Blog

Hi, Matthias Brendler here, transdisciplinary designer blogging what's interesting or significant relating to: Design, Education, Culture, Technology and Business (as well as anything that's really cool).

Hospital Sculpture Interacts With Human Heartbeats

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This interactive artwork by Andrew Small and Steven Almond was commissioned for the Royal Manchester Childrens’ Hospital in the UK. The sculpture uses digital lighting, medical monitoring equipment and control devices, and it becomes a heart rate monitor when people interact with it.

At rest, the artwork ‘breathes’ in waves of blue light at the average human breath rate. When a person interacts with it by holding the grips, it takes and projects their heart rate in pulses of red light. Infrared sensors around the sculpture create different color and sequence patterns when their beams are broken, and the sculpture also becomes a clock for five minutes on the hour. Click through to see pictures of the project design and the interactive artwork, and watch the video to see it in action.

Source: http://www.psfk.com/2012/05/hospital-inter...

Dutch Designers’ Modular “Fragmented Textiles” are Like Legos for Fashion | Ecouterre

Designers Fioen van Balgooi and Berber Soepboer created their Fragmented Textiles collection as an experiment in applying cradle-to-cradle principles to clothing production, use, and disposal. Made from Cradle to Cradle-certified wool felt in a range of vibrant colors, the Fragmented Textiles are based on jigsaw-puzzle-like zero-waste patterns that are designed to use every last scrap of cloth.
The click/fold assembly system allows you to wear the same garment in countless ways and replace the parts separately.

Political Noise: Radio as Spatial Practice by Paulo Tavares: <In the last five years, police forces have shut down approximately 7,000 illegal radios throughout the Brazilian territory, almost double the number of radio frequency concessions give…

Political Noise: Radio as Spatial Practice

by Paulo Tavares:

<In the last five years, police forces have shut down approximately 7,000 illegal radios throughout the Brazilian territory, almost double the number of radio frequency concessions given by the national government in the same period. In 2008 alone, out of approximately 19,000 claims for concessions, only 2,800 were licensed and around 1,200 illegal broadcastings were cut off air. This video shows excerpts of a radio deactivation mock-up made to be braodcast by the largest media corporation in Brasil (Globo). By portraying radio-practitioners as criminals, media trusts aim to hold power over the definition of what is technically and legally legitimate in relation to broadcasting.

Source: http://www.mara-stream.org/think-tank/paul...

The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture - Arts & Lifestyle - The Atlantic Cities

Are there in fact natural boundaries to the borders that we create as social creatures?

Let’s first examine the different borders we can define. We first have communication, from cell phone data. The map below, based on aggregated phone calls between counties, makes use of an algorithm we developed that detects communities within networks. The result is a visualization of highly connected counties, grouped together by color. These clusters of connected places sometimes coincide with political boundaries, but in many other cases do not.

One of the clearest regional differences in the U.S. can found by tracking the words people use to refer to soft drinks, which is in fact the map you saw at the top of this story. Pop or soda, or even Coke, these small linguistic differences are not as small as we might think. While soda commands the Northeast and West Coast (green) and pop is in between (black), Coke reigns in the south (turquoise). These small distinctions can often act as touchstones for larger cultural differences.

One of the clearest regional differences in the U.S. can found by tracking the words people use to refer to soft drinks, which is in fact the map you saw at the top of this story. Pop or soda, or even Coke, these small linguistic differences are not as small as we might think. While “soda” commands the Northeast and West Coast (green) and “pop” is in between (black), “Coke” reigns in the south (turquoise). These small distinctions can often act as touchstones for larger cultural differences.