THE INVENTABLES WORKSHOP

Thinfilm is a leading provider of roll-to-roll printed, rewritable non-volatile memory products. That was a mouthful so your probably wondering what exactly does that mean.  The company is headquartered in Sweden but spun out of the infamous PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)  and have invented a technology that marries transistors with memory.  This means it is a low cost way to print memory like you have in your computer.  This printed memory can be read, written, and small amounts of data can be proccessed. Below is a picture of the memory printed on a thin film.  The black dots are the memory and the copper colored traces are conductive material connecting them.  As you can see in the picture since the memory is printed on a thin film it is highly flexible. Flexible Thin Film Today Thinfilm announced they will be selling development kits for the technology at Inventables.  The developers’ kit provides designers with the tools they need to experiment with the printed memory sti

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is an interdisciplinary community of students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This community is dedicated to research and education in topics related to computer technology in support of human activity and society. Although the HCII is headquartered within the School of Computer Science, members of the community represent a broad spectrum of the CMU campus including the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tepper School of Business, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Software Engineering Institute, as well as the School of Computer Science.   Justine Cassell  is the Director of the HCII.  Her research interests originated in the study of human-human conversation and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in allowing computational systems to participate in these activities. This new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic elements of conversation and storytelling i

Sometimes you come across things that are just ridiculously cool.  A customer emailed in a link to this  Curbly  post.  The folks over at System Design Studio  come up with lots of cool concepts and products and this is one of their new ones.  They call it the iLamp and it uses silicone and an EL lamp.  I wonder how the lamp holds it shape when bent.  Maybe it uses some shape retaining plastic . The designers of the lamp are named Helbert S. Ferreira and Remi A. Melander and they live in Spain. The manufacturer is System Design Studio.  I can't wait to see one in person.