POWER-AWARE CORD
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The Power-Aware Cord(2010) is a power strip cord designed by The Interactive Institute, which is a Swedish nonprofit whose prime focus is on experimental IT & design research and dedicates “to the creation of ground-breaking user experiences”. The power strip’s goal is to make users more aware of their power consumption. This is possible by illustrating the usage of electricity. The cord has embedded wires around a cable forming spirals. These spirals pulse light as current is drawn. The more current being used, the brighter and faster the spirals are.
As you can see from the video above the cord is very responsive and also revealing. By illustrating power consumption it reveals to the user/consumer how unaware we can be about our consumption and how we can often forget or take for granted the process of electricity generation. This design also reflects on our consumption and on the way we consume. By making this consumption visible it is easier to understand how much we consume. This allows the user of this device to reflect and think twice about using too much electricity.
What impresses me about this product is that it is able to turn something that is essentially invisible to us, and make us aware of this action. Just by making us aware, our actions change and we begin to interact with more caution and begin to have some awareness of our consequences.
YEARS
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Years(2011) is an art work by the German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck. His piece consist of a modified turntable that uses a camera to interpret slices of wood into data that is translated into music. It is fascinating to observe the music being played as the circular disk of wood rotates. Personally what attracted me to this piece is the concept of data translation. Traubeck does an excellent job at this by showing how the information found in tree rings can be used and adapted into not just sound, but music.
Traubeck shows the second principle of Slow Design, that being expand. By interpreting the tree rings as music, this art work goes beyond what we typically associate tree rings with, and uses the rings to tell a story, the story of the tree. Along with this principle, the art work also reveals attitudes towards nature and the relationship we have established. A tree is no longer what your floor is made of, and the patterns in a piece of wood now become a part of the tree’s song. We often forget that the trees that we use for our products take years to mature. During this time a tree forms rings, the shape of the ring is influence by the environment and ecology that the tree is in. All this information is stored in the rings. This information that we usually never think about is what makes the music.