Dorkbot:62 November - resources and design

Dominic Muren is back with REMIX!! Bringing DJ Culture to Consumer Electronics with SSG 

 

Manufacturing is broken. Sure, we get super-low priced electronic devices at the store, but down the line, those phones or computers turn into high-priced subscriptions when we are forced to replace then every few years. Even worse, when was the last time you got exactly what you wanted out of an electronic product? The SSG Framework for electronic design addresses both of these problems, by making devices more modular, repairable, upgradeable, and customizable. By encouraging the development of a remix culture in electronics, SSG allows niche user groups to re-define products to fit their specific needs. As the club scene did for music, SSG will enable non-engineers o participate in the process of defining the "perfect" product. In this talk, Dominic will outline the Skin-Skeleton-Guts framework, and show examples of working prototypes.

 

Dominic Lectures in the Industrial Design department of the University of Washington. He also runs The Humblefactory, a design lab in Seattle which develops new methods and technologies for low infrastructure manufacturing. He was recently named a 2010 TED Global Fellow for his work on Humblefacture.com.

 

Jon Froehlich brings us Under Pressure: Transforming the Way We Think About Water in the Home

Under Pressure is not just one of the greatest musical collaborations of all time, it also the basis for our water sensing research at the University of Washington. In this talk, I will show how with just a single screw-on pressure sensor we can track water usage at each fixture in a home. I will talk about our longitudinal deployments where we directly instrumented water fixtures with accelerometers, reed switches, and hall effect sensors (among others) to collect ground truth data in order to validate our approach. I'll discuss failures as well as successes. I'll close the talk with a discussion about the future of sensing and feedback for environmental behaviors.

 

Jon is a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellow in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) at the University of Washington advised by Professors James Landay and Shwetak Patel. He was recently selected as the 2010 Student Innovator of the Year at the UW College of Engineering. He takes great inspiration from this.