I recently joined a bunch of really interesting colleagues as a member of Council, a “thinktank for the Internet of Things”. Many thanks to founder Rob van Kranenburg for inviting me.

Council’s first event, organised in association with tinker.it and LIFT@HOME, will be happening in Brussels on 4th December:

Are You Ready for the Internet of Things? (register via LIFT site)

4th December 2009, 0930-2200
IMAL, Brussels.

Should be a great day — I’m looking forward to it. Maybe see you there.

Since the start of the summer I’ve been a collaborator on The Power of 8, a project led by Anab Jain/Superflux and featuring a fascinating team of people.

The last few weeks have been exhilarating, exhausting and inspirational, leading up to the final exhibition opening last night at Watermans gallery, as part of London Design Festival. Please go and check it out if you’re in London — it’s open until 11th October. Watermans is just a short bus-ride from Gunnersbury station (Overground and District Line).

Nigel Batten’s Batsocks TellyMate shield is a low-cost solution that’s very easy to use since it listens to the arduino’s serial output, so you can use the standard Serial library to send VT52-compatible escape commands as if you were talking to a serial terminal. It’s very old-school (part of its charm, I think!), only B/W, 38×25 characters and uses the Code Page 437 character set found on the original IBM PC.

You can buy it direct from Batsocks in the UK, or from Sparkfun in the US. If you have the appropriate ATmega chip sitting around you can grab the firmware and burn it yourself. Keith’s also written up some great documentation on how he overcame the technical challenges behind generating the bitmap.

A more powerful add-on is the Propellurino, based on the Parallax Propeller processor which conveniently has colour VGA out and a PS/2 port for mouse or keyboard. The shield includes MIDI in, a microphone input and stereo audio out as well.

This shield’s available as a kit from e-robotix in Germany.

Disney’s new movie G-Force (2009), which features various rodents using hi-tech weaponry and surveillance gear, would seem to owe something to James Auger’s project Augmented Animals (2005 or earlier).

In particular, night-vision goggles on a hamster vs guinea pigs and a mole.

Just recently returned from exhibiting at New designers in London with the rest of my fellow class mates from Napier school of creative industries. It was an eye opening and thoroughly interesting trip and something I’m glad i experienced. The projects and stands on display were of a very high standard and it was great to see what fellow students had been working on and produced. There was a very diverse, impressive range of work.

Our stand (pictured above) received good critical acclaim for our process orientated presentation, clever use of recyclable cardboard boxes and diverse appearance in relation to many of the other university stands.

Tomorrow, we (me and my course mates from Edinburgh Napier) will be setting up our stand at New Designers. The exhibition is at the Business Design Center near Angel and we will be at stand F11. We encourage as many people as possible to come and see our work.

Puppets of propaganda or POPS for short is my final outcome for my major project at Edinburgh Napier university. The project stemmed from dissertation which looked at Guerrilla tactics in design. I undertook this project with the help of my final year atelier group leader Chris Hand.

Taking influence from such projects and groups mentioned on this blog such as Troika’s guerrilla projector, IAA, Tad Hirsch’s trip wire and after a lot of prototyping, testing, user research. I finally arrived at this final outcome which i am still constantly iterating.

The proposed is a Toy for children 6-11 years old which allows them to record a subversive message and play it back without being present…..

A project which looks at subverting the preconceived ideology of toys to promote anonymous audio freedom of speech. Aiming to challenge the social idea that children should be seen and not heard, the puppets act as a medium for social communication in the hope of provoking social commentary. The puppets work by allowing the child to record a message and communicate it anonymously when the inbuilt sensor is triggered.

The puppet has a microphone in the left hand ear and a tactile switch in the right hand ear. The child records a message by holding in the record button and speaking into the puppets ear. The puppet then listens to the child and the message is saved onto the inbuilt Arduino board which is linked to a SPIKENZIELABS VOICE SHIELD (Pictured bellow)

The child then places the puppet in their desired environment to ensure it has the best effect and there message his heard. The puppet is then triggered by the inbuilt sensor when someone walks within a certain distance ( This is currently a variable which is being explored) by doing so the child’s desired message it replayed anonymously to the masses through the speaker in the face of puppet.

when designing the puppet i undertook a very iterative approach, Modelling and re – modelling over and over again until i was happy with the form of the puppet, This was after a lot of sketching and research. The shell of the puppet is currently produce via a CAD file which is printed of to form the solid shell using a 3D printer.

Soft versions of the puppets are currently being worked on and tested, producing soft ones will allow for the puppet to be hidden around the house, in amongst soft furnishings, cushions etc. Sort of like domestic camouflage.

The puppets were exhibited in me degree show – Napier creative showcase, along with the rest of my fellow students work to great success and warm review.

I will Also be exhibiting at new designers 2009 from the 14th of July. New designers is one of the biggest design shows in Britain and a must see for anyone interested in the creative industries.

Feel free to visit me at www.rosscoffield.com or contact me at ross@rosscoffield.com.

all images copyright of Ross coffield 2009.

The voting for the Dwell 2009 competition is now up and running on the dwell website – www.dwell.co.uk

There’s some really nice, interesting proposals from both professionals and students alike this year!

My design T3 cups and stands are lucky enough to be one of the designs up for the second stage of voting. (Pictured bellow)

Its a public vote to see which designs go through to the next stage of voting .

The link to my voting page is

http://dwell.co.uk/designfordwell.php?design=46

Go on, have a look and vote for the designs you like, hopefully mine is one of them!

The winning design gets put into production and there’s a competition running to win the winning design for simply just voting!! it takes less than a minute!

Thanks if you vote!

So my package from shapeways arrived this afternoon. Need to just glue it all together now

Today’s experiment was a continuation of mondays experiment. Continuing my research into alternative perceptions i experimented having cameras for eyes. The plan was to pick up two pin hole cameras to attach to my hands and wire them to two LCD screens to act as eyes.

The experiment was to discover what it would be like to see out of different parts of the human body. I choose the hands due to the flexibility of the arms. As i don’t have the experience to wire two pin hole cameras to two small screens, i decided the quickest way to do it was with just a webcam and my laptop screen.

despite focusing on just the screen i could still see parts of my surroundings so the next step was to cover my head and the laptop so i could only see the what the camera could see.

What’s interesting is that due to the flexibility of the hands, it asks questions to what else they could be used for? Could they be used for vision and sensing our environment? The experiment reminds me of pans labyrinth, where one character has eyes on their hands. Using other sensors could the hands become an ultimate sensory device? 

Roberto’s Experience- Overall a very interesting experience. The camera was not able to process fast moving objects and as a result you had to take your time whilst walking. Also, the view that is displayed on the screen shows an image greater in size to that of human vision, therefore making objects look closer than they actually are. The experiment is a clever way to highlight perception alteration.

More to come…….