Artful clock incorporates ferrofluid

 A blend between art, nature, and technology, this clock displays time by magnetically manipulating ferrofluid, nano-engineered metal holding particles suspended in a carrier solvent. The clock, called Ferrolic, was created by master student Zelf Koelman at the department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. He researched the technology and interaction for a year before being able to create the beautiful dynamics he was looking for. He envisions an additional app in order to customize texts, shapes and transitions. So far, only 24 of the clocks have been made but future plans to scale up production are being created.

Dutch Design Week 2013 Highlights

According to Dezeen Magazine it's more interesting than New York and London's Design Week, and it all takes place in a pretty small post-industrial town that over the past years has been evolving into a vibrant, multifaceted and well interconnected creative community. We're talking about the Dutch Design Week 2013 which, as always, took place in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and hosted exhibitions by the Design Academy, Eindhoven University of Technology, several museums, as well as work by many other Dutch designers. Here are some highlights, categorized according to the 'trend' they belong to.

Wearables

Technology that is worn on the body or integrated into our clothing might go mainstream as soon as within five years, according to various reports. At the Dutch Design Week it became clear that the world of fashion and the world of technology are coming closer and closer together.



Some explorations by fashion or textile designers showed an inspiration or even integration of high technology. Philips has teamed up with a few designers in order to create a dress that integrates thin solar panels that may deliver enough power to charge the devices that you carry along with you. They also showed a new textile based on an integration of wool and fiberglass, which reminds a bit of 'space-age' design but now with a modern, intelligent, organic flavor. Also on display at Strijp-S was Iris van Herpen's magnetically grown dress concept, in collaboration with Jolan van der Wiel.





Several graduate students and young designers also reflected the influence of high-tech in their work. They incorporated metals, rigid elements, or simply a technology-influenced aesthetic into their pieces.



Perhaps the most interesting work around wearables came from the students and researchers of Eindhoven University of Technology, who managed to integrate aesthetics, manufacturing technology as well as meaningful interactivity into their work. At the Designhuis we saw a dress that has vibration motors integrated into it for the purpose of vibration therapy. It also has areas that sense the wearer's hands so the vibrations can be adjusted in a more direct and intuitive way. My own project, Flowtime, was on display at the Eindhoven University of Technology. It is an interactive system consisting of a yoga top with breath and movement sensors as well as vibration motors, that together with a software system helps people to practice yoga at home. Another interesting project was a hand prosthesis designed by Jeroen Blom. It has touch and bend sensors integrated as well as vibration motors, which allows amputees to get a better feel for the artificial limb and ultimately make it a more naturally integrated part of the body.


Product Design

It actually surprised me how little work was being done around small, handheld products such as smartphones, remote controls, or tools (as well as in the area of mobility by the way). One nice example is Dave Hakkens' Phonebloks concept, a modular smartphone of which you can upgrade or adapt each individual component, such as the battery, display, GPS, CPU, camera, or wi-fi modules. This can make the product more individualized as well as long-lasting, although it will probably cost a lot more to develop and produce.

The Eindhoven University of Technology displayed some products developed especially for the context of a prison, for which the designer spent some time in jail himself. This resulted in three product proposals, of which one is a doorknob that takes away insecurities and possible tensions by clearly making visible as well as tangible whether the door is open for the guard or for the prisoner.

Above you see some freestyle, organic form explorations applied to purses and furniture.

At a new DDW location called 'Kazerne' there were some interesting works on display, such as pieces made of a translucent, wax-like material that we could categorize in the 'immateriality' movement within product design, perhaps currently led by the work of Tokujin Yoshioka. There were also a few works with vibrant lights, working towards an almost psychedelic effect.

3D Printing

Some developments in 3D printing were shown, such as low volumes and prototypes of products made with low-cost 3D printers, its use in workshops where children were able to print out simple customized objects, new developments in materials at Shapeways' booth, and the improvements in quality in filament extruders such as the Ultimaker. Also noteworthy is Oce's new 2.5D printing technology, which simply works like an inkjet printer but can now print multiple layers on top of each other up to several millimeters high. This can give rise to very interesting graphical effects and relief-like prints.

Redesigning nature

 

In this category falls the by now well-known Next Nature Nanosupermarket, which again showed its far-future concepts based on emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and tissue engineering. One concept by a TU/e student showed an amulet that is hooked into the wearer's bloodstream and uses it to nourish and grow meat.

Some other projects of a similar provoking nature, but perhaps making a bit more societal sense, were on display at the Designhuis' exhibition 'de Gezonde Mens' (EN: the healthy human). One of them showed three proposals for how we could in the future design our own organs that we want to add to our bodies, such as a system for people with too much mucus that directly sends it to the digestive system, or an organ with cells like that of an electric eel, that can restart the heart in case of cardiac arrest. Another artistically inclined project was one where babies could be modified to have superior capabilities, such as added skin lobes to the head to regulate brain temperature better, or an extra intake organ behind the ear that allows for rapid absorption of medicines into the bloodstream. Perhaps now such concepts are quite far-out, but I can definitely see such things happening in the future - say 20-30 years from now.

Sustainability

An ever-relevant topic not to be overlooked, and also this year well-represented on the Dutch Design Week. In terms of remaking products into something else, an area where we rarely see something beautiful, there were some gorgeous chandeliers made out of used bike chains.

There were also a few exhibitions with bio-materials such as bioplastics, which in my view have the future. Materials and composites on display incorporated biological materials such as cellulose, potato starch, yute, hemp, kenaf, grass, flax, palm leaves and even vegetable and fruit peels.

Then an upcoming theme seems to be local manufacturing. There were a few guys who had custom-built a small manufacturing machine such as a vertical clay extruder or an injection molding machine, that allows them to cheaply create unique products. This can be the start of a true local manufacturing revolution, where every streetcorner so to speak will have its own little minifactory where people can create or order unique products. And with the internet and the cloud in our hands, the sky is the limit.

Bio-organic breast pump

'Fluenci' is an outstanding design project, where the underlying design philosophy, project approach, and design results are all very innovative and beautiful. The project was performed in 2010 by Jaap Knoester as part of his master graduation from Eindhoven University of Technology, and  in collaboration with Philips Design.

The vision of the project was to create a new type of breast feeding pump, that fits the intimate experience better than current models, which feel very mechanical and functional. Several interviews were done with mothers which showed that current breast pumps often make them feel exposed, or even felt degrading. It was also found that the so-called 'let-down' reflex, which triggers the milk flow, is stimulated the most when the mother can see, hear, smell and feel the warmth of her baby.

These stimuli are incorporated into the design of the Fluenci breast pump through a heated breastshield with electric thermofoils, an organic form that resembles the back of the baby's head and neck and allows for cradling, as well as sounds of the baby played by the remote pump unit. Because milk flow is most stimulated when suckling starts out fast and then slows down, this behavior was also incorporated into the breast pump. The device has a button on top which the mother can tap in order to adjust the suckling frequency.

User tests showed that this interaction for adjusting the suckling frequency should be more direct and precise. While a subtle and direct interaction such as the suggested tapping might seem beautiful, I think that the main reason it is not preferred over, say, a slider or control knob, is that it needs too much conscious attention from the user. It requires a felt connection to the device, in other words, the user needs to mentally get into a rhythm and then convey this rhythm in an embodied way. But such a felt connection is subordinate to the felt connection with the baby. A baby's suckling can obviously not be controlled by tapping on his or her head, so it is necessarily a non-anthropomorphic element, and probably it is best to design it as such - as part of the technical device, not the intimate experience. In this case it is probably best to leave the age-old ritual of breastfeeding alone and minimize other subrituals in terms of cognitive and physical load.

Overall, the test subjects much appreciated the device. Knoester explains in a paper written for the DeSForM 2012 conference called 'Fluenci: The expression of expressing' that the underlying design philosophy responsible for the success is based on a new type of anthropomorphic design that does not fit well into current classifications of anthropomorphic design, because it does not fully mimic human form, gesture, social roles or intentionality. Rather, it is more subtly designed with human qualities so that the user can interact with the device as if it were human. Knoester calls this Embodied Anthropomorphic Form.

Now, I think we need to pay some attention to this, because to me it is an extremely beautiful and powerful way to design products. It avoids the uncanny valley by not directly mimicking existing biological forms, and it avoids a too technical, robotic, distant look. I think that deep down, it is exactly where humans want to be in terms of interacting with their technological environment, and that it can dissolve such widespread modern-day feelings of alienation and dissociation. I think that we need to extend this approach into a design approach that can be used for all products, not just ones simulating human to human interaction. We need to learn to design products so that humans are invited to interact with them as if they were sentient beings in general, imbued with the same cosmic life force, you could say, that we humans feel. Then technological products would not feel distant and complex anymore, but we can accept their complexity because we feel the same life in them as we feel inside of us, so on a more basic level there would be a feeling of equality which can them give rise to empathy, acceptance, understanding, even love or oneness.

In the past, I have quite casually suggested the term 'biological modernism' for this design approach, because I believe that we should design according to modernist principles but now extended not just to minimize and beautify static qualities such as form and proportion, but also dynamic, alive qualities of interaction. I think though, that modernistic design could be more like a subclass of this kind of biological design, because it would allow people to also be less minimal (or even extremely extravagant) in case they prefer such an approach. It's just that personally I would advocate minimalism because it forces designers to use their creativity and intellect more fully in order to condense a lot of complexity into elegant design solutions, and this to me is what creates beauty. But of course nature does also not always seem very intelligent, and often extremely messy. The notions that nature is wild, nasty and chaotic on the one hand, and mind-blowingly beautiful on the other hand, are two opposite images and as always, neither is fully true. So now I would like to suggest a new approach, in the broadest sense based on encapsulating the biological lifeforce in technological devices, not just in terms of form such as organic designers such as Luigi Colani and Ross Lovegrove have been doing with their corresponding design philosophies of 'Biodesign' and 'Organic Essentialism', but extending this also towards the embodied relation with human beings. Therefore I would like to suggest the term 'Embodied Biodesign'. In case this sets you thinking and you come up with a better name, suggestions are welcome!

Dutch students reveal car with positive energy balance

A team of more than 20 students from Eindhoven University of Technology has recently revealed their proud creation, a family car fueled by solar panels on its roof. The car, named Stella, can produce more electric energy than it consumes, if you leave it out in the sun and drive it for an average amount of time. Even in a colder climate country such as the Netherlands it will be energy-positive during 10 months of the year, which makes it much cheaper to drive than a hybrid or even a full-electric car.

 

Another advantage is the light construction with an aluminum chassis and carbon fiber body and interior panels. The total car weighs only 380 kg, making it lighter even than a Twizy. Aerodynamically, the students managed to optimize the design while maintaining a large roof area, covering all wheels, and creating enough space for the occupants inside. Other requirements, such as imposed by international law and by the race that Stella is going to compete in, were also met. Think of the location of the lights, the viewing angle, and the maximum length and width of the car.

I am personally proud to also have co-operated on the design of this vehicle, and am looking forward to the World Solar Challenge in October, where the proverbial pudding will be eaten and the proof will come to light whether Stella is a rising or a shooting star.

 

Light made tangible by Philip Ross

Design luminary Philip Ross has developed what could be the most beautiful lamp, or even the most beautiful product, in the history of mankind.

It is called Fonckel, meaning 'glisten', and you interact with it by touching it on its back. Your hand movements will then more or less literally be translated into the behavior of the light, which swoops across the entire front surface. The movie below shows it all:



Fonckel is the result of Philip's PhD project at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, which again proves itself to be the city of light. His initial research was into how interactive products can elicit in people an experience of human values, such as creativity, helpfulness, and social power. Iteratively, and with the help of students, of which I had the fortune to be one (check www.nothings.nl/luxalive.html), he developed prototypes of lamps with different forms and behaviors. His final design, which was used for his scientific experiments, then led to the development of Fonckel.

From an aesthetic point of view there is not much to criticize about this design. You could say it can be categorized under the upcoming design movement of what I have termed 'biological modernism', as it has the purity of a design a la Dieter Rams, but also the organic and 'intelligent' forms that you see in nature. It would not surprise me if Fonckel would get an order from a Hollywood movie director in the near future, to have the lamp play a role in one of the next major science fiction films.

From an interaction design point of view you could argue that this design lacks both augmented and functional feedforward. Somebody who has never seen the object may have a hard time figuring out how to use the object, or even figuring out that it is a lamp in the first place. But I think the aesthetics and overall experience of the product overrules the usability issues here. This lamp is not meant to be useful. This lamp is meant to be beautiful and elicit a 'higher', even mystical experience in our little everyday lives. It intrigues people through its noble silence, its lack of communication, and invites them to touch it by the subtlety of its surfaces alone (this could be enhanced through certain materials or patterns though). Adding practical features would make this object much too earthly.



A main point for future improvement might be to expand the product's range of behaviors, possibly also with color, and the ability to link the light to things like sensors in the environment, or signals it gets from social media. Instead of having the user control the device fully, it may also attain some autonomy so that it starts to feel more alive (maybe this lamp will someday walk or fly around the home as part of a domestic robot). The product just feels so high-tech and sophisticated that you would almost be disappointed that in the end, it's just a lamp.

As far as I heard, Fonckel is ready to be sold at the moment, however I don't know the price. This is clearly still a product for the 'elite' who can afford quite a sum of money just to buy a lamp. But we need to start somewhere in putting beautiful products and experiences out there, don't we.

Shape-shifting kitchen tools

By now we all know that shape-shifting can be a very powerful aspect of technology. Since we witnessed the T-1000 change his hands from knives into hooks into pins, we all unconsciously knew that one day, we could have forks that can change into spoons or into scissors. And after a dream finds root into our psyche, the real work begins, which requires us to selflessly devote our mind-processes to the manifestation of that dream.

Many creatives around the world have become fascinated by products that can morph, with one of the new minds in the game being a guy from Eindhoven, the Netherlands with a good name for a designer, Jeffrey Braun. He has posted a video that shows an initial vision towards shape-changing kitchenware. In the video, you will see him varying his movements and gripping positions in order to morph his incredible tool towards the desired shape.

Of course, this video is just a video and only a small step away from the T-1000 towards actual, marketable products. If his aim was to show us something magical, I think he has succeeded. We must not remain sentimentally engulfed in a dream for too long though. I always love to see a designer step up and create a concept that actually has potential to hit the markets within a certain timeframe. It is through the largely social filter of the marketplace that true innovation occurs, after all.

I would actually be interested myself in seeing if we can develop something. Many things need to be critically thought out to see which concepts can survive. For one, magic has its limits. It can draw attention and evoke interest to buy a product, but a product will also have to match and support the actual ecology of use, including the physical, socio-economic, cognitive, and emotional environment. For one, I think that a clear mental model has to be available. Magic can be interesting, but it actual use not being at one with our products but having them do unpredictable, magical things, can be dangerous and induce uneasiness, even fear when using the product. True magic would occur when technology would be able to perfectly decipher the intention of someone in real-time. But in general, we humans have not even generated this ability yet, as this requires an intense felt oneness with the other.

Another approach is to make symbolic couplings from a consciously implemented human action to a consciously implemented technological action, as Jeffrey has shown in his movie. But the value of this is limited by how much we can and are willing to load our cognition. Then there is the issue of confusing an actual functional action in use for having a symbolic meaning for the product, so that it accidentally triggers a function. And the last major issue is that symbolic couplings disembody us from our ecological embeddedness. We lose track of what we are embodied in when we are acting as a result of a symbolic trigger. For example, you don't want to have to stab a knife backwards four times to make it turn into a fork. I can see the symbolic approach working for only a few actions per product, as both cognitive load and accident rate are minimized. If we have to go through the interaction design paradigms that human-computer-interfaces have gone through also for everyday physical tools, things might get a little chaotic.

I see most value in direct embodied couplings, say, when the amount you squeeze the handle of the knife determines the length of its blade, and the pressure you give with your thumb the width. These couplings are intuitive, do not necessarily require sophisticated AI, and have the human being actually become more embodied because it requires him or her to develop more physical control skills. There is a great shift starting towards embodied interaction, and I think that also for shape-changing products we should follow along with it.

Designing superhero interactions

Through our increasingly intelligent and interactive technologies, we are making our lifeworld more and more manipulable, giving rise to a world where humans are directly creatively involved in their environment. We understand now that everything is makeable, if only we have a sufficient palette of resources. Through technology we will be able to become superintelligent, superathletic, superhealthy, superhappy, and according to Dutch designer Ivo Daniel de Boer, we can even become superheroes.

Ivo envisions to extend human capabilities through interaction with technological devices, to make everyday events more extraordinary, and give rise to the feeling of being a superhero. He has made his vision tangible in a prototype for a ball that can be moved around without touching it. All you have to do is wear a wristband, and with specific ways of gesturing and moving your hand you can then make the ball move. Ivo positions this device as a toy, though I see many more applications of this so-called 'tele-kinesthetic' interaction paradigm in the future.

Now of course this type of human-computer interaction is quite close to the culmination of the Western ego-drive externalized. Who, at some point in their lives, and especially among boys, does not dream of being the omnipotent cyborg? Yet I don't think that we should avoid this possibility. On the contrary. It's great that dreams, silly as they might be, can come true through our own creative action. It's only when a dream gets realized, that we start seeing its flaws, after all. So I say yes to these developments; let people become almighty, let them become the alphas of the world, let them do whatever they want and can. The consequences will organically unveil themselves, so we'll only have learned from it.

It would surely be fun.

nanocereal

A little concept I did for the Nano Supermarket, organized by the Next Nature blog and Eindhoven University of Technology.

Describe your product in less than 200 words.
"The most innovative and revolutionary cereal currently on the market, Dr. Nano’s new N-flakes are the dream of any informed and connected consumer. These crunchy little nuggets have a completely safe form of nanotechnology inside that allows them to form a personal message for you after you pour them into your bowl of milk. All you have to do is wait a few seconds, and the flakes will rise to the surface to show you the weather for today, the amount of e-mail waiting for you, the score of that football match you missed, or even a personal message from a friend. And besides all that, N-flakes are simply scrumptious and highly nutritious, too!"

Describe the use of nanotechnology in your product, as well as its feasibility.
"Nanotechnology is necessary in this product in several ways:
- Having each individual flake receive a command from a central processing unit (mounted on the box). This command tells the flake where to position itself relative to other activated flakes that become part of the message displayed in the bowl.
- A mechanism need be present in each flake that allows the flake to, when activated, rise to the surface. For this, you can think of cells engineered to contain a pressurized gas. When activated, the cell would release the gas into the flake, hence propelling it upward to the surface.
- A mechanism need be present in each flake that allows the flake to position itself relative to other flakes while the flake is rising, as well as across the surface of the liquid in the bowl. For this, you can think of ‘nanomotors’: molecular motors that propel the flake in a certain direction.
- A nano-scale chip should be present in each flake. This chip would continuously receive signals about the position of other activated flakes, and control the nanomotors to get the flake in the desired position, within a short amount of time.

Realistically, I think this product can not make it to the market until about 2050. It requires nanotechnology of such a sophistication that the food industry will probably only take a hold of when it is available for a very low price. I do see it happening that nano-scale units will be standardized and produced on a massive scale for the food industry, maybe in the form of responsive and programmable powders."

Describe how your product can change our everyday life.
"Implications on people’s lives:

- The biggest implication, I think, is that through nanotechnology food can basically appear to ‘come alive’. As such, the distinction between product and ‘living being’ fades almost entirely, as our experience of these two always seemingly separate categories of things in the world will be less and less distinct. With food becoming physically active and responsive, people might feel as if they are eating something alive. In the N-flakes concept, the ‘it’s alive’ experience is minimized though, through not having the flakes physically change, and only having them give a single message, after which they become passive again like ‘ordinary’ foods.

- Putting nanotechnology in edible foods could make people very uncomfortable because they are eating parts of a ‘machine’ rather than ‘naturally’ grown food. Future generations have to grow up trusting that nanotechnology will not cause any significant harm to our bodies just like current generations have to trust a world where electromagnetic radiation is ubiquitous. It’s a big question how nanotechnology can be introduced to the world without entire cultures tipping into a state of distrust of this development.

- In a society revolving around information, people can tend to disconnect from their physical surroundings, such as the food they are eating. If the food itself starts to behave intelligently though, and becomes part of the information world, people may start to pay more attention to it, and less to technologies that deemphasize physical interactions. So where an information-overloaded person may simply devour food without any mental connection to it, in a world where the physical becomes the information this person can be led into a kind of ‘dance’ with the food. A disadvantage is that it could be quite a hassle interacting with things this way for just a little bit of information. Advantages are that the information can be more personal and meaningful, and that the interaction as a whole could bring you more into the present moment."

Skon: a light emitting hoodie

Very interesting piece of digital fashion done by Paula Kassenaar and Paula Segura Meccia from the design department I once was a part of myself: Wearable Senses at the Eindhoven University of Technology. To me, this piece is pure aesthetics. And in that respect, it shines. Interact with the shape of the hoodie, and the light reacts. As a one-week assignment this project hasn't strewn its full potentials yet, though already it can be felt how the aesthetics of soft technology could influence our lives. I would love to see a next version of this, maybe one in which the shape of the hoodie is more kneadable, and the light reacts in ways clearer corresponding to the wearer's actions. One interesting aesthetic use could be to use the light as a body movement trail: store activity patterns of the wearer throughout the day, and create an animation from these that continuously updates. This way, technology can become a peripheral awareness system we don't necessarily interact with consciously, but that more or less creates a dynamic field that filters our incoming perceptual data, setting the tone for how we act, like a gearbox that always runs on the background and evolves over time.



( Random train of thought: this is interesting stuff for a PhD work. A fundamental question then is: what is the parameter the system optimizes itself towards? I tend to say happiness. Then, define happiness. Do people know what happiness is, i.e. would we use it as an intrasubjective concept, do we treat it as a social construct, or can you even objectively define happiness? I always say that happiness is something people can only recognize when they have experienced it enough. People can say they are happy without knowing that there are even more supreme states of being. For me, pure and utmost happiness is the being rid of worry, frustration, irrelevant thoughts, so that you are in control of your mind, and instead of identifying with the mind you are the controller of the mind. Could you steer people towards this state of being in various situations? Since this work concerns the hoodie, what would be the power of visual neurofeedback in everyday life?)

ID'09 graduation galleries at Dutch Design Week 2009

Photos: Bart van Overbeeke

Nearing is the time for the Dutch Design Week 2009, that will take place from October 17th until the 25th in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I would recommend you to, next to the Design Academy, take a look at the graduation projects of Eindhoven University of Technology. This young school is quickly maturing and producing interesting interactive concepts for future products. You can even try out some prototypes for a personal experience.

My own project, Flowtime, an electronic vest for yoga practice, will also be featured in this exhibition, and the prototype is available for all to see.

So mark your agendas: October 17-25, ID'09, main building at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

See you there!