I’m prout to say that I was in the team that created “Window to the world” at CIID for Toyota.
More info here!

Well, it’s not that I want to promote this case as a design piece, but this give me an opportunity to talk about something else.
I’ve been asked so many time: “do you feel you can say you’re a designer?” my answer is ” I think I couldn’t be anything else”. I love projects. This case it’s an example. I thought about it for some days, I thought how it should be and look like, and then I could have sat and do it…no. I didn’t. I sketched it!

I made instruction for myself for how to build it… and you could think that I did it not to forget the plan. Maybe… but that’s not the ultimate reason since it’s a one day project, and my memory it’s not that short. I draw the step by step to see if what I hat in my head before touching the material was real. To check if my abstraction had ground in the reality. If looking back the process it’s different it means that I made a wrong preview of how the material will react under my hands. And this doesn’t happen only with material stuff. I like to fix in my mind everything I can learn from processes…there is something magic when the knowledge pass under your skin without you understanding how it got there.

Washsurfing it’s a service that allow to share private washing-machines.
This concept was developed in three days during the IxDa11 student competition, the general topic was “use, not own”. Thanks to this concept I won the honorable mention, but beside the prize it has been an amazing experience.

I got in to the finals thanks to a project called Laundrym, a pretty complex project that tried to transform Laudromat in social shared spaces.
I kept those three days to review the ground research that I had to explore a different approach, and start to build something much simpler, and that could be realized now.
Sharing an heavy object as a laundry has different implication than landing an hairdryer because it’s heavy! You are stuck in a physical space with somebody: this could be a problem, but what if we see it as an opportunity?
I really believe that sharing it’s a matters of behaviors before than sharing the real object. Sharing it’s something that we’re not trained to do anymore. In somehow people need to be re-educated to share.
People don’t share anymore because (maybe) it’s not needed, and so we don’t know who live next door, but we miss the fact that we don’t know who’s our neighbor, because this could make us feel more safe for example.
There is a lot of things that we miss from the past, I’m often asking to myself if the improvement of technology can give us those things back… things that people feel they lost because of the technology improvement.

During the conference I had the opportunity to attend the keynote talk by Richard Buchanan, and he said something that made me think a lot, and express something that I had in my head but I couldn’t find the way to say it, and for sure a way that is as good as his: “…we are not building interactions between people and things, but we are building interactions between people through things…”

Thanx Jacek

We went to the supermarket and bought ingredients we liked, and when we got home we made a list of things to cook:
°° ham rolls with ricotta, soy bean sprouts and paprika
°° melon with cream and rigatino
°° brown pasta, grapes, pecorino, pine nuts, yogurt and pepper (in the oven)
°° rolls filled aubergines with pear + different spices on it – curry or curcuma or turmeric
°° rolls filled leaks fried in orange juice + cinnamon
°° rolls with avocados with ricotta + paprika powder
°° strawberry with balsamic vinegar

if you want to know more about this crazy evening Ishac is much more scientific that me in documenting the process!

Here we are… the final project is in front of us. What am I going to do? Don’t know yet exactly. I’ve picked 4 words that synthesize my starting point: social, collaborative, performance, esthetic.
In the other hand, some of my schoolmates suggested me to work with food. I don’t think I would like to work with food, because it is my passion and I don’t want to reinforce the Italian stereotype. But. I also thought that there is something that embrace these words, that I’ve already experienced: making the homemade pasta together. So, I thought that this could be an interesting experience using the same process, doing something completely different. Something that if you do alone is so boooooooooring and take toooooooo much, but if you do it together it has some kind of magic…like learning physical computing for someone that has no knowledge about it.
I was thinking… how can I merge this with something that has no smell or taste? I said to myself….let’s start from the experience! So I asked some friends to help me, and teach me an Arduino recipe, and make it together.

Yesterday, the first cooking lesson happened for real, with Jacek Barcikowski as grandma that know the secrets of homemade pasta.
I have to say, it was amazing to learn with him. The experience was much closer to making pasta than I expected.
Work with hands, drinking coffee, gossiping… everything seems so easy!

We took a project from instructables, Jacek had the components already, because he wanted to make this little robot for a long time, but he never had the time. So for him, teaching me something was also an opportunity to do something he couldn’t do. Even reading some instructions (I hate instructions!!) is not that boring, if you share it, like it was an horoscope.

I’ve learned how to hack a 180° degree servo and turn it in a 360° one.
And also how make it work with Arduino…AMAZING!
As for the pasta process, in the end, you have this feeling of “l’ho fatto io!” (I made it!)

It was also interesting to observe the people walking in the room, and how they were catched by the project, hanging around, giving suggestions etc.

more at : http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/04/16/bendable-musical-shoes-for-nike-and-how-they-were-made/

One year ago I took part to a competition (Made in Macef) with this project, and now is on sell!
You don’t find your keys? Phone them!