(((Core77. Yeah, I do read 'em, I don't just pinch their awesome links.)))
Link: Life and the Big Screen: Media, Design, and the Apocalypse, by William Bostwick.
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From bookcases to billboards, design has gone media crazy.
Think of these projects as psychics, moving their divining rods to map the space we can't see, channeling the spirits of our geekdom.
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, industrial design provocateurs, (((Okay, big hint: if it's a design piece and it's got Dunne and Raby in it, it's probably mucho out-there))) call this glow Hertzian space. The idea is that our media gadgets—phones, radios, TVs—leak out a sea of electromagnetic waves. We can't see it, but it's there, as powerful and intangible as Eliasson's light.
Don't believe it? Try reading this post near Petra Farinha's Jealous Furniture. Farinha, a student in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, designed furniture that spies on you. Click through a couple links, fire up a few videos, and the lamp, hooked up via Bluetooth to your computer's internet connection, will start to flicker and shake and books will jump off their shelves as they sense how much bandwidth you're using. (((Yeah, that's very-very Dunne and Raby. They could be turned into a verb by now: "this needs to be done-and-rabied.")))
Andrew Doro's Table for Electronic Dreams.
Then there's fellow ITP-er Andrew Doro's Table for Electronic Dreams (the name references Dunne: "Electronic objects are not only 'smart,' they 'dream,' in the sense that they leak radiation into the space and objects surrounding them"). Drop your iPhone on the table, and its leaky radiation—its dreams—trigger an LED web that makes the table glow. Get a call, and the lights get brighter.
"The electromagnetic spectrum has become increasingly noisy and dense," Doro says. "But we do not have direct access to this medium or an awareness of its invisible contours." Think of these projects as psychics, moving their divining rods to map the space we can't see, channeling the spirits of our geekdom.
Our cars are plugged in too, with navigation screens taking up more and more of the dashboard and Bluetooth connectivity an increasingly standard option. They don't just light up when we get a call, they feed it through the stereo system, giving hi-fi, immersive surround-sound urgency to "don't forget to buy milk."
Check out Apartment Therapy's Unplggd blog for homes that are wired (or de-wired) for media technology. Their motto, "smarter homes, fewer wires," says it all. You can take drool-worthy slideshow tours of digitized digs where AirPorts replace Aalto vases and big screens seem to grow right out of the exposed brick.
But what about the houses themselves? Media technology is here too, in the literal nuts and bolts of building construction....
