Created by ECAL‘s past and present students, DRM Chair provides a limited number of use before it self-destructs. A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone stands up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.
The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair. The cast-wax block is embedded with nichrome wire, the sensor made with Arduino counts the people and number 8 is reached the system is turned on.
The project is an entry for thedeconstruction.org and made in 48 hours by Gianfranco Baechtold, Laurent Beirnaert, Pierre Bouvier, Thibault Brevet, Raphaël Constantin, Lionel Dalmazzini, Edina Desboeufs, Arthur Desmet and Thomas Grogan
And of course, we would be all delighted to buy such a product, and buy it expensive, several times, don't we?
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I truly believe computers, information technologies and networks have brought a lot to society, have transformed it and will continue to do so in conjunction with other "forces". The good side of these changes are blogs of passionate people, projects like Wikipedia, shared knowledge, home/personal computers, open source and unbranded communities, connection to others, diversity, etc. We all love this.
But on the other side, there is also since the beginning of the industry a terrible business model that come along with computers, information technologies and networks that has done a lot of damage. It is the "this year we put a 12 on the box" business model. Sounds like an old model at the time of "clouds" but it is in fact the same model that is being revamped and improved. A model where you are kept captive of an ecosystem of services and products, where you have to pay many times for the same service or product, where you trade your personal data against services that you even don't know what they will become (Google just decided to shut down Reader after several other unilateral shut downs --they won't give you back your data though... which would be at least fair trade--, last year Pachube was sold to a private company, Sketchup just got sold, etc. & etc. the list is endless).
When computing could have become a solution to consume less matter, offer great services, be a truly horizontal system, it has evolved into one of the symbol of stupid consumerism and often shit content (how can it be that a 3 years old "brand new and wow computer" or a "smart smart phone" has no more value after three years and that it all end up in the trash like vulgar pieces of waste? How is it that I can just listen to my music on only 5 devices? How is it that I have to pay every year 2000$ to have access to bad updates of programs? etc.) This industry is now on the point to restore the "good old" pyramidal model (branded "clouds" are in fact highly centralized and pyramidal systems). That's bad.
I never liked the capitalist or the liberal economic model and when it come to its mix with the computing industry, I think it has produced one of the most stupid and wasteful model ever seen...
So, where do we go from now?
Today's New York Times carries a front-page piece by James Glanz on the massive energy waste and pollution produced by data centers. The lovely cloud that we've all been seeing icons for lately, turns out is not made of data, but rather of smog.
The basics here aren't very new. Already six years ago, we heard the apocryphal story of a Second Life avatar consuming as much energy as the average Brazilian. That data centers consume huge amounts of energy and contribute to pollution is well known.
On the other hand, Glanz does make a few critical observations. First, much of this energy use and pollution comes from our need to have data instantly accessible. Underscoring this, the article ends with the following quote:
“That’s what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the problem.”
Second, much of this data is rarely, if ever used, residing on unused, "zombie" servers. Back to our Second Life avatars, like many of my readers, I created a few avatars a half decade ago and haven't been back since. Do these avatars continue consuming energy, making Second Life an Internet version of the Zombie Apocalypse?
So the ideology of automobliity—that freedom consists of the ability to go anywhere at anytime—is now reborn, in zombie form, on the Net. Of course it also exists in terms of global travel. I've previously mentioned the incongruity between individuals proudly declaring that they live in the city so they don't drive yet bragging about how much they fly.
For the 5% or so that comprise world's jet-setting, cloud-dwelling élite, gratification is as much the rule as it ever was for the much-condemned postwar suburbanites, only now it has to be instantaneous and has to demonstrate their ever-more total power. To mix my pop culture references, perhaps that is the lesson we can take away from Mad Men. As Don Draper moves from the suburb to the city, his life loses its trappings of familial responsibility, damaged and conflicted though they may have been, in favor of a designed lifestyle, unbridled sexuality, and his position at a creative workplace. Ever upwards with gratification, ever downwards with responsibility, ever upwards with existential risk.
Survival depends on us ditching this model once and for all.
Physicists have teleported quantum information from one ensemble of atoms to another 150 metres away, a demonstration that paves the way towards quantum routers and a quantum Internet.
Technologies behind a quantum internet will be quantum routers capable of transmitting quantum information from one location to another without destroying it.
That’s no easy task. Quantum bits or qubits are famously fragile—a single measurement destroys them. So it’s not all obvious how macroscopic objects such as routers in a fibre optics network can handle qubits without demolishing them.
However, physicists have a trick up their sleeve to help send qubits safely. This trick is teleportation, a standard tool in any decent quantum optics lab.
It relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement in which two quantum objects share the same existence. That link ensures that no matter how far apart they are, a measurement on one particle instantly influences the other.
It is this ‘influence’ that allows physicists to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without it passing through the space in between.
Of course, teleportation is tricky, but physicists are getting better at it. They’ve teleported quantum information from one photon to another, from ions to photons and even from a macroscopic ensemble of atoms to a photon.
Today, Xiao-Hui Bao at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and a few buddies say they’ve added a new and important technique to this box of tricks.
These guys have teleported quantum information from ensemble of rubidium atoms to another ensemble of rubidium atoms over a distance of 150 metres using entangled photons. That’s the first time that anybody has performed teleportation from one macroscopic object to another.
“This is interesting as the first teleportation between two macroscopic-sized objects at a distance of macroscopic scale,” say Xiao-Hui and co.
Quite right. The goal in a quantum internet is that ensembles of atoms will sit at the heart of quantum routers, receiving quantum information from incoming photons and then generating photons that pass this information on to the next router.
So clearly the first teleportation from one of these hearts to another is an important advance.
Of course, there are hurdles ahead. Xiao-Hui and co want to increase the probability of success for each instance of teleportation, to increase the amount of time that the atomic ensemble can store quantum information before it leaks away (currently just over 100 microseconds) and to create a chain of atomic ensembles that will better demonstrate the potential of the technique for quantum routing.
None of those challenges seem like showstoppers. Which means that practical quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the corner.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1211.2892: Quantum Teleportation Between Remote Atomic-Ensemble Quantum Memories
A working invisibility cloak that makes one object look like ghostly versions of another has been built in China.
Illusion cloaks that make one object look like another are a fascinating type of invisibility device. The general idea is that such a device would make an apple look like a banana or a fighter plane look like an airliner. Clearly this would have important applications.
But while materials scientists have made great strides in building ordinary invisibility cloaks that work in the microwave, infrared and optical parts of the spectrum, making illusion cloaks is much harder. That’s because the bespoke materials they rely on require manufacturing techniques that seem like a distant dream.
Today, Tie Jun Cui and buddies at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, say they’ve designed and built a practical alternative to illusion cloaks, which they call a “ghost cloak”.
Conventional illusion cloaks rely on a two stage process. The first is a kind of invisibility stage which distorts incoming light to remove the scattering effect of the cloaked object, an apple for example. The second stage then distorts the scattered light to make it look as if it has been scattered off another object, a banana, for example. The result is that the apple ends up looking like a banana.
But materials that can perform this two-stage process are too demanding to make with current techniques.
So Tie Jun Cui and co have developed a single stage process that achieves a slightly different effect. Their idea is to do away with the first stage that makes the apple invisible.
Instead, their device takes the light scattered from the apple and distorts it to look like something else such as a banana. The symmetry of the effect–light is scattered on both sides of the apple–mean that this approach produces two “ghost” bananas, one on each side of the apple. The technique does not remove the apple entirely but distorts it, making it appear much smaller.
So the result is that the apple is changed into a much more complex picture that is significantly different from the original.
The big advantage of this approach is that it can be achieved now with existing technology. Tie Jun Cui and co first simulate the effect of their ghost cloak on a computer model.
They then go on to build a working prototype using concentric cylinders of split ring resonators that operates in 2 dimensions. They say that the results of their tests on this device closely match the results of the simulation.
That’s an interesting advance. The ability to distort and camouflage objects is clearly useful. However, an important question is whether the distortion that this device offers is good enough for any practical applications. Tie Jun Cui and co mention “security enhancement” but just how effective this would be when the original object is still visible, albeit in shrunken form, is debatable.
It may be that there are ways of improving the performance so it’ll be interesting to see what this team comes out with next.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1301.3710: Creation of Ghost Illusions Using Metamaterials in Wave Dynamics
We all love a bit of colour in our lives, right? It’s the spice that can turn the drabbest of life experience into a wealth of vivid wonder, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Carlos Cruz-Diez has been exploring the kinetic movement of colour in his celebrated works, creating interactive manufactured chambers that lures visitors to rethink their perceptions of colour in their everyday lives.
The installation works in a very personal way, altering the colour of your skin, clothing and anything you so happen to be carrying on your person. It culminates to create an experience that adapts depending on what chamber you emerse yourself within, drawing attention to the individual experience of processing colour through a disruption in the way that light is received and understood.
These wonderful installations have been developed over many years, and can be explored at the Musée en Herbe en in paris and the Museo universitario arte in Mexico. But if you can’t make it to these, feast on some images and live your life through a spectrum of colours that can only add a richness to your imagination and a smile to your face.
This 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.
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