Tinker it now!

++ The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir, I can’t even describe this.

++ Wired has picked up on the growing popularity of hacker spaces.

++ Launch your line is an interesting platform for possible micro-production. Seems like an empty shell at the moment so hard to tell.

++ Open Hardware hackers special interest mailing list.

++ Ground-breaking Djing tools :P

++ Nice blog by Tony No-One about home automation hacks using the Arduino.

++ Herman Miller have written an interesting paper on Progammable building environments

++ The Horniman museum has an exhibition on called The Robot Zoo, looks fab.

++ Nice video of Bruce Sterling talking about generative art as part of a workshop at Fabrica.

Massimo Banzi will be going stateside next week speaking at Flourish in Chicago, but on his way back he’s dropping by the Big Apple and running a 2 day workshop on Building Interactive Retail Environments with Arduino. Generously hosted by Icon Nicholson and organised with the Zonebee team this is a great opportunity to learn from the co-founder of the Arduino project and on the work we’ve been doing in retail environments at Tinker.it!.

Sign up quick!

Time flies when you’re having fun, join us for this last minute Beginners Arduino workshop in London on March 28th-29th as April is riddled with Easter holidays and our yearly Milan Furniture Fair, we will organise the next one only in May, so get your ticket while there’s still time!

Sign up quick!.

Just came back from Newcastle this weekend for the first ever UK Makerfaire and I had a blast. I thought I’d report on the cool stuff I saw there before crashing (6 hours to travel back to London took its toll).

We were there with Folksy to present the work done during Makers & Hackers 2 weeks ago, which was great. People’s response was very positive overall. More photos on Flickr and a I did a short interview on the BBC’s Channel 5 Live on the weekend (around 0:50 seconds in).

Other fantastic people who were there included:

- The Curiosity Collective presented a series of great physical projects based on proverbs.

- BBC RAD (Research and development) team was there presenting some of their work including a lovely how-to on building your own cheap multi-touch table.

- The guys behind the Tv Be Gone project were there running soldering workshops.

- Aaron Nielsen from Oomlout was there and showed off his fantastic instructables leaflets for Arduino-based projects.

- Guido Maciocci had a fantastic touch-sensitive plant-based animation.

- Adrian McEwen was showing off the Bubblino and also had a Lava Lamp that responded to the energy level on the national grid.

- The guys from Shapeways were there too and gave a talk about fabrication, 3d printing and mass customisation.

- Kosbo was showing off some of their Nixie tubes clocks and displays, really pretty.

- Brian Degger had some lovely light-shy bots with colored heads.

I also met some fantastic people for the first time and was happy to see familiar faces. Thanks to Brian and Pete for showing us Newcastle and generally making me fall in love with the city, its 6 bridges and incessant hills.

++ Open Source Hardware: Is it good for business a session run by BugLabs CEO at Etech next week, wish we were attending!

++ The guys over at Liquidware have put together some great thoughts about Open source hardware and funding.

++ Don’t forget the pubmeet tomorrow night in London!

We’re still reeling from a fortnight of heavy work so I hadn’t had the time to report back on the great fun we had last weekend at the London side of Makers & Hackers. The nice thing about the internet of course is that other people have done a fantastic job at doing just that :)

- Craig Smith from O’Reilly wrote a lovely blog post about the event

- Nick O’Leary also wrote about their Wearable bracelet project that won the Expert’s Choice Award!

There are some lovely pictures of the projects made that day which included a haptic alarm clock and a confetti throwing alarm clock, a swirling Nike+iPod type chair and the winner of the People’s Choice Award a music-based welcome home rfid system hidden inside lovely robot keyrings by Nigel and the Craft Girls.

Allpictures are on the Flickr pooland we’ll be taking the winners of the day’s award as well as all the documentation for that day up to Newcastle as part of a Folksy & Tinker.it! booth.

Thanks again to the sponsors of this event and for attending as well: Rain Ashford for BBC Backstage and Craig Smith for Make / O’Reilly as well as4IPfor supporting the parallel event in Sheffield.

++ Trackmate, a new open source project developed by Adam Kumpf of MIT’s Media Lab, allows users to create their own tangible and multi-touch interfaces easily and inexpensively. Two distinctive features of Trackmate are Tag generator, producing visual markers with unique IDs that are therefore re-usable on different systems, and LusidOSC, an OSC based protocol integrating different types of tangible and touch interfaces. For more detals of how to use Trackaate, check out the two examples Adam published: How to Make Simple Tagged Objects and Portable Plexi Cliffhanger.

++ After a successful pilot run, The Interaction Design Pilot Year, run by Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and the Danish Design School (DKDS), is seeking students for the formal course, beginning September 2009. The course aims to expose students to a multicultural and multidisciplinary studio environment to teach them how to apply technology to our daily life, from software design to goods and services. For more information on how to apply…

++ New York’s School of Visual Arts offers a Master of Fine Arts degree in Interaction Design. The program aims to explore the potential of interaction design shaping our daily life, among business, social, and cultural contexts. It’s a small program (around 15 students per year) aimed at professionals not just in design but also research, writing and engineering.

++ I attended Central Saint Martin’s MA Communication Design Work in Progress private view last month. Some fabulous work there.

Highlights include interaction designer Giuseppe Costanza’s landscape research, Ozant Kamaci’s photography, the illustration “So happy to be dead” from Julian Bruderer, and Origins from Kevin Moore. Young artists expressed their concepts, thoughts about life, and questions of our surroundings and environment. They also challenged the definition of emerging technology, investigate traditional art and contemporary art forms, and present ed their ideas through diverse language and methods, graphics, videos, and sounds.

The show moved from topography, craft, and computing to experimental ways to explore new art languages. It is especially worth mentioning that the entire venue, with its exposed pipework and building material textures, served to highlight the works on display.

++ A BBC report on How the Bionic eye Works discusses a blind patient, 73-year-old Ron, who has been fitted with a ‘bionic eye’ which will allow him to see for the first time in 30 years. It’s amazing and promising to see that technology is getting to a point where it can really change the world beyond recognition!