Okay so this a a post I’d like to write weekly to keep things alive over here. In the RRIs we’ll try to include as much sources of inspiration we’ve gathered over the week. These sources can come from anywhere at all. As designers we’re inspirable by anything we might encounter, so here are their web counterparts.
The gang suited up to visit CeBIT 2008 in relation to Project E. CeBIT was rather dull overall; it turned into a large, overcommercial gamerfest. Young geeks sporting oversized AMD and Intel totes with an amazing amount of nice and less nice magazines, pamflets and other advertising material absolutely dominated this conference. And while all the larger companies were having a contest on who could shout ‘innovation’ the loudest, it were the peripheral and smaller Taiwan and Hong Kong pavillions which carried the most interesting products, for us as a design company at least.
While browsing Engadget, I found a very interesting new product. The Swinxs. A ‘toy 2.0′: this could bring children who are used to play behind their computers outside again. Equipping children with RFID tags however, seems to worry a lot of technology pessimists: they have tremendous privacy concerns in their own backyard. The product is utterly simple; it’s an RFID reader with some sort of computer and pre-loaded games. The games themselves are not innovative at all, these are games I used to play as a kid before i found out about the Sega Mastersystem.
I wake up to the warmth and soft light emitted from my pillow. It gradually starts mimicking morning sunlight, gently caressing my face. I check the time and date: it’s the twenty-first of March, 2020 at 11:15 AM. Saturday! Weekend, it’s about time. I get up out of bed and as I walk away from the bedroom my pillow dims and calibrates itself to my Sunday morning setting.
As I move from the bedroom into the bathroom, the bathroom lighting emits a soothing light to improve my laid-back Saturday morning experience. I take a leak; what a relief. However, me taking a leak unchained an invisible process taking place right inside the urinal. Instant analysis of my urine is sent to the seamlessly integrated computing system running my home. As I move away from the toilet to the sink, an embedded User Interface in the mirror lights up: the visual items are styled according to my bathroom’s interior design, featuring soft light tones and chrome elements. This User Interface is the way I communicate with this particular part of the house; a graphical representation requiring point-and-select actions enable me to focus and wake my mind after my full night’s sleep. The bathroom floor measured my weight; I’m 0.7 kilograms above my optimal BMI. The system suggests a meal to get me back to that optimal weight, based on the content of my refrigerator. What I don’t see is that the system included info to select foods with a high sodium content; the awkward process of my urine analysis probably detected that my body needs a little salt. With a simple gesture, a swipe of my hand in the direction of the kitchen, I confirm the selection of the nutrition by the system and leave my bathroom. As I leave, the pressure-sensitive floor detects my absence, and turns off the ambient lighting as well as my health-reporting bathroom system.
iPhone/iPod touch users might have already noticed the Mobile Safari specific support we added to Important Things. By adding the iWPhone plugin to our Wordpress we managed to do so. If you don’t own one yet, check out the pretty picture on Flickr or above.
