blankensmith
Google commissioned my Dad and me to make a glass cover for their OnHub internet router. We saw this project as an opportunity to explore the different ways hand-blown glass could be finished, colored, and layered. For the outer shell we used a process called a blow-through to create a gradient from opaque white to fully transparent. We then acid-dipped the whole outer shell to frost it. We wanted…
A month long project in Shenzhen, China designing, prototyping and manufacturing a wearable olfactory display as part of Judith Amores broader PhD work at the MIT Media Lab. nbsp;The device provides just-in-time release of scents based on the physiological state of the wearer. It can release up to three scents and passively captures subtle chest vibrations associated with the beating of the heart…
Early into pandemic Devon Turnbull released a DIY kit to make an Ojas two-way speaker. The kit uses a series of clever connectors called Lamello Cabineo that make it easy to assemble using just a drill and wood glue. I swapped the original horn with an Altec 811B I bought on ebay. I also designed the stand (Judd was on my mind after seeing his show at MoMA) and fabricated it with Skilset in the…
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant cameras don’t take very good photos — that’s why I’ve always wanted to hack my medium format camera to take instant photos with shallow depth of field and sharpness. We took an instant camera and a medium format camera and hacked them…
AlphaGarden “AlphaGarden places a robot into a living polyculture garden to study the nature of diversity and explore the limitations of artificial intelligence in the context of ecology and sustainability. The project in progress consists of an automated robot that has been installed over a 3 meters long by 1.5 meters wide garden at the University of California at Berkeley. Deep Learning AI…
8:07 p.m. Mojave Desert. Moonlight strikes more than 107,000 solar mirrors to create a portrait of Apollo 11 computer programmer Margaret Hamilton. Bigger than New York’s Central Park, the portrait is a tribute to Hamilton's contributions to the Apollo program and the field of software engineering. What started as a napkin sketch over a conversation with a friend, came to life after three years…
Isaac Blankensmith Multidisciplinary designer, artist, and educator working and living in Los Angeles, California. He is a co-founder and the Head of Design at Early Works. Previously, he was a Design Lead at Google Creative Lab and taught interaction design at Parsons and School of Visual Arts. ↳About
Recorder It’s a simple idea: give an audio recorder really good transcription that works without the internet. Suddenly audio is searchable. Conversations have notes. Audio can be edited by just editing the transcript text. In the two years spent making this little app, the unexpected joy has been in seeing how people find creative ways to use Recorder. nbsp; Dictating passages to remember while…
Paper Signals A DIY kit that lets you build a little paper display to track things like weather, currency, and rocket launches. They don’t have a screen or buttons, so you control them talking to them. Anyone can build one from home with off-the-shelf parts, a printer, and a Sunday afternoon. Our six pre-designed templates are: an umbrella that tracks rain, an arrow that tracks the value of a…
Wash your hands, keep a safe distance, and don’t touch your face! Two weeks into the US COVID outbreak, a lot of us were finding that last one to be a pesky habit to kick. To teach ourselves to stop, we built a website that yells “NO” at you whenever you touch your face. It works by letting each person train a personal ML model to detect when they’re touching their face. Role: Concept, Creative…