Tuesday, June 30. 2009Sensors for Tracking Home Water UseSensors track devices' electricity, water, and gas consumption from one spot.
By Kate Greene
Finding the flush: This sensor attaches to a water pipe and wirelessly communicates changes in pressure to a microcontroller that infers the use of specific fixtures. A Bluetooth transmitter streams the data to a personal computer. - Shwetak Patel, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle, developed the sensors, which plug directly into existing infrastructure in buildings, thereby eliminating the need for an elaborate set of networked sensors throughout a structure. For example, an electrical sensor plugs into a single outlet and monitors characteristic "noise" in electrical lines that are linked to specific devices, such as cell-phone chargers, refrigerators, DVD players, and light switches. And a gas sensor attaches to a gas line and monitors pressure changes that can be correlated to turning on a stove or furnace, for instance. Now, Patel and his colleagues have developed a pressure sensor that fits around a water pipe. The technology, called Hydrosense, can detect leaks and trace them back to their source, and can recognize characteristic pressure changes that indicate that a specific fixture or appliance is in use. Patel hopes to incorporate electrical, gas, and water sensors into a unified technology and has cofounded a startup, called Usenso, that he hopes will start offering combined smart meters to utility companies within the next year or so. The goal, says Patel, is to make a "smart home" universally deployable. "I looked at the existing infrastructures," he says, "and saw that they could be retrofitted." Smart sensors have become increasingly popular over the past few years as more people have become interested in cutting their utility bills and minimizing the resources that they consume. A number of startups offer to connect utility providers and consumers so that resource use can be tracked over the Internet. So far, however, no company or utility has been able to provide the sort of fine-grain resource usage that Patel hopes to offer with Usenso. The idea behind the water sensor has its origins in Patel's original work with electrical lines. Rather than simply looking at the amount of power consumed by all the devices in a house, he decided to look at noise patterns--irregularities in the electrical signal--that propagated over household power lines as a result of electrical consumption. "Let's say you turn on a light switch in the bathroom and kitchen," he says. "We can tell the difference between the two" due to electrical impulses that resonate at a high frequency. "So if you have two different impulses you see originate from two different locations inside the home, you can trace them back to a particular device," Patel says, noting that location can be determined by the amount of time that it takes for a signal to reach the sensor, which is usually just plugged into a spare wall outlet.
Likewise, Hydrosense consists of a single device attached to a cutoff valve or water bib that monitors the entire plumbing infrastructure. "When you open a valve, the pressure on the entire system goes down," says Patel. "And whenever you change the water flow from static to kinetic, you get a shock wave that propagates throughout the pipes." He explains that the shock wave, while relatively mild, has a characteristic shape that can be used to identify different fixtures--even the distinction between the toilets in different bathrooms. Using data collected in nine homes of varying style and age and with a diversity of plumbing systems located in three different cities, Patel and his colleagues have shown that by monitoring these shock waves, it is possible to identify individual fixtures with 95.6 percent accuracy. "The idea of being able to plug one device into a home and build a picture of what's going on and off is really fascinating," says Adrien Tuck, CEO of Tendril Networks, a company that makes smart meters and plugs for homes. But he suspects that there will be some kinks to iron out before the technology is deployable at a large scale. "If it were easy, it would have been done already," he says, "and that probably means that there are some things that need to be teased out." In addition to monitoring utility usage, Patel says that the sensors can track human activity within a home, which could be useful for elder care and reducing energy waste. He has also developed a fourth sensor that can be integrated into a home's heating and cooling systems. By monitoring pressure changes that occur when people open and close doors and when they enter and exit a room, a sensor within an air-conditioning unit can infer with relative accuracy where people are within a home or apartment, Patel says. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Related Links:Tuesday, May 26. 2009See-through toiletAnother item I found curious while spending time in Lausanne the the other day: a see-through toilet. Based on a steel-and-glass architecture, the toilet is based on a transparent system: when pressing the “voir” button (which means “see”), the glass gets transparent and it turns opaque when someone is inside and presses the button again. A motion sensor also turn the glass transparent if there’s no motion during a certain amount of time (to prevent people from staying there for too long or in case of a problem) OR if there is TOO MUCH ACTIVITY (no party is allowed in there). It’s questioning as well to see that the button has been called “VOIR” (”see”), as most of the people who enter the toilet do not want to “see” but instead to “not be seen”. My guess is that it’s on purpose, to disrupt people’s behavior (who would want to press a button anyway to see how to make the glass opaque). From what I’ve read, the point is to find an answer the recurring problems of toilet trashing. By looking at the inside, people can have a direct overview of the toilet state. Designed by Oloom in 2008, the whole point of this is explained on their website:
An important feature in this design is the presence of a pine tree next to the transparent toilet. This tree has been especially chosen to be planted there because it’s aimed at bringing more pleasant smell. A sort of high-tech/low tech combination. Why do I blog this? An intriguing piece of furniture with curious combinations (the pine tree, the syringe trash can). Is this the Everyware-like city toilet of the future? I don’t know but it’s certainly interesting to understand more the way the glass gets transparent or opaque. The rules embedded in the system, that I described at the beginning of this post, tells us captivating insights about what is considered as normal or not in society. ----- Via Pasta & Vinegar Related Links:Personal comment: Petit essai socio-fonctionnel sur nos toilettes du Flon! ;) Thursday, May 14. 2009Pervasive games book
Why do I blog this? just saw this on, need to get it and peruse this interesting compendium of case-studies (Killer, Insectopia, Botfighters, Uncle Roy, etc.). People interested can also listen to the podcast by the editors. ----- Via Pasta & Vinegar Personal comment: Un livre en rapport à l'émergence des jeux "omniprésents" (pervasive) destinés à être joués dans des lieux "réels" et ayant des rapports avec ce lieu. Wolfram Alpha: the next Google or the next Cuil?There’s always an urge to declare a major new player in search as a “Google killer” because of its unique approach to the space, its celebrated founding team, or copious amounts of industry hype. Wolfram Alpha has a bit of all of these elements working for it, though it’s significantly different than other recent attempts to dethrone Google, such as Cuil, which fell flat on its face on launch day, or Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft before ever really getting a chance to prove itself as a commercially viable product. The first key thing to be aware of with Wolfram Alpha – the project of Stephen Wolfram, a noted physicist and mathematician – is that it’s not a search engine in the traditional sense. Its goal isn’t to index the Web and direct you to Web pages quickly, but rather, to make computations based on a rich database of historical knowledge. What It DoesIn checking out the private preview this week (the site is expected to launch later this month), the first question to come to mind was when exactly would I use this as opposed to Google? Most of my searches are navigational – I’m either looking for a specific type of website (travel, tickets, etc.), or researching a story that I’m working on for Mashable. To answer this question, Wolfram Alpha has an “examples” section with about two dozen different sample uses of its technology. Some of these examples are really heady, academic stuff – like the calculus you probably don’t remember from college.
Others are more practical, like entering in “San Francisco to Tokyo” and getting data on how many miles apart they are, the projected flight path, and current local times. Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to know what time the sun rose and set on the day you were born, type in your birthday and Wolfram Alpha will tell you (and also let me know that I’m approaching my 10,000th day on earth!).
What It Doesn’t DoWhile that is pretty cool, it’s not exactly something I’d need to use every day, nor something I could easily explain to typical Web users. Additionally, when trying more Google-like searches, like trying to find a Las Vegas hotel room, there doesn’t seem to be much that Wolfram Alpha can do to help. But, that also doesn’t really seem to be the point of Wolfram Alpha – at least for now.
Where It FitsThe real strength and power of Wolfram Alpha does seem to be for the academic and research community, where the company’s founder has been innovating for more than two decades. How well it works will ultimately come down to its ability to interpret user inputs (i.e. - the examples are impressive, but how well will it respond to the queries of real users?), and its ability to grow its database to perform more everyday tasks. Ultimately, it’s hard to see how Wolfram Alpha could be called either the next Google or the next Cuil. Rather, it seems to have the ambition of making accessible a whole different type of information, that could be quite useful to a significant subset of Internet users. And eventually, that might make it a good compliment, but not a replacement, for today’s leading search engines. Related Links:Personal comment:
Un nouveau moteur de recherche autour duquel beaucoup de "hype" se développe. Et l'"adverstising" est fait pour que de la hype se développe. Monday, April 27. 2009Facebook To Open Your Status Updates to DevelopersIn another targeted shot at Twitter, Facebook is expected to announce on Monday that developers can take the streams of Facebook status updates on user profiles and mix them into new applications. Just like the massive Twitter ecosystem, this could lead to a blossoming of innovation around Facebook streams. What’s being made available? Updates, photos, videos, notes and comments, says the Wall Street Journal, but only if you allow access. We’ll be interested to see if such access is provided as a single privacy setting on Facebook (”anyone can mash up my updates”), or done on a case-by-case basis like Facebook Apps and Facebook Connect - the latter is far more likely, and the WSJ appears to confirm it:
And this, I think, is the reason Facebook’s open ecosystem, despite its 200 million-plus users, may not kill off Twitter’s traction with developers: Facebook’s culture is one of privacy and shared updates with friends. Twitter is all about public updates, and hence users love for you to mash up their Tweets into public-facing applications like TweetingTooHard.
Twitter is Still More Open
We’ll likely see a bunch of new applications to post media to Facebook (think: browser plugins and desktop applications) and explore content from friends, but building an open ecosystem will not change the closed culture of Facebook and our willingness to share with only a small circle of personal friends there. Twitter, then, remains the most open…culturally, at least.
----- Via Mashable Reviews:
Personal comment: On peut donc s'attendre à voir fleurir de nouvelles applications/interfaces dédiées à l'affichage les statuts... Et éventuellement encore d'autres choses (installations? --je repense évidemment ici à Listening Post--, displays divers, etc.) Monday, April 20. 2009A pseudo-random collection of Information Visualization links
Schmidt & Pohflepp: Social Collider / William Forsythe & ACCAD: Synchronous Objects A disclaimer is in order: The following post is not original content, rather it is a collection of links provided by various people on a private mailing list. The initial request (from Memo Akten) was for “really hot data visualization”, and the following suggestions were made by some fairly knowledgeable people. They are presented here as an unedited list of links, they are listed in the order they appeared on the list. Some are fairly new projects while others are well-known canonical works. Two new favorites are shown above, namely Social Collider and Synchronous Objects. Some pseudo-random Info Viz links
----- Via Generator.X Personal comment: Marius Watz, auteur du blog Generator.X (generative design) donne ici quelques liens et ressources vers des designers attachés aux questions de visualisation d'informations. Friday, March 20. 2009News Alarm: A DIY Sonic News Stories Alert
The project consists of hacking an off-the-shelf smoke detector and connecting it with Arduino to a Processing application that connects to the API. The application is currently configured to sound if more than 50% of the NYTimes headlines contain the word 'aliens'. As the author puts it: "You never know... right?" UPDATE ----- Related Links:Personal comment:
En soi assez DIY, mais dans l'idée des projets, installations ou espaces qui auraient une "conscience géo-politique" ou "globale" que nous cherchons à développer. Voir l'API du New York Times.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Interaction design
at
10:56
Defined tags for this entry: devices, hardware, interaction design, media, ressources, software, tangible
Tuesday, March 17. 2009Collaborative ServicesSocial innovation and design for sustainability - Eivind Stø, Pål Strandbakken, John Thackara, Victoria Thoresen, Stefanie Un, Edina Vadovics, Philine Warnke, Adriana Zacarias. "What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?" A new book, edited by Francois Jegou and Ezio Manzini (with a chapter by me in it) attempts to answer some of these questions. Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability suggests a variety of scenarios: Car-sharing on demand, micro-leasing system for tools between neighbours, shared sewing studio, home restaurant, delivery service between users who exchange goods… The scenarios looks at how these kinds of daily life activities could be performed by structured services that rely on a greater collaboration of individuals amongst themselves. ----- Related Links:Personal comment: Téléchargeable directement en ligne sous forme de pdf, le livre présente tout une série de stratégies pour "vivre à moindre coût énergétique", à titre individuel ou en groupe. John Tackara (Doors of Percpetion) y contribue. Une ressource, gratuite, à faire circuler. Thursday, March 12. 2009OpenProcessing.OrgGosh, that's all-Processing toys, all the time. That site's a tarpit for Art-and-Code wannabes.
http://www.openprocessing.org/browse/
----- Via Beyond The Beyond (Bruce Sterling's blog on Wired) Personal comment: Ressource de sketches et projets Processing (code accessible) Tuesday, March 03. 20096 Ways to Publish Your Own BookShevonne Polastre is a freelance Technical Writer who assists companies and non-profits. She authors FreeAgentWriter, a blog about the technology world. Online self-publishing services have given users the tools they need to create, publish and promote their work. These sites allow authors to bypass the process of finding an agent and pitching to publishing houses, a venture that can take months, if not years. Here are six great sites that will help you publish your work, guaranteeing you a published book that can be sold via different outlets, such as Amazon. Have another service to suggest? Tell us about it in the comments. 1. LuluLulu allows you to create a variety of books, but also lets you develop digital media. These range from music and ringtones to videos and e-books. With Lulu, you can also scan and digitize your old books, albums, and photos. You are given the option of leaving the book in private view or releasing it to the public. Before finalizing the book, you are able to download and print a proof of the book, and when your book is ready, you are able to sell it in your customized storefront. Users are able to use Google Book Search (Beta), which puts your book content in Google’s search results. When viewers click on the link, they are taken to a Google-hosted web page that links to Lulu. Lulu also provides groups that allow you to sell your book with similar books in a group storefront. Group members share a group blog, forum, and find like-minded individuals for future collaboration efforts. What makes it unique: Lulu provides an FTP site for uploading files larger than 300MB. In addition, you are able to distribute to third-party sites, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, by purchasing a distribution package. What it’s missing: You are not able to build your own templates or layouts. Pricing: Softcovers start at $7.60 and hardcovers at $17.48 2. BlurbBlurb allows anyone to create any kind of book, from nonfiction to photo, recipe, and more. You can use one of their templates and layouts or import your own design. Once you’ve created your book, you can choose between making the book open to the public or keeping it private. If you choose to make your book public, it can be sold on the Blurb website. Additionally, you can opt to offer readers a preview of the first 15 pages of your book to help them decide if they want to make a purchase. To increase your search ranking, you are able to add subtitles, tags, categories, and descriptions. If you are in need of assistance, you can contact a “Custom Bookmaker,” an independent provider who can help you in your book development. What makes it unique: Blurb offers BookSmart, free software that assists you in developing your book. If you use Typepad or LiveJournal, you are able to import blog entries to create your book. Additionally, Blurb allows you to import images from Flickr, Picasa, and SmugMug. If you are using a Mac, it also integrates with your iPhoto library. What it’s missing: You are not able to build your own templates or layouts, though you are able to import your own design. Also, the BookSmart software drastically slows down your computer, and there is no online writing collaboration, only photos. Pricing: Softcovers start at $12.95 and hardcovers at $22.95 (Disclosure: Mashable is partnering with Blurb for our event at SXSW) 3. CreateSpaceCreateSpace was acquired by Amazon in 2005, and similar to Lulu, it provides book publishing and digital media development. Because CreateSpace is a subsidiary of Amazon, it’s easier and quicker to sell your book through Amazon. Like the other sites, you are able to choose between making your book open to the public or private. The only format accepted during the submission process is PDF, which is for both text and images. What makes it unique: CreateSpace is the only one of the self publishing services that provides you the ability to create your book in Kindle format. Additionally, you are able to immediately assign an ISBN or use an existing one. What it’s missing: There is no option to create hardcover books. Also, while users can participate in the CreateSpace message boards, it’s lacking some of the social media tools, groups, and messaging that other self-publishing services provide. Pricing: Standard B&W starts at $3.66 per book; Standard Color starts at $6.55. You can also upgrade to their Pro Plan, which is $39.00 per book. The Pro Plan allows you to keep more from each sale, and pay less when ordering copies. 4. CafePressCafePress provides a way for people to sell their creations in “shops.” It is a marketplace with over 150 million products (i.e. clothing, gifts, books, etc.). They also provide you with the ability of self publishing your books. Like the others, CafePress also has private and public options. While you are able to upload your book in PDF format, it has to be less than 100 MB. There are different templates you can use based on the type of book you are trying to publish, and you can tailor it the way you see fit. What makes it unique: CafePress sells a variety of items, such as books, cds, clothing, art, etc. You do not have to be a member to use their self-publishing service. What it’s missing: There is no option to create hardcover books and it doesn’t have the ease of site navigation like the other services. Pricing: Prices start at $0.045 per page and a $4 binding fee. 5. WeBookWeBook combines the joys of self publishing with social media. You are able to write a book alone or collaborate with other writers. The site provides an online text editor for you to write, and you are able to add images from image-hosting sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, etc. There are two levels of privacy: You can choose who is able to view your writing, and who is able to write the story. Throughout the year, WeBook has submission periods in which you are able to submit your book for consideration for publishing. You can choose to share your royalties with people who have given you helpful feedback and assisted in the development of your book. What makes it unique: You are able to collaborate with different writers, and be part of various groups. Writers rate and review submitted books, and the ones with the highest ratings are published by WeBook. Additionally, you can share your royalties with selected reviewers who have provided you with helpful feedback. What it’s missing: There is no option for you to publish your book, if you desire. It is all dependent on the rating you receive. Also, you are not able to import from another word processor or PDF. Pricing: $0 6. XlibrisXlibris was founded in 1997 and is one of the first self publishing services in the industry. You start the process by having a consultation with one of their consultants about your needs and the correct package to fit those needs. They create the full design of the book and send it to you for feedback and approval. After that, the book is yours and you are able to sell it wherever and to whomever you want. What makes it unique: You get a free consultation to ensure that you are on the right path. Additionally, they offer leather-bound editions of your book. What it’s missing: Competitive prices and private/public options. Pricing: Prices start at $299 More writing resources from Mashable:Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kate_sept2004 --- 10 Ning Networks to Help You Land Your Next Job ----- Personal comment: Ressources, si on souhaite se faire un "self-published" book. L'aspect intéressant d'une telle démarche est évidemment qu'il n'y a pas à "payer"pour produire un certaine quantité de livres qui ne seront pas forçément tous vendus, qu'il ne faut poas payer non pus pour lr réseau de l'éditeur. La contre-partie est évidemment qu'il n'y a, justement, pas de réseau de distribution autres que son propre site web, les blogs et j'en passe de la "self-communication"!
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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