Democracy as a creation of the individual rather than an abstract system

Here's a little video I made for the Democracy Video Challenge 2010. Ideas posited in this video are: democracy is not just an abstract system, we can come to embody it. Ways to this are to create awareness, and to change the environment so as to guide people in acting more according to democratic ideas. Democracy can be generated within too, and we have to devote ourselves to seeing when we can develop towards a more democratic stance. Democracy is in our every move.

graphics on a windmill

This is the Siemens superstar, a project by German multimedia artist Michael Pendry. It is basically a wind turbine with 9.000 programmable RGB LEDs integrated into it. The superstar was installed last month in Munich, a city that wants to run on sustainable resources by 2025. I'd love to see these graphics coupled to a realtime digital datasource, so it becomes sustainable plus decorative plus informative.

See it in action here:

the first steps of regrowing the human body

Anthony Atala explains at TED how the first steps are taken to regrow human tissue, his ultimate goal being to regrow entire body parts, and who knows, maybe entirely new body parts too. Watch if you are interested in engineering your body, tissue conditioning outside of the body, baking organs in an oven, and inkjet printing a heart in 40 minutes.

generative product design; computers that create ideas

It's one of the big new ideas: creative computers. The first reaction is often one that stems from the oh so pervasive idea that humans and computers are fundamentally different, a reaction of resistance that occurs so often when the abilities of computers expand into new realms, the reaction "that's impossible".

Sure, computers are programmed by people. Sure, even when you program a computer to do something random or chaotically, still this was programmed into it. At some point though the causal line between programmer and programmed becomes very hard to be found, and it's only a matter of perception before you see a computer as an autonomous thing with thoughts, feelings, empathy, and creativity.

On these pictures you see what happens when you use generative algorithms to automate the exploration of a design space. As a designer I must say that I think this can be inspiring in the early stages of a creation process, though in the end a design will still have to be internalized by people if we want to prevent things from becoming a postmodern cybermess where we treat the physical as a product of the mental, but instead suffuse the things we make with socio-cultural and psychological depth. I don't think computers can do that at this stage, because they simply too much lack a body and a way to base their behavior more on their direct embodiment instead of on abstract codings. But as always, development comes from both sides of a spectrum, and I think things could really get interesting this way if we can do world-simulations in which our products participate with simulated bodies that operate according to an embodied cognition approach. In other words, things get interesting when we can simulate an entire design process, including virtual user involvement. How shallow it may seem as an idea, still I think it might drastically speed up design processes.

sculpting through singing

How simple an idea, yet how brilliant the enaction. Mitchell F. Chan had the idea of physicalizing voice through ondulating ropes, and used the increasingly popular programming environment Processing to analyze the voice of soprano Ashleigh Semkiw and turn this into output for motors to change the frequency and intensity of vibration in the ropes. Thus he gave nascence to a kinetic sculpture in which human and technology are intrinsically connected as if they were one.

LED floorlamp

Nice design by Zhiqiang Liu for this floorlamp based on LEDs. The position of the lights can be controlled with a remote control. A future idea might be to explore a bit more on the interaction side, since I'd suppose few people like to have yet another remote. What's the problem with just walking to the lamp, or maybe gestures or full body motions can be coupled to the lighting qualities.

digital guitar

Check out the Misa Digital Guitar. There has been an ongoing evolution of digital music instruments, but this one is pretty interesting. Of course, you lose the traditional beauty of sound that directly comes from vibrations in the material of the instrument, but the main point why these digital instruments are so interesting is their programmability. In the future devices can intelligently adapt to their users so we might come to see a true mutual interaction between a human and his instrument, where next to the human playing his instrument, the instrument plays its user too.