Blog posts tagged as 'product'

The project we ran in the spring with the Goldsmiths Design BA course was not ‘live’ in the sense that there was a commercial client’s needs informing the project, but it was an approximation of the approach that we take in the studio when we are working with clients around new product generation and design consultancy.

It was also an evolution of a brief that we have run before at SVA in New York with Durrell Bishop – but with the luxury of having much more time to get into it.

Our brief was in two parts – representing techniques that we use in the early stages of projects.

The first half: “Death To Fiction” stems from our love for deconstructing technologies, particularly cheap everyday ones to find new opportunities.

It’s a direct influence from Durrell – and techniques he used while teaching Schulze, Joe Malia and others at the RCA – and also something that is very familiar to many craftspeople – having at least some knowledge of a lot of different materials and techniques that can then inform deeper investigation, or enable more confident leaps of invention later on in the process. It also owes a lot to our friend Matt Cottam‘s “What is a Switch?” brief that he’s run at RISD, Umea, CIID and Aho…

We asked the students to engage with everyday technology and manufactured, designed goods as if it were nature.

“The Anthropocene” has been proposed by ecologists, geologists and geographers to describe the epoch marked by the domination of human influence on the Earth’s systems – seams of plastic kettles and Tesco “Bags For Life” will be discovered in millions of years time by the distant ancestors of Tony Robinson’s Time Team.

There is no split between nature and technology in the anthropocene. So, we ask – what happens if you approach technology with the enthusiasm and curiosity of the amateur naturalist of old – the gentlemen and women who trotted the globe in the last few centuries with sturdy boots, travel trunks and butterfly nets – hunting, collecting, studying, dissecting, breeding and harnessing the nature around them?

The students did not disappoint.

Like latter-day Linneans, or a troop of post-digital Deptford Darwins – they headed off into New Cross and took the poundstretchers and discount DIY stores as their Galapagos.

After two weeks I returned to see what they had done and was blown-away.

Chewing-gum, Alarm-clocks, key-finders, locks, etch-a-sketches, speakers, headphones, lighters, wind-up toys and more – had all been pulled-apart, scrutinised, labelled, diagrammed, tortured, tested, reconstructed…

And – perhaps most importantly I had the feeling they had not only been understood, but the invention around communicating what they had learnt displayed a confidence in this ‘new nature’ that I felt would really stand them in good stead for the next part of the project, and also future projects.

It was all great work, and lots of work – the smile didn’t leave my face for at least a week – but a few projects stood out for me.

Charlotte’s investigations of disposable cameras, Helen’s thought-provoking examination of pregnancy tests, Tom’s paper speakers (which he promised had worked!), Simon’s unholy pairings of pedometers and drills, Liboni and Adam’s thorough dissections of ultrasonic keyfinders and the brilliant effort to understand how quartz crystal regulate time by baking their own crystal, wiring it to a multimeter and whacking it with a hammer!

Hefin Jones’ deconstruction of the MagnaDoodle, and his (dramatic, hairdryer-centric) reconstruction of it’s workings was a particularly fine effort.

The second half of the brief asked the students to assess the insights and opportunities they had from their material exploration and begin to combine them, and place them in a product context – inventing new products, services, devices, rituals, experiences.

We’ve run this process with students before in a brief we call “Hopeful Monsters”, which begins with a kind of ‘exquisite corpse’ mixing and breeding of devices, affordances, capabilities, materials and contexts to spur invention.

We’d pinched that drawing technique way back in 2007 for Olinda from Matt Ward, head of the design course at Goldsmiths so it only seemed fitting that he would lead that activity in a workshop in the second phase of the brief.

The students organised themselves in teams for this part of the brief, and produced some lovely varied work – what was particularly pleasing to me was that they appeared to remain nimble and experimental in this phase of the project, not seizing upon a big idea then dogmatically trying to build it, but allowing the process of making inform the way to achieve the goals they set themselves.

We closed the project with an afternoon of presentations at The Gopher Hole (thanks to Ossie and Beatrice for making that happen!) where the teams presented back their concepts. All the teams had documented their research for the project as they went online, and many opted to explain their inventions in short films.

Here’s a selection:

• http://roadsmata.wordpress.com/
• http://berg-ers.tumblr.com/
• http://printergame.tumblr.com/
• http://inventosaurs.tumblr.com
• http://Bergdesign.tumblr.com

A special mention to the ‘Roads Mata’ team, who for me really went the extra-mile in creating something that was believably-buildable and desirable – to the extent that I think my main feedback to them was they should get on KickStarter…

There were sparks of lovely invention throughout all the student groups – some teams had more trouble recognising them than others, but as Linus Pauling once said “To have a good idea you have to have a lot of ideas”, and that certainly wasn’t a problem.

I wonder what everyone would have come up with if we had a slightly longer second design phase to the project, or introduced a more constrained brief goal to design for. It might have enabled some of the teams to close in on something either through iteration or constraint.

Next time!

As it was I hope that the methods that the brief introduce stay with the group, and that the curiosity, energy and ability to think through making that they obviously all have grows in confidence and output through the coming years.

They will be a force to be reckoned with if so.

Congratulations to all the team at The Guardian for launching their iPad app this week.

BERG played a small role at the very beginning of the process with initial product workshops, Nick contributing his experience on iOS prototyping and Jack consulting on the interaction design with Mark Porter and the team.

Andy Brockie who led the internal design team there has put together a great ‘behind-the-scenes’ gallery of the process, and newspaper design guru Mark Porter has an in-depth blog post about his involvement here.

From that post, a snippet about some of the ‘algorithmic-art-director‘ workflow the team invented:

Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.

It’s not quite the “Robot Mark Porter” that Schulze and Jones imagined in the workshops, but it’s as close as we’re likely to see in my lifetime. Of course robots do not make good subs or designers, so at this stage some humans intervene to refine, improve and add character, particularly to the article pages. Then the InDesign data goes into a digital sausage machine to emerge at the other end as HTML.

Fascinating stuff, and perhaps a hint of the near-future of graphic design…

It was a pleasure working with the team there, and Mark especially. The final result looks fantastic, and more importantly perhaps reads beautifully and downloads extremely quickly. Well done to all involved!

And now, we can now finally exclusively reveal our prototype sketch for Robot Mark Porter…

I bought some Nike Mayfly running shoes.

They are ultra-lightweight, and quite lovely.

They are so light because they were designed with a definite lifespan.

They are only built to last for 100km.

On a good day, I usually run 10km.

These shoes are shoes I can use maybe ten times.

This defined sense of the object’s limited-life reinforces it’s narrative.

The thing is a clock.

It’s beginning, middle and end will be marked.

And indeed, the object itself asks you to record the beginning…

…and to do right by it’s end.

This is planned obsolescence with conviction – and as a result it involves you with the object, it’s materiality and your use of it to a greater degree than most mass-produced goods.

I haven’t run in them yet.

I’m waiting for just the right moment to start the clock on their life, and take my first steps in them – towards their end.

We’re practically all back in the studio after New Year – Jack and Kari return next week. The studio mailing list is humming again – lots of links from over the holidays being shared, not to mention interesting tidbits sniffed out from CES, and a general buzz from being back in the studio and back at work. Jolly good. Here’s a small selection from what we all saw this week.

From CES, an example of the digital becoming physical; in this case, a brand created relatively cheaply in the digital world starts to make inroads into the physical. Mattel’s Angry Birds: Knock On Wood is a tabletop game based on Rovio’s ubiquitous mobile game, transporting the bird-flinging action into the real world.

Andy shared this post from the Ponoko blog on the work of the ontwerpduo design studio. I loved Marbelous, their table with a built-in marble run.

Alex found the Crayola Crayon Maker. You put old wax crayons in, melt them down, and then mould that mixture into new, multicoloured, crayons. They’re different every time. It’s not a million miles away from our Metal Phone; I like that it emphasises the wax-ness of wax, as it were: this is a material you can shape and mould, so why not make products that let you shape and mould otherwise unwanted crayons.

Matt J pointed out this beautiful Flickr set of playing cards for Braniff Airlines, designed by Alexander Girard in the late 1960s. Each card teaches a tiny fragment of foreign language, alongside a simple, stylized illustration. I really like the colour palette used in the images – just blue and red on top of the black-and-white line art.

Photo credit – duxn-wy on Panoramio

Business Insider have collected this set of images of “ghost towns” in China – vast, empty residential and business districts, often in remote parts of the country, built as part of a huge property bubble in the country.

It’s quite a thing to see urban planning on this scale: universities designed to house 2.3 million students; whole city districts practically empty. And, of course, everything planned out up-front: there’s no organic growth here; just new towns dropped onto the map in one fell swoop. And now, the prevalence of aerial imagery allows us to see these cities from afar, their empty car parks and deserted streets preserved for history on Google Earth.

Pistil SF make customised blankets based on OpenStreetMap imagery. The custom maps can be centered around any latitude/longitude, and are available in a variety of custom colour schemes thanks to the Cloudmade styles. Freely available data turned into a beautiful, desirable product.

Andy spotted Mr Switch – a switch blanking plate designed by John Caswell, that injects character (and a little fella) into any light switch.

I loved James Bridle’s Romance Has Lived Too Long Upon This River. It’s a really abstract representation of the height of the Thames, manifesting as a single-serving webpage. It’s also a synecdoche for the whole river, perhaps even the city of London; a glanceable manifestation of nature, in a window on your computer, or on your tablet, or on your phone. James explains the technicalities – and the romance – over on his blog.

Chris Burden’s Metropolis 2 is a kinetic sculpture: 1200 toy cars racing around a colossal series of tracks. Brilliant. The noise sounds deafening. (via Kottke).

The noise of Metropolis II reminded me of this delightful marble run around a the edges of a room. I particularly like the way deftly curved lengths of wood are used to slow the marbles. It embraces momentum, rather than artificially killing it.

Several of us have been admiring Spacelog this week. It’s a really lovely representation of the space missions it covers, taking original radio chatter and mapping it to not only mission personnel, but also the phases of the mission itself. It’s another kind of macroscope: the many small actions of the vast teams at NASA, distilled into a few hours of spaceflight, and explained through careful representation of that data.

I mentioned the John’s Phone on the studio mailing list last week. We ended up getting one to look at in the studio; it arrived this week, and I spent some time exploring it.

The John’s Phone is a simple mobile phone made by Dutch design firm John Doe. The phone came about as an attempt to take the ultra-simplicity of their From The Supermarket to a mobile phone. To quote their blogpost on the subject:

We’ve always wondered why most affordable phone looks so dull and boring. All cell phones are great high-tech product we like to use every day. Why not spend more time in designing. It’s the things we don’t see that are the most essential to creating a great design. A great design is a present. Why not make yourself happy with a present everyday in your pocket.

It’s a really immediate product: the entire front face is devoted to the keypad and physical interface. The top of the phone has an LCD display, positioned much like an old-fashioned pager; the side of the phone, which you can just see in the pictures above, has a rocker switch for volume, a SIM card slot, a switch for the ringer volume, and a power switch.

The phone makes its intention clear: the immediacy of use and that interface is more important to it than any screen or display-based interaction. It’s all about phone calls and phone numbers.

The John’s Phone is almost exactly the same size as an iPhone 4 – but its keypad takes up as much space as the touch screen does on the iPhone. The touchscreen has become a focal point of the design of smartphones, the hardware being designed around that bright rectangle. The John’s Phone is equally designed around its interface (or, at least, the “input” element of that interface) – it just happens to be a physical keypad.

There are delightful, surprising touches. There’s a biro hidden down the side, where you might expect a stylus on an old touchscreen phone. You can use it to write in the addressbook hidden in the back of the phone.

But that paper addressbook sums up some of the problems with a phone this simple. Is that simplicity for the purpose of simplification, or to support an aesthetic of simplicity?

The website for the phone claims that it’s “the world’s simplest cellphone“. That’s true – if you agree with their idea of what a cellphone is.

For instance, if you believe text messaging to be a fundamental feature of a cellphone, then the John’s Phone doesn’t even live up to your expectations of what a mobile phone is. But if all you want your mobile phone to do nothing but send and receive calls – which is true of many phone owners – then it really is a simple, satisfying expression of that goal. Satisfaction with the device comes down to what your expectations – or requirements of it – are when you first pick it up.

That aesthetic of simplicity is at times complicated by the technology the phone runs on. Whilst John Doe promote the paper addressbook as the best way to store your phone numbers, reading the manual reveals that there is a ten-number memory built into the phone.

How do you put numbers into that memory? By typing **1*01234567890# (to put “01234 567890″ into slot “1″).

Doesn’t that, as an interface, feel totally at odds with the aesthetic the physical device is cultivating?

(Of course, “reading the manual” seems like an activity also at odds with a device already so explicit in its physical form; had I not done so, I’d have been perfectly happy not knowing about that feature.)

At first, the character-design on the “hello” and “goodbye” buttons seems at odds with the restrained, minimal physical exterior.

As you use the phone, though, you’ll get to see a lot more of that character. He’s called Fony, and he appears throughout the phone’s operation. He’ll wave hello and goodbye to you when you turn the phone on and off.

When the phone’s asleep, you might see him tucked up in bed.

When you charge the phone, he gets electrocuted from time to time (which seems curel to a character I’d imagine I was supposed to be sympathetic towards).

I can appreciate the care and attention in the realisation of Fony. He’s charming and never intrusive on the phone’s screen, often explaining what the phone’s currently doing through his appearance (rather than through text, which there’s very little space for). John Doe say (in their explanation of his design) that “Fony makes John’s a friendly phone“. I think he’s part of that friendliness – but not nearly as much as the much more immediate friendliness of the clear, simply designed hardware.

It’s important to factor the price of the product into any discussion of it. The John’s Phone costs €70 – about £50. That puts it in line with fairly cheap pay-as-you-go phones. (And: the John’s Phone is sold unlocked from any carrier, so that’s £50 without any carrier-subsidy).

Price changes the the relationship to a product. At £150, this would be a premium product designed for a wealthy few as a provocative statement – but likely a “second phone”.

At the current price, it’s a much more relevant purchase for a wider audience. If that price were even lower, new – and larger – audiences become available.

It’s only fair, in the end, to criticise the John’s Phone in light of that initial quotation from John Doe, which serves as a kind of design brief:

A great design is a present. Why not make yourself happy with a present everyday in your pocket.

A device that makes you happy; a device that is a delight every time you pick it up. By those criteria, the John’s Phone is clearly a success. Everyone who’s seen ours wants to pick it up and take a look; everyone who picks it up smiles, and plays with it, explores its secrets; everyone wants to answer the question “is it really a phone”?

Yes, it is. And it’s not just an ultra-simple phone; it’s an affordable ultra-simple phone, that you can buy right now. All credit to John Doe for taking their vision of what a mobile phone could be, and making it real, at the right price.

We’ve been closely following the progress on reverse-engineering Microsoft’s Kinect in the studio. My favourite example so far is Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille’s prototype of a hand-puppet. A lot of the early demos of the Open Kinect drivers have, understandably, been very technical in their focus, and not always that attractive visually. I love the hand-puppet because it’s both: not only does it demonstrate skeleton-tracking from the camera-data, but it’s also completely charming.

Matt W pointed out the similarity between the Kinect hand puppet demo and Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters. Worthington’s project – from his 2005 RCA show – turns the shadows of people standing in front of it into appendages of monsters. It’s delightful to watch, as teeth and eyes emerge from shadows on the wall.

9eyes is a blog capturing striking images from Google’s Street View camera cars. Some are beautiful; some stark. Some are surprising; some are funny. It’s remarkable not to see how much of the world Google has covered – but to see how much of the world is covered in roads, from which it can be photographed.

Via This Isn’t Happiness comes this beautiful piece of product design: the Sony TR-1825 from 1970. Sliding the radio open reveals its speaker.

It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m about to catch a train to Sheffield. But before I do that, it would be a shame not to round-up some links from the studio mailing list – especially given the box-fresh surroundings of the new BERG website.

Via infosthetics comes this set of photographs from Brian Steen. They depict data over time – in this case, the population of Germany from 1994 and 2009 (in red and white). The images are long exposures of data extruded through space, in a similar technique to that of Making Future Magic. It’s striking to see this technique used for visualisation of data, though – and it’ll be interesting to see where Brian goes with it.

Damjan Stanković’s Cipher Glass shows you what’s in it when it’s full of fluid – the name picked out in negative-space on the side when a particular colour fluid is in the glass.

Nick pointed out E4′s “Mess With The Misfits” promotional campaign. It’s really clever – dynamically compositing images and text from Facebook into Flash video; it’s also very tasteful, and leaves no trace on your Facebook profile unless you ask it to. A slick, inventive piece of imaging trickery; very cool.

The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience is a bombastic name for an impressive piece of motion graphics. Projected onto the side of their 1 New Bond Street store, it uses carefully mapped graphics and video to transform the outside of the store. My favourite segments are the ones where they physically reconfigure the form of the building, such as the transformation at 1:40. It’s always interesting to see the way large brands are using such techniques for promotional purposes.

Russell spotted Mayo Nissen’s City Tickets. City Tickets was a final thesis project at CIID. It’s a service that proposes using existing parking machines as a platform for citizens to feedback on issues with infrastructure – giving them small, receipt-like pieces of paper to feed back about local issues on. Mayo explains:

City Tickets makes the bureaucratic and opaque workings of governance more transparent and accountable, while redefining the balance of power supporting participatory urban planning and management processes. Updating current machines to also issue city tickets in addition to existing parking tickets allows this existing infrastructure, without the inclusion of any costly additional technology, to be reconsidered as a way to make neighbourhoods more liveable and cities more responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.

It’s simple, acute, and charming: it already feels like a service I’d like to use. And, as we explored in the Media Surfaces films, it’s another exploration of print being quick.

I saw this picture via The Online Photographer a few days ago. It’s a Leica M4, being sold second-hand right now on eBay, for the premium prices such cameras command.

I loved the wear at the edges, where the black paint has been worn away to reveal the brass underneath. It’s not broken; it hasn’t been mistreated. It’s just been well-used in its 35-year-odd lifespan.

And, in some ways, it’s more attractive for its wear. This isn’t a camera that’s been locked away in its packaging by an over-protective collector; it’s been well-used for its intended purpose. Part of the attraction to such an object isn’t just the aesthetic quality of its patina: there’s also something attractive about the action that wear represents. As a photographer, I’m attracted to this wear because in some ways, it represents the act of photography.

I’m not sure I’m explaining this well. Here’s another example.

I was looking through my links for other articles about wear and patina, and I found this Reuters photograph from last year. It’s of the floor of a Tibetan monastery, where, over twenty years of daily prayer, Hua Chi has worn his own footprints into the floor.

He has knelt in prayer so many times that his footprints remain deeply, perfectly ingrained on the temple’s wooden floor.

Every day before sunrise, he arrives at the temple steps, places his feet in his footprints and bends down to pray a few thousand times before walking around the temple.

The footprints are three centimeters (1.2 inches) deep where the balls of his feet have pressed into the wood.

1.2 inches of prayer. There’s something beautiful about the smooth imprints of a human foot worn into wood. But the wear itself also comes to symbolise the action that led to it: in this case, Hua Chi’s prayers.

Patina is the effect of actions made solid; photography into worn paint, prayer into a worn floor. It is verbing turned into a noun.

Shared Lives

Nouns and verbs. That reminded me of this post about “The Life Of Products” by Matt W, from nearly four years ago. Matt wrote:

Products are not nouns but verbs. A product designed as a noun will sit passively in a home, an office, or pocket. It will likely have a focus on aesthetics, and a list of functions clearly bulleted in the manual… but that’s it.

Products can be verbs instead, things which are happening, that we live alongside. We cross paths with our products when we first spy them across a crowded shop floor, or unbox them, or show a friend how to do something with them. We inhabit our world of activities and social groups together… a product designed with this in mind can look very different.

Wear is, of course, both a noun and a verb. It’s the verb that inevitably happens through use, and it’s the noun that the verb leaves behind. Patina is the history of a product written into its skin.

And, of course, it takes time for wear to occur. Objects start their lives pure, unworn, ready to be both used and shaped by that use. In Products are People Too, Matt’s 2007 talk from Reboot 9, he said:

Products exist over time. We meet them, we hang out with them, we live life together.

Patina is a sign of a life shared.

Here’s a life I’ve shared.

This is my three-and-a-half year old laptop. It’s my second aluminium Mac, and, just as with my previous laptop, the surface has tarnished right underneath where my palms rest. It’s not a fault – that black speckling is just what happens when perispiration meets aluminum. It’s not as beautiful as the Leica, or the monastery floor – but it’s not as ugly as cracked and chipped plastic.

I think that might be one reason I’ve kept it quite so long: the material and form of the exterior have encouraged me to hold onto the laptop. Certainly much longer than if it had been poorly constructed, becoming damaged rather than worn.

In his talk at Frontiers of Interaction in 2009, Matt J showed this photograph of Howies’ “Hand-Me-Down jacket”.

It’s a jacket that’s designed to last. Howies ensure they have the materials to repair it, encouraging the owner to mend the jacket rather than throw it out. Inside the jacket is the label above: name tags to last several generations, indicating periods of ownership.

The label is surprising because it serves as a reminder that the product will last. The encouragement to pass something on, and to measure ownership in years, acts as a reminder that there’s no reason to throw the jacket out.

It seems absurd to have to be reminded of that.

But: how many essentially functional pieces of clothing have you or I thrown out? How many items that could be repaired have ended up in the bin? How many objects have never had the time to acquire a patina – thrown out before their time was truly up?

It’s sad that we have to be reminded that objects can last. I cannot deny that there’s a role for inexpensive, cheaply-manufactured, and somewhat disposable products – but they shouldn’t condition us into thinking that’s how all products are.

Designing things that want to be kept

I read an article – which, alas, I can’t find a link to at the moment – about the disposal and lifespan of mobile phones in the USA. The most shocking item in it was that, when questioned as to the lifespan of a mobile phone, most Americans responded with “about 24 months”. A mobile phone may not last like a Leica or a Stradivarius… but it’ll last a good bit longer than two years before it’s beyond use.

24 months was, of course, the length of common cellphone contracts. And so, as contracts expired, and network providers told their customers they were eligible for a new phone, they began to assume there had to be something wrong with the old phone. And it would go in the bin.

When the patina an object gains is attractive, it acts as an encouragement to keep it. Good jeans really come into their own as they wear down and develop creases, rips, rough patches. It’s why my favourite pair say something along the lines of “wash me as little as possible!” inside.

It’s important to note: the wear I’m discussing isn’t related to things breaking. Things break because they’re worn out, or poorly designed, or used inappropriately. Patina is that wear which comes from entirely “correct” usage of a product. That usage might be intense – a professional guitarist’s instrument will acquire patina far faster than mine will – but it is, nontheless, the intended usage of the object.

I’m not sure patina can be designed. After all, it’s a product of the relationship between product and owner.

The form it takes can be shaped – by the materials used in a product, by the nature and frequency of operations that an owner might perform. I suppose that a product can be designed to age gracefully, to wear attractively; it’s just the exact nature of that wear that’s out of a designer’s hands.

In considering the patina a product might develop, you of course have to ask a series of interesting questions: about longevity, about sustainability, about materials, about manufacturing. Going beyond “peak X” and towards “resilient X”, as Matt J said. But I think the most interesting questions – at the very heart of that consideration – are emotional ones. “What if someone adores your product? What if someone really does want to make a product a part of their life? What will your product look like when it’s been worn into the ground by virtue of its own success?”

I don’t think there are single answers to those questions, but they’re great questions to have to consider.

(One answer, which leaps to mind for me, can be found in The Velveteen Rabbit – one of those children’s books that manages to be, of course, both profoundly sad and yet uplifting with it. The toy rabbit in question discovers that if his owner loves him enough, he becomes real. Products are people, too, right there in 1920s children’s books).

Another Leica M4 to end with: this one belonging to the photographer Jim Marshall, noted for his music photography since the 60s. (If you don’t know the name, you’ll almost certainly know his work).

Marshall made so many striking images with this camera and others like it, and, in that making, gave it its unique patina. It’s a camera as rock’n'roll as the subjects it shot. Somewhere in that wear – buried in the scuff-marks, the scratches, the flaked paint – are Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: the “life lived together” of Marshall and his camera.

This week’s been buzzing and busy – everybody’s back in the studio after a week of holidays, festivals, and trips to India. That means the studio mailing list has been buzzing again, and so it’s time to take the cream of the links and get them onto the blog.

Matt J found Gearbox, a company making “smart toys” to pair with your smartphone. Their first toy is a ball that rolls the direction you tilt your phone in. They explain:

We are then leveraging the connectivity and computing power of the phone to create a fully interactive experience for the user. Our first app for the ball is Sumo. I throw my ball on a table, you throws yours on the table and then we can try and sumo each others ball off the table. However, while our physical balls are moving there is also an onscreen component with online stats, profiles, damage, powerups and other aspects of gameplay that aren’t possible with a regular remote control toy. For instance, when the balls collide they can sustain “damage” and roll slower or I could get a powerup to reverse your controls for a few seconds.

Aside from the games we produce we are also opening up the APIs for the ball so any app developer with no hardware knowledge can build their own games or applications and bring them to the real world.

Smashing; it’s the open-API that really sets these toys apart from something more constrained, like Sony’s Rolly. And this is only their first product!

Joey Roth’s ‘Charlatan / Martyr / Huslter‘ poster has been doing the rounds, recently, and with good reason – it’s lovely. But equally lovely is the attention to detail on the webpage selling it. Matt W sent it to our internal list, commenting on how the product page “communicates desire” – the closeups of the type and paper stock, the shot (reproduced above) of copies being stacked. It reinforces that it’s not just an EPS on a piece of paper; it’s a real product, and Roth’s website makes you want it.

Damon Zucconi’s Fata Morgana is, essentially, Google Maps without the Maps: roads, land, and water are all stripped away leaving just place names and street names. Even zoomed in, as above, the effect persists. Maps made just of names and streets aren’t a new thing – but there’s a strange juxtaposition in seeing them in slippy, interactive javascript form.

Here’s a short demonstration of an official version of The Settlers of Catan for Microsoft’s Surface. It’s a little underwhelming – very literal in some of its metaphors. That said, I loved the interaction between physical tokens and the board – in particular, the way the “visor” has an X-ray effect on cards underneath it. By making it a very realistic – and carefully masked – X-ray effect, the metaphor actually holds up better. It’s very much an understanding of the Surface as a Magic Table rather than a big window.

And finally – this is Racer. An old arcade cabinet; a remote control car on a small circuit; a remote camera, and timing circuitry. Put them together and you’ve got this charming and effective game. A tiny, remote-control version of C’était un Rendez-vous, if you like. This video of it in action is great – alas, I couldn’t embed it, so I hope the link suffices.