Jake William Thomas Young

The Design Studies module in semester two involved two projects called Revolutionary and Evolutionary. Revolutionary asked to analyse a familiar household product and identify at least three defining characteristics that are strong visual identifiers of the product’s purpose, operation or meaning. Then to redesign the product without referring to these characteristics at all. Evolutionary asked for me to choose a recognisable brand that has been developed over a long period and produce a timeline showing the ways in which it had developed. Then to identify the brands visual characteristics which define it. Following that I had to redesign it with reference to those characteristics in its further evolutionary step forward for that brand.

So the Blue Skies project is over and the portfolio for it handed in! The whole thing has been based around conceptual design for around twenty year in the future, but then this appears! It’s amazing what we can do with design and technologies today.

Follow Link to BBC: Blind man ‘excited’ at retina implant

The Blue Skies project is complete. Here is the portfolio gallery.

Alternatively you can view them at a higher resolution on flickr here.

I made a little video showing some of what I got up to over the Easter break. Mainly made this because I’ve never had the chance to play with Adobe Premiere.

Check out what’s going on over at Google - Project Glass.

Design Statement: Revolutionize online social interactions in a way that is not feasible to realize using the technology of today or the immediate future.

This statement will guide me through the designing process. It acknowledges the parameters of the initial project brief, while being considerate to the results of my research.

Humanities recent social movements have all had the same vital push from the rise of extraordinary technologies. Technology is now so sophisticated and widely available that soon everyone on the planet will possess the adequate tools for social change. The technologies have helped organise and give voice to the oppressed, allowing large scale complicated conversations to be successfully made. News is now within the people’s power, not in the hands of the corporate media. It is forcing governments to serve the people, and not the other way around. By 2020 three billion new minds will come online to help solve humanities grand challenges, and as technological and human connections are becoming more natural to us all, the speed at which this can be done will increase at an ever advancing rate.

The Blue Skies project brief states that “Feasible concepts using the existing technology are not eligible.” Recent advances in technologies include:

• Cloud computing
• Sensor and networks
• Robotics
• 3D printing
• Synthetic biology
• Digital medicine
• Nano-materials
• Artificial Intelligence
• Virtual Intelligence

My designs cannot be feasible using these current technologies. They will exist in a world where these technologies are the norm. You will be able to download any product from the cloud to your 3D printer, redefining the concept of online shopping and home delivery. The world will be ever increasingly social with connections so vast and complicated that no human would be able to understand them.

The union between humans and their technologies will redefine life itself. By today’s definition we may become cyborgs, whereby a person’s physical and mental abilities become superhuman by mechanical assistance.

Developments being made in smart material research promise to provide material capabilities beyond anything we have today. Graphene is currently at the forefront of many scientists minds. The miracle material could permit the functions of a smart phone on something the size of a credit card, while facilitating processors many times more powerful than those viable today. Some say it will replace silicon as the basis of all electronics. Its 300 times stronger than steel, but flexible. The application of this material within products could create a whole range of new wearable, bendable, colour changeable and even transparent electronic devices.

It is almost certain that in the next decades we will be introduced to products with technological capabilities that is only the stuff of science fiction now. Already in developed countries we are seeing the implementation of robotics and high technology applications. As robotics improves we will experience jobs being threatened that we never thought would be. Even within fields like medicine jobs may be threatened as robots become better at caring for our health needs than other humans can. Virtual intelligence machinery is already entering our service based jobs with the introduction of automated tills and within high tech products like Siri in Apple’s iPhone4s.

Virtual intelligence and artificial intelligence often get confused with each other even though we have been using both for a while now. The V.I. from Apple called Siri in the iPhone4s has pre-programmed variables and settings. Unlike artificial intelligence which is capable of learning, interpreting and developing on its own, independent of programming.

Some days you wake up and don’t feel like doing anything much at all, you don’t want to talk to anyone, you want to get away from it all and have some time to yourself. Yesterday that is exactly what I did. I recommend to anyone with a bicycle or if you enjoy long walk to do the route from Saltdean through Brighton to Southwick.

Susain Cain argues in this passionate talk ‘The power of introverts’, that introverts bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world, and should be encouraged and celebrated.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4

“Solitude is especially relevant to creativity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find is people that are very good at exchanging and advancing idea, but who also have a very serious streak of introversion in them and this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient to creativity. Darwin took long walks alone in the woods; Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple Mac computer sitting alone in his office cubical in the HP offices where he was working at the time…”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17357374

A new world speed record for the fastest 3D-printed nano-objects has been claimed by researchers in Austria.

The team is able to create sculptures as small as a grain of sand in a fraction of the time than had previously been required.

The researchers are now developing bio-compatible resins so that the objects they create can be used by doctors.

“We can also ‘write’ these structures in the presence of cells as we use an infrared laser which is completely harmless for biological tissue…”