Solar Cells Can Now Be Printed on Anything, Even Paper and Fabric

 

Bike lights powered by your clothes? Phones charging in your pockets?

Researchers at MIT have figured out how to print photovoltaic cells on every-day materials like paper or fabric — and the process is practically the same is printing this article out on your desk printer.MIT reports that a team of researchers has published a new paper in the journal Advanced Materials detailing how solar cells can be printed as easily and as cheaply as “printing a photo on your inkjet” thanks to new special inks.

via Solar Cells Can Now Be Printed on Anything, Even Paper and Fabric : TreeHugger.

Artificial Sight On View In London

 

A fascinating blend of science, technology and design

Mobile phones and computer games consoles now carry sophisticated position detectors, video cameras, face recognition and tracking software, you name it.

And researchers have been looking for new ways to exploit this in other fields like medicine.

[...]

Researchers at Oxford University are developing the “bionic glasses” to help partially-sighted people who have just a small area of vision, or whose vision is blurred or cloudy, or who can’t process detailed images, such as they can see that a hand is front of them but they can’t make out the fingers. A good example would be someone with age-related macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy.

Dr Stephen Hicks of Oxford University’s Department of Clinical Neurology said in a media statement:

“We want to be able to enhance vision in those who’ve lost it or who have little left or almost none.”

“The glasses should allow people to be more independent – finding their own directions and signposts, and spotting warning signals,” he explained.

The glasses have video cameras at the corners and arrays of tiny lights embedded in the see-through lenses. The camera collects images and feeds them to a smartphone-type computer in the wearer’s pocket which has software that can locate objects or people, and track their position. A feedback mechanism drives the colours and intensities of the lights in the lenses in real time, so the wearer can “see” what is happening in their surroundings well enough to navigate around a room, and pick out relevant objects.

via Artificial Sight On View In London.

(image: Dr Stephen Hicks)

Walt Disney explains the latest in animation technology

Will computer games help children with cystic fibrosis?

Doctors in the US have noticed children [suffering from cystic fibrosis] rarely perform their breathing exercises, preferring to do other things, such as playing computer games – so they combined the two.

Instead of using a hand-held controller or motion sensor, these games rely on a spirometer, which measures how much and how fast air is exhaled.

Breathing is used to drive a car in one racing game and to blow slime off animals in another.

Professor Peter Bingham, from the University of Vermont and Fletcher Allen Health Care, tried the games out on 13 children with cystic fibrosis (CF), aged between eight and 18.

Breathing controls the on-screen action

He said: “The key finding was that children actually use them.

“Spirometer games can be a good way to involve children in respiratory therapy.”

Read the rest at BBC News – Will computer games help children with cystic fibrosis?.

The sound of Fabric

 

 

An interesting experiment – turning textiles into audio speakers:

Sometimes people ask me if there is a way to replace headphones with smart textiles, sound coming out of a hood or from the fabric around the shoulder areas, near the ears.What at first seems impossible is actually feasible with a bit of eTextile magic. Hannah, one of the most innovative personalities in the wearable technology space, published on her newly created Kit-of-no-Parts wearable tech website a possible way how to make sound with Fabric speakers.

 

 

Read the full story at The sound of Fabric

Two sites worth subscribing to if you’re interested in wearable technology are talk2myshirt and kit-of-no-parts.

Twitter: the end of civilisation as we know it? Or have we heard that somewhere before?

When people complain that Twitter is a waste of time, and ruining our brains by shortening our attention span I remember the reaction when I first demonstrated the concept behind the worldwide web to the bosses at the company where I worked, back in the 90s. They said it was a fad, that it would never catch on. Stop wasting your time on it, they said.

Fortunately for them I didn’t listen, so when they finally came in screaming “we need a web site, we need a web site!” I was able to say, “here’s one I prepared earlier”…

Those were the days.

At other times I speculate that when the printing press was invented, the same thing happened. “It’ll never catch on,” people would have said.

It turns out, that’s exactly what they said. Well, not exactly. But effectively. Take a look at this bit of blurb on the back of Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

From its very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the most part, however, it was welcomed as a “divine art” by Western churchmen and statesmen. Sixteenth-century Lutherans hailed it for emancipating Germans from papal rule, and seventeenth-century English radicals viewed it as a weapon against bishops and kings. While an early colonial governor of Virginia thanked God for the absence of printing in his colony, a century later, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic paid tribute to Gutenberg for setting in motion an irreversible movement that undermined the rule of priests and kings. Yet scholars continued to praise printing as a peaceful art. They celebrated the advancement of learning while expressing concern about information overload.

Now read through that passage again and notice a couple of things. “Revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic paid tribute to Gutenberg for setting in motion an irreversible movement that undermined the rule of priests and kings”. Strike you as familiar?

And what about “they celebrated the advancement of learning while expressing concern about information overload”?

At a time when revolutions in the middle east are being played out using social media like Twitter, the similarities with the way the printing press upset the balance of power are startling. And the responses of those in power – not just the “kings” but the “priest” (who today could be said to be the gatekeepers to knowledge, the journalists, writers and academics) are also similar: it’s the end of learning, the end of deep thought and calm reflection; infomation overload really means too much information, and you can never have too much of that if it sets you free.

Admittedly a lot of that information is rubbish: I try my best not to read the comments on news sites and YouTube for fear of my brain throttling me in self-defence. But for all the rubbish, there is good stuff out there, and more of it, and more opportunities to publish without having to gain the approval of an editor. Okay, Twitter has its faults but they’re actually the faults of the masses, not of the medium. The same with printed text. For now, it’s enough to know that just as there will always be people who think any new technology will be the end of civilisation as we know it, so there always have been.

The irony is that each new generation of doomsayers has been educated by the very same technology their predecessors said would be their doom. When 3D holograms are being charged with threatening our very existence, the people making the accusation will probably be using Twitter to do it.

How Nokia Failed To Design NFC

We talk about service design a lot in Design Studies as, apart from anything else, it’s a good way of demonstrating how skills and knowledge from one area (say, interior design or jewellery) can be applied in a seemingly entirely different one.

This anecdote from former Nokia employee Adam Greefield gives a good overview of what service design is, although he doesn’t use the term explicitly, simply calling it “design”.

Nokia: Culture will out « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird:

Nokia spent many years, and a great deal of money, doing research and development of a technology called NFC, or ‘near field communication.’ NFC really does have the potential to transform all kinds of everyday interactions; it’s essentially a flavor of RFID that allows signals to pass between objects that are brought within close (touch or tap) proximity with one another. It’s the gimmick underlying the phone you’ll buy next year, with which, if you live in the developed world, you’ll almost certainly conduct the lion’s share of your daily monetary transactions.

When I arrived at Nokia, the folks down the road at NRC were very proud of something they’d ginned up: an NFC-equipped, but otherwise entirely conventional, vending machine. At last!, I thought, here’s a concrete step toward the future of everyday transactions. And in what was, from my perspective, the very best kind of context: that of an interaction so banal and unremarkable that it undermined any conceivable charge of utopian handwaving. Whatever frisson of futurism you derive from the encounter quickly subsides beneath the threshold of the ordinary, which — per all my gurus, from Don Norman to Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa — is exactly as it should be.

Except that, as realized by Nokia, this is precisely what failed to happen. I experienced, in fact, neither a frisson of elegant futurism nor a blasé presentiment of everyday life at midcentury. I was given an NFC phone, and told to tap it against the item I wanted from the vending machine. This is what happened next: the vending machine teeped, and the phone teeped, and six or seven seconds later a notification popped up on its screen. It was an incoming text message, which had been sent by the vending machine at the moment I tapped my phone against it. I had to respond ‘Y’ to this text to complete the transaction. The experience was clumsy and joyless and not in any conceivable way an improvement over pumping coins into the soda machine just the way I did quarters into Defender at the age of twelve.

It’s not that the NFC-based, phone-to-object interaction didn’t work. Of course it did: it had been engineered perfectly. But what it hadn’t been was designed. Those responsible for imagining the interaction apparently wanted to protect users against the (edge case!) contingency of someone making off with their phones and running up a huge vending-machine tab. They failed to understand that, for low-value transactions like this, at least, the touch gesture is a useful proxy for consent — and that if someone’s got physical possession of my phone, I’m likely to have bigger problems than whether or not they order a few cans of Coke with it. A designer committed to the user and the quality of that user’s experience gets this in a way only the rarest engineer seems to. Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.

Bottom line: the ‘magic’ of an NFC-based transaction, the ‘surprise and delight’ our esteemed colleagues in Marketing so often demand we wrest out of technological interactions, was foreclosed from the beginning. All of the potential lightness and elegance that would make this not merely a possible way of doing things but a better way was ruled out, by an organization committed to the virtues of engineering rather than those of design.

 

3D printing: The printed world

The Economist (I told you it was worth looking at!) carried a great cover article on 3D printing last week, and you can read it in full on their website. Here’s a snippet:

FILTON, just outside Bristol, is where Britain’s fleet of Concorde supersonic airliners was built. In a building near a wind tunnel on the same sprawling site, something even more remarkable is being created. Little by little a machine is “printing” a complex titanium landing-gear bracket, about the size of a shoe, which normally would have to be laboriously hewn from a solid block of metal. Brackets are only the beginning. The researchers at Filton have a much bigger ambition: to print the entire wing of an airliner.

 

Far-fetched as this may seem, many other people are using three-dimensional printing technology to create similarly remarkable things. These include medical implants, jewellery, football boots designed for individual feet, lampshades, racing-car parts, solid-state batteries and customised mobile phones. Some are even making mechanical devices. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Peter Schmitt, a PhD student, has been printing something that resembles the workings of a grandfather clock. It took him a few attempts to get right, but eventually he removed the plastic clock from a 3D printer, hung it on the wall and pulled down the counterweight. It started ticking.

Read the rest at 3D printing: The printed world | The Economist.

Police Crime Maps “Improved”

The Guardian has been dissatisfied with the way the UK crime maps were produced:

The government’s recent launch of police.uk saw a phenomenal public reaction. Within hours of going live, millions of users had attempted to gain access to maps permitting street-level scrutiny of crime incidents across the UK. Dogged by “technical problems”, the site was reported by many to have failed in the face of public interest. Although the servers now seem much more capable of dealing with ongoing demand, we couldn’t help but wonder if we could offer people some alternative ways to compare and contrast crime levels around the country.

Read the whole article on what they did next, and click here to try out the new maps.

 

(I think it might be England only…)

Wear I go and CatCams

This project, Wear I Go,  has been mentioned by a couple of people following Friday’s lecture. It’s an interesting idea relating to wearable technology that I think has lots of potential applications. It reminds me a bit of the CatCam (pictured below), something I’m rather tempted to get for my own cat as I have so many questions…

 

 

Here’s the creator of Wear I Go, Yves, explaining her project. I recommend taking a look at her other videos.

“Wear I Go” is a camera-wearable that introduces new perception into your everyday. You believe you knew where you live but this device will help you think again. As a font of inspiration, photographic experiment or just for the fun of it, Wear I Go will put your life in to a whole new perspective.

The initial device is a self-contained ring. When you buy this ring, you are automatically subscribed to a service that allows you to upload photos and videos as they are taken. On the ring itself, there is a built-in diamond like camera which you can use as just another camera and take pictures on demand. Or, you can also use it as a “second-eye” by setting it up to automatically take pictures at pre-defined intervals, and in this case your device will pleasantly surprise you by giving you unexpected angles and bringing a new light into known and new grounds.

By setting your ring to “public mode” when you and your friends are together, will also allow you to sync your photos to your friend’s online account, meaning pictures will be taken at the same time from the Wear I Go devices worn by different people, documenting “this moment” from a variety of view points.

The Wear I Go ring is only the starting point. You can expand your collection and bring newer angles by buying accessories, such as pendants, earrings or bracelets, which also have built-in cameras and are part of the full concept. In this case, your ring works not only as a self-standing device, but also as a “remote-control” to the other Wear I Go devices.

via Wear I go on Vimeo.

What do you think? Fancy having your every move and encounter saved for posterity? What potential uses do you think it might have? Social, medical, emergency? (A video camera on a ferret, sent down into collapsed buildings, perhaps?)