No Place Like Home shoes guide the wearer to whatever destination in the world they wish. Firstly, the required destination is plotted onto an on-screen map and uploaded to the shoes via a USB cable. Then the wearer unplugs the USB cable and puts on the shoes. The heels are clicked together three times to start up the GPS module that is embedded in the left shoe. The circle of LED lights on the left shoe point in the direction of the destination and the row of LED lights on the right shoe give a progress bar of distance traveled.
The idea for the shoes was inspired by the film The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy clicks her ruby red shoes together to be magically transported back home to Kansas.
Dominic Wilcox’s No Place like Home shoes were commissioned by Global Footprint, a project to celebrate the long heritage of shoe making in Northamptonshire, England.

The world is in a constant state of flux. Cities expand and contract like the tide. Day in day out, we are witnesses to the resultant changes on the landscape, but we often forget or have no way to properly observe them. A sense of nostalgia is often attached to certain places that have become the backdrop to people’s lives. However the unrelenting momentum of urban development often leaves little behind to bookmark the cherished and slowly fading memories. Horoculars provide a means to revisit this hidden past. One lens is a normal binocular, the other a historical slide viewer. By viewing both at the same time it is possible to overlay images of the past and present in order to chart the memories and evolution of place.

Scripta volant. A writing surface, a place usually associated with permanence, it is made sensitive thanks to a touch-triggered microphone. In this way, the variable pressure exerted by the user while writing generates an audio signal that, once properly amplified through a speaker, reveals its mechanic nature by stirring up a medium that is volatile by definition: feathers. The weight of writing thus changes: what matters now is no longer the result, the act of preserving words potentially forever, but the act itself, that is writing and transforming time through movements.

Surface is an experimental film, exploring the emotional journey from an underground urban perspective. This “urban symphony” transforms human actions and street objects into beats that harmoniously set up a grand audio and visual composition. The film also emphasizes the notion of live footprints as the abstract representation of human identity.

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera: point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype uses crowd sourcing to output a text description of the scene.

There are five multi-touch gestures forming the language we use between our fingers and iPhone screens. This is the way we communicate, navigate and give commands to our iPhones. Nowadays, finger gestures like tap / scroll / flick / swipe / pinch are considered to be “signatures” of the Apple iPhone. Gabriele believes that in ten years or so these gestures will completely change. Therefore, her aim is to perpetuate them so they become accessible for future generations. She has translated this interface language of communication into 3D objects which mimic every multi-touch gesture. Her project is an interactive experience, where visitors can play, learn and be part of the exhibition.

An everyday event, “taste” is created as a combination of more than five senses. Tasty formulas with the 5 elements – temperature, color, texture, volume/weight, and form – are applied to design proposal. If we can stretch the borders of what tableware can do via exploring “synesthesia”, the eating experience can be enriched in multi-cross-wiring ways. The tableware we use for eating should not just be a tool for placing food in our mouth, but it should become extensions of our body, challenging our senses even in the moment when the food is still on its way to being consumed.

Xylinum is a research project that poses the question: what could future materials and production processes be like? The title Xylinum is the name of a bacterium which produces an artificial cellulose material. This bacterium counsumes sugar and builds a cellulose fibre structure around any given form. Since the process takes place in a nutrition liquid, the wet material can be dryed later on, resulting in a durable and 100 % biodegradable material. The properties of this material can be adjusted by changing the genetic code of the organisms. In collaboration with the company Jenpolymers, a technique was developed to create a “skin” around a wooden stool frame, forming the coating and seating surface.

Hövding is an invisible bicycle helmet, designed as a stylish collar worn around the neck while cycling. The collar contains an airbag that is visible only if an accident occurs. The airbag is shaped like a hood, surrounding and protecting the cyclist’s head. The inflation is triggered by sensors that register the abnormal movements of the cyclist in an accident. Sales began in November 2011 and Hövding is now available to buy in stores in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland as well as from the company’s website, www.hovding.com.

In order to explore the current limits of 3D printing technology, Amanda has created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D-printable, 33rpm records and printed a few prototypes that play on ordinary turntables. Though the audio quality is low – the records have a sampling rate of 11kHz (a quarter of typical mp3 audio) and 5-6 bit resolution (less than one thousandth of typical 16 bit resolution) – the audio output is still easily recognizable. These records were printed on an Objet Connex500 resin printer to a precision of 600dpi with 16 micron z-axis resolution. The 3D modeling in this project was far too complex for traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so Amanda wrote a program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a 12” record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to a 3D printable file format.