Designswarm Internet of Things & Interaction Designalex@designswarm.com
Good Night Lamp
The Good Night Lamp is a family of lamps which allow people to communicate the act of coming back home to their loved ones, remotely. As you turn the bigger light on, your presence home is indicated to your friends whose smaller lamps turn on as well. Inversely, the smaller lamps that you’ve collected from [...]
The airport & the convent
6 years after graduating from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, I decided to collect the best of the pictures I had kept of my experience there and tell the story of the school from the perspective of it’s former students. The result is a 52 page book that documents our life in Ivrea, then Milan, [...]
Map of Making 2012
Updating my thinking around the world of makers and mapping the overlap in design / digital practice in 2012. Full blog post here.
Day in the life of a designer & her networked objects
In 2006, I collaborated with Tom Klinkowstein in helping write the scenario for this extremely large diagrammatic narrative. In it a potential scenario for life in 2030 is fleshed-out including the new smart products which might emerge out of current technological development. The full diagram can be downloaded as a pdf.
Mozilla Festival 2011
I acted as Local Producer for the 2nd annual Mozilla Festival 2011 in London on November 4th to 6th. The topic was Media, Freedom & the Web and attracted more than 700 attendees. It’s not what I usually do, but I enjoyed it and learnt a lot.
FRSTEE
Management & production for this rapid prototyped snowman decoration based on your Twitter data. On sale now. Done as part of RIG in collaboration with Andy Huntington.
Utah
Utah is a response to the Utah teapot, a standard reference object in the computer graphics community. The complexity of the object lies in the different types of curves that make it up, and therefore make it one of the most difficult objects to learn how to build in 3D. The original teapot given by [...]
MapCodes
Why can’t we use maps to link to maps? An abstract, blocky shape is easy to recognise with the right software as AR projects have shown, but the marker (qr codes, fiducials, etc) often isn’t human-readable or bears little relationship to the content. Mapcodes would present a simplified map which, if you know the area, [...]
Deep City
I’ve been thinking about smart cities and the city experience over the course of the past few years. This first took the shape of a talk and photo-montage for Microsoft Social Symposium 2010. Then Proboscis asked me to come in and use bookleteer to make an e-book. I decided to build on that talk with [...]
Homesense
Homesense is a project that rethinks how we design smart homes and investigate how we interact with technologies at home. Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities and open source to product design research in the home. Done in collaboration with EDF R&D and featured as part of the MoMa exhibition Talk to [...]
Big Red Button
The Big Red Button is a shiny round plastic red button that triggers a keyboard keypress when you press the button. Very useful for presentations and other digital shenanigans. Designed with Really Interesting Group and noew featured at the MoMa’s exhibition Talk to Me. ON SALE HERE
Tinker London
I founded and ran a design studio called Tinker London from 2007 to 2010. Throughout our work I pushed my interest in the intersection of product design & the internet. I was featured in a variety of magazines and publications, worked with a range of clients across the UK and beyond.
A Map of Making
Started thinking about the state of the act of “making” something back in 2006. Things have changed a lot since then so it’s now more of a picture of that time. As an industrial designer, working in installation design and then interaction design what has surprised me most and what I tried to capture here [...]
Constant Setting
Constant setting is a simple website that displays in real time, any sunset images taken and posted to Flickr as creative commons that correspond to the cities where the sun is setting at the moment. You can see the city where the image was taken (which you can click to be redirected to the Google [...]
Topoware
Topoware is a tableware collection that questions the landscape of dining. Taking inspiration from the recent popularity of geography as a media of communication (with Google maps) and more specifically with topographic maps, which define heights of a landscape two dimensionally, Topoware in turn, “outlines” the dining experience. Made up of cups, plates, bowls, placemats [...]