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Alice Wang, a recent graduate of RCA, has designed a set of 3 cheeky bathroom scales that ease the ritual of weighing yourself (and maybe dieting, for that matter). One of them, “Open Secret” reveals your weight every time you weigh yourself by sending a text message to a desired mobile phone. Wang offers that “the receiver is then responsible to reveal the answer immediately, or the next time you two meet.”

All of these projects were conceived as a reaction to Isaac Asimov’s 1st law of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Here’s more from the designer:

Artificial intelligence is a topic widely used in the media, however, exactly how far are we from such technology? Are these fears towards robotic developments necessary or purely irrational? What is it about these currently fictional characters that scare us? Are there existing domestic objects that already break this law? Weighing scales, although not performing physical harm, have been subtly damaging us psychologically. Should objects like these exist in a complex society like ours where people are more emotionally fragile?

See this and other work by Alice Wang at her site.

Here’s a cool marketing idea from Nike: bespoke shoes based on your own mobile phone snaps.

This is a part of a mobile campaign called PhotoID. Buyers can take a cameraphone snap of “brightly coloured subjects, such as street graffiti or clothing”, MMS it off to Nike and get a message back showing a pair of Nike’s 1985 Dunk high-top customised using the colours in the photo. Anyone who’s really taken with their shoes can then buy the customised footwear.

You can see a video of the service in action over at The Guardian. If you want to give it a go, you need to MMS your picture and the word “DUNK” to the following numbers: Denmark: 1231, Finland: 17163, France: 31000, Germany: 99666, Spain: 5222, Sweden: 72445, Norway: 2201, UK: 88247, Italy: 3464646402.

Especially in this period, when in UK the youth knife crime is on the spotlight, there is a SMS service being trialled in schools in East London to prevent it. This service enables youngsters to anonymously report classmates or other youths they suspect of carrying knives to anti-crime charity Crimestoppers UK.

Posters urge youths to text details of potential offenders, such as their name, nickname, school and year.

The charity said the pilot is small-scale as it wants to determine whether misuse of the system is likely to be a problem - for instance, by kids attempting to get innocent classmates into trouble - although it stressed that to-date there have been no problems reported. It will also conduct a review of the scheme once the pilot concludes.

Text messages sent to the Crimestoppers UK number are encrypted and routed through a secure server so informants’ details remain anonymous, according to the companies.

I am start getting more and more surprised about how the big companies are gathering interest in the bluetooth marketing. In Paris, for example, you can easily find “interactive” advertising box that ask customers to activate the bluetooth on their mobile phones, in order to send them some interesting content: maps of the city, discount coupons, etc etc.

The following is instead a more subtle promotion: to promote popular reality show Big Brother 2008 on Channel TEN in Australia, advertising agency Marketforce in Perth came up with a unique bluetooth SMS campaign that really caught people by surprise. The ads embodied the “Big Brother is watching” slogan, which is the essence of the show. The campaign installed Blue-tooth transmitters in over 20 high-traffic bus shelters around town. The transmitters automatically sent two anonymous messages to any bluetooth enabled phones in the area.

The first message was tailored specifically for the local location, with something along the lines of:

I’m watching u. Ur at the (customized current location)

The second message is received 30-40 seconds later with the big reveal, saying:

Big Brother is back. 7 PM weeknights on TEN

Hopefully people won’t get mad at them.

This is an idea that came out from Volkswagen, and it is somehow an extension of their policy about polling about all the usual customs of the people. For example, Volkswagen knows that 73% of the people want to take the tiny soap and shampoo from hotel rooms. They also know that 60% of ice cream buyers prefer cones over cups.

On an apparent quest to learn everything, Volkswagen’s launched SMS polls on a big screen on Times Square. In this picture, for example, you can see how VW asks for people preferences inflight.
Results are generally announced one day after, which is a nice invitation for the people to return to the store soon in order to see the results…