Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

This photo has been selected for the third The Average Home, which kicks off tomorrow night on windows in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, New York, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Wrocław.

Many thanks to Arne & Katharina!

Banks are facing a massive loss of confidence since their customers have realised that depositing money effectively means allowing it to enter the global financial playground. Those who panicked will need to be slowly re-accustomed to investing because there is no such thing as living detached from the markets anymore.

This apparatus for individual mitigation management allows for anxious customers to place, move or even withdraw their assets from the CEO’s desk in their own home, determining how their money is actually being invested by the bank. It consists of a miniature office, an RFID-enabled table, an e-ink display showing the latest financial headlines, a cable connecting it to the bank and a small figurine with a detachable head. Should the current CEO be replaced, a new head would immediately be issued.

After the kit has been assembled and plugged into the wall, tokens for individual assets can be placed on the table and will, depending on their position on the table, more or less risk-adversely be invested by the bank. The anxious customer will probably watch the office closely, especially the financial headlines, and is likely to take action should he or she become increasingly concerned, adjusting the assets to restore a personal sense of comfort.

The overall design aims to convey a sense of control over systems and inherent risks, giving an individual the possibility to tweak certain aspects of an otherwise immaterial world and thus offering a remedy for the fear of a crash. It is, however, to some extent a placebo since it does not liberate the investor from an overall systemic risk, which can not be escaped.

More photos.

New work from Design Interactions and pretty much everyone else, massive show – Monday, 28th January from 18.30h at the RCA, Kensington Gore right next to Royal Albert Hall.

http://www.exporttoworld.net

Now online: documentation and DIY-materials from our project at the recent Ars Electronica in Linz–a workshop aiming to copy objects from Second Life’s walled economy of simulated things by transforming them into life-size papercraft models.

(Related brief: The future of money)

During the credit crunch of 2007, banks were facing the loss of a great deal of trust–both the trust of other banks but also that of their private customers. Those small-scale clients, in many cases probably for the first time, realized that they do not only deposit their money with their bank, but that they are actually investing it in the global economy. They thus subject it to the complex movement of the markets as well as to inherent systemic risks. In the face of this shock of recognition, Northern Rock’s customers withdrew two billion British pounds in just a few days, leaving the bank in a precarious financial situation.

In order to regain the trust of customers, this project proposes a kind of asset which alludes to bonds and stocks of the past which through illustration and text gave their owners a rich idea of what they were related to. In a similar fashion, this asset shows its current monetary value and related news on itself, using e-ink technology to create a dynamic document. More important, however, is that it plugs into a proprietary wall-socket provided by the bank to connect itself to the global economy. However, the customer decides how deeply the plug fits into the socket , thus determining how risk-averse he or she wants to deal with the market. Should there be a major rupture in the financial system, the more cautiously plugged-in assets will physically disconnect from the socket and be retracted from the market. The document goes blank with nothing but the name of the owner and its current value remaining, effectively becoming a cheque that can be cashed in or re-connected if so desired.

While this design acknowledges that it is impossible to fully disconnect from the economy because the overall systemic risk always remains, it aims at the same time re-gain customer trust by providing them with a sense of domestic control over their assets–which at the same time are in fact roaming across the globe.

(Related brief: Radio)

Our Spaceship Earth is spinning around itself while it circles the Sun. This means that one side is being exposed to light and energy from the Sun while the other is dark and energy is being consumed to brighten up the night.

Recent improvements in solar cell technology suggest that it would be possible to design devices which actually generate power from the sunlight rather then either being a consumer or off.

The Sunlight Exchange proposes a network of light-emitting devices which, employing methods not unlike Nikola Tesla’s vision of wireless energy transmission, power each other over great distances and thus effectively send sunlight from one side of the planet to the other.

During the first term at Design Interactions, we have already worked on and presented three projects, even though often they often are rather sketches than completely finished scenarios. With the upcoming Work-in-Progress show at the end of the month, I will have to select and refine one of them. Let me know which one in your opinion is the most promising one–

Turky, that smart little robot (Related brief: 54p7)

As computers grew ever more powerful, the area of artificial intelligence continued failing to show significant progress in basic skills like the understanding of language and making any kind of subjective judgment–tasks which pose no problem to the most poorly educated human.

As a consequence, individuals are increasingly being integrated in the process of the computed management of the world, making the decisions at which the otherwise highly efficient machines get stuck.

This system, which is also in widely used by what used to be called Job Centre Plus put people back into employment, uses a technology which is not unlike what Amazon Inc. launched as Mechanical Turk in the early 2000s. It was, however, a toy company that make the idea an enormous commercial success when they launched “Turky, that smart little robot”, a product which, while seeming entirely autonomous and almost intelligent to millions of kids, was in fact remotely guided by equally many so-called turkers around the world.

Happy New Year everyone!