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.

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 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 Mz-Tek was rendered as accurately as possible and divided into pieces which were then prototyped using SLS technology (selective laser sintering). The pieces were then painted to make them look as close to porcelain as possible, but in areas which aren’t usually glazed, and ignoring some key areas that should. The ubiquity of this everyday object is forgotten and the object, its process and materials, made to be reconsidered in light of new technologies.

A collaboration with Campbell Orme for Mz-Tek’s Chi-tek project. Exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in September 2011.

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 some new pictures I’d taken and thoughts I’d had. This is available for download through Diffusion publishing.

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 Me.

GO SEE THE SITE

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

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.

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 was the way that the act of making something in a professional sense (which is perhaps why I did not include craft here, you’ll have to forgive me) can now take place in so many different ways (in yellow type), using different tools (in black) and attracting different types of designers (in pink) who train and learn in very different environments (in white).

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 maps location, if you don’t know where in the world that is) as well as its geographical information (long / lat) and the local time in that city.

There’s a little timer to let you know how long to the next one, and because this is crowdsourced in a way, it might go back to the same image, until it finds an image tagged with “sunset” for the next location.

Code by D’arcy Saum, Richard Groenendijk & Nicholas Land

GO SEE SITE

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 and a tablecloth, the collection explores the visual and social landscape of dining by using outlines and descriptions to describe, question and push our eating experience, making it really feel like a journey.

Designed with Karola Torkos.

Was featured in print in Grazia Casa, New York Times, Kommersant, First hand article in Ambidextrous 7: Food Also featured online profusely.

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 your friends will turn on/off as they come home, go out, go to bed. You’ll never come back to an empty home again.

Each family is composed of a large lamp with an energy saving bulb and powered normally. Each “parent light” is wirelessly connected over wifi to its children: smaller wireless lamps with LED lighting. This allows you to give away the little lamps to your loved ones around the world. Wherever they are, when you turn your light on, theirs will turn on as well.

Collect your loved one’s little lamps so that you can tell when they come home. This also makes for an organic interior lighting as they might be at the other end of the world on a very different timezone (and it might be the middle of your night) when they come back home. Where will you put your little lamps then?

UNDER DEVELOPMENT. SEE WEBSITE.

The Hungries are a family of plush nested monsters that can record and playback sound in their own voice. When they are fed to one another, the voices of the monsters are mixed in fun, unexpected ways!

Response to a brief to design new play experiences for 3-4 year olds for Mattel‘s yearly Design Summit. The project was selected as a finalist.

Designed as a student project with Alejandro Zamudio & Dana Gordon.