Our pal Alice Wang dropped us a note letting us know about her latest project, Commodity Love. She’s at it again making us scratch our head wondering what’s true here. She says “As products get more and more attractive, can they replace the feelings we have towards our loved ones? Will you love your phone more than your girlfriend? Or will you love your car more than your wife? And how would you feel if your wife told you she suddenly loves chocolate more than sex?”

Depends what kind of car I guess.

The badges are made out of stainless steel with a piece of magnet at the back that can be attached to any garment.

They are on sale at Galleria Nina Lumer in Milan:

22-27 APRIL 2009
GALLERIA NINA LUMER
VIA BOTTA 8 20135 MILAN

Related Posts: Chairs with Personality, Sleep Inventions, Peer Pressure

All chairs are not created equal. Especially not if you’re short. So we give props to Alice Wang. The brilliant mind that thought of a friend-calling alarm clock brings us her ingenious line of conceptual chairs for the dysfunctional.

Beyond her Equality Seeker (pictured), a chair with adjustable legs that allows everyone to sit an an equal height of 140cm, there’s also a seat for fidgeters that will record the calories they burn as they just…can’t…sit…still. But, our favorite? The Silent Farter. For those who like to stink up the room and get away with it, this tattletale chair amplifies your gaseous problems to the rest of your dinner company so you can’t blame the dog. Which is really quite unfair to the canine.

We've had some good debates on this site. Alice Wang was responsible for a good one over her concept audio sticks. Just to be extra clear this time around: Alice is an idea fountain. Her products are concepts that hopefully will one day become reality, but at present, are just concepts. That said, she has invented a couple new projects that deserve some attention.

Perfect Sleep: a reverse alarm clock to be programmed for how long you want to sleep instead of when you want to wake up. Keeping with her ideas on sleeping and waking, Wang has come up with a Tyrant alarm clock, which steals your mobile phone and makes random calls every three minutes until you get up. Really bad news if you keep ex-girlfriend's numbers in you mobile phone. Head over to Alice's site to see some more sleep related and non-sleep related concept inventions.

Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics stated that “a robot may not harm a human being.” While we don't remember Rosie ever bludgeoning Elroy Jetson with her duster, our old friend, Alice Wang, not only worries about the danger of artificial intelligence in the home of the future, but also questions whether or not current home mechanisms are already doing us harm. Her thesis project examines the effect scales play on the human psyche. Wang has created three scales which reverse the effects of weight consciousness by giving the person being weighed the choice of knowing their actual weight.

The accuracy of the white lies scale depends on closeness to the center of the device. If the weight watcher wants to be lighter, they can stand closer to the edge. The number placement on the half-truth model doesn't allow the subject to know their weight and must rely on their companion for a truthful reading. The open secrets model text messages one's weight to their phone, where they can decide whether or not they not they want to know the results. Our question, though: who gets the scale's cell phone bill?

We started quite the debate last June when we blogged about Alice Wang’s Audio Sticks– her personal vision of what the future for sellable-audio might hold, in this case she experimented with USB flash memory keys decorated in album art. Her latest project addresses another big phenomena that comes up in everybody’s life: Peer Pressure. She says not everyone has the potential or enthusiasm to act through life just to impress others. Can products be designed to create these similarities for you? She created a line of products with this in mind, like double sided headphones for when you’re worried about other people hearing music you’re listening to, you can play your music inwards, and something else (popular songs) outwards. She also designed a mobile phone application that makes you look popular in public by sending you text messages, a keyboard that makes it ’sound like’ you’re typing fast, and my favorite– a printer that only prints out positive emails for your co-workers to accidently find. Her concepts always bring up life issues in neat and digestible ways– nice work Alice!

We’re always wondering, what does the future hold for personal and home audio? What will consumer packaged music look like even just a few years from now? With the advent of perpendicular storage, NAS systems, cheap flash memory, and increasing political and legal issues regarding ownership and piracy, the answer is not simple. Alice Wang, a product design major and native of both Taipei and London, explains her vision in her latest project called Audio Sticks. Wang envisions a future where artists will release their albums on USB flash memory keys, each holding 70 MB of data. Due to their compact size, the Audio Sticks will be more portable than the compact discs we use today and there will much less materials wasted on packaging. The artist claims that mix tapes are no longer being produced and the portability of the Audio Sticks will convince friends and family from combining their music into a sort of primitive mix tape. This would all come together nicely if every home was equipped with a storage and playing device whose mock up looks like a slender and tall, wood paneled, giant USB hub. The concept of Audio Sticks is certainly intriguing and answers some questions about the future of audio interaction in our culture, while raising a few of its own. I think it’s time we see something like this in the market place!