A Robot Making Coffee With a Keurig Is Wonderfully Redundant

This particular minnovation comes from a company called FOCUS Integration, and in its defense, the JoeBot does more than just push the brew button on the Keurig. It can load in new capsules, swap out full and empty coffee cups, and even label the cardboard sleeve with a custom design. Now if it could only refill the Keurig's water reservoir, which seems to be perpetually empty whenever you want a brew.Up until he went to college, Japanese media artist Yuri Suzuki thought he was stupid. Music was in his blood, his bones, his thoughts, but he couldn't read it. Suzuki was dyslexic, and as much as he loved music, the only sound a series of notes arrayed upon a musical stave implied was the sound of chaos.

That's why much of Suzuki's work focuses on new ways to visualize music. Looks Like Music is his new project, an alternative to standardized Western musical notation synesthetic enough for even dyslexics to understand. Even cooler? It's music notation done with robots.Even as a child, Suzuki loved music. Raised in a richly musical household where the big band sounds of Glenn Miller seemed to come crashing like thunder from his father's stereo, young Suzuki was inspired to begin his education in the trombone at an age when he would scarcely have been able to hold the thing upright: just three years old. In high school, Suzuki joined a ska band as a trombonist; later, he left the band, and, inspired by musicians such as Yellow Magic Orchestra, Devo, and Kraftwerk, Suzuki began to focus on synthesizers and electronic music.

Although musical, Suzuki was working with a disability, one that it took him a long time to realize was there. "I had all these friends asking me to read scores and do music theory stuff, but I couldn't read the notes. I thought I was dumb," Suzuki tells me. "It was only when I got to college that a coordinator took a look at my work and said, 'Yup, you're dyslexic.'"The revelation was eye opening to Suzuki, whose work since college has largely focused upon visualizing music and sound. "I try to design systems that don't require words to explain," Suzuki tells Co.Design. "Think iOS instead of Unix."