As i love supporting good friends when they produce such awesome work, i thought i would post something that a friend has recently been involved with. The video responds to the Munich 2018 Winter Olympics hosting bid. The interface design and animations are by Marc Osswald.

Marc was approach by Schusterjungen & Hurenkinder and Technik und Design GmbH in München to produce an interface system that would coincide with making München stand out as a vibrant and inspiring city to host the famous winter games in 2018.

The interaction helps the viewer navigate themselves around the famous Germanic city of München. The user is able to explore around the ‘proposed’ sites that are being turned into Olympic and tourist hotspots. Many of us already know that München last hosted the games in 1972 in where the Olympia site still stands to this day; I hope that if München wins the bid that the old site will both reflect and being incorporated in a way that responds to its history.

The interaction was used as a showreel piece during the winter Olympics this year in Vancouver, Canada! Bravo to Marc for such nice use of interface design!

The new WEAVE is out since yesterday and it has plenty of envis in it!

This time, it’s all about Hollywood. The cover features four technological visions from the original series of Star Trek. Some of them even made their way into our lifes already.

The article we contributed is dealing with the same topic. It explores how interaction design influences interfaces in Hollywood movies and how movies influence modern interfaces. There is also an interesting interview with Marc Coleran who has designed various interfaces for well known Blockbusters. In addition to the article you can find a list with tons of movies and links about HCI and SciFi at the weave website.

Furthermore my bachelor project “Experiencing Abstract Information” is featured in the education section. Yeah!

Enough reasons to grab your Tricorder and your Communicator and beam yourself to the next kiosk to buy a copy of this fine magazine for interactive design!

Two months ago I received a mail from André Menks a member of Multilogica Shop, a brazilian Arduino supplier. They had the idea of to producing an embroidered Arduino patch for handing it out to their customers. They were not sure, if they could have the right to use the logo for that. As the creator of the icon we had an agreement with David A. Mellis to publish it under Wikimedia Creative Commons. André told us about that they were planing, because this should be a »real« extension of our creation. We realley loved that idea and customized the logo a bit, so that the vector file was perfect for the stitchery. After that they only had to order the production at a specialized company and wait for the results. André and his guys from Multilogica Shop were satisfied.

Two days ago we received a package with three samples and we definitely like it. It‘s a good feeling to see something that was created for screen usage, getting to a real product, that can be touched. If you are in Brazil you have the choice to be one of the firsts to use the Arduino icon patch. It has approximately 6,5 cm and can be hot applied on T-shirts, caps backpacks or wherever you imagine. By this moment they recommend to take care in applying over synthetic fabrics. Soon they will publish a tutorial about application. If you want you can order it for 10 Reais (4,40 EUR) at their Shop.

Thanks to the big ashcloud coming from this vulcano with that extraordinary name my flight to Munich was cancelled today. The flights for tomorrow haven‘t been delayed yet, but you never know. The alternate transportation could be by bus. 20 hours from Madrid to Munich? We will see…

We uploaded some »behind the scenes« pictures of Campus Party Madrid to flickr. Some official pictures and video will be uploaded after we arrived back at Munich someday…

WEAVE #4 is out! And once again we contributed an article, this time about creating audiovisual compositions using what we call a visual synthesizer.

Sounds familiar? It sure does, because what we are talking about is the basic framework on which our Quasar artwork has been built.

And if you know Quasar, you’ll certainly recognize the cover art of this issue! There are four different versions of the cover, all finely polished stills from the Quasar artwork. So I’d suggest you to get out there and buy all four of them!

The idea is simple and nice. Take a wind mill and put some colorful LED lights on it so everybody can see. The so called Siemens SuperStar was created by multimedia artist Michael Pendry for the company and was displayed till January in Munich (close to the Allianz Arena). Pendry convinced both Siemens and the Stadtwerke München (Munich City Utilities) to let him install this art piece on one of the utilities’ wind turbines. It was created to showcase and promote sustainable energy and green innovation. Passing cars on the motorway could find this a little bit distracting, but it looks good.

9.000 OSRAM LEDs were superglued to a wind turbine in just under two weeks. Thanks to smart energy systems like smart grids and power highways, it only consumes as much energy as a hair dryer! The 9.000 LEDs put out as much light as 20.000 Christmas candles.

I think it´s pretty amazing that a project like this was done in Munich, a city which is known as a conservative city, but Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, has been an enthusiastic proponent of the energy-efficient spectacle from the start and hopes his city will be the first of its size to meet all energy requirements from renewable sources.

via Andreas Brendle

P.S. The nerdy part of the installtion. Look at this beautiful array of LEDs…

Tomorrow the envis team will be hanging around at Schwäbisch Gmünd to have a look at the latest work from the students. We expect some innovative concepts at the media lab like the last years project from Jonas Heuer and Jürgen Gräf. Notput is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting.

All basic clefs, note values and accidentals exist as single wood elements. Whole, half, quarter and eighth notes differ not only in their form, but also in their weight: Long note values are heavier than short ones. The idea is pretty simple and the experimental approach is enjoyable and informative at the same time.

Why don´t we use tools like that at school?

New year, new weave! The third issue of this well done magazine about interactive design is available in stores. Envis precisely is featured from page 50 – 53 within the article about the Center for New Technologies at the Deutsche Museum (Munich). But there´s more to it. I held an interview with Arduino co-founder David A. Mellis about Open Source Hardware. You can read more about at page 106. All things considered this issue is one of the best weave. It´s nice to see and feel the development process which is going on right now. I like the broad range from web development to interactive installations and design science. So grab yourself a new weave, it´s worth beeing read. At this time Philipp is preparing the next article about a visual synthesizer. You will find it out at weave 02.10 coming out on 15th march 2010…

We spent the better part of last weekend in Graz with the fine students of FH JOANNEUMs information design department. They were taking part in a workshop on Processing and the general idea of computed and generative design.

Our basic idea was to present the students with snippets of code that can be combined in different ways in order to foster creative use of programming languages.

The outcomes quite frankly exceeded our expectations. You can explore them in their full variety in this flickr set.

Congratulations to all participants for what you achieved:
Christoph Mauerhofer
Franz Ferdinand Kubin
Gianna Tatzel
Julian Kogler
Lisa Weishäupl
Magdalena Kahr
Moritz Rzehak
Roland Mariacher
Thomas Raggam

We hope you enjoyed the two days as much as we did!

We received a mail from a friend this morning, who told us that our Arduino Icon Redesign was brought to life. The Massimo Banzi´s students of CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) baked a cake based on the icon for the Arduino IDE.

And Massimo Banzi seemed to be surprised, but happy. How long did he spent eating this Arduino Mega Cake…?

via Arduino Blog

Last week we received a visit at our new office at Morassistraße 18. Industrial designer Iris Koser came around for a short lunch break. We talked about future projects and her Chocolate Furniture, a noble but extravagant piece of furniture inspired by a bar of chocolate… want to know more about it? Read more about it at the official PDF.

If you want to visit the new envis precisely office, just give us a call and we can arrange something…

Barely a week has passed since the Deutsche Museum opened up the gates to our latest project, the brand new ZNT (Center for New Technologies). This week the Museum published this »Making of« Clip. Can you imagine that it looked quite like that one week before the opening? With a hundred of willing hands working there and some serious sleep deprivation the exhibition could open in time.

via youtube channel of Deutsches Museum

Today is the release date of the brand new book called »Generative Gestaltung«. It was written by some people which I know back from the good old days at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd. It´s a comprehensive and monumental book about generative design. If you want to learn more about typography, you probably will pick »Lesetypgrophie« by Friedrich Forssman and Hans Peter Willberg. If you want to know more about generative systems, you have to pick this one. 500 pages full of experiments, tutorials and tons of code. It will cost about 75 EUR at amazon. An english version will be released soon…

You probably know the website wefeelfine.org. We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases »I feel« and »I am feeling«. Jonathan Harris has written a book about it now. You can see a preview about that on the official website. It contains some inspiring infographics. This one will be released on 1st of December and will cost about 20 EUR at amazon.

This post has exceptionally nothing to do with interaction design or media technology. It´s  just about music… Tonight The Skydrunk Heartbeat Orchestra will release their third album called »Grown«, which has been featured at FM4, Bayern3 and EgoFM the last weeks and will be released by Cologne based indie label Rookie Records. As the designer of the original bandlog and first cover artwork I feel kind of »emotional connected« to this guys. When you will listen to their music you find out that their style is hard to describe… I would call it a mixture of Ska, Rock and Polka. Just check the Skydrunk Player or feed your iTunes with some fresh stuff.

The price of our recent quiz goes to Sabine for suggesting these lovely wall graphics that made the geek who dwells deeply within all of us smile. Congratulations, you will receive your prize shortly.

The special prize for the most saucy answer goes to Joni. Unfortunately we don’t have the stamps you’re suggesting yet, so you’ll have to drop by here in Munich in order to get your magazine  ; )