COOL HUNTING

 

The Aphrodite Project: Platforms - We spotted The Aphrodite Project at NextFest last night. Designed to help “sex workers protect themselves,” these Get Smart x Batman (Batgirl?) shoes bring hi tech muscle to the hustle. Designed both for improved marketing—the shoes display video, can flash the worker’s name, number, message, email address or web site and can play music—they also have a number of safety features—an alarm, one-button access...

 

Ted Talks: Jeff Han - Since June, Ted Talks, the series of video and audio podcasts produced by the annual invite-only conference called Ted, has been wowing audiences with heady doses of architecture, politics, and philosophy that are neatly packaged into short, digestible segments. In the episode released last Monday, 31 July 2006, Jeff Han demonstrates the Multi-touch User Interface that we covered a few months ago. He narrates...

 

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...

 

ITP Spring Show 2006 Video - The latest CH Video is now up in all its usual places (iTunes, CH Sidebar, CH Video pages) and features last week’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) 2006 Spring Show. A chance for the student artists of ITP to introduce their ideas and projects to the public, the exhibition showcases a range of futuristic concepts to a capacity crowd. In this episode—the second time Cool...

 

ITP Spring Show 2006 - Each ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) expo seems bigger, crazier, and more well-produced than the next. Last week's show was no exception with projects like the De-Painter, a machine that uses viewers' movements to generate paintings, and a Bluetooth person-tracking system called BlueWay. The digital readout pictured above left is Robert Seward's trippy Consciousness Field Resonator that takes the concept behind Princeton's Global Consciousness Project...

 

Disturbance at the Great Eastern Hotel - The future starts in London this weekend, with Disturbance at the Great Eastern Hotel. It's a showcase for fourteen design students from the Royal College of Art, and includes new product ideas scattered around the hotel that are meant to provoke participation and interaction. Of the eighteen pieces on show, I've picked out three of my favorites. Brit Leissler's Punch'n'Cuddle Bag is what you...

 

Game Set and Match II - As a follow up to the original GameSetandMatch Conference held in November of 2001, Game Set and Match II provides a fascinating, kaleidoscopic view of the most recent developments in the digital design domain. Through a series of essays stemming from such diverse backgrounds of authorship as architecture, design and technology, this book emphasizes the importance of "game technology" used in software development as...