Grinding in probability
Personally, I adore watching designers try to reinvent the mid-1980s—I am fond of the look for a multitude of reasons. To be more precise, it’s more that era’s take on the future of design that I truly love. Science & speculative fiction’s relationship with fashion is something that just about anybody is aware of by now. The ability to not be bounded by tradition and/or possibility is (finally) really spilling over into the most commonplace venues. This, in turn, widens the skies for the truly expansive ideas.
During this beautiful dreaming, comparatively simple jewellery and accessories seem to be popular. Maybe it’s the portability and modular aspects, the general un-scariness of it. It’s such a gateway though, I mean—there’s such a short jump from sweet lovey ideas to slightly invasive useful tools to implanting things and gently pushing the definition of humanity. But let’s not prod that interesting beast with a stick right now. What we’re looking at here are accessories, gadgets and usefulness. Or non-usefulness. It depends on your definition.
Social networking sites, for instance. The internet and how we use it in general. An MIT student group have made this thing, it projects information and “virtual gadgets” into what they charmingly call the “tactile world.” Bonus: you can interact with it.
In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes’ goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses . . . When he encounters someone at a party, the system projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to provide more information about him — his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests.
Talking about this with a friend, her first thought went to implants. My first thought went to accessories. Because really, how boss would that be?
I mean, really.
Design and tech are starting to go steady and I like it. Secretly because I am a huge nerd.
