+ Tatsuo Miyajima’s C.F.Bubble in the Water

 

I came across this facinating lamp with LED numerals "bubble in the water" at Salone del mobile 2006. For further details and images refer to Japan Design Net

Loop- Digital Dawn

Loop.pH is a design and research studio that creates and develops new surfaces & structures, conducts an extensive range of research activities and collaborates with industry. It is a multidisciplinary partnership set up in 2003 by Rachel Wingfield with artist Mathias Gmachl after meeting on a FoAM project in the UK. Together they have fabricated reactive surfaces for a variety of environments, from the public to the domestic. Their work aims to provide a more intuitive understanding of our natural environment, from day-night cycles to power consumption. Research into the physiological effects of light and colour on the human body is a strong component in their work. They are developing textile-based ambient displays for the home with active textiles that visualise information through dynamic pattern and colour change.
Some of the interested project on which Loop has been working on are Digital Dawn, Light Sleeper, Blumen wallpaper, walls with ears, Temporal Lights. Check this link.

OLLA Project: Spreading OLED’s

The OLLA project is an Integrated Project (IP), funded by the IST program of the European Commission’s 6th Framework. OLLA is started on October 1st, 2004, and will run for 45 months.

The aim of the OLLA project is to research and develop high brightness, high efficient white OLEDs and demonstrate its use in general lighting applications..

The OLLA consortium consists of 24 partners from 8 European countries. Each OLLA partner is a world-renowned specialist in its particular field of science and technology. The partners have gathered to propel Europe to the forefront of organic LED’s for ICT (e.g. display) and Lighting applications (e.g. novel OLED light sources).

Based on the experience and expertise in organic LED’s in Europe, whereby many research groups and companies have achieved an important standing in the display world, OLLA sets out to tackle a much larger and classically European dominated world market of Lighting.

Through OLLA the necessary breakthroughs in various fields of the technology (materials, deposition technology, device technology and application requirements) will be achieved in order to enable manufacturing and selling of products to the lighting markets as well as advanced components to all OLED manufacturers worldwide. Therefore, OLLA will assist in securing the future of many jobs in the Lighting industry, as well as in creating a much larger demand for products from the strong component industry in Europe, such as high-value new materials and manufacturing machines.

Only a concentrated effort combining the necessary breakthroughs in time in the various areas involved will ensure a significant progress and thus bigger chances of sustaining a strong lighting industry in Europe in the face of the disruptive solid-state lighting revolution. For all these reasons, OLLA is an urgently necessary investment in the future of European industry. Mainly because Japan and the USA have already started massive public funding programs to support industrial-university cooperation to achieve a dominant position in OLED Lighting.

OLLA Official website: http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/olla/index.html

Pixel Roller

The “PixelRoller” project is a collabortive investigation into a new creative tool between Stuart Wood MA (RCA) Interaction Design and Florian Ortkrass MA (RCA) Design Products.

PixelRoller is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces. The content is applied in continuous strokes by the user. PixelRoller can be seen as a handheld “printer”, based around the ergonomics of a paintroller, that lets you create the images by your own hand.

Checkout the official website of Random Internation for further details about Pixel Roller and other interesting projects.
http://www.random-international.squarespace.com/

RCA graduates Flo Ortkrass, Stuart Wood (both 2005) and Hannes Koch (2004) have operated as rAndom international since it was born on a hill in Egham (Surrey) in 2002. While gaining experience at Audi Design, the BBC, Philips Design, Pearson Lloyd, Metadesign and artist Olafur Eliasson, we have continously worked on both freelance as well as self-initiated projects.

The latter include Wallpaper clock and Instant Labelling Tape in 2004, and last years PixelRoller projects and the complementing PixelTape. Among rAndom collaborations are the Sunlight Table (with Anab Nain, 2005) and the Split68 series of lights (with Caroline Noordijk, 2005/06), which is currently on show at the Design Museums Designmart exhibition.

rAndom international works in a studio in Acre Lane in Brixton, south London. Hannes currently teaches together with Gabi Klasmer Platform 8 at the Design Products course at the Royal College of Art. Stuart and Flo are Research Associates at the RCA’s Innovation Unit and develop the Pixelroller there. Phil by the way, who helped bringing rAndom up, now teaches design in a school down here in Brixton.

Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED)

The OLEDs (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) are a new and attractive class of solid-state light sources, which are opening up completely new applications in large-area illumination. OLEDs are produced by depositing a stack of inorganic layers on a specific substrate. By carefully tuning the of the red, green and blue emitter materials, OLEDs can produce any light colour – including white – with excellent light properties.

They are a flat lighting source. They can be thin and flexible as a plastic lighting sheet. They are able to live for 10.000 working hours saving 1/3 of the normal energy absorbed by an incandescent lamp.

OLED broucher

Eavesdripping

eavesdripping is the design for an installation that uses water as both medium and display, rendering invisible communication visible.

the starting point for this project was an assignment at the berlin university of the arts: by enhancing a material electronically, make an intelligent surface intelligent and able to interact with the world around it. my initial approach was to experiment with physical displays that show computer generated information by a physical change of material. related projects are the wooden mirror by daniel rozin as a physical representation, the source by greyworld as a volumetric display and bitfall by julius popp as an approach to using natural effects as means of display.

the surface which i chose for my work is water – or more precisely, the visual effect of drops of water hitting a liquid surface. my goal was to construct a physical display which by raining on a surface could display simple information on it. every splash would represent a white dot in the image on the ground, every absence of a splash, a black dot.

Source:

Sascha Pohflepp

ITP

ITP is different. More than just a graduate school, ITP is a creative ecosystem – a living and interdependent flow of people, projects, ideas and applications all dedicated to exploring and expanding the ability of real people to use media to connect to one another and influence the world around them.
http://itp.nyu.edu

RCA

The Department of Interaction Design explores the role of technology in people’s lives and imaginations. Essentially, we represent an alliance between electronics and the humanities. Our teaching, our research, our designs — all are as much about culture and society as about emerging technologies.

IDII

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Interaction-Ivrea) is an independent non-profit organisation, founded by Telecom Italia and Olivetti, and now part of the Progetto Italia initiative of Telecom Italia. Based in Milan, it offers a two-year Masters Programme in Interaction Design for participants from all over the world with prior college degrees in design, architecture, communications, computer science or psychology.

Arduino

Arduino is an open hardware system for artists and designers. It is a simplification of the use of microprocessers for the purpose of setting up interactive installations and quick models of electro-mechanical devices. The system was created by the designers Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles in Talponia, Ivrea, Italy. Only three months after its creation, the RCA in London, the ITP in New York, IDI-Domus in Milan, K3 in Malmo and other schools of design had adopted it as an educational tool.

Different pieces, which include this board have been exhibited at the Motor Show in Milan, at the Venice biennial, at the Science Fair in Gothenburge and at the V and A in London. The electronic devices can function as either an interface to computer programs or independently.
Further information can be found on http://www.arduino.cc/en/