworld Expo again this year here in San Francisco. I wish I had more time to attend all the demos, but it was the first week back after the holidays and I had lots of client work. As a Mac-geek, it’s memorable that this year is the last year Apple will participate and the infamous keynote has come and gone.

Some highlights of the keynote:

• New 17″ MacBook Pro with 320 GB hard drive. Price starting at $2799. Built-in battery (up to 8 hours). Still no removable battery :(
• iTunes prices has changed to three levels in April with DRM free music. The store is now available by 3G (and not just wi-fi) on iPhones
• iPhoto’s new features include sorting and finding photos by face recognition, ability to upload directly to Facebook and Flickr, as well as geotagging.
• iMovie has been updated and has a more precise editor, drag-and-drop features for layering movies
• Nope, no iPhone nano or Snow Leopard…

Some photos below: