New Born Fame is a series of social media-enabled baby gear created by Laura Cornet for her graduation show at Eindhoven Design Academy. It went viral during Dutch Design Week.
Though kid-free herself, Cornet studied the steady stream of newborns popping up in her Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook streams, and wondered what the kids themselves might have to say about it [Nothing! They're babies! Ha. Oh wait.]
So she figured out how to empower kids to upload their own photos and videos, by equipping crib toys with motion- and play-activated cameras that automatically post to social media platforms. A ball logs its GPS coordinates whenever it's squeezed, and a pair of booties post their motion logs [which go nowhere, right? Kid can't crawl?]
From Dezeen:
The tools aim to plainly demonstrate that an infant has no idea that it is providing information about itself to an audience, in the same way as when a parent does it for them.From before the kid was born, back when the only thing we thought we had to worry about was her Google results, we've kept our kids out of our public online spaces and social media networks. We're right at the cusp of where our older kid is thinking of venturing into the world herself. So alongside Cornet's study subject, kids "brought up by parents who grew up with Facebook," we turn out to have the rare kids brought up away from Facebook. i feel like a control group in Cornet's little experiment."If you show it like this, people say: 'the baby doesn't know what he's doing, it is awful that it just puts everything online'. But when a mother does the same thing, it is suddenly accepted; while the baby has no say in that."
Laura Cornet | New Born Fame [lauracornet.nl]
Interactive Soft Toys Let Babies Post To Facebook [dezeen]
