Category Archives: Design

Brian O’Connor im Interview

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Brian O’Connor ist einer der Köpfe hinter dem iPad Magazin “The Iconist”, das der Axel Springer Verlag relativ aufwendig und exklusiv für das Gerät entwickelt hat. Im Gespräch erzählt er von der neuen Herangehensweise an ein Magazin auf dem iPad, Beispiele für Geschichten und gibt einen Ausblick auf die nächste Ausgabe.

MIt P3000 arbeite ich an einem “Blogger Reachout” um den Iconist in die deutsche Blogosphäre zu bringen. Am Dienstag abend hatten die Iconistmacher zu einer kleinen Runde ins Hotel de Rome geladen, zu dem wir unter anderem auch Julia (LesMads), Clemens (Ignant), Silke (Netzpiloten), Theresa (Flanellaparell) und Sachar (Massenpublikum) begrüßen konnten. Man konnte das Magazin ausprobieren, mit der Redaktion plaudern, Champagner trinken und sich lifestylig fühlen. Auf den Punkt brachte Inga Griese, Chefredakteurin des Iconist, in ihrer Begrüßungsrede den Lifestylejournalismus als “nicht zwingend nötig, aber wahnsinnig schön.”

What is Beck’s Gold Urban Experiences?

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Starting from tonight, “Beck’s Gold Urban Experiences” will be exploring urban ways of customizing reality today. It is sponsored by Beck’s Gold and supposed to reach out to artists and creative people for producing ideas and lots of beautiful content to put the spotlight on interesting approaches and enrich an entertaining discussion within this field.

The campaign will be lasting at least during 2010 and consists of several events and online documentation and interaction. First, there will be three so-called “workspaces” in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, starting tonight in Berlin. Artists are invited to shape their vision of customizing reality and to present them to an audience which hopefully interacts with the created pieces. The artists, like e.g. Kim Köster, Klub7, Tracknfield or Balestra Berlin create a room filled with pieces which exist, shine or interact with the people. All of the artists have a background of creating art in a modern, reflecting and urban way in a sense of technology and interaction. Tonight, there will be a breadbaking experiment, lifesound recordings and lots of visual approaches to shaping urban environments. Check out some impressions from the preparations:

My role in the campaign is and was to find ways for interaction, preparation and documentation online, including a community for artists, social media profiles like Flickr, YouTube and the Urban Blog urban.becks.de. Together with Silk relations, Coma and the Beck’s team we put together lots of ideas which will become reality in the next 14 months. Follow @becksurban on Twitter to get updates and get the Urban Blog RSS. The blog is curated by Nilzenburger and will feature a ton of writers who will put together their vision of urban reality today.

MyLifestyleblog has a good overview in German about Beck’s Urban Experiences too.

Next weekend in Berlin: Atoms&Bits festival

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atoms and bits logo 200px

Next weekend, a bunch of friends of mine will organize the atoms&bits Camp, a weekend full of making, doing, questioning and understanding. It’s part of the Atoms & Bits festival, a decentralized event that stretches over 10 days (September 18-27th), taking place in different locations from Berlin to Brooklyn, from Munich to Montreal.

atoms&bits Camp is one of the central points of the a&b Festival. Around 400 participants will meet to discuss, plan projects, and to network. Borrowing from the Barcamp format, all participants will actively engage in the event; the presentations (“sessions”) are interactive and created by the participants themselves. In the open “Barcamp” area, participants will organize completely free sessions. Moreover, the 5 central themes of atoms&bits Festival will be addressed and discussed in designated and curated rooms. Spatial proximity and thematic ties will ensure intensive crossover among these topics.

Join us and be party of a creative party! For now, go ahead and join the A&B mixxt network! It’s free!

atoms&bits festival

Sounds, Fashion, Art: Driftwood.de

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Es ist schön zu sehen dass es immer wieder Leute gibt, die mit dem bloggen anfangen. Manche hören auf, bei manchen schläft es ein, aber immer wieder entdeckt jemand Neues die Freude an der eigenen kleinen Seite, auf der man sich ausdrücken kann wie man will. Da hilft auch kein Facebook oder twittern; dein Blog ist dein Blog, nirgendwo bist du freier als auf deiner eigenen Plattform.

Dachten sich auch Anne und Tobi, als sie endlich die schöne Domain driftwood.de, die Tobi schon länger inne hatte als Adresse für ihren Blog Driftwood zu nutzen begannen. Und so ähnlich wie Pärchen auf dem Flohmarkt zusammen die schönsten Stände haben (er die Schallplatten, sie die Kleidchen), so verhält es sich auch hier. Schöne Dinge kommen zusammen, wenn Tobi über Musik und Anne über Mode schreibt.

Letztere hat dabei einen schönen do-it-yourself-Ansatz: Bewusst geht sie mit den Hypes in den Modeblogs um und kommt auf viele Möglichkeiten, den letzten Schrei mit einfachen Mitteln selbst herzustellen. Z.B. Schulterpolster selber zu machen oder ein Kleid von Kick mit Nadel und Faden zu drapieren so dass es Dries van Noten mäßig daher kommt.

Außerdem freue ich mich schon sehr auf die von Tobi persönlich angekündigten DJ Mixe und sonstige Elektronik-Musik-Tipps. Der Mann ist nämlich ein äußerst fähiger DJ.

A 3D business card

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Ok, now here we are with augmented reality, it is starting. We have the tools like webcams and Actionscript and in flow the impressive examples.

AR Business Card from James Alliban on Vimeo.

You can try it too! Print this and go here and be amazed!

It’s done by James Aliban, an artist-developer-scientist who likes to experiment and build stuff with all sorts of hardware and flash. Here is how to build a multitouch screen very easily on your own. And he has many more examples.

(via Michael)

Update: Thanks to Konrad here is another augmented reality example by GE

My DLD09 summary

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First, you can get an overview of all articles published on the DLD live blog here.

After three days of intense blogging, live blogging(!), there should be a little resumée. Must be a personal one, naturally, although I aim to grasp some of that spirit hopefully many people sensed in these days of Digital, Life, Design 09.
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Café Solvey

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For the most time I have been in my current flat, the little store in the ground floor was filled with a computer store. The guys where nice, even had some hints for me from time to time but obviously they did not suceed with their business and closed last year. Some months later people started to build a café there. This was of great delight to us since we have many bars in our neighborhood but no nice cafés to sit and read newspapers.

In september, Café Solvey opened finally and we instantly became friends with Solvey and her family who run the place. It’s warm and cosy, with very old porcelain, self-made cake, soft armchairs, a kids corner with toys and a fake, yet very well done chemin. And when Solvey asked me to help her out with a website I could not say no. Jimdo was the system of choice to build it fast and easy and when I see now that Solvey herself (who is not a big fan of these “computer things”) edits the events on her page and adds products, I know it was the right decision – Jimdo obviously easy to use. And I earned myself a couple of coffees, breakfasts and cakes!

Take a look at Solvey’s website, more importantly, visit the café if you are around and leave a comment in the guestbook!

Jawbone Headset Campaign

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jawbone_german_campaign_01Last week, I got a package via mail which looked quite interesting, sent to me by K-MB, a brand consultancy from Berlin.

Opening it, I found two cans connected by a thread just like one of those tin can telephones kids connect their rooms over the street with. Also, a Noise Conspiracy cd and a nice handwritten letter, inviting me to either a Babyshambles or a Noise Conspiracy concert.

Since Babyshambles are cancelled (what a surprise..) I guess, I’ll go for Noise Conspiracy on January 19th.

jawbone_german_campaign_01Opening the cans, I found one of them filled with earplugs and other stuff which turned out to be a bluetooth headset, namely a Jawbone.

I am not only impressed by the effort of this campaign; which also got coverage on other blogs like Lumma.de or blog.telefon.de but also by the product.

It looks nice, the descriptions are comprehensive. It connected easily and fast with the iphone, I just managed the first phonecall with it and the speech quality is good and everything works well. Besides, it comes with a charging unit and several eargear in different sizes.

Good product, good idea.

Create a job and service profile, connect with others, make offers and earn money.

What you can do with Arduino

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Arduino“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

Hm, so what does that mean? Basically what you can with the little Arduino board is easily bring lots of input in and turn it into certain outputs. Sounds easy and maybe trivial but really is not. Because Arduino can process many different signals and trigger many different outputs. Kiss a door and it opens. Step close to a mirror and a video starts playing with the mirror talking to you. Turn TV picture into LED-signals. Connect it to the Wii and In general one might say it’s very nerdy and looks a little unready still. But it’s definetly the start into a development of selfbuilt robots and machines.

Below are some video examples. I particularly like the TV to LED part because it’s kind of what a friend and I did for a party once. We put 16 toilet paper rolls covered with translucent paper in fornt a tv and thus reduced the pictures to a 16×16 pixel screen. We taped it to video and had a nice party light installation. The posted below is slightly more elegant but, really, less charming.
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