A quick post about the latest project by my former Media and Design Lab boss: Jef Huang and his wife Muriel Waldvogel: the newscocoon project:

"Newscocoons is a set of pulsating furniture objects that display news - user-generated videoclips, pictures, stories, blogs - fed from geographically dispersed sources. The cocoons glow and breath slowly. Each cocoon tracks specific keywords (such as “body,” “emotive,” “recombinant,” “alienation,” “reality,” etc.), and aggregates content tagged accordingly, created locally and over the Internet, by amateurs and professionals. The global shape of Newscocoons is constantly in flux, emerging from the particular constellation and intensity of information flows from the various sources. (...) The ambition for Newscocoon is to create a new kind of furniture for news consumption, one that breathes news, has a memory and fosters social interaction in the form of co-zapping."

Why do I blog this? what I find curious in this project is the notion of pulsation with fed information and the importance of a threshold where physically it gives the impression of "when the eminent danger of an explosion becomes unbearable".(and yes of course it's easy because I love inflatable stuff). The co-zapping feature is also innovative.