I had dinner at the Albion the other night. The veggi menu options were frankly average – but the amazing cupcakes made up for it.

Thankfully, you can see exactly when a fresh batch has been taken out the oven, by following @albionsoven. A little gadget in their kitchen allows the baker to turn a dial, press a button, et viola. – tweet sent.

BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.

Kudos to poke for creating a arduino based kitchen friendly gadget, that builds the relationship between their client and the peckish users.

How cool is this? Augmented reality t-shirts that pull in a twitter feed.

As both a knitter and a web / interactive stuff designer, i’m fascinated by the space between interaction design and craft.

Leah Buechley invented the lillypad (a kind squidgy version of the arduino), and in the talk below speaks about getting knitters and grannies and the like involved in innovation and interaction design.

Design Futures: Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab) – New Craft – A Marriage of High and Low Tech from Elizabeth Goodman on Vimeo.

We are not quite at the point of getting my gran writing processing just yet, Leah admits, but i genuinely love the idea of technology as an extension of craft. Also a common theme of the work she shows seems to be exposing the circuit and making it part of the asthetic, see this flickr set on the paper circuit, or have a look at the things people are making with conductive embroidery.

Conductive embroidery from make magazine

Interactive paper

Just a quick note about the exciting things people spoke about at This Happened on Friday night.

This time around we were tucked away in the corner of the Tim Walker exhibition – (photos of multicoloured kittens and this really cool giant glove) at the Design Museum, which was good because we could see and hear everything.

Yuri Suzuki spoke about scalextric style record player, from his latest project “physical value of sound”. A little car with a needle on the underside followed a track made from recycled vinyl cut at 45 degree angles.

He combined the elements of two toys to create something that had a great tactile and playful quality. Would be great to see this taken further, with one car on vocals, one on drums etc. I think it would be great in-store in a trendy record shop or something. I liked the fact that he showed the last minute breakthroughs and the fact that they finally got it working about 4 days before the show!

Dominic Harris from Cinimod Studio spoke about making a UFO that flew over the Polish city of Gdansk.

Essentially a giant plate shaped thing dangling from a terrifyingly vintage helicopter covered in LED’s, the Gdansk UFO is a surreal and wondrous thing. To me it looks pretty magical. Apparently YouTubers agree, as many seem to think its a hoax!

As you can tell by my former todonnalovebob obsession, I love a good mystery.
Without sounding too worky, some of the best interaction experiences you can create involve a little bit of…. magic…

Here’s a couple of examples of when the mystery and the hunt are all part of the fun:

geocaching looks dull, but in fact its a means of making people explore, and showing them new and interesting things, by means of a GPS enabled treasure hunt. This results in lots of outward bound fun

book crossing is a great big book club. The only snag is, before you can read it, you’ve got to find it. Books are deposited in different hiding places around the world, so that folks can find them, read them, and then hide them away again.

This guy at Goldsmiths is making a musical instument which is controled with the power of your mind.

Ok, so its not making beautiful music just yet, but as the BBC news article points out, the aplications for gaming are obvious. There’s also a great potential for people who can’t use a mouse or keyboard for mobilty reasons.

Can’t see that mind hat/swimming cap being a good look at a gig though. Redesign needed me thinks…

Lisa Smith has created the Cute generator. These blobular objects have (from what I can gather) RFID – chips inside that gather and collect information.
This information is the basis for their physical form, so each character is totally unique to it’s user.

What fascinates me about this gets to the core of what character design is all about. We identify abstract shapes readily – (a blob is an eye, a wiggle is a mouth ect) – because it is human nature to project ourselves onto other things. It makes a lot of sense to me that a character could be used as a form of expression of personal identity.

Check out the flikr set here.
Read more about the project here.

LED’s that like to hug.

made by cibomahto

via Make