- OpenROV — open source submersible, funded in 1 day on Kickstarter, now available for purchase.
- Ur/Web — web application language that’s functional, pure, statically typed, and strict. (via IT World)
- MeArm (Thingiverse) — a low cost robot arm. The meArm is designed to be light weight and inexpensive – to be the perfect introduction to robotics. Design on Thingiverse, kickstarting the controller.
- Eric Rodenbeck on Running a Studio (Flowing Data) — Stamen’s founder on the challenges of staying current. I hadn’t realised quite how quickly the visualisation field is changing.
FEATURED STORY
Business at web speed
Out of the fire of Velocity came a new way of doing things forged in a web-centric world. Along the way, something changed fundamentally about not just tech companies, but companies in general. We realized it wasn't just about the web and fast pages any more. Read more ...
Biology as the next hardware
Why DNA is on the horizon of the design world.
I’ve spent the last couple of years arguing that the barriers between software and the physical world are falling. The barriers between software and the living world are next.
At our Solid Conference last May, Carl Bass, Autodesk’s CEO, described the coming of generative design. Massive computing power, along with frictionless translation between digital and physical through devices like 3D scanners and CNC machines, will radically change the way we design the world around us. Instead of prototyping five versions of a chair through trial and error, you can use a computer to prototype and test a billion versions in a few hours, then fabricate it immediately. That scenario isn’t far off, Bass suggested, and it arises from a fluid relationship between real and virtual.
Biology is headed down the same path: with tools on both the input and output sides getting easier to use, materials getting easier to make, and plenty of computation in the middle, it’ll become the next way to translate between physical and digital. (Excitement has built to the degree that Solid co-chair Joi Ito suggested we change the name of our conference to “Solid and Squishy.”)
I spoke with Andrew Hessel, a distinguished research scientist in Autodesk’s Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter Group, about the promise of synthetic biology (and why Autodesk is interested in it). Hessel says the next generation of synthetic biology will be brought about by a blend of physical and virtual systems that make experimental iteration faster and processes more reliable. Read more…
Four short links: 29 December 2014
Open Source Submersible, Web Language, Cheap Robot Arm, and Visualisation Trends
Fairy tales and pop culture as inspiration for design innovation
In this O'Reilly Radar Podcast: David Rose on fairy tale inspiration, and Simon King on designing for future context.
In this podcast episode, David Rose, an instructor at MIT’s Media Lab and CEO at Ditto Labs, sits down with Mary Treseler, O’Reilly’s director of strategic content for our design space. In the interview, Rose defines his mission: “to make technology more elegant, more embedded, and hopefully, more humane.” Technology itself isn’t what drives Rose — he’s looking for inspiration in places that have captured and fueled our imaginations for centuries:
“I’m trying to be very, sort of, fairy-tale driven rather than tech driven. In the book [Enchanted Objects], I go back to some of the patterns that are revealed through Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm or other pop culture, like spy culture or Harry Potter or Frodo, and I try to think about what those technologies are or how those services are transferable from one person to another.
“Super powers like Superman’s ability to fly don’t count because he can’t give that to anyone else, but if it’s boots that allow you to walk many miles that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to walk or a purse that replenishes or a magic carpet that could transport anybody, those qualify because those are objects that can be used by many people. I have gone back, studied these crystal balls and other objects of enchantment and magic, and think about how those could be used as a way to inspire the inventors of The Internet of Things today.”
Bitcoin is a digital money ecosystem
Behind the scenes, there's a lot more to bitcoin and blockchain than first meets the eye.
Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of our recently released book Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas Antonopoulos. You can read the full chapter here. Antonopoulos will be speaking at our upcoming event Bitcoin & the Blockchain, January 27, 2015, in San Francisco. Find out more about the event and reserve your spot here.
Bitcoin is a collection of concepts and technologies that form the basis of a digital money ecosystem. Units of currency called bitcoins are used to store and transmit value among participants in the bitcoin network. Bitcoin users communicate with each other using the bitcoin protocol, primarily via the Internet; although, other transport networks can also be used. The bitcoin protocol stack, available as open source software, can be run on a wide range of computing devices, including laptops and smartphones, making the technology easily accessible.
Users can transfer bitcoin over the network to do just about anything that can be done with conventional currencies, such as buy and sell goods, send money to people or organizations, or extend credit. Bitcoin technology includes features that are based on encryption and digital signatures to ensure the security of the bitcoin network. Bitcoins can be purchased, sold, and exchanged for other currencies at specialized currency exchanges. Bitcoin, in a sense, is the perfect form of money for the Internet because it is fast, secure, and borderless. Read more…
Computational power and cognitive augmentation
A look at a few ways humans mesh with the rest of our data systems.
Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from our new report Data: Emerging Trends and Technologies, by Alistair Croll. Download the free report here.
Here’s a look at a few of the ways that humans — still the ultimate data processors — mesh with the rest of our data systems: how computational power can best produce true cognitive augmentation.
Deciding better
Over the past decade, we fitted roughly a quarter of our species with sensors. We instrumented our businesses, from the smallest market to the biggest factory. We began to consume that data, slowly at first. Then, as we were able to connect data sets to one another, the applications snowballed. Now that both the front office and the back office are plugged into everything, business cares. A lot.
While early adopters focused on sales, marketing, and online activity, today, data gathering and analysis is ubiquitous. Governments, activists, mining giants, local businesses, transportation, and virtually every other industry lives by data. If an organization isn’t harnessing the data exhaust it produces, it’ll soon be eclipsed by more analytical, introspective competitors that learn and adapt faster.
Whether we’re talking about a single human made more productive by a smartphone-turned-prosthetic-brain, or a global organization gaining the ability to make more informed decisions more quickly, ultimately, Strata + Hadoop World has become about deciding better.
What does it take to make better decisions? How will we balance machine optimization with human inspiration, sometimes making the best of the current game and other times changing the rules? Will machines that make recommendations about the future based on the past reduce risk, raise barriers to innovation, or make us vulnerable to improbable Black Swans because they mistakenly conclude that tomorrow is like yesterday, only more so? Read more…
Hardware start-ups now look a lot like software start-ups
Joi Ito on the evolution of manufacturing.
Editor’s note: this interview with Joichi Ito is an excerpt from our recent report, When Hardware Meets Software, by Mike Barlow. The report looks into the new hardware movement, telling its story through the people who are building it. For more stories on the evolving relationship between software and hardware, download the free report.
Joichi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab. Ito, who is also co-chair of the O’Reilly Solid Conference, recalls sending a group of MIT students to Shenzhen so they could see for themselves how manufacturing is evolving. “Once they got their heads around the processes in a deep way, they understood the huge differences between prototyping and manufacturing. Design for prototyping and design for manufacturing are fundamentally different,” says Ito. The problem in today’s world, according to Ito, is that “we have abstracted industrial design to the point where we think that we can just throw designs over a wall” and somehow they will magically reappear as finished products.
The trip to Shenzhen helped the students understand the manufacturing process from start to finish. “In Shenzhen, they have a $12 phone. It’s amazing. It has no screws holding it together. It’s clearly designed to be as cheap as possible. It’s also clearly designed by someone who really understands manufacturing and understands what consumers want.”
Ito also sees a significant difference between what’s happening on the factory floors in Shenzhen and the maker movement. “We’re not talking about low-volume, DIY manufacturing,” he says. Instead, Ito’s students are working through the problems and challenges of a real, live paradigm shift — the kind of gut-wrenching upheaval described in Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. From Kuhn’s point of view, a paradigm shift isn’t a cause for celebration or blithe headlines — it’s a sharp and unexpected blow that topples old theories, wrecks careers, and sweeps aside entire fields of knowledge. Read more…
