Edited by: Roberta De Monte roberta.demonte@positive-magazine.com
Design by: Calvin Chu, Ashish Bidadi and Fred Ting
Proofreading: Bianca Baroni
The interaction between users and computers usually takes place in the same way, through the use of the classical tools: mouse and keyboard. Some may use more complex tools such as joysticks or tablets, but these sectorial devices are made only for certain categories of users. In order to create a new system of communication between our computers and us, Calvin Chu and his partner Ashish Bidabi have developed Palette, a customizable tool that can be adapted to the way we work.
Palette is a modular system and all the various elements can be assembled like pieces of Lego. It’s up to us to decide how to position the different modules to suit our needs. There are buttons, knobs and sliders and each component can be mapped to a specific function, thus allowing an infinite possibility of configurations.
The design has been studied to adapt to any laptop as a desktop computer. The basic idea was to create an art palette, where artists could choose their own colours. Palette is an intuitive system, which was created to be used by professionals such as graphic designers and photographers, but the range of affected users is much larger.
The funding for the project was made through Kickstarter (a crowd funding website for creative projects), the designers are now working to start, in the coming months, the production of Pallete, which for now you can only pre-order. For now the focus is the setup for the 900 supporters who financed Palette, in autumn should be ready units for other users.
