Amy Friedman

05 Feb 2015

Love Project

This project was created by Estudio Guto Requena with D3 in 2014 unveiling the project at the Sao Paulo Design Weekend, the projects slogan is “Love Stories shaping everyday objects”. Using vocal recordings, brainwave, heartbeat and perspiration data, this project generates house hold items based on the emotion and biosensor data created while talking about their loved ones. This project tries to create a physical record of love, but is this the best way to convey this data. The object may create emotional attachment from the creator, but that doesnt mean everyone else will recognize its significance. We cant gauge if the object means that they loved someone more than others, or learn about the story behind the object as its a record created from data without a way to retrieve the data. I think this succeeds in applying emotion to tangible objects, but there needs to be a way to interact with the data so we understand the emotion as Sveta McShane critiques in “Can You 3D Print Emotions? New “Love Project” Uses Biometric Sensors to Create Household Objects”.

Biometric Jewelry

Created by Hideaki Matsui using Arduino, Rhino, Grasshopper, Firefly, and LunchBox, Biometric Jewelry used biometric data from a temperature sensor, heart rate sensor, and ultrasonic sensors. The ultrasonic sensors determined the width of the wrist to create a customized bracelet that can be 3d printed. Using biometric data we can customize artifacts to fit ourselves, but the  documentation of Hideaki’s personal project doesn’t indicate how the heart rate and temperature informs the design of the jewelry. Similar to Love Project, how do we know what we are interacting with? Biometric data can be valuable to create custom prosthetics and other need-based products, but developing a code to define emotion doesn’t mean we understand what our emotion is at that moment, or how the artifact is encoded.