With his team at SENSEable City Lab, MIT’s Carlo Ratti makes cool things by sensing the data we create. He pulls from passive data sets — like the calls we make, the garbage we throw away — to create surprising visualizations of city life. And he and his team create dazzling interactive environments from moving water and flying light, powered by simple gestures caught through sensors.

Paola Antonelli-Keynote: Talk to Me from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers write the initial script that will let us develop and improvise the dialogue.

PAOLA ANTONELLI-THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

• TEXT BY DAZED DIGITAL

The new pop-up watch store from Dezeen launches at 55 Neal Street in London’s vibrant Covent Garden this June, with their latest line of colourful watch designs. The Dezeen Watch Store is the first design-led online watch boutique store in the world - set to run for 12 days, from 29 June – 10 July. Focusing on a modern sense of design and contemporary timepieces, the collection on display has been carefully curated by the Dezeen team according to their own personal tastes.

Founder of the design blog Dezeen, Marcus Fairs, and of The Dezeen Watch Store says: “We started Dezeen Watch Store for a number of reasons. We noticed there were a few young, design-led watch brands starting up, such as Uniform Wares, VOID and Normal Timepieces. These were usually tiny brands started by designers, selling lovely products via their own websites. They would get in touch with Dezeen and whenever we ran stories about their products they would be really popular with our readers, who’d often ask where they could buy them.”