Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.
Hello fellow human, welcome back to another issue of oio news. Leaves turn yellow and days get shorter, and we’re all going to die eventually. But not today! Stay with us, for another peek into the oioverse. 🔮
PSA - welcome substack
You probably noticed something different, and that’s because we moved from Beehiiv to Substack. It’s the third migration our newsletter is doing (hopefully the last). Just like the universe, our number of subscribers keeps expanding, so we’re in need of bigger homes that can support our growth, and for now, Substack seems to be the right place for us. Things are slightly different here, the layout editor is a bit more constrained, so bear with us for these first few issues, we’ll get around it eventually.
In this issue, we look at the many ways our friends have created their own mur mur speaker! Oh and we’ll be a Kikk festival this weekend, so give us a shout, if you’re around. Then we continue by welcoming new faces to the oio team, a throwback to the oio drinks in Barcelona, and another entry to our team corner, featuring Bjørn Karmann. Finally we end with the usual bundle of handpicked links from our Discord community. So let’s dive in! 🤿
mur mur keeps murmuring
It’s been a while since we released our DIY mur mur kit, and we’ve seen some really cool builds out there! Whether it’s hacking the electronics, or printing with florescent plastic, we hope mur mur brings you some good energy to your space. Keep us updated on your work in our mur mur’s Discord channel!
see you at KIKK
This Friday and Saturday (Oct 23–24), our co-founder Matteo will be attending KIKK Festival in Namur, Belgium. Kikk is an international festival of digital & creative cultures exploring the crossovers between art, science & technology.
Earlier in February, Matteo hosted a workshop with the students of Media Design at HEAD Geneva and the final results will be presented at KIKK Festival this year. If you happen to be there as well, let us know by replying to this email and we can meet up!
new oios!
Just like our subscribers, also the oio team is expanding! In the last couple months we welcomed two new members to the group, Luca and Andrea. Luca is our interaction design intern based in Como, Italy, and Andrea is our new project manager, joining from Zagreb, Croatia. Keep an eye out for the upcoming oio team corners to get to know more about them!
thank you all! 🫂
Thank you for sharing the night with us in our new home in Barcelona last month. The office is now officiallywarm™, and we think it passed the vibe test. It’s now ready for future events and gatherings. Stay tuned! 👀
team corner • bjørn
Hello again from the oio team corner™, where you get to meet them oios one by one 🎙️ In this issue, we’d like to welcome Bjørn!
Meet Bjørn Karmann, senior designer at oio 🧙 Germany-born, Denmark-raised, Amsterdam-based yet winter-hibernating in Barcelona, Bjørn migrates and prefers to call the continent of Europe his home.
Early interests in mechatronics, creative coding and art installations had led Bjørn to study at CIID, developing his love for tangible, intelligent interfaces and speculative design. He then spent some time at Tellart as design lead, working on immersive, interactive exhibitions, while also teaching. After an intense two-year project at the Dubai World Expo, Bjørn left the exhibition world to reconnect with his initial design curiosity, joining oio in 2021.
For someone dealing with prototyping and physical computing on a daily basis, having your own lab is really important. And Bjørn has many machines to keep him company: plotter and 3D printers, all the way to a fully customized work station! 😮
Bjørn feels proud that the group relationship is built on trust and that everyone feels open to speak their mind. Through collaborative exchanges and hands-on tinkering, the team allows the best ideas to rise naturally, and celebrates when someone finds a new golden nugget or a perfect solution. With everyone taking ownership over their specific tracks and goals, the team manages to pull off projects that would normally require a lot more people, tackling briefs and challenges at the absolute edge of what is possible with technology.
As a huge nature lover, one of the greatest challenges in Bjørn’s work is finding the balance between tech development and nature preservation. “Whether it's making drawing machines, writing code that mimics nature, or growing mushrooms to hack a smart home device, nature is an extremely important antidote when working with emerging technology” he shares. The key is to “design with nature, creating experiences that make humans less machine, and more human.”
💅 cool links
Another tasty load of handpicked 𝕠𝕚𝕠 𝕔𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕗𝕚𝕖𝕕™ fine goods from our Discord community (not there yet? Join now 🏃♂️).
🕹️ google labs latest experiment(AI / gaming)
🤔 clef is an open source decision model(AI)
💀 reverse engineer anything(AI)
🚦 LED synthesizer played with fingertips(product)
🌱 for communities that seek to put down roots(thoughts)
🛋️ a lamp as your companion(product / AI)
🪀 katamari objects(3D)
🕹️ agents at your fingertips(product / AI)
👾 pixel drawing(www)
🪦 the extinction of humanity according to AI builders(AI / thoughts)
🤧 a chatgpt flyer pandemic(AI / visual)
📺 infinite TV(www)
👔 the worst onboarding ever(UX)
Want to share your cool links? Join us on Discord!
📈 monthly stonks
🌐 www: museum of the human web
🕹 game: into the unwell
📁 arena: poetic web
📚 wiki: chernoff face
🔧 tool: ponytail
stay lazy
Matteo & Norman
you may have noticed that on desktop, this gif is not left aligned. that is odd, isn’t it? and that’s because there’s no way to left-align images in substack, allegedly. so we’re left with a few options: we could create a long gif with empty space on the right, and make it full width, but that wouldn’t scale on mobile and other screens. we either scale the whole gif to be full-width, but that would make it way too big, or we just stick with this pseudo-centred gif with left-align text above, as we did, which clearly look like a mistake, so that’s why we had to write this paragraph to explain this odd layout decision. fuckthank you substack for not allowing such simple option. great editor 10/10 bye see you next month