Wooden Trackmate Laser Cut Tags, originally uploaded by jeanbaptisteparis.

Laser cut trackmate tags, each tag is unique (trillion combinations).

trackmate.sourceforge.net/

Urbanwild Translator, originally uploaded by jeanbaptisteparis.

A wooden exoskeleton to turn your mobile phone into a urbanwildife scanner and animal language translator. Project done in collaboration w/ Dana Gordon for Harvard conference on ecological urbanism

Harvard GSD will host soon a conference on Ecological Urbanism. In collaboration with Dana Gordon, Dale Joaquim and Myriel Milicevic, I will present some devices that make us aware of wild life in the city and how we share services with neo-urban species. This work originated with Cite Sauvage, our first workshop in Berlin, is now going to GSD and later to the Sustainable City flavoured exhibition at the Media Lab next month.

Urbanwild Radio, originally uploaded by Dana Gordon.

Here is a presentation i created for a panel on ‘Metaphor we Design By’ with fellow Media Lab researcher Susanne and Amit.

I discussed among other things of the importance of visual representation in the crafting of new technologies since these depictions oblige their makers to operate choice and decide how to shape ideas that are often very complex. This simplification process has a cost: it turns scientific topics to poetic artefacts, not valid anymore, but shareable outside an elite community.

Trackmate, originally uploaded by jeanbaptisteparis.

Trackmate is an open source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system. The Trackmate Tracker allows any computer to recognize tagged objects and their corresponding position, rotation, and color information when placed on a surface. Trackmate sends all object data via LusidOSC (a protocol layer for unique spatial input devices), allowing any LusidOSC-based application to work with the system..

Some articles about it in instructables, createdigitalmusic and make magazine.

From toys to collaborative work, boardgames to augmented surfaces, the conference TEI 2009 that takes place now in Cambridge UK presents all the latest trends in the domain of tangible interfaces and physical computing. Tom Igoe gave a great keynote this morning about the importance of DownCycling and reusing existing electronic devices with new purposes, like the REWARE project of Hans Christoph Steiner at Eyebeam in Nyc. He talked as well of the PlantR project that uses cellphones to probes soils in order to know what kind of plants can grow at your home, a mobile phone version of EasyBloom.

The second keynote was given by Ayah Bdeir, an artist from Lebanon previously in CompCulture group at the Media Lab. Her works in the domain of wearables technologies present different level of critical works around identity, sexuality and hacking. One of her last project, LittleBits presents a toolkits to use electronics as materials. These magnetically connected boards are intended to be used by designers and artists to create rapidly prototypes of interactive devices.

And the last keynote, very inspirational was Durell Bishop, product designer and inventor of fantastic physical interaction paradigms in the early 90’s. Bishop created the marble answering machine, that inspired Spielberg for Minority Report precog information tokens. He is also the creator of one of the first system for tangible video editing.

Electric exhibition at Palais de Tokyo around the works of Nicola Tesla and the HAARP projects situated at Gakona in Alaska.