Engineering to inspire

Engineering is Serious Business…NOT!

We’re back with a bang! Over the next two weeks, we’ll be giving away four pairs of tickets to Universal Studios: Singapore! All you have to do is to join in our fun contests to win ‘em!

So head over to our Facebook Fanpage at http://www.facebook.com/ucreatechange?v=app_17037175766 and get started on winning your pair of tickets to Universal Studios: Singapore!

Art & Technology

What happened on UCreateChange.com (17-23 May 2010)

“Art imitates life; life imitates Art.”

The truthfulness of this palindrome is apparent now that technology has overlaid digital worlds upon our bricks-and-mortar realm.

For example, Augmented Reality lets us look through a mobile phone’s camera and see overlays (more in our Mobile apps for your life post). On the art front, the Japanese have create a live Twitter feed on an Augmented Reality building. By looking through your phone’s camera, you can see what its inhabitants are twittering about and shop advertisements.

That’s what we saw. But we heard…

…several German inventors modified a piano to speak text from the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court. This project was part of an art event in Palazzo Ducale (Venice). What they did was to map and match a child’s reading onto the piano scales to get this musical rendition of a very dry topic.

Sometimes art has purpose.

Like this project which aims to get people to use the stairs more. They turned a staircase into a piano that it tinkles whenever you step and riff on the keys. As the video shows, almost everyone used the staircase instead of the escalator. Now that’s success, ain’t it?

Why not sell art on E-bay?

That’s what Caleb Larsen’s art piece “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” does…automatically. The black block connects to the internet and asks for bids on E-bay. If there’s a successful bid, the block changes owners and re-bids itself after some time. The metaphysics are beyond us, but it’s a quirky way of using how art and technology can mesh and mingle.

Take the Create2011 engineering challenge and wow us with your vision of the Future. The Grand Prize: A Nokia Experiential Journey in Beijing and Singapore!

The Future of Mobility

What happened on UCreateChange.com (10-16 May 2010)

Mobility: “the quality of moving freely".

What we wanna do is to improve that quality. After all everything – from traffic to information – wants to be free. Just look at Wikipedia, it’s an encyclopedia of information created by people like you and me, and moderated by very interested parties…

And it’s also the theme of Create2011: our annual engineering challenge!

So every now and then, you’ll find things that might just define the future of mobility on our website; such as Bicycle lanes in the air that let you soar above traffic & cars… the peeps over at Habbo certainly liked them enough to give it props. What really weirded them out was this magnetic ink that turns any paper into nanomachines such as levers, tweezers and speakers to boom the bass!

The Light touch Pico Projector might just change how we interface with our computers and devices. It’s a light show that creates touchscreens out of any surface. Applications include: ordering Sushi by drawing on your table; playing (literally) off the wall piano.

And the newspaper industry should get booster shot with this portable E-Reader that folds, rolls and yes, displays the news like traditional newspapers, but only as it happens. Finally we heart this invention where cars are steered by the driver’s eyes. So remember to keep them on the road at all times!

Take the Create2011 engineering challenge and wow us with your vision of the Future. The Grand Prize: A Nokia Experiential Journey in Beijing and Singapore!

Contests Galore & of course, the Future

“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.” – John M. Richardson Jr.

We belong to the third category: the sort who wonders what’s going happen in the future.

That’s why for the last coupla months, we’ve trawling the web for nuggets of info that might just be the Next Big Thing...and now it’s your turn.

We’ve created two contests that you can take part in: Create2011 & our Facebook contest.

Create2011 Challenge!

Our annual challenge is back! This time, we want you to come up with a brilliant idea related to the theme of Future Mobility, one which can improve the way we play, think, live and connect.

Why take part?

‘Cause you might just win a once-in-a-lifetime Nokia Experiential Journey Grand Prize, which includes an all-expenses paid learning programme with Nokia in Beijing and Singapore!

Head over to Create2011.com.sg to sign up now!

And don’t forget to join our…

Facebook contests!

We’ve been giving away tickets to exhibitions, movies, any event that we think is cool. To win a pair of tickets for yourself, just go to our Facebook contest page and follow the instructions.

To get you started, we’ve included clips from the uber-cool "Tomorrow Show" by Mo Rocca on what the future might hold for us. Worth a few eyefuls, especially the one on The Future of Dating…with Robots. Now that might just be the Next Big Thing….

New car innovations like seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes and attention alerts may seem like they have taken the danger out of driving, but they haven't. Mo Rocca examines the future of traffic.

Interview with Create 2010 Winners: Great Ideas Association

We hate them. We really do.

It costs a ton of cash to fly to Munich, doze in Hilton, and munch on Bratwursts, Schnitzels, and Pretzels. But these boys get it all for free!

The trio from Raffles Institution, collectively known as Great Ideas Association, won over our Create 2010 judges with the GDome – a “greenhouse that could transform coastal regions into arable land and efficate sustainable farming” (read it on Scribd). It came out from their motivation to “reduce world hunger and secure our food for the future.”

The project addresses very real problems. Hopefully it’ll get turned into reality some time soon. (Remember you heard it here first!) Until then, they’ll just have to make do with a trip to Munich.

Ahhh… Bygones. It’s water under the bridge.

But questions bugged us. How did they win Create 2010? And why did they even sign up in the first place? So we caught up with Great Ideas Association and jawed over coffee, rain and travel plans.

PS: Create 2011 is just round the corner. Check back for more details!

Singapore: the land of “no ingenuity”?

Not if my trawl through the net had anything to say about it.

My research for this week’s posts on Asian inventions and Asian inventors at UCreateChange.com turned up an amazing revelation: Singaporeans are as inventive as Koreans, Japanese, or Silicon Valley types.

A little history, we have plenty of firsts – Sim Wong Hoo for PC sound cards (to better listen to MP3), Trek Technology for thumbdrives (to better carry data around), and X-mini for mini subwoofers (to better blast emo-punk music).

We know them cause they made it to the top. So are there inventors who aren’t on our collective Wikipedia entry?

Hell, yeah.

Congratulations to Top 5 finalists!

Congratulations to the top 5 finalists of Create 2010!

We did it!
It took our judges a looong time to pick and choose because every submission is awesome! But our judges must decide, so here are your finalists:
• Weighing Wheel by Team IV
• Gdome by Great Ideas Association
• Pendulamp by Frontier
• Expired Food by Create!
• Virtual Cloning by Nimnix3

Check out their ideas at ucreatechange.com/create2010.