June is here and the majority of student degree (and some MA) shows are on in England so I went to London today to go and see at least the Royal Collage of Art MA show if not a few others as well.

The R.C.A. show, titled The Great Exhibition 2007 (a nod to the Great Exhibition of 1851) this year, usually has a few gems especially from the Design Interactions and Communication Art and Design MA’s but Painting, Photography and Printmaking and Industrial Design Engineering are definitely worth a look as well this year.

Semaclock (image above, video below) was the first work I saw that appealed to me from MA Design Interactions. It is:

an electro-mechanical Internet device for people with deipnophobia or other social anxiety disorders. Installing a Semaclock in the home means that sufferers need no longer worry about awkward silences and the crippling embarrassment of running out of things to say when entertaining guests.

Plugged into a home network, Semaclock connects to the Internet to retrieve news and topics of interest from one of the thousands of freely-available RSS feeds, and then displays them using the semaphore alphabet. Seating your guests with their backs to the Semaclock allows you to easily read the incoming items of interest without them noticing.

By default the device spells out the three most recent headlines from the BBC Entertainment News website, although this can easily be changed by the device’s owner to suit personal preferences, via a registered user account on the Semaclock website. Although the extensive Semaclock user manual and free wallchart both help with the process of learning the semaphore alphabet, a training device is also available to assist in recognition.