NYC Underground Park

Design site Inhabitat has a video that looks at the idea of creating an underground park in an abandoned part of the New York subway system. 
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/855802805/lowline-an-underground-park-on-nycs-lower-east-sid

Grammy Nominee Daily Song Alarm
Uniqlo’s Wake Up iPhone app collaboration with Grammy nominated artist Cornelius is a melodic alarm clock with a difference. Changing according to the weather forecast, you can be serenaded awake with a musical rousing that is outside Apple’s 20 nominated and highly annoying ringtones. 
http://www.psfk.com/2012/05/uniqlo-grammy-nominee-alarm-song.html

Clothing Store Displays Real-Time Facebook “Like Counter” on Hangers

C&A Brazil, a Brazilian clothing store,  has figured out a way to help alleviate a common anxiety women experience while shopping:”What will my friends think? Will they like this outfit?” by merging social media activity with in-store shopping behavior. 
http://mashable.com/2012/05/08/hangers-update-facebook-likes/ 

Tumblr of the Week:

http://fuckingcreatives.tumblr.com/

Google Launches Augmented Reality Glasses in Beta
Google has released a sneak peek at Project Glass, an effort to replace the smartphone with glasses that can beam texts, emails, music, weather, and more directly to your field of vision. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/04/project-glass-google_n_1403174.html

Snoop Dogg’s Smokable Songbook
Rolling Words, a self-advertised “smokable songbook”, contains pages that can be ripped out for use as rolling papers. Baked with lyrics from many of Snoop’s popular hits such as "Gin and Juice" and "Drop it Like Its Hot," you can sing along as you're smokin' up. http://www.psfk.com/2012/04/snoop-dogg-smokable-book.html 

Buy Designer Clothes Straight from Music Video
Online fashion store SSENSE has created the world’s first shoppable music video. The integration they are introducing between technology, entertainment and retail with this video not only creates a unique experience for the audience, but also has utility. http://www.ssense.com

Tumblr of the week:
See some of Siri's finest moments. http://shitthatsirisays.tumblr.com/

DK’s Director of User Experience, Cristin Siegel, has an article in Target Marketing Magazine this week sharing her expertise on website design concept testing. “Concept testing – which is different from usability testing,” she explains, “puts two different website design treatments in front of representative users to see if one concept is perceive to be more usable or engaging than the other. Once a design is chosen and client-approved, the build phase can begin.” Dive into the rest of her thoughts here.

Cameron Friedlander, VP, Creative Technology, and Chris Stewart, Associate Creative Director will judge this year's Seattle and Cleveland ADDY awards, respectively. Occuring in the communities worldwide, the competition - one of the largest in the advertising world - explores creative excellence at all levels. Click here to learn more.

The team's outstanding work on the HP project "Everybody On" garnered attention at this year's Caples Awards, and Designkitchen is a finalist in the Integrated Campaign category! The campaign celebrates how people around the world use HP technology to pursue their personal and professional passions. You can see a list of all the finalists here.

This week a group from Designkitchen attended CES, a major electronics trade show held every January in Las Vegas. The team took in all the latest and greatest in technologies and innovations in order to better serve our clients this year! To learn more about the show, check out the official site. 

The DK Holi-Cray-Matic™ is an open-source, Twitter-controlled, Arduino-connected (http://arduino.cc/), node.js (http://nodejs.org) application.

There is a self-hosted Node.js web server sitting at holiday.designkitchen.com that is the central hub of the project. It opens up a connection to Twitter’s Stream API and listens for any tweets mentioning @designkitchen and creates a random event job for them – snow machine, table lights, wall lights, beacon lights, inflatable sky dancer. Every 40 tweets, an all-on-holicray event is triggered. Once the jobs have been created, an event is broadcast via websockets to all the webclients (the website) to update the real-time website. These jobs are processed one at a time and sent to the Arduino node.js application sitting in the conference room.

On the Mac Pro, there is a local Node.js application that is connected to the web server via websockets (socket.io). This server is responsible for accepting job instructions from the web server, turning on Arduinio for 9 seconds, and then turning it off, and then reporting back to the web server to say the action took place.

We built out our own power circuits using PowerSwitch Tail II hooked up to an Arduino Uno board connected to a Mac Pro in the conference room. All of the holiday decorations are then plugged in downstream on those PowerSwitches, always on, waiting for the control pin on Arduino to complete the circuit and make stuff go HoliCray!