Email, Reduced to A Series of Tubes

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/10777240[/vimeo]

This is totally flowing my mind.

Developed by Dean McNamee and Filippo Cuttica of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (they have freaking schools for interaction design in Denmark. I was totally born in the wrong country), Go with the Flow is a new way to visualize email. Built of tubes and wires, the contraption filters your incoming emails into three cylinders - work, family, and friends - and colours them accordingly. That's kind of neat on its own, but here's where it gets interesting: you actually haven't received any emails yet. They're just backed up and chillin'. To receive emails, you operate valves beneath each tube, allowing water to trickle down into a physical inbox. Depending on how far you've opened a valve, you'll receive a proportional amount of emails from that category.

Practical? Of course not - and it's not supposed to be. "The concept," says Cuttica of the device, "even if meant to be a statement object, helps people working from home better divide their personal and work lives. This creates a liquid membrane instead of a solid barrier." Sexy.

[Via Yanko Design]