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 …
Stuart Firestein narrates the origins and case studies of his course, offered in the Biology department at Columbia, called Ignorance. It started with his dissatisfaction in teaching a stock-in-trade course called “Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience”: “[A]s a lecturer, you wish to sound authoritative, and you want your lectures to be ‘informative,’ so you tend to … Continue reading »
At donghits, via Broken Hill. Continue reading »
3D printing is a perfect match for lightweight prosthetics, it turns out. The material makes so much sense for children, whose parts will invariably need to be re-sized and whose use of force is still in development. I covered the “magic arms” a few months ago; the promise of these printed parts’ physical qualities, plus … Continue reading »
Megan Clarke’s face-attachable forest. I’m not sure why this is so appealing; the pun on “forest for the trees,” certainly, but what else? More from Megan Clarke. I neglected to note where I first saw this; if it was you, let me know so I can credit properly. Continue reading »
Last year, Suzanne Fischer pointed to Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality as a worthy guiding set of principles for critical making: With Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich extended his analysis of education to a broader critique of the technologies of Western capitalism. The major inflection point in the history of technology, he asserts, is when, in the life of each tool … Continue reading »
Ana Rajcevic’s collection, ANIMAL: The Other Side of Evolution, proposes a set of wearables that explore “animal anatomy, building upon existing skeleton structures to create a series of sculptural pieces that appear as natural properties of the human body.” Made of gelcoat, fiberglass, resin and silicone rubber, the suite of works form “a collection of … Continue reading »
