designswarm thoughts

This is a little project of mine that was born over a year ago in Amsterdam but went into hibernation for a while for obvious reasons. I’m happy to consider this is my first actual contribution to the web2.0 conversation.

I’d like to thank D’arcy Saum, Richard Groenendijk and Nicholas Land for helping me out on this project.

Constant Setting:

Communications technologies allow us to be connected globally but there is nothing more deeply moving than the natural and uncontrollable motion of the day. Every hour of the day, somewhere in the world, Mother Nature offers us that symphony of color, and we take pictures of it.

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.

You can also see who took the picture and get redirected to the original picture to add to your favorites! 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.

Enjoy and do let me know what you think! Consider this version1.0 :)

I’ve started contributing to Shift6 , an industry-facing blog about young people and media associated with Blyk. Follow my occasional rants about an age group I am no longer part of :P

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I’ve included my slides here. I basically tried to make a case on why electronics, hardware hacking and physical computing was in general an area that designers should be interested in. Not sure it was the right crowd for it, but then you never know.

I’m trying to tie loose ends before I go spend 2 weeks working with the wonderful people at fo.am in Brussels. Yes grant you it’s not very far, but I really need to step out of London once in a while, to remind myself that the rest of world doesn’t live this frantically.

While I’m there I’ll be the first speaker at Pecha Kucha Brussels where I’ll be talking through a presentation entitled: “Or how I stopped worrying and learnt to love electronics”, about the work we do at Tinker and what I think it means for designers.

If you’re in the area, do ping!

Just a quick announcement that I have switched to Feedburner for this blog’s RSS feed…subscribe away!

Yes yes at last, it’s now ready to ship via everyone’s favorite site Etsy!

No not the weighted companion cube :)

I’m finding myself with a few interesting personal projects that involve web/mobile/API harnessing and am looking for a server-side developer / programmer who’d like to work with me on them.

If you like the challenge of working with designers and their craaaazy ideas then have a look at my work. On the long term I’m looking to build a relationship with a technologist who would like to work with me on a regular basis. If that’s not possible, then just contractually, that’s fine too :)

Get in touch!

I’m about to go into hypertravel again but this time it’s a little different. Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent in Milan working with Massimo and greeting our second intern. Then I’m back in London for an evening before embarking on the spanking new Eurostar to Bruxelles (2hours 20 minutes…woah)

The event I was supposed to attend unfortunately got canceled so I will actually be somewhere I haven’t spent any time in, with the people I know being out of town… is that what real tourists do? I doubt it, they usually plan this ahead, it isn’t accidental.

So I’m left with an open day that I can fill up in whatever way I please, so if anyone has suggestions, do ping me! I’m thinking “moules frites”, having a look at cartoons and books, and walking around flickring, buying chocolate…

I’ve been heavily involved working with Blyk and tinker.it lately, so I could do with a day off in an unknown city.

On Friday, I’ll be having lunch with the nice people at 31 Volts in Utrecht… which reminds me I have to write something for their blog… argh.

An article on my work of the past few years was published in Surface magazine’s 10th annual Avant Guardian edition, page 132.

And for some reason, they thought i should go shoe-less…:P

This is just wild!.

Since I’m involved with way too much technology, leading activities for tinker.it! in London, and helping out Tom with thinking about the future internet of things, I suppose it’s only normal I’m also spending time on technology-light projects as well.

I worked on to&fro(muji) with Dave last August and we submitted the idea to the Muji Award 02. The second edition of this international conference, the theme this year was “re”. Re-do, re-use, re-think etc…

We focused on reviving a lost art of letter writing. Taking the idea of RE-spond, RE-use and RE-think, we wanted to inject this activity with some of the components of it’s more modern counterpart: email.

The reversible envelope allows you to write the name of the sender and receiver once. As you write your letter on the perforated letter-paper provided, you can choose to tear the leftovers after you’re done (leaving no space for a reply if it’s a “dear john” kind of letter :) ) or not. Put your letter in and fold up the envelope and make sure your “to” will match the adress you’ve written down. Put a stamp on the right hand corner and send it.

The person who receives it gets to open the envelope and reply with the space you’ve left, deciding whether to keep your letter or not. He/she simply reverses the envelope (as the adress turns from “from” to “to”) includes her reply and sends it along.

Check out the Flickr set for this project.

Enjoy!

(Yes, I know this is starting to be boring :P )

If you’re in town this week, well you’re probably going round the London Design Festival. Topoware will be part of the Designboom exhibition hosted by designersblock 10th anniversary show so come on down!

London design festival guide 2007. Tee hee.

Some great progress lately on the Good Night Lamp, go check out the new site with some more details and new fab images.

A reason for the update: yours truly might appear in the Annual design review of Surface magazine this fall. Yes, old media! I’m excited nonetheless.

Must be the weather. I’ve changed the blurb on my website for the first time since I started freelancing.

Before:

This is the online portfolio of Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, freelance interaction designer. I am interested in the way service design ties product design and interaction design together to create meaningful experiences for people both in the virtual and tangible worlds.

After:

This is the online portfolio of Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, industrial and interaction designer. She designs technology-enabled and socially-aware creative solutions to problems. From product design, service-based experiences, mobile-based interactions as well as play experiences, what binds her work is a holistic approach to problems, a keen interest in the user and collaborations with partners and clients from around the world. She now freelances in London, UK.

I like it, what do you think?

Update: ok here’s the final version in light of comments :)
This is the online portfolio of Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, industrial and interaction designer. She designs technology-enabled and socially-aware creative solutions to problems. She takes a holistic approach to problems, a keen interest in the user and collaborates with partners and clients from around the world. She now freelances in London, UK.