Years ago the futurist, inventor and sci-fi author Sir Arthur C. Clarke had a brilliant idea: Instead of launching rockets to get up into orbit, why not build a "space elevator?" The idea was that a space station would be tethered to the Earth by an extremely long, straight cable. The station would be held in place by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation, and an elevator could ferry supplies up the cable, inching skywards the same way tourists get to the top of the Empire State (except the distance would be a bit longer, around 62,000 miles). Check it out:
Sure we might need a rocket to get the thing up there in the first place, but consider how ingenious this is. Rather than having to build subsequent rockets that all have to escape the Earth's gravity with massive engines, we could simply ferry parts up the elevator bit by bit, and assemble a craft in space, which would presumably require far less power to travel around in a vacuum.
Surprisingly, progress on this idea is actually being made. The Spaceward Foundation is dedicated to building a space elevator and is now holding their Power Beaming (Climber) Competition to see if anyone could make the actual elevator part of it. (The cable's a whole 'nother story.) A company named LaserMotive built a contraption that has thus far performed the best, scaling a cable nearly a kilometer high (held up there by a helicopter) at nearly 4 meters per second, placing it in the $900,000 prize money range. (The winner gets a cool $1.1 million.)
The problem with the term "package designer" is that it's so nebulous that an industrial designer, a graphic designer, and an engineer with absolutely no aesthetic training whatsoever could all rightfully have it on their business card. I bring this up because a company called PTI Packaging Systems has just come up with a new dual-chamber stick package, which sounded cool until I saw the photo; improved utility aside, holy cow is it ugly!
Called Twin Stick, the new packaging tech is capable of holding either liquid and/or powder in each of its dual chambers. When you think about all of the consumables that work in pairs--salt and pepper, cream and sugar, shampoo and conditioner, etc.--the benefits and cost-savings of a package design like this become obvious. I just wish the public presentation of this new tech didn't look like someone's cousin shot it on a cell phone from three years ago.
Sustainable Minds has just released the first version of their web-based, on-demand life cycle assessment software. Based on the Okala Design Guide 2009, this comprehensive SaaS software encourages the design of greener products by providing information at the beginning of the design process about the potential impacts of material choices on the environment and human health.
Features include optimization for electro-mechanical products; assessment for any portion of the product (whole or subassembly); streamlined use with CAD and PLM systems; 450+ impact factors with CO2 equivalent values; and much, much more.
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You can watch the video demo or look through the comprehensive information available on their website. The cost is $700 for a single user, annual subscription, and a 30-day free trial is available as well.
If the Happiness Hat, created by interactive artist and designer Lauren McCarthy, senses that you aren't smiling, it shoves a metal spike into your head until you do. A ruthless device to help you train your way to what McCarthy calls "Improved Social-Interacting." She demonstrates in the video below:
Rob Englert and Grant Meacham are in the process of developing a new method of cataloging and distributing reclaimed materials in an effort to promote the benefits of their use in new constructions and products. To do so, they are creating a website called D-Build, which will be both a blog and an online marketplace that sells material from dismantled houses and the products made from them, while illuminating some of the material's cultural history.
This will be done by carefully cataloging a house as it is dismantled, taking note of historical information alongside dimensional data, which will be uploaded to a central database. Additionally, each home will be scanned, preserving buildings that might otherwise have no blueprints or other documented history. Then, all of this information will be linked to the online marketplace, so buyers can access an information-rich history of the materials they are browsing.
D-build is currently being prototyped, but you can check out their demo in the video above. The website will first focus on Syracuse, launching at the grand opening of the new Syracuse Center of Excellence Headquarters in December. It looks like this will be the first house to be taken apart and cataloged:
Any of us who have left their car in a sunny parking lot for a few hours and returned to an oven-like interior know that there's a lot of wasted energy right there. To make matters worse, we usually then crank up the A/C to compensate, increasing the environmental damage.
Well, here's a clever way to leave cars in shade and generate electricity at the same time: A solar-power-gathering parking lot. Above is a shot of a "Solar Grove" built by Envision Solar for Dell Computer's corporate headquarters in Texas. The panels not only generate juice for the facility, but are also connected to two CleanCharge stations that electric vehicles can plug into.
Hit the jump for the full press release, and a nine-minute video explaining the concept.
Inspired by student-built and inhabited shelters exhibited alongside the Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward exhibition, the Guggenheim and Google SketchUp put together the Design It: Shelter competition, challenging "amateur and professional designers from around the world to submit a 3-D shelter for any location in the world using Google SketchUp and Google Earth."
The winners are announced in the video above, but here's the rundown:
David Mares from Setubal, Portugal took the People's Prize Winner, determined by popular vote from among 10 finalists. The building is made from cork, which would be locally sourced and serves as a sound and temperature insulator.
The Juried Prize, determined by a jury of seven professionals, was awardid to David Eltang from Denmark. His shelter is located on the coastline of the Wadden Sea, allowing the high tide to roll in around the building while inhabited. When it's low tide, the inhabitant can leave the building and stroll the seashore.
Curious about the rest of the entries? There all described and located on Google earth here.
Those who remember the advent of the CD will recall the demonstrations given at the time, where some guy in a lab coat would scratch the disc up with a screwdriver, then stick it in the player to reveal no loss in sound quality. For a generation coming off of easily-scratched vinyl this was a miracle.
Half a generation later, here we are with OLEDs about to replace LCDs. And here's the updated stress test: Unseen lab man smashes each in turn with a hammer. Guess which comes up second best?
We're looking forward to the next generation of lab tests using hand tools, when future lab man crushes a flash drive with a crescent wrench while the high-tech crystals that replace it remain unscathed.
Petter Prinz, Kaspar Prinz and Phillip Cristofor of the D&AD Student Awards 2010 have just launched Creative Search, a new search aggregator especially for designers conducting visual research.
The idea is simple: search for a term and the site will show results from a number of different search queries. This is not a new idea, but the curation of search engines is specifically targeted for designers, including results from Google Images, Google Blogsearch, Flickr, iTunes, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon and Wikipedia. There's also a Save/Share option that will send a permalink of your search to you via email or to others through a number of social networking sites.
I typed in RFID as a quick test and I can already tell this will save me loads of time. Try it out and bookmark it.
If you live in Manhattan, I guarantee this has happened to you: You check to see that the coast is clear, and start to cross the street. Then you hear this attention-getting noise: Shrill howling, Doppler-effected cursing or the sound of a human voice mimicking a police siren with astonishing accuracy. As you pause, a bike messenger hurtles past you with mere inches to spare.
Urban bike messengers have long known what hybrid car owners are just now discovering: When people can't hear your moving vehicle, they have a tendency to step in front of you, creating a potentially messy physics lesson involving bodies intersecting at vastly different speeds. And so, as an article in the Times points out:
Working with Hollywood special-effects wizards, some hybrid auto companies have started tinkering in sound studios, rather than machine shops, to customize engine noises. The Fisker Karma, an $87,900 plug-in hybrid expected to go on sale next year, will emit a sound -- pumped out of speakers in the bumpers -- that the company founder, Henrik Fisker, describes as "a cross between a starship and a Formula One car."
Nissan is also consulting with the film industry on sounds that could be emitted by its forthcoming Leaf battery-electric vehicle, while Toyota has been working with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Federation of the Blind and the Society of Automotive Engineers on sounds for electric vehicles.
"One possibility is choosing your own noise," said Nathalie Bauters, a spokeswoman for BMW's Mini division, who added that such technology could be added to one of BMW's electric vehicles in the future.
Yep, make no mistake: One day we'll all be downloading vroom tones that will annoyingly branch out beyond mechanical sounds to include the latest YouTube sound effect or cloying songs that will remain stuck in your head for the rest of the day.
If this comes to pass, I'm going to develop and market a vroom tone of an angry bike messenger screaming "Yo yo yo YO!"
By the by, my favorite screamed bike messenger invective, overheard seconds before slamming into a pedestrian:
Here's a bit of interesting DIY manufacturing news: Rapid prototyping technology company Objet is making available, to owners of its Connex 3D printers, a "digital material pack" containing 18 new materials that emulate a wide range of hardnesses and properties.
With these materials, Connex users can print parts, such as wires and cables, grips and handles, plugs and connections, shock absorbers, function buttons, gaskets and seals, among other rubber applications.
The new rigid materials simulate the strength and toughness of products made of such standard plastics as PP, LDPE, HDPE, PVC and PS. Up to 11 different rigid and flexible materials can be combined in a single part in one build.
By combining Objet's materials a designer could, for instance, "print" a bottle opener with a flexible handle and a rigid claw, a sneaker with a hard sole and soft upper, a hard plastic device with soft, rubbery buttons, et cetera.
"...This new offering [allows] engineers and designers to develop products and parts with physical and mechanical properties that were previously unattainable with 3D printing," said David Reis, CEO of Objet Geometries, and added: "The increased capabilities extend tremendous benefits, opening up the use of printed models for many more applications."
Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing and current head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia, has a new manifesto on his blog called "Towards urban systems design," based on a talk he'll be delivering in November at the Pompidou. The abstract reads as follows:
The networked objects which are increasingly populating our lives and our cities already generate torrential, unceasing volumes of data about our whereabouts, activities, and even our intentions. How can we ensure that this data is used for the equal benefit of all? What provisions regarding such objects should citizens demand of their municipal governments? How might the juridical order respond most productively to the presence of these new urban actors?
"This is not a talk intended, primarily, for technologists," Greenfield explains, "but for people who understand themselves to be citizens, constituents and co-creators of an urban polity. And it's an attempt to use the appearance of networked informatics in our cities to argue a much larger point: that our times and circumstances call for a conscious art and craft of urban systems design."
At some point, p2p networks won't have just mp3 files, they'll have CAD files. When they do, the first thing that will happen is factories in distant corners of the manufacturing world will start churning out bootleg product at a pace that will make current infringement look like pre-Napster music "sharing". After that people will start using locally-based fabbing services to rapid manufacture parts the way people used to photocopy stuff at the local copy shop. Eventually, home-based 3D printers (or, possibly in the more distant future, nano-factories) will allow people to fab something as easily as they currently print their digital photos.
That's the future. It's all up for grabs. Creatives can either try to fight it or they can figure out new business models.
At the bottom of the entry, the (uncredited) writer lists no less than 26 "links to IP-related news which should be of interest to (industrial) designers," including the lurid tale of Herman Miller combatting knockoffs...in Second Life, of all places.
Although we found the Microsoft Research technologies demonstrated here mostly uninspiring (unlike last week's cool multi-touch demonstration by BumpTop), they will be of interest to anyone studying or working on interface design. Microsoft's five experimental mice use a variety of sensing technologies to translate user gestures into on-screen actions, giving us entirely new ways to develop carpal tunnel.
Oh, and the boys at Microsoft haven't lost their touch for naming products and technologies--as you'll see in the vid, one of the mice operates via something called "Frustrated Total Internal Reflection."
The Boston Globe asked local artists and architects to re-imagine the sites of construction projects that have stalled in response to the recession, becoming eyesores that remain separate from the rest of the city's cultural fabric.
Our favorite entry is Howeler + Yoon and Squared Design's imaginative proposal for the 32-story Filene's development downtown: a network of algae eco-pods which will turn the entire site into a large bio-fuel reactor. The reactor would serve as a center for energy production, while supporting bio-fuel research by allowing scientists to test the effectiveness of different algae species and perfect methods of fuel extraction. The structure would have other benefits as well—in addition to producing energy, micro-algae reduces carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere without relying on arable land.
To maximize the effectiveness of the project, the whole thing would be reconfigurable by a set of robotic arms. Powered by the fuel produced by the reactor, the arms will move the algae pods around the framework to ensure that the plants have access to favorable growth conditions.
The Boston Globe is holding a vote to determine the best proposal, so go see the other projects and cast your ballot now.
For more information about the eco-pods, read Building Design's writeup here.
It's the bane of every blogger: comment moderation. Not only are most completely inane, it's difficult to understand how to encourage constructive commenting and discussion. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. Which would, of course, be okay if it somehow enriched a reader's experience. Most of the time, however, it doesn't, amounting to not much more than piles of textual trash.
With Associates is as fed up with this as we all are, but proposes a new solution: to encourage discussion (rather than anonymous one-worders) by holding people accountable via Twitter. Not only will this encourage readers to think before they write, but it also has the potential to bring other twitter users into the discussion...and your website.
Here's their proposal, taken from a larger article on commenting they wrote for It's Nice That:
At With Associates our general view is to use comments in moderation and with moderation. Don't open them on everything you publish, and consider what your desired definition of 'comment' is. Do you mean comment as exclamation, conversation, discussion or conclusion? And will your participators feel the same way?
We've opted to use Twitter to authenticate users and double as a way to discourage anonymous comments. Sure, anonymity can still be achieved, but hopefully under ongoing pseudonyms that in themselves will offer consistency and identity.
We've also played a little with the convention of how comments are shown (minimising them all to 3 lines on first view) with hope to democratise the page and help the reader scan and delve deeper when intrigued. We hope this might also encourage writers to think more succinctly about their first words and so post them on Twitter to encourage others to join.
Most obviously however you will notice that comment is only open here in the new Discussion section of the site. In developing this solution it was agreed unanimously between It's Nice That and With Associates that there was little benefit in adding comments to the daily posts on the homepage. That curated content remains an offer and a reference only.
They've launched the new commenting system alongside this article, so head over there and try it out. Maybe this is the answer to creating more accountability on internet, which, despite all my misgivings, is a great way to use twitter.
Frog's latest issue of designmind, their multimedia publication on business, technology and design, focuses on the TedGlobal conference held in Oxford this past July, on the theme of "The Substance of Things Not Seen." With selected articles online and a print version available to purchase, this issue offers both behind-the-scenes coverage of the acclaimed TedGlobal conference (where frog acted as a content partner) and reflections by frog designers, technologists and strategists on the conference content. For example, in Seeing the Future Synesthetic, Laura Richardson, a principal designer at frog, reflects on Beau Lotto's talk about artificially created synesthesia:
Like TEDGlobal speaker Beau Lotto (see "A New Way to See"), I don't research synesthesia—I prefer to create it artificially. Lotto calls this "virtual synesthesia." I call it "associational synesthesia." While he might want to leverage synesthesia for experimenting with the brain's adaptability, I want to cultivate and harvest it in order to design thinking processes and problem solving skills.
"You can teach people through [synesthetic] experiences to heighten their ability to find new relationships and new associations that haven't been discovered before. That's the creativity," says Lotto.
There's much more where that came from—frog has a wealth of selected articles here, including pieces on musician Imogen Heap, the working homeless, organized crime and micro-sculptures, among others. For even more, get the printed version.
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2009
PRAGUE DESIGN DAYS 2009
LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2009
GIZMODO GALLERY 2009
EUROBIKE 2009
MAKER FAIRE AFRICA
NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL GIFT FAIR
ISTANBUL DESIGN WEEKEND 2009
BAUHAUS SUMMER SCHOOL 2009
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