New RFID Radio pics

Although I'm currently in Michigan, the paper radios are back in Sweden. My friend p-a porier took these pictures for me.

common spuds

Over the last few weeks I've been trying to clean up my computer. In the process I've found a lot of random projects/illustrations and I'm putting them up here if you want to have a look.

RFID Radio

For this system, you would have a speaker with an rfid reader, and laser-cut paper radios with rfid chips inside. The radios themselves are designed by musicians, charities, brands, and designers. When the paper radio is placed over the speaker it changes the radio station to what the artist has chosen. Other noises and interactions can be programmed in too. Alec Baldwin's radio for example could politely ask everyone to turn their lights off from time to time. People could have the paper radios around their house in different rooms. The supremes radio might be a better living room station. This system tries to add a little bit of fun to internet radio, and give people a connection with the artists they choose. The radios themselves would hopefully be cheap and collectible little sculptures, each one accessing unique stations.


some of the laser-cut radios
the rfid tagged radios slide over a speaker with an rfid reader


the radios would be designed by musicians, charities, politicians, artists, anyone that people would want to have as a radio station host

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For the last two years, I've been a student at the Umea Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden going for my masters in Interaction Design. My final project was titled "Food and the Future of it". I chose food because it was something that everyone could have an opinion on, and that was important to me while choosing a subject. When I started the project, I tried to find a sponsor but found no takers- at first I was pretty depressed about this but in the end it gave me a lot of freedom and I don't think the result (which I like) would have been the same at all.
For starters, I was really interested in design fiction, and ideas as a product instead of one fine tuned concept as a product. Keep this in mind a little while looking at the work. Anyway early on I wanted my target year to be 2040, and a lot of the material I looked at suggested that we'd all have 3D printers in our house by then. Other material suggested that lab grown meat (which we have now) will be much more commonplace in 2040. I was also interested in this 'cloud' that everyone keeps talking about when talking abotut the future. So with those things in mind I started coming up with concepts, bouncing them off my classmates, and then making a prop for that concept. One time, I had a brainstorming session with my classmates by a campfire near the river. It was the middle of January and in northern Sweden it gets insanely snowy, dark, and cold. It turned out to be a great brainstorm session for food because it took us forever to get the fire started and we were all getting a little desperate. I passed around a microcassette recorder and we took turns answering questions and talking about the future of food.
One thing that was really fun about this project was just 'doing'. I was used to making rhino models of things, and then making a rendering. It was so great to make the actual physical props this time- the response from people was so much better. It was also fun to watch people pick some of the things up and tell me how they'd use them- a lot of fun. It was also great to make models out of actual food, imagine paying for your building supplies and your dinner at the same time!
So I guess right now I'll explain the concepts a little bit. They all either print food, or grow food. The ones that grow food do it by duplicating cells and proteins (something that we do now to get our lab grown meat). The printers use the same technology (only smaller and better) as the 3D printers that we have now. For this world, I've made some small devices that could exist. Human Creativity is absolutely amazing, and I'm confident that if people could design their own custom eggs, pasta, snacks, and other things then they would. And communities would be built up around these designs.
These printers and growers would run off of cartridges, a lot like printers today. Some would hold cells, and others would hold real foodstuff and have everything you need to do 'italian' or 'mexican' food. You know Kraft and Unilever would have a hayday with this. Also, fast food would never be the same. Firstly, Burger King will find that their name is too limiting, and drop the first and last letters off of 'burger' to become URGE King. Two things will happen at Urge King: One, they'll give you free spice cartridges with their brand image on them. You'll buy codes every time you want to print something on the cartridge. Now of course almost everyone will hack this system, but Urge King won't care because they get all of that free advertising. The second thing goes on at Urge King restaurants. They'll have the best, fastest, newest food printers. They'll also have all of the spices you could dream of. They make their own branded food, but can also print off whatever you want them to, just with the Urge King logo on it. Fast food will definitely have to do a lot of things to survive in a world with less cars and more people eating at home.
In the end, there were a lot of scenarios like Urge king, and a ton of other ideas that emerged from talks and brainstorms. In the end I could only do so much, and that's what you'll find in the previous posts. If you have any questions (and I'm sure you do), send me an email immediately at deltaninertango@yahoo.com . Thanks for reading this much and enjoy the rest of the posts!
-Brown

Degree show

Since the subject material is fairly scary to most people (growing meat and printing food), I tried to keep the visuals and the way I presented my work pretty light. For the poster that we were required to have at school, I chose to print it off white and just hand draw everything on there. I was so tired while drawing it I didn't worry so much about having to get it right in one shot. In order to unify all of the objects that I made, I made some laser cut place mats and wrote descriptions on them with a sharpie. Also, it didn't seem right to have one of those 'DON'T TOUCH' signs up, so I didn't put one up. One model has been broken though (the ultimate tortilla dipper that you'll see later). If people were interested in the work, I made some little matchbook style booklets that they could take. The original booklet was written on a typewriter that didn't have a working space bar or @ symbol (to explain the underscores and the hand drawn @). So far the show has gone great and people seem pretty interested. A lot of people are completely disgusted, but that's good because we can talk for a while about that.

Food Making: The egg printer

This device grows and cooks eggs. The eggs themselves can be made with all sorts of things inside, bacon, kalles, cheese, mustard...The eggs are grown by duplicating cells and proteins, that eventually give you a perfect little breakfast. One nice thing about it is, you could have your egg cooked fully on the bottom, but runny on the top. I made some sample slices that you'll see below.



These are all of the egg slices I made. In the bottom right is the 'gridder', which I especially like. The one with the star shape is the '9-legged susan', and would have a good yolk to white ratio. Of course people could get whatever pattern they want inside of the eggs, writing messages to eachother or making DEVO eggs.

Food Project: Come and get it

This is a modern update of the classic dinner triangle. This one, instead of making a sound, sends a calling out to your family members to let them know that dinner is on. This call goes through their phones, brains, or whatever is the technology in 2040.

Food Growing: Cell packages

A lot of the stuff that you grow on these devices would work off of something similar to these. Each chip has a few cells and proteins in it, which can be duplicated to make something tasty, like a steak or an egg. You could even eat woolly mammoth steaks - worked for the cavemen. All sorts of companies would get in on this, and in some cases the scientists would be rockstars. I'm speculating that some of those scientist/rockstars will be the Ludemann Society, and the LaDuke Brothers.

Food Growing: Ape food

When the great apes have a good idea, we should use it. A real un-tapped resource if you ask me. This device is a snack maker, just as the apes dip blades of grass into ant hills for a quick bite, humans can now dip sticks into this device. Meat and other food is grown on the stick, and the longer you leave it in the more food will grow on it. You can eat some, put it back, wait for it to grow and cook, take it out, and then eat some more. Sorry about these pictures, but liver paste is the only thing I had on hand to put on the stick. I've also replaced the metal rods with thin, wood sticks in the final model.

mmmmmm.

Food Making: Huxley, the smell producer

While printing and growing food, it would be really nice to have something to give out the proper smells and sounds. This device, the Huxley, does just that.

Food Making: Cheese Extruder

This device duplicates proteins and creates a cheese like substance inside of it. When the time comes, stroke how many rows of cheese you want and watch it get extruded from the holes. When it hits the air it hardens. You can then scrape it off the device and enjoy your extruded cheese!

Food Printing: Pasta

This pasta printer doesn't use cells like some of the other devices, it just liquifies the pasta material and prints out unique pasta shapes, one at a time into the green bowl. I think that whole communities would be built around people making their own pasta shapes. It would be a lot of fun. I've done some sample pasta shapes. Due Fiori sort of blooms on both sides when cooked. Agli in Camicia is a delicate open dumpling that you'd fill with meat or veggies before cooking. Casacci is random geometric pasta. On a side note, the green bowl was difficult to make, vac forming it first, then lasering it twice.

Utensil Printing: The flavor spoon

You could also call this one, 'the recession spoon'. It's pretty easy to use, you chop up some garlic, or anything with strong flavor, and put it in the pink spoon. After that, you put the white spoon over it (they fit right together). Then you just start eating your soup, and you'll have the flavor of whatever you hid inside the spoon in every bite. If you're really broke, and I tried this, you can just eat hot water with it.

Grown Food: The Marinator

This is some beef that is grown in your house. Aside from just the meat, there are thousands of little flavor beads inside of it. When you bend the steak, the beads break and the steak is instantly marinated from the inside out. To prove that it works I've cut the steak in the last picture so you can see all of the marinade.

Printed Food: Ludemann's Potato Armor

The pentagons and other shapes you see on this potato are printed on your home food maker. They have little spikes on the bottom and stick right into the potato. So instead of wrapping your potato in tin foil, you stick these all over it. They come out nice and crispy, and add a lot of flavor to the potato. The flavor could be anything, but I suggest alternating bacon and cheddar pentagons. With a little onion every once and a while.

Genetically Modified Food: The Hendersson Apple

Genetically Modified food scared me, but for a minute I wanted to assume that it was totally safe, and what sort of things would people be making if it were easier to do. I thought that a fruit salad, all contained in an apple would be a good start. For the model I gouged out parts of the apple and put in slices of strawberry, cherry, and grape. I had to spray a little lemon on top to keep it from browning immediately. A very tasty model.

Printed Food: Kid's fish dumplings and utensil

This is an example of a utensil printed off on your home printer, and some fish dumplings that are hidden in some soup. You fish for them with the utensil, kids go crazy for it! Of course the dumplings can be made with whatever flavor you want, and with whatever level of nutrition you want.

Printed Food: Bowman's ultra tortilla dipper

NIGHT HORSES

Night Horses was an obscure toyline from 1989-1990. Never very successful in the U.S., they found a small cult following in northern Sweden. Three series were produced - unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the third series. The story goes that in the future, horses have gained "insane" knowledge and power using the forbidden "HENDERSON" graph (you can kind of see the graph behind the horses).

The slogan that apparently failed to drive the kids crazy was "POWERFUL MASTERS FROM THE FUTURE WITH THE STRENGTH OF A HORSE AND THE MIND OF A MAN"...The third series, which is very hard to find, featured "fiercely loyal unicorns with insane firepower". Basically they had guns, instead of horns, on their foreheads. I'll get pics up of those soon. But anyway, here are series 1, and 2 of the NIGHT HORSES:

KID COLORADO (the romantic renegade) & ZEBRAXUS (the lonely tourist)

JONESY (the curious worker) & LAKRITS (the perverted prince)

7.72 (the star-born stallion) & HOSS DIXON (the forbidden negotiator)

NIGHT HORSES

PRISCILLA POWERTRAIN (the endearing menace) & DONK (the punchliner)

KIMKIM (the outlandish mono-twin) & 7.71 (ambassador of the stars)
SOTIRIUS (the silent duke) & OLGAXA (the hong kong hologram)

NUGGET (the life liver) & POPCORN (the galloping glutton) ---both series 2 "GOLD LORDS"

HAWN (the solar reverend) ---series 2 "GOLD LORD"

A closer look

A closer look at the "powerful masters"

A closer look at the "powerful masters"

Sensing and Sensuality conference gifts

Recently at the school I go to (Umea institute of Design), we held a conference called "Sensing and Sensuality". For the speakers our class made some fake future devices, named them, came up with stories, packaged them and gave them out at the end of the talks. I think people liked them alright, except maybe the unfortunate person who got the 'CRUMPTER'.


SIMIAN HUMOUR REGULATOR: In the year 2052, apes have become very intelligent and can learn human languages. They normally work in large assembly plants as they are cheaper than robots. Their sense of humor hasn't developed yet and causes a lot of pain for the humans who manage them. This device can be used to regulate their humor in outlandish ways.

RATION EXTENDER: Given away by the world government as a way to duplicate small amounts of food. It was scrapped in 2044 due to people duplicating things other than food, and people selling them instead of using them to help their village.

SINEWAVE POLLINATOR: In the year 2012, all the bees were gone and that caused a lot of problems. This device sends out specific sinewaves that can pollinate trees, flowers, anything that needs pollination.

Here are all 12 of the devices boxed. The story is that they are all black market products sold by someone who aquires and tinkers with things.

The rest of the devices, and descriptions, can be found here

SLEEP PLAID

With a box full a' sensors by your bed, you could collect data every time you moved (temperature, noise, light...). This data could be used to make specific plaid! If it was a special night you could remember it forever by sending your data to the NIGHT PLAID company and have them print you off a shirt. Or you could get swatches, to make a 'best nights of your life' quilt. I'd bet that there would be some really rare plaids, and if you had a shirt with those on it people would really give you some respect. This is part of a bigger service where you get images, and plaid generated by the way you sleep.

TIME CAPSULES for derelicts

When I was a kid and I had to clean my room, I put most of the stuff on the floor in trash bags and called them 'time capsules'- that way I could get away with it. I think a little sticker that you put on the bags would make it more official. Currently I have two time capsules in my closet.

Wish Radio

Here is one of those things that will hopefully give you a moment to remember. It's really just a box that you put behind your birthday cake, starting when you're really young. You blow those precious wishes in there and then one day, you break the thing open and it plays a song, kind of letting loose all of those wishes. "I've been blowing all of my wishes in this thing for 25 years, and then one day I needed some luck and I broke it. It played 'Dancin' in the Dark' by Bruce Springsteen. bwhaooooow."

The DESIG

Used it today, works great!

Private Idaho

Hey guys, I bought this album without a cover last week. I wanted to print this off and put it on there, but someone told me that doing that is lame. So I didn't!

Welcome all

this is merely a test.