New Products

Well its been some time since I last posted here, yes we all seem to get caught up in our busy lives but I thought Id take some time out of my Monday morning and show yall some cool and interactive things and products - something of which has been missing here a bit of late.
This first one is an interesting childrens play ground device. The video is a little repeatative yes but give it a go and just imagine how cool this would have been when you were growing up!



Invoxicated from PlayDesigner on Vimeo.

The Invoxicated interactive play sculpture is a bit like that, but a bit more complex, a lot cooler looking, and it actually works! Children can explore the playful qualities of sound by talking into one end of the sculpture to produce sound for the listener on the other end. By bending parts of the sculpture and pressing its various buttons, a multitude of sound effects can be achieved in real time.
Designer: Karl-Johan Ekeroth

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When I was in my 2nd year of study of industrial design, I was given the task to go and see an OT. An occupational therapist assit people with disabilities to overcome certain tasks which 'normal' dont give a second thought to. Have you ever thought how you might open a jar with only 1 hand. Many people in this world have to find ways to every day. One of the hardest places for the disabled to function self suffieciently is in the kitchen and with food preperation. This next product is a great effort to help people with these tasks

 

 

Designer: Grace Lim

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The last product Im going to show you today isnt so much a tangible thing but in todays world of design, we must be opening our minds to the fact that design is capable of thinking about and more importantly solving problems humans have without the tangible. The free time identifier is a solution to that social networking problem we ve had for years. "Im free and I want to connect with others in real life. Not on the web, but how do I know who else is free?"

Free-Time Identifies When You’re Not Busy, Shares Your Availability With Friends

By Adam Dachis from LifeHacker (See the side bar just over there... Subscribe, you ll learn all sorts of stuff)

iOS: Free-Time is an unusual but helpful app that takes a look at your iPhone’s calendar(s), figures out when you’re free, and lets you know how much free time you have open in the day. You can then share this information with friends for simple planning.
Free-Time works with any calendar you sync with your iPhone, whether that’s through iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, or any other supported service. When you start it up, it’ll teach you how to use it and you’ll enter a little information about your day so it knows when you’re generally busy even though your calendar shows that time is free. These are things like going to work and sleeping. Once you answer these questions, you’ll be presented with all the time you have available in the day. You can then apply filters to only show when you have time for certain activities, such as dinner or coffee. When you’ve selected a period of time you want to share, you can send it via SMS, email, copy and paste it wherever you want, or bump it to another device running Free-Time.
While the app seems a bit unusual at first, it’s a neat idea that’s executed well. When someone asks you if you’re free on a specific day for a specific purpose, you can use Free-Time to check.
Free-Time (Free) [iTunes App Store]

Strange adictions to Wordswithfriends

First up, I am not benefiting from talking about this game (they aren’t paying me to tell you about it), I have simply become addicted to WordswithFriends by Zynga.

Since getting my smart phone and finding this game on the android market I was just enjoying playing against the old random opponent and might I say, loosing poorly. So I went off the game somewhat and found other games. But then my heart longed to play a game against other real human beings. Flicking through my endless list of apps sitting in my phone I re-discovered words with friends. Then I went over to my brother in laws house and his house mate was playing the game. I was pumped. It didn’t even click to me that some of my friends could have the game? (how wrong I was...). It turned out this house mate was playing her boy friend (my groomsman, small world hey?) and so the quest to find more friends to share words with began.

A quick look up at the old FB page and within a few days I had found out that quite a considerable group of my friends where playing the damn game and we were all like, "geez I didn’t know you had this game too!"
So now it is common to wake up every morning with a list of about ten or so others waiting for me to make my move on the board. Isn’t it a wonderful age we live in where technology integrates so seamlessly into our lives... Hmmm maybe. But at the end of the day I've become addicted to it and I've found that there's actually a whole community out there (I should have guessed) that have created their own tournament play etc.
Look it up at  http://wordswithfriends.net/

Not really sure on what the point of this post was supposed to be about, but in any case if you have a smart phone (iphone and android) you'll love playing this game, at any hour...