Covering World: Technology

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Life-saving designs: a little smart thinking is leading to products that are changing millions of lives

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Let's take a minute to praise drip tape. You can find it at your local gardening
centre -- thin, perforated plastic strips that deliver water directly to a
plant's roots. Drip tape is one of the biggest advancements in farming of
the past 80 years, radically reducing the water industrial farmers
need and enabling our food supply to skyrocket. We take it for granted because,
like many great designs, it is so simple and commonplace. But it depends on a
pressurised water supply. Millions of farmers in the developing world, where
drip irrigation is impossible, must carry water cans on their backs - it's
painful, scarring labour. 
But in 2009 a small design startup, Proximity, launched a gravity-fed
drip system. It's much more than a huge PVC-canvas bag raised barely a metre
off the ground. The design hinges on an innovative water filter that cleans out
dirt and grit without sapping water pressure. Proximity's system cuts
water usage in half, increases yields by a third and costs just £21. The
device enables one woman to tend a larger plot by herself. Her children can thus
go to school instead of attending to their farming. Thousands of farmers in
Myanmar have bought them. 
Contrast the success of the Proximity system with the disastrous PlayPump, a
merry-go-round that pumped water while children played on it. By 2008,
Roundabout Outdoor, a company with backing from the US government, had
installed more than 1,000 of these £8,700 devices across Africa, often at the
expense of existing wells. Unfortunately, the maths suggested that kids would
have to play 27 hours a day for the PlayPump to provide enough water
for those it served. Today most of them lie fallow, rusting monuments to good
intentions married with half-baked design. 
Over the past few years, design has become a crucial tool in helping the
developing world. And that makes sense. After all, designers aren't just
obsessed with fashion and form -- they are trained to articulate people's needs
and desires and to build devices we will actually use. In the developed world,
that can mean creating a variety of products that solve even the tiniest daily
inconvenience, rely on our abundant infrastructure and appeal to our relative
wealth. But those conditions don't apply to the world's poorest. So if you're
going to help the developing world, you can't just airlift in supplies we use
in the rich world. You need to understand deeply how the people there live,
then design things that make sense for their specific conditions. 
This trend has its roots in the early 2000s, when business writer CK
Prahalad challenged the then-dominant view of the world's poorest people as
charity cases who would gratefully use anything they were given. Instead,
Prahalad saw the developing world as an unaddressed consumer market filled
with individuals making tough choices to satisfy their needs. A mother in India
facing a trade-off between medicine and mobile-phone minutes is every bit a
consumer -- but her dilemmas are profound, and thus the products aimed at
her need to prove their worth unambiguously. 
We can still be naïve about the many challenges involved in making a product
succeed in the developing world. But designers in recent years have become more
exacting about the delivery and sustainability of devices and
services. What follows are some of the most inspiring projects in
development, including a light for treating infant jaundice that offers
treatment at just ten per cent of western costs, a flask that can
deliver vaccines to the most remote places in the world and a cholera ward that
stops infection from spreading simply by treating its own water. These are
the kinds of innovations that can help people today -- and will lead
to even better-designed solutions tomorrow. Tim Brown 
Vaccine storage device 
Unrefrigerated vaccines spoil a problem in remote regions where electricity
is spotty. Global Good'sanswer: Use a super-efficient cooler that requires just
two bags' worth of ice to stay cold for up to 50 days. Liz Stinson 
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9TUetwsZ9mCnEusGGTHASSu93TsP9V1QaDYavF6opjR8IdeAsbnhpUiKPupLG4tKWpsen4HQgOMD0FuIX5PhwjCF0dhk2h6L0LN7VN8comrxWF1C6jTqifng37y0VDaxcmGER02i6ue8/s1600/27_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9TUetwsZ9mCnEusGGTHASSu93TsP9V1QaDYavF6opjR8IdeAsbnhpUiKPupLG4tKWpsen4HQgOMD0FuIX5PhwjCF0dhk2h6L0LN7VN8comrxWF1C6jTqifng37y0VDaxcmGER02i6ue8/s1600/27_2.jpg" width="212" /></a>A Constant Log 
Spoiled vaccines don't necessarily look spoiled, which is why vaccine
refrigerators in the west often log their temperature history. This one keeps
track of how often the lid is opened, and records temperature and GPS data,
which can be downloaded via USB or relayed via SMS. 
Insulating Layers 
Eight plastic ice-filled containers stack inside the cooler's body. These sit
inside an aluminium bottle wrapped in sheets of the same foil-like insulation
that shields satellites from extreme temperatures by reflecting heat. A
vacuum seal helps keep the inner chamber cold. 
Efficient Retrieval 
Inside are vials for 300 inoculations loaded on to trays that come in
interchangeable sizes to suit different vaccine configurations. They're
reachable through a 12cm opening: 95 per cent of hands can fit through it, but
it's still small enough to limit warm air from flowing in quickly. 
Farmer's helper 
Liz Stinson 
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEZIJMYI1P4D1svV2kWN2vgkOc1B0nksK8KQLCJA1ft7-4uSG_1b4XrgSSwCAhyUWnzl0mXkY_mRoHst97WCH2Z45xU5D8DSyFNiMn63KJfWyYHY-VdoR89QBj-LUA3BtXS_RooocbRNQ/s1600/28_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEZIJMYI1P4D1svV2kWN2vgkOc1B0nksK8KQLCJA1ft7-4uSG_1b4XrgSSwCAhyUWnzl0mXkY_mRoHst97WCH2Z45xU5D8DSyFNiMn63KJfWyYHY-VdoR89QBj-LUA3BtXS_RooocbRNQ/s1600/28_2.jpg" width="213" /></a>In the west, dairy farmers are the first link in a hyper-efficient processing
chain. In Kenya, they do everything themselves, from milking to carrying their
wares to market. As a result, up to five per cent of the milk produced
each year is lost to either spillage or spoilage -- a major economic drain. The
biggest culprit is the jerry can most farmers use to carry milk. So Global Good
created the Mazzi, a container designed to be just big enough to carry a day's
output from the typical three-cow farm, about 9.5 litres. It will hit the
market next year in eight African countries. 
How it works 
A detachable funnel allows farmers to milk directly into the jug so there
are no transfers. The ends of the Mazzi handle (on the back side) are pinched
off, eliminating hollows that can shelter bacteria. The 18cm-wide mouth lets
users reach inside to scrub thoroughly. 
 
 
 
 
Lightsaver 
Jaundice kills hundreds of thousands of babies in India and the developing
world heartbreaking, since it can be cured in a couple of days with a simple
blue light. But photo-therapy devices don't last in settings where replacement
bulbs and parts are in short supply. Working phototherapy units are rare as a
result, so nonprofit product outfit D-Rev developed Brilliance, a unit that's
cheap and robust. Kyle Vanhemert 
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Dependable bulbs 
Hospitals in Nigeria and India often have photo-therapy units - but they're
broken. Among the biggest culprits are compact fluorescent bulbs, which burn
out after treating just 50 babies. Brilliance uses long-life LEDs, which
can treat more than 1,000. 
Fewer LEDs 
LED models cost upwards of £1,800, thanks in part to their hundreds of diodes.
For the Brilliance, D-Rev used computer modelling to optimise light coverage
with just 12 LEDs. It sells for £250, yet it outperforms many state-of-the-art
units. 
Passive cooling 
Most compact fluorescent phototherapy units include fans to cool the bulbs.
Brilliance uses passive cooling - exposure to air - to regulate temperature,
which in turn maximises LED performance. It's cheaper, and has one less
breakable part. 
A familiar look 
D-Rev designed Brilliance with urban hospitals in mind, but it found that some
doctors weren't likely to trust equipment that was too newfangled-looking. So
the device is carefully crafted to look familiar and western. 
Pleasurable protector 
Mark Yarm 
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuz-vPnJoEKK49beDuvULfj6EG3fxeniVaBhuY_Tpn3FAfQ4gxt7ZN4ZtUaXnjhsLuP7KzIQxf1mzVey6qeRq-OlXnXs30hkf75qyLWVf8LdlYA6DsDAbq7_nnQFVMNM4MCjCfbDhyphenhyphenAcY/s1600/female+condom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuz-vPnJoEKK49beDuvULfj6EG3fxeniVaBhuY_Tpn3FAfQ4gxt7ZN4ZtUaXnjhsLuP7KzIQxf1mzVey6qeRq-OlXnXs30hkf75qyLWVf8LdlYA6DsDAbq7_nnQFVMNM4MCjCfbDhyphenhyphenAcY/s1600/female+condom.jpg" width="320" /></a>In the developing world, it's still often taboo for a woman to ask her partner
to wear a condom, so their use remains rare, and female condoms are
uncomfortable, impractical and noisy. So Mache Seibel and a team at Condax are
developing a female condom with an irresistible selling point: pleasure. The
Femex has a thumb pump attached to inflatable tubules that grasp the male
tightly while stimulating the G-spot and clitoris. 
How it works 
The thumb pump and air infusion, partly inspired by Nike Air patents, are
strikingly effective. In tests, women overwhelmingly prefer it to normal
condoms. The Femex can be inserted up to six 
hours in advance - a big draw in regions where women are less empowered and unlikely
to press for protection. 
 
 
Waste zapper 
Mark
Yarm 
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPmesVqMNQjJYYHYnPH0Y7iMzRK4p5S2Tp3ADN73eCfhUFUfuA2LEurOchT1vaBWvbpQdsPY6ZMjpgGvP2ms8BDNjGsZnGwghZ0dirDQgBPhXn4QFSeAdeaoijdkr9erEHievdwIMy3Uw/s1600/30_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPmesVqMNQjJYYHYnPH0Y7iMzRK4p5S2Tp3ADN73eCfhUFUfuA2LEurOchT1vaBWvbpQdsPY6ZMjpgGvP2ms8BDNjGsZnGwghZ0dirDQgBPhXn4QFSeAdeaoijdkr9erEHievdwIMy3Uw/s1600/30_2.jpg" width="426" /></a>Some 2.5 billion people more than a third of the world's population lack
clean toilet facilities. Such poor sanitation causes diarrhoea, which kills
800,000 children each year. A Caltech team led by Michael Hoffmann, a professor
of environmental science, is creating a new toilet to solve the problem. This
design, which recently won a grant from the Gates Foundation, costs less than
one penny per person per day to run, while requiring minimal maintenance. 
Nesting 
To minimise transport costs, the toilets are housed in shipping containers. Two
units will be shipped to India for field-testing this month. 
Power 
The toilet has to work in areas without electricity. But to be sustainable, it
also needs a water-recycling pump. The requisite juice comes from solar panels,
which also power the sterilisation process. To prevent theft, the assembly is
cemented securely in place. 
Water spray 
In Southeast Asia, it's customary to throw used toilet paper in a bin to
prevent pipes from clogging. The bin thus becomes a disease vector. These rooms
reject toilet paper in favour of a purified-warm-water spray and blow-dryers. 
Electrochemical treatment 
Any remaining water is sterilised electrochemically and is ready for another
flush within four hours. By that time, it's also clean enough to be used for
irrigation - creating additional revenue for the toilet's manager on top
of per-use fees. 
Cholera killer 
Haiti's massive earthquake in 2010 led to the deadliest cholera epidemic in
recent history. Next year Gheskio, a healthcare provider, and MASS Design
Group will complete Port-au-Prince's first permanent base for treating the
disease. Temporary clinics can be disease vectors: truckers hauling away
contaminated sewage often dump their loads along the road, re-fouling the
groundwater. Kyle VanHemert 
How it works 
To avoid dumping, all sewage is treated on-site: underground chambers filled
with anaerobic bacteria digest 99 per cent of pathogens. Water is then
chlorinated before it flows to an adjacent garden.

Life-saving designs: a little smart thinking is leading to products that are changing millions of lives

Let's take a minute to praise drip tape. You can find it at your local gardening centre -- thin, perforated plastic strips that ...

19:27

Withings Aura: the bio-alarm clock that monitors your sleep from under a mattress

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Withings wants to help you sleep better, and it wants you to do so by
joining you in bed. 
More specifically, it wants its new <a href="http://www.withings.com/en/aura">Aura
sensor</a> to get under your mattress. This small, soft device will spend the
night subtly reading your body's movements, breathing patterns and heart rate.
A companion device -- essentially a lamp with an embedded speaker -- rests on
your bedside, monitoring the noise and light in your bedroom. Paired to an
iPhone, the Aura system knows how well (or poorly) you sleep, and can begin to
help you understand why. 
It will also aim to determine the optimum time in the morning to wake you,
and does so using light (from the lamp) and sound (from the lamp's speaker).
The same works in reverse to help you fall asleep peacefully. 
After gathering data over a series of nights, the iPhone app presents data
to show how irregular your sleeping is. Do you always wake up after a couple of
hours? Are you tossing and turning all night? Is your heart rate too quick
while you're sleeping? 
It's a system that will seem familiar to anyone who has used the popular
Sleep Cycle app. This app -- with so many downloads it scored ninth place in
Apple's list of the most popular iPhone apps of 2013 -- rests under a pillow
and uses the phone's sensors to monitor sleep, then wake you at the right
moment. 
But Withings is confident its interpretation of the so-called
"bio-alarm clock" is better thanks to its unique sensor and its
pairing with a dedicated lamp and alarm system. It's difficult to test on-site
at a trade show (there are very few "test beds" available on the CES
show floor, and even fewer you'd want to fall asleep in) so we'll hold our
breath for our full review later in the year.

Withings Aura: the bio-alarm clock that monitors your sleep from under a mattress

Withings wants to help you sleep better, and it wants you to do so by joining you in bed. More specifically, it wants its new Aura se...

19:18

Awkward moments from the future of computing

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Technological development is a steady and predictable march --
things get smaller, quicker, better. The path we've taken is the only
obvious one. Two-hundred and forty volts. MP3s. PDFs. They are naturally
occurring phenomena. They're just there, part of the ineluctable unfolding
of history. That's perhaps why technology narratives tend towards the
extremes -- utopia or dystopia, everybody's happy or everybody's
dead. We want to hear a big story. 
So when a new technology hovers into view we need someone to roll out that
map for us. Show us what's predestined, tell us what's going to happen. What
behaviours will emerge? Who will be the winners? Will we finally get pills
instead of food? 
The big story, though, would be a lie. The future of a category such as
"wearables" is so contingent and contested that it's bound to be a
mess. Cultures and corporations will collide with beliefs. Overlapping
aesthetics will trigger new concerns, technologies will rub up against laws,
something will suddenly get really cheap and spawn an irritating Christmas
phenomenon. 
The only way to map this out is fractionally, in fragments. There are only
little stories, bitty possibilities, tiny paragraphs with slightly amusing
subheads. 
So that's what we've got 
And so you know what you're dealing with, let me tell you this. For years now
I've worn one of those original iPod Nanos round my neck on a lanyard, with
headphones. I live in dread of being stuck for five minutes with nothing to
listen to so I always want music close at hand. The Nano slips inside my shirt
and I secretly enjoy pressing the buttons through the fabric -- like I've got
controls on my chest. The fact the screen lights up under my shirt like I'm
Iron Man doesn't hurt either. 
On the other hand, I'm 47. I've lived through several generations of
false technological promise, waves of hype crashing on plastic beaches. I
know we've seen remarkable progress but I also know that no one had any clue
what they were doing. The winners we're looking at now are just the people,
products and technologies that were lucky enough not to fail. That's me.
Now you can calibrate your pinch of salt. 
This will be essential because great new marketing beasts are stirring. A
new technology category is spinning up. Tectonic plates of design, culture
and opinion are being dragged into place, battle lines are being drawn,
metaphors are being mixed and will soon be ready to deploy. You think
there's been hype in the technology world? Wait until the fashion people get
involved. 
The Chinese army in your pyjamas 
You can imagine this: get a bunch of tech executives and designers together
for a brainstorm and ask them to come up with future projects. Perhaps throw in
a presentation about trends for a bit of stimulus. They'll inevitably spot the
potential for health-monitoring products for a rapidly ageing Western
population. They'll think about wearable tech. 
They'll invent intelligent nightwear that monitors your sleep patterns,
wakes you when appropriate, nudges you if you're snoring, and sounds a gentle
alarm if your elderly infirmity gets the better of your bladder. They'll call
them Smart Pyjamas. Or Smartjammies. Or Psyjamas. They'll need power, of
course, so I bet they'll come with a handy bedside charging station. And
they'll have some sort of minimal operating system, so, sewn into the waistband
alongside the washing instructions, there will be a handy guide to resetting
the firmware. And, it'll need some sort of networking kit. We'll probably
get that off that company owned by the Chinese military. They're very good,
and, importantly, they're cheap. 
Nymi wristband 
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Like your fingerprint, the pattern of your heartbeat is unique. Developed by
Toronto-based startup Bionym, the Nymi wristband uses this fact to securely
authenticate a user's identity: when you touch the device, it reads your ECG
using electrodes. The band stays authenticated until it's removed, and
automatically unlocks devices that are in close proximity (and have compatible
apps). An integrated accelerometer and gyroscope also recognise simple
gestures, so you can tailor commands/actions to tasks. getnymi.com 
Technology has a long nose 
You'll have heard about the Long Tail. (In a nutshell: markets have big blockbusters
that sell loads of copies and a long tail of many, many products that sell just
a few. There may be opportunity in the long tail.) Technologies have a long
nose. Before the big break-out moment, before the hits arrive and everyone
notices that it's happened, there's a long nose of precedent and people who got
there first. Whatever you've just launched, or just heard of, someone has
already done it. Someone was working on it at MIT or PARC and the Victorians
did something very similar with telegrams and horses. 
There were MP3 players before the iPod, there were digital music
players before them, there were portable music systems before them and
there's probably a recording of Boudicca's address to her troops made with
a wooden stylus on a parchment cylinder. Don't let it worry you. The only
pickings in the nose are for patent trolls. 
Down the market 
You can look at a new field of technology such as wearable computing and expect
three things to emerge: the productive, the pointless and the perpendicular. 
The productive is the stuff everyone expects. It's what most people are
trying to build, especially with traditionally expensive technologies such as
computing. These are the practical things -- firing tables, spreadsheets,
routing algorithms, printers. The things you can sell to large organisations.
Technologies start here and wend their way into the regular consumer
landscape later on. 
Then there's the pointless stuff, the technologies which seem, to most,
to be a waste of time. They're the hacks that technologists do to amuse
themselves, the ideas that always prove irresistible to every new intake of
interaction-design students, the things that no one can imagine being
popular: Tamagotchi, texting, Twitter. 
And then there's the perpendicular -- the ideas that poke out from the other
two, at completely strange angles. Lolcats, spambots, Google Ngram. 
The first things to hit the mainstream will feel obliged to give us a show
of "productivity theatre". Making a call is even easier on your handy
smartwatch! Keep tabs on your kids with our Intelligent Wrist Bands! Ensure
maximal knee health with our Always-On iTrousers! 
But if wearable is going to get anywhere it'll need to embrace the
pointless. It's the domain of the pointless, the terrain of the trivial. If we
were all being practical, we'd wear identical nylon boiler suits and £4 watches
-- but that's not the species we're in. We're the species that evolved a
fashion industry and Global Hypercolor T-shirts. Efficiency is not a
priority for wearables. What are the cheap fashion applications? What
accessories can Claire's sell? What can you buy at the garden centre and
down the market? 
Because once your technology is there, it is cheap and ubiquitous enough for
the perpendicular possibilities to emerge and that's when things get
interesting. 
NFC Ring 
Using near-field-communication (NFC) technology, the NFC Ring can unlock
smartphones and modified doors, and transfer information such as URLs to
friends' devices -- all with a high five or fist bump. It has 144 bytes of user
memory and contains two different NFC inlays to keep public and private data
separate (so you don't accidentally share your key codes instead of your
contact information). All of the tech is in a metal ring about seven
millimetres wide and, because it uses passive NFC, never needs charging.
Bradford-based developer John McLear raised more than £240,000 on Kickstarter
for the project in August, smashing his £30,000 target. nfcring.com 
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Aspects of gloves 
The dream, of course, is to transition from wearable to invisible. The big,
dumb tech-company wet dream is for all the technology to "go away" --
all the interfaces are in your brain, or your fingers, or in the air. They
seem to think the intermediate step will be gloves. You'll be waving
them around and doing gestural stuff to bring your wearables to life. It's just
so dorky. Some things are just aesthetic dead ends. Bluetooth headsets. Drop
shadows in PowerPoint. Cyber gloves. 
Wearable, meet luggable 
The name is never right. The internet of things is a bad name, social media is
a bad name. Ubiquitous computing is just terrible. The names are always stuck
somewhere between the old paradigm and an overly optimistic marketing spin. My
favourite was the brief enthusiasm for "luggable" computers. The manufacturers
couldn't credibly deliver "portable", so "luggable" popped
up. I love the delicious implication -- you could lug it, but you probably
wouldn't want to. Wearable feels the same. 
Tattoo thermometers 
 
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Wearable thermometers developed by a University of Illinois team are just
micrometres thick and stick to the skin like a temporary tattoo. The patch-like
devices contain temperature-sensitive resistors or diodes in thin metal films
or silicon membranes, and are pasted to a patient's skin with special glue.
There, they monitor temperature with an accuracy of 0.02°C. Although they
currently rely on an external power supply, researchers hope to develop solar,
bioelectric, or radio frequency (RF) sources that could be integrated into the
patches themselves. rogers.matse.illinois.edu 
Talk to the hand 
I've been waiting for the smartwatch most of my life. I've bought many
generations of failed and lumpen plastic from the long nose of wrist computing.
There was the Casio MP3 player watch with barely enough battery to get through
a Napalm Death song. The Fossil/Microsoft thing with the tiny
stylus buried in the strap. The huge Swatch with its own version of metric
time. They were all rubbish and I bought them all, because I grew up watching
Knight Rider and I want a watch you can talk to. And, because it seems to me,
there's a real product opportunity there. It's not just technology hype. The
wrist has been a display area since before the watch and it's conveniently
located right next to our most movable parts. It's the perfect place to put an
outboard augment for the bigger slab of brain and battery we'll carry in our
pockets or bags -- what we'll probably still call our phone, even though its
operations are likely to be dispersed across our bodies and its services
will be sprayed across the cloud. 
Or maybe a bowler 
Actually, just what is the domain of "wearable technology"? What are
we talking about here? Let's leave out things such as nano fabrics for now.
Let's say we mean putting computing (which these days should also include
connectivity) in things people tend to have on their body. That list could
include: shoes, hats, clothes, jewellery, tattoos, intestinal flora and fauna,
wheelchairs, watches, perfume, piercings, prosthetics, wigs, backpacks,
wristbands, bandages, plasters, spectacles and parrots (though that's mostly
confined to pirates). Google Glass would be an example, as would a Nike+
FuelBand and a Fitbit and a Pebble. And so would those belt buckles you
can get with LED displays on them so you can beam "amusing"
messages across the dancefloor. And those light-up shoes that kids wear?
Probably no computing in them yet -- but there will be pretty damn soon. 
The wearable I'm looking for, personally, is a Smart Top Hat. It would
be perfect. Lots of room in there for power, a processor, a camera. You
can carry a decent weight on your head without too much trouble. It could be
voice-controlled and voice-responsive without disturbing other people too much.
Perhaps you could have some clever gestural stuff triggering a pleasant effect
when you politely touch the brim of your hat. You can imagine perching it
on a nice Victorian charging stand. And if you want to go offline, it's
simple: just forget your hat. 
Work wearable 
Stop and think about it: who's doing wearable technology now? Firstly,
obviously, traffic wardens. All those pouches -- a ticket machine, a camera, a
phone. Then the police. Firefighters. Paramedics. Nurses. Then all the
artificial-fibre enthusiasts -- cyclists, hikers, sailors, runners, people
down the gym -- the world of technical apparel. If the technology companies had
any sense they'd now be partnering with workwear makers -- the really
practical, hardwearing stuff that's quite fashionable now. But, if there's one
thing that consistently blindsides technology companies, it's finding their way
into fashion. They all, as Steve Jobs famously said about Microsoft, "have
no taste". Hence, will.i.am. 
That's the part of the wearable revolution that I'm looking forward to
most; the ungainly partnerships that'll bubble out of this mess. American
Apparel and US Robotics, HP and H&M, Burberry and BlackBerry. Just think of
the tech executives sweating on stage in sample-size smart garb. Or the panic
backstage at their catwalk shows -- getting the lights, the models and the
servers all up at the same time. 
And there's a bunch of other aesthetics and concerns mixed in that pot too.
Who's done wearables best in the past? Spies. A camera in a button? A mic in
your lapel? Some of your more artisanal clothiers might appreciate the Stasi
vibe, but most will find it a little off-putting. Here's a question: your
dinner companion has a camera pointing at you, all the time. Would you rather
that camera were big, obvious and blinking on their glasses, or would you prefer
it to be tiny and discreet, nestling on a lanyard? Those are your choices.
Unless you're un-British enough to actually say something about it. And how
will paranoia evolve when everyone is always filming? 
Machina MIDI Jacket  
 
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International design collective MACHINA's first "wearable
machine" is a weatherproof jacket that doubles up as a MIDI
controller (wired 11.13). Sensors hidden beneath the jacket's outer shell, such
as potentiometers that can respond to finger movements and accelerometers that
detect arm movements, create and control sounds to turn the human body into a
music-making interface. Users can configure the sensors to communicate with
devices in different ways. You're encouraged to expand the jacket's
functionality by hacking it -- to mix video, for example, or to interact
with a Kinect. machina.cc 
I want to ride my lifecycle  
The lifetime of a fashionable T-shirt: a few weeks. A piece of technology: a
few years. A great piece of jewellery: a few generations. These things don't
align. You've been wearing in your fancy selvedge jeans for years, carefully
not washing them, getting them just right. But then you have to dump them
because the processor needs an upgrade. What a bummer. 
Point of view 
You're in a meeting. Some dreary person from HR. Tedious PowerPoint. This is
not a productive use of your time. You have deadlines, assignments, to-dos that
need to-doing. Fortunately you've just got some new peripherals for your phone.
There's a motion controller in your watch and a display in the corner of your
glasses. Subtle movements of your hand translate into cursor movements on
a tiny screen. You check your email. Nothing. You suddenly notice you've been
granted new lives in Candy Crush (wearable edition). You should play that now,
then you can really get down to some work later. That's the greater
productivity. 
You're in a meeting. Presenting to the design group. Stuff they really need
to know if they're going to stay employed. They're all looking at you, there
are no laptops and they appear to be listening. But there's a weird vibe. Then
you realise they've all got wearables. Some in their necklaces, some in their
glasses. Some have had that weird augmentation, but they're all off somewhere
else. 
Actually, it's not so bad in these situations. You can normally get their
attention back by hacking into one of their cameras and transmitting yourself
back into their streams -- they love the novelty of that. It's a useful
enough strategy that HR have built the shortcut into your top hat. It's in
personal interviews that these things get unbearable. You're trying to talk to
someone -- an ostensibly normal adult -- but they're coming on like an
adolescent. A distant gaze and sullen mumbling. They're off in wearable space.
Eventually, you have to drag them off to the Faraday cage every HR department
has these days, just so you can force them to listen. 
Will we wear screens on our clothes? Probably. It sounds stupid now, but so
did Snapchat. I'm envisaging a sort-of flexible e-ink thing with a succession
of amusing slogans like you get on T-shirts down the market. 
Eye nailed shut 
Think about drivable computing. Cars got computers before we really noticed.
Engine-management systems, squirrelled away inside, reporting, adjusting,
tweaking. Performance improved significantly but we could no longer fix
our own cars. You needed the right interface to wire yourself up to the engine.
So, gradually, we stopped doing it and the car makers stopped allowing it.
These days they might as well nail the bonnets shut. Is that the endgame for
your Fitbit or your Google Glass? 
Muse headband  
 
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The Muse headband contains EEG sensors that monitor the wearer's brain
signals. It sends this data to a tablet or smartphone app via Bluetooth,
where the brainwave patterns are used in exercises aimed at improving skills
such as memory, concentration, and relaxation. But, although the company focus
is currently on brain health, the headband can also command games, and will
eventually allow users to control devices with their mind. Muse has been
developed by Toronto-based company InteraXon, which raised $6 million (£3.5
million) in Series A funding in August after reaching almost $300,000 through
an Indiegogo campaign. interaxon.ca/muse 
Bikes yes, meetings, no 
If you're old enough you'll remember the minor publishing flurry that
accompanied mass participation in what we used to call "online". We
all had to read books about netiquette so we knew how to reply appropriately to
emails (less formally than letters, apparently) and could answer a text without
alienating our children. It seems quaint and silly now, but new technology puts
us in uncomfortable new situations. Society needs a way to work out a response.
I've noticed, for example, that when my smartwatch buzzes with the arrival of a
text message -- I've got a Pebble, obviously (I told you I was a sucker for
this stuff) -- I really can't help but glance at it. 
When I'm on my bike this is an improvement on my previous behaviour --
risking life and limb by looking at my phone (I know, Mum, I'm sorry); but in a
meeting it just looks like I'm bored. There's not a critical mass of
people who understand what's going on. Hurry up please, people. I want to
look at my watch. 
You can't start with an ecosystem 
The problem everyone has to face is that wearables will really work only when
they're part of an "ecosystem" -- a mutually supportive network of
hardware and software that means that things work together well and improve
each other. Without that, each new wearable has to install and boot its own infrastructure
every time it starts. That's why we'll creep towards a wearable world, edging
out on beams of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. 
Otherwise it will be like trying to sell someone a mouse before they've got
a PC. But there will still be a complicated mess of protocols and standards. If
I were a high-end furniture maker, I'd be working on a fancy dressing-table
with all sorts of hidden drawers and compartments for all the docking and
charging stations our future jewellery is going to require. Delicate, refined,
with lots of power. 
Wave 'em like you just don't care 
We all have our little technology behaviours. Theories about where the Wi-Fi is
strongest and clever ways to balance on a park bench and get a signal. We're
going to look very odd when our devices are embedded, getting our shoes to talk
to our watches, getting our backpacks to sync with our hats, waving our hands
in the air. 
Now I think about it 
JD Wetherspoon will probably open a bar called The Faraday Cage and we'll all
go there for a connectivity holiday and the last real pub quiz in town.Russell
Davies is a creative director at GDS and a partner at Really Interesting Group.
russelldavies.typepad.com/home 
<div class="MsoNormal">
Kapture wristband </div>
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Another life-logging device, the Kapture wristband has an omnidirectional microphone
where you might expect a watch face and continuously buffers audio in a
60-second loop. When you tap it, the previous minute of audio is saved locally
before being transferred to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Soundbites can then be
cut, named, tagged and shared using the features of a dedicated app. The
wristband is designed for style as well as function (it's not intended to be
employed as a spy gadget) and, thanks to a collaboration with 3D-printing
company Shapeways, even comes with the option of a gold-plated grill.

Awkward moments from the future of computing

Technological development is a steady and predictable march -- things get smaller, quicker, better. The path we've tak...

19:14

Self-assembling swarmbots are amazing, and look creepily alive

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Researchers at MIT have created
cube-shaped modular robots that can flip, jump, and assemble themselves into
any number of configurations. And remarkably, they have no external parts.</div>
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They’re called M-Blocks, and they’re
able to move by virtue of an internal flywheel mechanism that can reach speeds
of 20,000 revolutions per minute. And when the flywheel is motionless, it gives
the block its angular momentum. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face,
there are magnets that allow the cubes to attach to each other.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFNrKYKUQNEbHvnfWakDlEZaOuF1LFKIKbep8fjy1TDa9MQs-6FPjIiqoOaMFyjFBTN3TANTwqj67LnnkwqcbwP42hut5434iy_5wtvMvLyT1_QpRC5zAA1R4FREqu6oLflXZcDOrQGlY/s1600/ku-xlarge2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFNrKYKUQNEbHvnfWakDlEZaOuF1LFKIKbep8fjy1TDa9MQs-6FPjIiqoOaMFyjFBTN3TANTwqj67LnnkwqcbwP42hut5434iy_5wtvMvLyT1_QpRC5zAA1R4FREqu6oLflXZcDOrQGlY/s640/ku-xlarge2.gif" width="640" /></a></div>
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 Modular
robots, or reconfigurable robots, have the inherent advantage of being able to
adapt to different tasks or terrain confronting them. They’re able to climb
over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and
move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces.<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 24.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"></div>
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When two cubes approach each other, the magnets are forced to rotate so that
north poles align with south, and vice-versa. This means that any cube can
attach itself to the face of any other. 
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Currently, each M-Block is controlled externally by an operator (a computer
sends instructions via wireless radio). But eventually, the developers hope to
provide each block with its own set of algorithms, thus making them autonomous.
Future versions could even be equipped with sensors, cameras, and even
problem-solving AI, which would make them able to work out how to accomplish
specific tasks on their own. 
Even more conceptually, miniaturized versions could self-assemble like the
liquid steel androids in the movie Terminator II. 
Eventually, swarms of M-Blocks could be used for making temporary repairs to
bridges or buildings, or as self-assemblling, re-configurable scaffolding. They
could also be used to make furniture, heavy equipment, or works of dynamic art. 
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigMa1N-QB18TsFS5BLRbJbHjplWk8dbNzCkDp8sKdrCpVKIMVQOetQfOlWjKtU_xv3lazAznnkZqWP5tsO4uztN02zXwNK0kng8ui5AxfliGRIo5MgsRFkKKILjaYWalH7Wsn-_tnrsLs/s1600/ku-xlarge.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigMa1N-QB18TsFS5BLRbJbHjplWk8dbNzCkDp8sKdrCpVKIMVQOetQfOlWjKtU_xv3lazAznnkZqWP5tsO4uztN02zXwNK0kng8ui5AxfliGRIo5MgsRFkKKILjaYWalH7Wsn-_tnrsLs/s640/ku-xlarge.gif" width="640" /></a></div>
The M-Blocks were developed by John Romanishin, a research scientist in
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He and
his team will detail their findings at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems. 
[ <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/simple-scheme-for-self-assembling-robots-1004.html" target="_blank">Source: MIT</a> ]

Self-assembling swarmbots are amazing, and look creepily alive

Researchers at MIT have created cube-shaped modular robots that can flip, jump, and assemble themselves into any number of configuratio...

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