conversation clusters, and personal space suit.

Thank you all for the positive responses to my Lilac Ball post! Very grateful indeed, both for my colleagues' confidence in me, and my friends' support. I love everybody! (Please refer me back to this post whenever you find me e-whining.)

I thought I'd leave you with fun things to look at this weekend. On Wednesday night, I attended the Spring Show of the Interactive Telecommunications Progam at NYU Tisch, where many of their full-time graduate students -- designers, multimedia experts, artists, geeks -- had their senior projects on display.

Here are two that I noted in particular:

Demetrie Tyler's Hypothetical Drawings About Real People:
In this piece, which you should go to the website to see in detail, you'll see line drawings of crude-looking figures, surrounded and overlapped by snippets of random conversation.

His site explains that he's developed software that can filter "conversational" content from the Web (prioritizing sites like MySpace and blogs) from factual content (like Wikipedia), separating "good" from "bad." I find this fascinating, particuarly with all the blogging and user-generated content that has consumed the new Web revolution. Then he's taken these little blurbs and created conversation clusters, and ultimately, a kind of social landscape represented in drawing.

I think this is TRES cool.

The other project that I loved was based on a much simpler, but no less fundamental concept: personal space. Terence Arjo, another ITP student, created the "Personal Space Suit," a suit that protects, well, your personal space. It has a sensor built into the fabric, and if you get too close to the suit, it deploys needle-like quills that rest flat on the suit normally. The quills rise dangerously straight, but slowly, organically almost, in a kind of mammalian basic instinct sort of way. It reminded me very much of the way a cat's hair straightens on its back, or of a porcupine trying to ward off its prey.

Check out his blog devoted to personal space.

Anyway, food for thought. Have a good weekend everyone, and see you next week.