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.

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.

The last half of 2008 have been spent working on a Hamburg University of Applied Arts joint venture between the design and computer science departments. The question we’re addressing is the following:

Is it possible to design an organism that communicates through different senses, and in such a way, that the viewer becomes the designer as well as part of the object?

With the intersection of design and technology we’re trying to create an organism that responds to the user. The exhibition is the 6th of February and it’d be great to see you there.

While in Paris this past spring we experienced a vertical garden before entering the BHV Homme back entrance to stock up on agnès b. Definitely something we would like to see more of in cities. Gridskipper has a nice couple of links to other vertical gardens in Paris.

MIT researcher David Merrill has created a compelling form of interaction through siftables (ambient devices):

Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives.

As the price of technology lowers so does the exposure to new ideas rises. We would love to use some of these in our research project we are doing with the computer science department at the University of Applied Arts in Hamburg.

After creating our one page support for Obama, we came across an eco-friendly way to show our support: Obama spoke cards. They arrived today along with an extra and sweet Shepard Fairey sticker. Very cool! Stencil by art-n-craftivist Margaret Coble. Get yours here.