Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2012! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

• Pulse - Information Simplification
• Designer: Jon McTaggart & Christian Ferrara
• Location: KISD - ECAL
• Category: Consumer Products
• Award: Student Notable

Pulse is an analog device capable of displaying information obtained online. Pulse is meant to be hung on a wall in your living room or kitchen, where it will constantly keep you up to date on whatever information feed you connect it to. By tilting Pulse you are able to switch between three different information feeds of your choice, all of which are easily programmed by pairing the device with its online platform.

How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury? We we're both out and about traveling in France and Interning in Spain when we got the Email from the crew at Core77 (Sarah), so It took us a while to get back home and actually realize our project was recognized by the jury. Jon read it first since we applied with his account, so we ended up having a little celebration over Skype with Beer in Seville and Kölsch in Cologne. 

What's the latest news or development with your project? Since we applied for the award with some concept renders we have had the time to further develop the idea into a working prototype. It's been a pretty bumpy road with quite a lot of mechanical difficulties and many nights in the RISD workshops, but we managed to overcome almost all of them and we now have a working prototype that shows us a weather feed via the Google weather service. We are planning to build an online platform and make it open source so users can easily create and share their own feeds for Pulse and hopefully one day when we iron out all the details get it onto Kickstarter.

What is one quick anecdote about your project? Jon can't code and Christian hates electronics. Maybe that's why it took us almost three months and 13 servo motors (We burnt 7 motors by wiring them up back to front) to get Pulse just right. All jokes aside we couldn't have don't it without the Gadgeteer electronics prototyping platform and the help of Prof. Andy Law and Nic Villar from Microsoft Research. We're just better at bending aluminum and turning parts on the lathe.

What was an "a-ha" moment from this project? We were trying to figure out how to avoid any buttons on Pulse so we could keep it as simple and pure an interaction with the information as possible, yet we still wanted to have three different modes for the user to switch between. We were stuck for quite some time until one of us standing in front of an early prototype started playing with it by twisting it on the wall - we both looked at each other and went A-HA!. Really.