Cohen Van Balen is a design partnership I’ve been admiring for some time. I’m only now posting one of their projects here—The Phantom Recorder : “The Phantom Recorder system projects a cold and damp sensation onto the skin surface, triggering the brain to hallucinate a phantom. As the phantom movement stimulates the peripheral nerves, its …
Update: This work now has a life of its own: the Accessible Icon Project, and we’ve been getting some super press coverage lately. See stories on FastCo, Print/Imprint, among others. More to come! In 2010, after this early post where I started comparing and collecting old-and-new images indicating wheelchair accessibility, my collaborator Brian Glenney suggested …
Soon after I posted an image of my project Unknown Armature: Body Socks—that’s another one, above—Duane McLemore pointed me to these “entoptic phenomena,” William Hundley’s photoset on Flickr: I have exactly zero sense of how these are done, and I love that whatever anthropomorphism is present fades in and out of the set—appearing and disappearing. …
After io9 posted this story about 3D printed sonogram technologies, allowing prospective parents who are blind or have low vision to experience their developing fetus, I got to talking with Aimi Hamraie, assistant professor of Medicine, Health, & Society at Vanderbilt University, about all the interesting questions this practice might raise. The article lists both …
You might think of this project as a poetics of sensory substitution: swapping one capacity for another. There are a number of tools in development now that translate visual material into audible “colors,” or use tactile signals to “see” the environment—they create an artificial form of synaesthesia that’s meant to compensate for lost function in …
From Wired Design: “Lantos Technologies, a small startup spun out of MIT, has created the first FDA-cleared digital ear-canal scanner. While that may seem wildly specific, and maybe a little gross, it could dramatically improve your grandfather’s hearing aid, Lady Gaga’s in-ear monitor, and mission-critical communication devices used by the military. The Lantos 3-D Ear Canal Scanner should …
Jennifer Crupi is externalizing body language cues—some iconic, some more insidious—with wearable armature. Largely made with sleek aluminum parts, these tools recall a medical grammar of the early 20th century: braces, stirrups, or dentistry tools. So the emotionality of their gestures comes as a gorgeous surprise: Her “Posture Gauge—Chin“ measures chin placement and its associated degrees …
Along with a bunch of other artists, including several I already admire, my ongoing experimental work, Unknown Armature: Body Socks, and Slope: Intercept will be on view at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. Opens tomorrow. I would kill to be there, but I’m not. Prague will have to wait. The newest sock, above, is … Continue reading »
Anthony Ptak pointed me to this vintage cane camera—old school private-eye gear, from the 1920s, 30s, 40s. For covert spies of old, or for the collector. Continue reading »
Elasticbrand designers Arjen Noordeman and Christie Wright created this suite of sonic wearables. The series is inspired by idiophone instruments—those which make sound primarily through the instrument’s vibration, without the use of strings or membranes—and aerophone instruments—those whose sound is produced by the vibration of air, again without strings or membranes, but also without the … Continue reading »
Yoony Byun’s prosthetic leg concept repurposes sneaker parts, making a user-adjustable, low-cost limb: Byun had in mind the common injuries that happen in landmine encounters—lower leg amputations sustained in parts of the world where landmines can linger, hidden, indefinitely. (78% of landmine injuries in Cambodia, for instance, are this “transtibial” kind.) Byun’s … Continue reading »
I’ll be at NYU next Thursday and Friday, April 11 and 12. Thursday’s talk, “When Prosthetics Speak,” is with the NYU Council for the Study of Disability—5:30 – 7 in the Payne Room, 4th Floor Pless Hall, 82 Washington Square East. On Friday, I’ll be speaking alongside Geoffrey Bowker in the Media, Culture, and Communication … Continue reading »
I came across a succinct and probing summary of Michel de Certeau’s ideas about strategies versus tactics in Tim Cresswell’s On The Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. This comparison—and the affirmation of the tactical—is referenced so often by artists, but usually without sufficient explanation as to why. A long time ago I pointed to Mitchell … Continue reading »
A while back I wrote about a set of china from the Design for Dementia project, made to maximize independent eating for older users whose hand coordination is declining. In this beautiful set of sculptural cutlery, Mickael Boulay provides an on-ramp for people developing motor skills for the first time—especially when those skills are already hampered … Continue reading »
