Cool Hunting

Royal College of Art Summer Show 2006
Having spent weeks talking to students and looking at the annual Royal College of Art degree show, Exhibit-K, a London-based art tour service, came up with five hot design picks exclusively for Cool Hunting. Doodle Dudes Andrew Haythornthwaite's Doodle Dudes gives the characters that children create in their drawings a 3-d life by using rapid prototyping to print their drawings in 3 dimensions. Children’s...

Sony Data Tiles
Developed by Jun Rekimoto in the Interaction Laboratory of Sony's Computer Science Laboratory, these Sony Data Tiles use tagged, transparent tiles to present dynamic information when placed on a flat panel equipped with sensors. The system makes use of both physical and graphic user interfaces and can either be used independently or in complex configurations. To get a better sense of how they work,...

Nokia N92
In 1999 I wrote a graduate thesis (NYU, ITP) on form defining function in mobile devices. My collaborator Kent Hollrah and I even went so far as to mock-up a prototype we called The Stack. It was made of multiple display panels that were hinged in a manner that allowed it to be folded into four different shapes; each used for a different purpose—phone,...

DetourDVD's Op Art
Pretty up your flat screen with the latest release of moving graphics from DetourDVD. Black, grey, and white Op Art imagery slowly morphs from cube patterns to concentric circles to checkerboards to spirals and so on, recalling Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, and the like. Founded and created by husband and wife team Gretchen and Nick van der Grinten, the Op Art DVD (as well...