“The sun is our natural light source. Our homes are filled with artificial light replacing it, undeliberately disrupting our biological clock.”

“This product works autonomously with a light sensor. During the day, mechanical flowers are closed enabling sunlight to come in. When sun sets, the flowers open and start to emit light. In this way, awareness for a beautiful phenomenon will be brought back.”

via Wendy Legro and more information here.

Installationen & Objekte, Eröffnung am Do. 22 April um 19 Uhr, 23-29. April Di – Fr 15 – 20, Sa 14 – 20

Im Gängeviertel / Kutscherhaus, Caffamacherreihe Ecke Valentinskamp, Hamburg, Germany (weitere info)

Mit Katrin Cornils, Gesa Hansen, Fee Keller, Svenja Keune, Marissa Kimmel, Milena Krais, Janina Schlichte, Gesa Troch and Paul Zürker geleitet von Prof. Franziska Hübler, Dr. Prof. Kai von Luck and André Jeworutzki

Marissa Kimmel (a student in one of Franziska’s classes at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg) created this spellbinding video in Processing with music by Geometry Jega.

More info here.

An art project that uses smart textiles to allow participants to play pong together by slow dancing. Or, how geeks become more comfortable slow-dancing with members of the opposite sex.

via Ed Keeble.

A workshop for the Miami Ad School Europe and a presentation for the Art Directors Club – Germany all with the same goal: Figuring out how to survive when everything we know about how we communicate is going through a Darwinian evolution.

As we are city-dwellers most of the year, we wanted to created a relationship with a special tree. It was with this in mind, and an idea taken from one of our favorite children’s books “The Giving Tree” from Shel Silverstein, that informed our entry into Nokia’s PUSH initiative. The idea was to wire a tree with various sensors, an arduino board and the Nokia N900 and have it publish the movements it made via Twitter.

You can now follow our eclectic collection of art, technology and design on FFFFound! Thank you Jemma.

Nearness is a Rube Goldberg machine that works with with RFID. Nearness is the first exploration into designerly applications for RFID by BERG. Berg is the new name of design duo Schulze & Webb.

Bare Conductive, a technology developed by RCA Industrial Design and Engineering masters students Bibi Nelson, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt Johnson, is “skin-safe, conductive ink”. When painted on the skin, it allows a current to be passed through the body without causing an electric shock.

Calvin Harris recently created a Humanthesizer using bare conductive showing how this can be applied to music among other things. If you have the chance to make it to one or RCA Final Show’s, it’s well worth it!

Two weeks ago we took part in Hamburg’s first ever planning barcamp. The idea was to invite 20 planners to each present for 10 minutes and then discuss for 10 minutes a topic of their choosing. We decided to talk about Germany’s lack of a culture of failure and its impediment in creating innovation.

Have a look for yourself and let us know what you think.