Dutch Design Week

It's cold in the Netherlands.. not freezing cold, but cold enough to warrant wearing a beanie, scarf and gloves when cycling. And it's rainy.. not crazy rainy, and when it rains it's a little bit warmer due to the cloud cover. This weekend we changed over to Daylight Savings Time, which means there's now an hour difference between the Netherlands and South Africa. It also means that there's light when I wake up, but that it's already dark when I leave the university in the afternoon.

This past week was Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. We kicked it off on Friday 16 October with the opening of the ID'09 Exhibition, which showed off our department's Bachelors and Masters projects. One of the projects that I found really interesting was "Jukebugs", which are smart music players, sensitive to light and motion. You can influence a Jukebug’s music choice by exposing it to different lighting situations, or by moving/shaking it.



During the week we attended exhibitions at the Philips Klokgebouw (pictured above) and at the High Tech Campus (pictured below). The exhibitions at the Klokgebouw more closely resembled the conventional(?) idea that most people have of industrial design as designing form and function (e.g. expensive chairs/tables/kettles/vacuum cleaners).



The High Tech Campus is were Philips Research is situated. A few years ago, while still busy with my undergraduate degree, I had hoped to one day being able to work there. It was therefore quite strange to now being able to visit the place and see what it's really like. One of the exhibitions we attended there was the Philips ExperienceLab. This includes the HomeLab (which consists of a kitchen, living room and bedroom where they try out new ideas and devices), ShopLab (which consists of a mock-up clothing store, with innovative lighting techniques) and HotelLab (which consists of a hotel lobby and two hotel rooms, with a number of interesting ideas and devices that they haven't even showed to possible clients yet). All in all an interesting experience!

Turtle-sized chocolate croissants

First off: I've decided to post my photos to Facebook rather than Flickr, as there's a 200 picture limit on Flickr, and I would like to have the online version as a type of backup in case something happens to my computer. You can still access the latest album even if you're not on Facebook, by going here.


This lovely culinary specimen is a turtle-sized chocolate croissant, sold by the wonderful Fournos Bakery at OR Tambo International Airport. This is me consuming said turtle-sized chocolate croissant:

And yes, it was deliciiooussss... :P

So, I'm back from my trip to South Africa and Kenya, which, as you can see from the pictures,
was awesome. A week of hard work at the IEEE AFRICON 2009 conference in Nairobi, and a week of partying and relaxing in good ol' SA with friends and family.

Last night the Parlotones played in Amsterdam. It was great fun - you'll be amazed at the number of South Africans in the Netherlands willing to support SA music! Note to self: Don't depend on the night train to get you back to Eindhoven from Amsterdam in future - you will be spending a lot of time (2 hours) waiting to change over in Utrecht.

If you look very carefully you might just be able to make out Kahn from the Parlotones singing Lisa se Klavier in the photo below :P

And apparently you lose the ability to identify fashionable accessories when you don't get enough sleep: