Constructed of stainless steel and aircraft aluminum, the display is made of 888
LED screens, with 500,000 pixels spanning across them, providing concertgoers
with clear and visually stunning images. It has a screen area of 3,800 square feet,
and weighs approximately 120,000 pounds.
Hoberman Associates has teamed up with Innovative Designs and Barco to create the Expanding Video Screen, a transformable elliptical screen for the U2 360° Tour. Based on Hoberman's patented Iris structure, this "fusion of architecture, stage scenery and extreme technology" stretches upwards to form a 7-story cone around the band, displaying footage directed by the Irish artist Catherine Owens.
E-waste, that nasty by-product of our desire to constantly upgrade our gadgets, is a problem that we really wrestle with in the design community. The most common ways to "handle" the problem at present: 1. Ship the waste overseas to workers so desperate for cash that they expose themselves to the toxins within just to reclaim the materials, 2. Throw it in the landfill so all of those lovely toxins can seep into the ground water.
Hardly elegant solutions.
In this recent NYTs piece, the debate is focused on who should be responsible for picking it up and managing it. Is it the states? Is it the Fed? How about the manufacturers?
Of course, 'Who should take care of the mess once it's made?' isn't the right question to ask. From the NYTs piece:
Ultimately, said Ms. Kyle, coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, recycling does not eliminate the root problem: the vast amount of electronics generated in the first place and fated for disposal.
Carole A. Cifrino, the environmental specialist who manages Maine's e-waste program, said she hoped the strict recycling would eventually prompt manufacturers to rethink their designs.
"Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup," Ms. Cifrino said, "it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life."
That's right, designers. It's on us! No challenge too big, right?
"How tightly can a product's lifecycle be compressed... and what are the ramifications of doing this?"
These are the questions Elliott Montgomery asks with his MicroCycle project--a mini manufacturing station-turned-public outreach kiosk that recently appeared on the south end of Union Square in New York City. Here, he and his posse created fabric shopping bags (made from salvaged materials, natch) but doesn't sell them. Instead, you can buy one by providing "an idea" for localized manufacture, materials sourcing, or the like. He designed and built the solar units for Solar1's outreach project I Heart PV.
@Jennifer van der Meer's a fan: "What's so fun about Elliott's installations is that he gets people to think in the immediate, about the waste streams available in their neighborhood, today, that can be recommissioned into something useful. He also thinks in terms of future reuse, plotting identified waste streams on a map, and posted online as an open source database.
The Guardian News blog reports on how Iranian people are turning into digital smugglers to spread their message, despite depleted phone and internet services.
"In days gone by, crushing a revolution was a lot easier. There were no mobile phones to co-ordinate street action or relay what was happening to the outside world. Even more importantly, there wasn't an internet. Now it is common to hear of "internet" or even "twitter revolutions" - as Andrew Sullivan on the Atlantic has already described the current protests in Iran.
It is precisely for that reason that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have - temporarily at least - shut down Facebook, Twitter, mobile phone networks and unsympathetic websites. Nevertheless, Iranians are still managing to feed out information, embracing the technology that the moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi employed during his ultimately unsuccessful election campaign."
The Infrastructurist, a blog started in 2009 to report on American Infrastructure, recently launched F** This!, "a place for residents of America's largest city to identify and fix problems with the local infrastructure." The project uses software from SeeClickFix, and allows users to report on problems, watch problem areas, vote for repairs, and close tickets. The project is still in a very early stage, but we encourage you to test it out and help The Infrastructurist iron out the kinks!
Above are renderings done with Patchwork3D, French company Lumiscaphe's rendering software, which has been knocking around since 2003. The forthcoming version 3.2 update promises some type of "fast rendering technology" (that's as specific as they get) that lets users edit visual characteristics in real time and see results instantly.
So how does it work? We'll have to wait until August's SIGGRAPH, when 3.2 will be released, to see.
What if you are holding the last iPhone ever made?
What if the 3G-S looked no different than the 3G?
What if the 4G looked no different than the 3G-S and so on...?
What if all iPhones looked the same from now on?
What if it didn't matter that the iPhone could be made 1/16" thinner next year?
What if it didn't matter that the iPhone could be produced in a host of different colors and metallic finishes?
What if the design could not be improved upon?
What if Apple stopped releasing new iPhones?
What if you could expand the capabilities of the iPhone infinitely through software?
What if there were a billion different apps available to download instantly?
What if you could plug-in new hardware modules to extend the capabilities even further?
What if you could send in your iPhone to have the internal components upgraded each year?
What if you subscribed to the iPhone instead of owning it?
What if the iPhone was guaranteed for life?
What if you never bought another phone?
What if Apple really decided to think differently?
(What would you be willing to pay for a Continuously-Upgraded-iPhone-for-Life? I would love to hear your answers...)
Robert Fabricant is the VP of Creative at frog design
Digital Confetti, by the Interaction Lab at Rockwell Group, draws from "noisemakers, confetti, balloons and fireworks" to create an interactive centerpiece for Metropolitan Home Magazine's Design 100 party in New York last month.
A twelve-foot diameter weather balloon floats above the pool at the Four Seasons restaurant. Projectors surrounding the balloon display “Digital Confetti”, small colorful shapes that mimic swimming fish in their movements. The graphic on the screen is also effected by special maracas around the pool. Shaking each of the eight maracas has a separate effect on the projected ecosystem. One stirs up the confetti, causing a firework-like spectacle of light, color and sound. The second brings text to the surface of the balloon. Continued shaking of these maracas causes letters to vibrate and eventually flip and transform into one of a sequence of words related to design. The words are projected as black, causing them to be illuminated by the background explosions of confetti, which encourages collaborative interaction. Each maraca also generates a different musical note, creating a harmony of sounds when all shaken together.
Motorola's struggles with product design over the past few years tell a well-documented cautionary tale. The close observer can practically watch the monthly tides of design strategy ebb and flow, washing an occasional, gem-like RAZR or PEBL up on the beach, along with the more frequent seaweed-pile of a phone, too tangled up in its own confused strands to draw covetous eyes away from shinier competitors' offerings. These variances of design success have been an ongoing topic on Core77 for years, swinging between high praise and scornful rebuke, and sparking some impassioned discussions on the boards as well. The upshot: Motorola's clearly shown that they can do good design, so why don't they do it more often?
Part of the reason for this unevenness, compared with Nokia, LG and others, may well be the vision thing: Motorola was first to the dance with its Star-Tac 25 years ago, but has spent most of its time since then with little coherent sense of what its devices, and by extension its brand, ought to be like.
In conversation last week with Dickon Isaac, Motorola's North American design manager, the possible explanation of a "design mythology" came up: the idea that a set of universal aspirations are crucial for an organization to develop the drive and coherence necessary for real innovation and a unified identity, much as engineers in the 50s and 60s looked to the gee-whiz sci-fi of their youth for inspiration in developing the space program.
A bit late on this one, but Hackaday's got a quick post on business cards from the Faire, with some nice links. We especially LOVE Limor Fried's Spirograph item in the video above. Please send to Core77 HQ!
As we first mentioned in March, iFixit's been showing panicked people all over the world how to repair their abused and overused electronics by themselves. Occasionally, the iFixit team takes apart a new piece of hardware (like the Kindle 2 and Pleo pictured above), documents it, and posts it as a teardown, letting thousands of people take a look at what's inside and disassemble it themselves.
Today, they've seriously extended this part of the site by launching a user-driven teardown platform. The new creation tools allow anyone to author guides, and, with so many people contributing, who knows what we'll see disassembled? Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, is explicit about the variation they hope to see: "The deviation from writing Mac teardowns foreshadowed today's epic announcement. We hope that people use our flexible teardown platform to create teardowns of devices of all kinds, not just Apple products."
To introduce the teardown creation tool, iFixit has posted several user-authored cell phone teardowns and a step-by-step guide of exactly what's involved in publishing. It's all laid out for you, so show the world some gadget guts!
The Artvertiser allows citizens to reclaim advertising-saturated city spaces by looking through a hand-held device that substitutes billboard content for art. This virtual canvas is not too far removed from the 3D artists portrayed in William Gibson's "Spook Country" who build location specific installations, viewable through special equipment that creates a layer of virtual reality over the physical. The Artvertiser software is programmed to recognize individual advertisements, each of which can be replaced with art regardless of whether the ad is on a building, in a magazine or the side of a vehicle.
The project was started by Julian Oliver in early 2008, he's now collaborating with Clara Boj and Diego Diaz and you can follow their progress on his blog. They're currently making a set of weather-proof digital binoculars--improved connectivity, battery life and solid state storage--and hope to have the software platform working with mobile devices (running Symbian and Android) by the end of the year. Check out their latest 'postcard' demo below and more video samples at vimeo.
The Model A made its debut in 1949. The rest of the fleet was numbered, in order. Sonja Henie took Nos. 2 and 3 for her ice show. No. 9,056, almost complete, is headed to a rink in Monterrey, Mexico.
"It's a small, family-owned business," Mr. Zamboni said. "It's got a name, but it's sure got a small niche in a small industry when you get down to it."
The Zamboni ON THE COVER of today's nytimes. Image above is the original contraption from the Times' nice slideshow.
Wanted to make sure you didn't miss this in the magazine (and at the ICFF show this past weekend).
A French team of an engineer and two architects have won this year's prestigious Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize for "Wind-it," a design to place wind turbines inside existing high-voltage electricity pylons. The winners are Julien Choppin, 31, and Nicola Delon, 31, partners in the Paris architecture firm Encore Heureux, and Raphael Menard, director of Elioth, a 20-person conceptual and experimental research arm of the large French engineering firm Iosis Group. The first non-US winners of the prize, Choppin, Delon and Menard were judged to have best met the 2009 Next Generation Prize Challenge: "FIX OUR ENERGY ADDICTION."
Wind-it answers one of the greatest challenges to the development of wind power: where to site wind turbines. Choppin, Delon and Menard's design uses existing infrastructure--the towers and pylons that dot the more than 157,000 miles of high voltage power lines in the U.S.--to locate their turbines, which can be stacked within already sited structures. Moreover, Wind-it solves the problem of linking energy generation and electricity transmission in the same way--by co-locating them.
Also from the NYU's Interactive Technology Program spring show, a remarkable take on the venerable drum machine. Steven Litt has gone extra analog with his CrudBox, which drives hacked doorbell solenoids to bang on pieces of scrap material, creating a more organic sound than what usually emerges from a digital sequencer. The sounds produced can then be processed through all manner of effects pedals, which are also contained in the rather mysterious looking hard case body.
Definitely a different experience from the typical electro-beat sound, and you've got to love the dramatic red lighting.
The end-of-year show at NYU's Interactive Technology Program (ITP) is generally a mixed bag of art, design, and technological innovation, saturated with a sense of geeky wonder reminiscent of the coolest science fair ever. This years' was no exception.
Core77's survey of the 40+ student projects filling the Manhattan gallery was overwhelming, charming, and occasionally thrilling -- a good example being Christian Cerrito's Cobots, collaborative robots that require human interaction to properly function.
A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet
New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.
NEW YORK DESIGN WEEK 2009
MILAN DESIGN WEEK 2009
PICTOPIA FESTIVAL 2009
HOME AND HOUSEWARES SHOW 2009
TRANSVERSALE 2009
NEW YORK CITY TOY FAIR 2009
IMM COLOGNE INTERNATIONAL FURNISHING SHOW
NORTH AMERICAN INT'L AUTO SHOW '09
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2008
LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2008
BICYCLE
100 PERCENT DESIGN SHANGHAI
