It doesn’t look like much, but it was the hottest item on Kickstarter this Christmas season, shattering its fundraising goal and acquiring nearly 4,000 donors.

This unassuming little box uses various sensors to capture information about a space or object and send it to the owner through the channel they choose. For example, with Twine attached to your front door, the built-in accelerometer can detect when someone is knocking and send you a text or Tweet while you’re away.

More sensors are in development, as is a breakout board that will allow users to gather other types of information by connecting their own sensors.

Check out the short video.

(Without considering history and without a proper degree of hindsight): Siri “feels” like a big moment in designing technology for humans, a significant dot in the timeline because all those that follow will similarly shed their surface elements for more intuitive (some might say less meaningful) ways of interacting with the device.

For a glimpse into how this might manifest in other types of devices, take the Lytro Camera. It is doing the same for how we capture photographic information.

 The Lytro Camera is the first light field camera to hit the market (or will be in early 2012). As a light field camera, it captures all of the available light in a scene, which without getting into the details, means for the user there is no adjusting the aperture and no need to focus. All of these details are manipulated on your computer in post-processing. This drastically simplifies the camera interface. There are just two buttons: power and the shutter.

The interesting aspect from the user perspective is the degree to which Siri and the Lytro Camera change not just how you send text messages or take pictures, but the extent to which these actions are a natural part of your daily life. Does the simplicity of sending a text message or taking a picture make it an unconscious action, requiring less thought or perhaps even less care?

One of the unofficial metrics Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, relies on is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow Means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions. 

Despite the unassuming brand, Waffle House is actually quite efficient when it comes to supply chain crisis management. Check out the video over at the WSJ.

The sudden declaration from a panel of nine septuagenarians about the validity of video games as an art form is not a singular turning point in our cultural relationship with video games, but it is as good an excuse as any to look at how the debate has evolved. Here a couple of interesting perspectives:

• Seth Schiesel writing for the New York Times suggests that video games need to “grow up” and that their designation as art has imbued them with a duty to contribute to society.
• Not long ago, Roger Ebert was excoriated by gamers everywhere after issuing his thoughts on the matter in a succinctly titled blog post, “Video games can never be art.” He later conceded to the angry gamers on his front lawn in a post with an equally efficient title: “Why video games are indeed Art.”
• There are indie game designers who have been using video game design as artistic expression. Here’s a profile from Esquire that focuses on the work of Jason Rohrer, an independent game designer who makes games that make you think as opposed to react.
• In 2006, Chuck Klosterman wondered why no one was writing about the artistic and cultural implications of video games.
• And finally a relatively new site that does just that.

It’s in these cases that we tell stories to remind ourselves and our clients that we’re solving problems for real people. We need good stories that make us care about the characters.

In the video below, Kurt Vonnegut gives some advice for what makes a good story. Good stories have shape. They rise and fall with the emotions of the characters, and when solving problems for real people, we should too.

This chart shows music industry revenues from ’73 to ’09 by format. Common belief is that digital piracy is killing the record industry, but it’s clear the CD era greatly inflated sales. What could be going on here:

With the CD, consumers were repurchasing albums they already owned on vinyl or tape. Forced obsolescence isn’t an issue with digital music. It’s relatively easy to burn music from CDs into the new format.

The 90s CD era featured the emergence of “alternative” music genres that widened the music buying audience. This doesn’t just mean grunge though. Mainstream country became a massive market. Garth Brooks became the best selling artist of all time and Shania Twain’s album Come on Over went 20x platinum.

Economic recession. People buy less stuff when the economy is bad. The 90s were good, the late 2000s, not as much.

This chart doesn’t show how the industry has changed. While sales have fallen, the concert  industry posted record years before the recession took hold.  And there’s also the music licensing and publishing industry that puts popular music in movies and commercials.

Home recording and online distribution is often seen as a response to record industry decline, but it’s a viable option for musicians to promote their work. Musicians can make and record music rather cheaply, distribute it online, promote on social networks, and build a following. The music industry is no longer in complete control of who becomes a star. Aggressive mass marketing is simply not as effective as community building.

From the looks of the teaser below, it feels like a Park Chan-Wook film – disturbing, campy, and visually compelling – but more importantly it perfectly illustrates that technology is lowering the startup costs for art in filmmaking. The Internet has already given aspiring filmmakers a low cost source of distribution (Vimeo is great for short pieces and animation and SnagFilms for documentaries) and now device makers are incorporating video technology that could inspire the auteur in all of us.

It is a simple extension that makes sharing content a more intuitive part of the web browsing experience. So much of what we do online is tied to sharing and the workflow for this behavior is often complicated, requiring new tabs, copying and pasting, and shortening links.

With Cortex, you simply hold down the mouse button for a beat and a wheel pops up with options for where you would like to share. You can add text to your link, hit return, and you are done.

Cortex is one of those tools that does something so simple, so well that you wonder how it didn’t already exist. Chrome users should check it out.

When you are sitting at a traffic light, this is what’s happening. A control system for the lights is counting down the seconds before your light changes from red to green. You’re essentially waiting on a clock to tick down. Before you arrived at that intersection, traffic flow was analyzed, numbers crunched, and the lights were set according to an “optimal” schedule, depending on where and when you’re driving.

As anyone can attest, this doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you’re the only person waiting at this particular intersection, or it could be packed, bumper to bumper. The problem according to Dirk Helbing and Stefan Lammer, two scientists studying ways to improve traffic congestion, was that “the average situation never occurs.”

One of the ways they recognized this problem and the potential solution speaks to the value in bottom up approaches to solving problems, which often begin with simple ethnography:

They noted that when crowds of people are trying to move through a narrow space, such as through a door connecting two hallways, there’s a natural oscillation: A mass of people from one side will move through the door while the other people wait, then suddenly the flow switches direction.

“It looks like maybe there’s a traffic light, but there’s not. It’s actually the buildup of pressure on the side where people have to wait that eventually turns the flow direction,” says Helbing. “We thought we could maybe apply the same principle to intersections, that is, the traffic flow controls the traffic light rather than the other way around.”

Based on their research, Helbing and Lammer are instead developing a system that takes a bottom up approach to managing traffic lights. Their system places two sensors at each intersection to measure traffic flow in and out. Each intersection then communicates with the next to prepare for incoming traffic. Gaps are opportunities for the opposite flow to have their turn.

Lights respond to cars, not the other way around.