If you only ever subscribe to one podcast then I cannot recommend WNYC’s marvelous Radiolab enough. Over the last few months I’ve been listening to their back catalogue – science radio at its very best. A dash of depth, a dash of humor and lots of interesting diverse topics. It always leaves me delighted and wondering could I do research in that field, and that field, and that field. Boo, there’s never enough time for all the interesting things in the world!

What’s cooking in Research and Development at IBM, Microsoft and HP.

Blog-a-licious 3 Quarks Daily – An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature.

Scientists have created an entire synthetic genome. Another important step towards making biological nanobot “machines”, which would be extremely useful as smart malleable materials.

Very very blog relevant and interesting Call For Papers: Imagining Domestic Interiors. This is one CFP I’ll definitely be working towards! Robots are set to play an increasing role in our everyday lives, particularly in our domestic interiors. Already, they have found their way into vacuum cleaners, sweepers, mops, and other automated service machines for the home. Looking beyond these largely predictable developments, advances in self-configurable and adaptive robots promise some radically new possibilities. Our furniture, for example, may be host to interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can re-configure themselves to suit different purposes, events, or even moods. An adaptive home interior might also physically age with its occupants, conforming to their changing needs and operating to support their states of development and health. (rest…)

What Kind of Genius Are You? Slow burn or short fast bright bright bright.

This post is dedicated to Molly “Isn’t it only natural”.

More sketching Phun. Another very pretty sketching “game” like those I mentioned in Sketch & Draw = Create & Design Interactive “Things” and Link Bucket: Crayon Physics, Optical Illusions, Design Is & Rocky Origins. (thanks Ross)

Design lovely – 16 of the Most Extreme & Modern Beds You’ll Ever See. Especially relevant to User Designer is Animi Causa’s malleable Feel Seating System bed (pictured above).

Read about morphological liberty in the essay Plateaus of Completeness on The Speculist blog. Should people be forced to use tools that are designed to augment their abilities? For example should you be required to use a computer and credit card to book an air flight? What about more futuristic “tools” that are implanted in people, such as FDA approved RFID Tags?

Graph your favourite website in your web browser using a spring / force directed layout. (thanks Baz)

There’s only going to be one UD post this week – lots of holiday days in Ireland this week so I’m chilling out and eating Easter Eggs! Yum.

Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance.

Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks)

Gimme gimme one of the Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface headsets. No contact gel required. Of course you could always build your own based on designs from the OpenEEG project.

Neat video of a time fountain optical illusion. Looks like water is running backward defying gravity and hanging in mid-air.

Would you like one of these futuristic disappearing car doors? Here’s an online video of it in action.

At Ellyssa Kroski’s InfoTangle read about the leading forms of information design and navigation structures for the web. Non-technical and clearly written – perfect.

Here’s lookin at you, human. Golan Levin and co’s art piece Opto-isolator is going to stare you down. Time to plonk two of those eyes on top of every TV to cure us of TV addiction?

Help yourself by helping yourself while helping yourself. Ouch. Play the temporal-tastic Cursor * 10. Interesting game idea that could be extended to other forms of interaction design. Reduce task complexity by timeshifting collaboration with yourself?

Have a look at Yahoo’s Design Innovation Team project website for some interesting visualisations and interactive concepts.

we make money not art writes about creating art with living materials. There’s something about that kind of bio-art that tickles me.

Neat concept: Spy planes to recharge by clinging to power lines

Just a small heads up: At some stage over Christmas I’m going to turn back on blog comments, once I’ve got the right comment and spam filters installed. It shouldn’t take long but the blog will be briefly offline during the update.

The seat has drawn lots of attention in the blogsphere over the last few weeks. I wonder what draws people’s attention to it? Are they interested because the seat is different? Do they imagine how they’d use the seat in their living spaces? Would it solve a problem, i.e. maximizing seating room when visitors call around? Does its attaction lie in letting people realise aspirations of designing and building their own furniture?

From the videos it looks like the range of possible physical designs is limited but it is very very easy to reshape. As we move towards smarter materials, such as shape memory alloys, can we retain that ease of alteration? The flipside of ease of alteration is there’ll need to be some way of locking things into a shape.

Bean bags are an example of a readily reshapable seat that has no shape memory. I’ve a bean bag at home and every now and then I find that sweet spot where its really comfortable and feels fitted to my body shape. When I get up I know that by the time I return to the bean bag it’ll have “forgotten” my shape. This makes me loath getting up. Though a potentially beneficial side effect of the shape forgetfulness is a form of subtly enforced stillness and calmness.