Commuter-Friendly Office on Wheels Puts Bus in Business
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Sprawl
In cities across the world, traffic is getting out of control; some people now routinely spend upwards of two hours of every day, just in transit. What's to be done?
They point out that almost all efforts to curb congestion have failed; even in the beautifully planned city of Vienna, average commutes are 48 minutes and 56% of commuters ride in cars, alone.
The key innovation in their bus concept lies in the seats, which can be configured as a kind of upright cubicle, or can be turned to face each other, to create an ad-hoc conference room.
C.F. Møller Architects, a powerhouse Danish firm, has taken the grand-prize in a competition to design a totally zero-energy housing development for Denmark's Aalborg waterfront.
Of the five groups that competed, C.F. Møller was one of only two that passed the stringent, zero-energy guidelines. The firm pulled that feat off by some clever design features that maximize the potential for on-site energy generation.
Particularly key is the shape of the building itself. No, it's not a ski-jump, despite its looks. Rather, the long, sloping form creates a huge plane for almost 13,000 square feet of solar panels--enough, given typically PV power outputs, to provide electricity for all 60 apartments in the complex.
Meanwhile, C.F. Møller sited the building right on a fjord. That, in turn, will allow the building to draw cold water to power heat pumps. And because the location makes for particularly high winds, four wind turbines would be installed and dedicated to charging electric cars.
That video above isn't some ancient TV show, dragged back to life on YouTube. It's part of a full-on series that the superhip agency Mother London has created for Stella Artois, the Belgian beer label. There are eight more installments of "Stella TV" that will trickle out on the channel in the coming days.
Granted, this isn't the first time a big company has created Web shorts to promote themselves--Google Chrome just recently commissioned some of the hottest animation/graphics studios in the business to create 11 experimental shorts; way back in 2005, Volkswagen commissioned a series of "feature films."
But what's interesting about the Stella ads is just how similar they are to real TV shows--the one above tops 15 minutes. The shows are roughly tied to a theme of treating Mother Nature well. The fictional backstory is a show hosted by "Alain du Monde," a supposedly forgotten eco-futurist from the 1960s. The shorts will accompany Spotify takeovers, and even direct marketing--200 bloggers will be getting three-course TV dinners in the mail.
Given all that, how long is it until companies begin sponsoring full-on TV shows of their own and publishing them on the Web? That doesn't sound too much different from television entertainment in the 1950s and the rise of soap operas. And now, the economics make tremendous sense: Why bother creating TV ads if you can get a few million views with no distribution costs while simultaneously creating and having final cut control over far more ambitious content?
The trick, of course, is creating something that millions will actually choose to watch. With that in mind, how long is it until some canny marketer commissions, say, the Gossip Girl team to create extended scenes, and then publishes them to the Web? And after that, when will TV producers begin pitching pilots directly to marketers?
The cable news networks are having a field day with President Barack Obama's sagging approval ratings--it seems like every politics story you hear begins with the ominous caveat: As the public disapproval of Obama grows...
It's all nonsense, cooked up to milk a fake drama, as the superb Presidential Approval Tracker by USA Today illustrates.
At first glance, what the data tells you is that almost all modern presidents have seen their approval ratings sag tremendously in their first two years of office. Bouncebacks--when they come, as with Reagan, Clinton, Carter, and even Nixon--tend to happen 2-3 years after the election, when a president has a chance to tout the changes he's ushered in.
Meanwhile, the excellent interactive portions of the graph are revealing, allowing you to limit the time frame you're looking at, and, what's more, compare presidents against each other.
And what you see with Obama is that his approval trends most closely resemble Reagan's. Granted, the starting points are a bit different, but just a few months into each president's first term, the lines begin looking quite similar:
Meanwhile, you'll note that the only president to have seen his approval ratings tick quickly upward from the start was actually George Bush, Sr.
Didn't help him so much with getting re-elected, did it?
Speed isn't good enough when you're shipping something like transplant supplies for emergency surgery or tissue samples. You also need to be perfectly sure that what you're sending hasn't been compromised for even a second along the way. FedEx has come up with an answer: Senseaware, a drop-in sensor that pings the status of its contents to the Web, including temperature, exact location, and whether the shipment has been opened or exposed to light. There's even an accelerometer, for detecting drops. Having already completed a beta test, Senseaware will now be deployed with 50 FedEx medical clients this spring.
"Four years ago, we started thinking about the next-generation alternatives to RFID," says Mark Hamm, FedEx's VP of Innovation. What they came up with is a Web-platform, combined with a sensor the size of a Blackberry, loaded with temperature and light meters, as well as GPS and a cellular antennae. (During plane rides, the device automatically goes into sleep mode, monitoring data but temporarily silencing the data relays.) Thus, as a shipment goes out, its location can be tracked to within feet of where it is at any second, and the Web interface registers its condition in real-time--a device/platform ecosystem that Hamm likens to iPod/iTunes.
That's particularly useful in the medical industry. For example, one of the trial testers of Senseaware was a maker of one-off surgical kits, which the company sends to doctors and the doctors send back after using. Live monitoring means that doctors on the receiving end can known exactly when to begun surgical prep, thus saving them time and scheduling hassles. It gets even more complicated on the way back. The company refurbishes the kits, but they also contain sensitive materials such as bone samples. The drop-in sensor ensures the integrity, and allows the company to prepare all of its refurbishing equipment in advance, so that the kit can be refreshed and sent back out the door almost immediately after receipt--to another waiting doctor. "That's an anticipatory way of looking at shipping which has never been possible before," says FedEx spokesperson Matt Ceniceros.
But the main benefits might be economic. Where companies relying on precise logistics usually have to spend millions to install RFID monitoring systems and IT, the Senseaware currently costs just $120 a month. You just drop it into a box; the only thing you need is an Internet connection "This is pay as you go," says Hamm. "You don't need a big investment to have real-time information about your shipment."
After the trial run this spring, Hamm expects that FedEx will begin aggressively rolling out the product worldwide, and dropping the price rapidly as the project reaches scale. And once the price falls to somewhere around $10 a trip, the applications will start growing, from Christmas hams and Italian truffles, to art and irreplaceable keepsakes. FedEx is already developing new services around the device, including ways of intercepting and saving a package at risk.
When rapid prototyping becomes cheap and ubiquitous, everyone will get a chance to realize their craziest dreams for products. The results should be...interesting. And you can bet you'll see more projects like this jewelry by Joshua DeMonte.
DeMonte created these when he was a student at Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art--which is presumably when he had free, unlimited access to a rapid prototyping machine. He writes:
My jewelry objects mimic ancient architectural elements activating the space surrounding the body and altering the viewers perception of the wearer. My work has replaced the traditional embellishments of jewelry objects with the details of traditional architectural form. The objects have become jewelry that have defined architectural space around the body, altering our perception of the figure.
Heh--"Activating the space" and "altering our perception of the figure." That's design-speak for: My stuff is ginormous!
Looks like the dude got his head caught in the space shuttle toilet seat. The rest of the stuff looks like wedding cake decoration that was left in a hot car. WOOF!
The three high-cheekboned lads above aren't in a Danish pop group. They're all big-name product designers, and they've joined to form the new firm KiBiSi.
In the picture, from left to right, are: Jens Martin Skibsted, founder of Biomega, which makes some of the most beautiful bikes in the world; Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG architects, a firm that's had a meteoric rise in the last couple years; and finally, Lars Holme Larsen, founder of Kilo Design.
All three have known each other for years--the Danish design scene is still pretty small, after all. It makes sense that they'd form a joint venture: We've seen for some time that clients are eager to get a suite of services, surrounding a single project. For example, when Coke rolls out a new soda machine, it incorporates graphics, product design, and environmental design (kiosks, show booths, etc). Some design firms have begun offering services to suit those sprawling projects--but the results have usually been hackneyed. (Here's a free tip: DO NOT hire advertising agencies to do architecture--I'm looking at you, Microsoft and Coke.) Hopefully, these three genuine talents from disparate fields will be able to produce something better.
Naturally, the three of them have excellent Rolodexes, which they capitalized on for a series of products launching in 2010:
Headphones with leather-covered ear pieces:
Bespoke chairs for a new housing development in Copenhagen that BIG is designing, called 8 House:
Another set of headphones launching in 2010, and produced by AIAIAI:
A series of bikes, designed for Puma, and continuing on Biomega's brilliant early design for bike with an integrated cable lock (visible in the second row, on the left):
We look forward to the day when American product designers are treated like rock stars too. In the meantime, you can be a groupie over at the official KiBiSi site.
Bless the Web team over at Mint.com for this new infographic, detailing their shopping indices in the run-up to the coming Black Friday. Mint's users input their spending habits on the site, and the anonymized data has yielded lots of interestingresults. The latest is about Black Friday sales, they're predicting that this year should be pretty strong.
The bottom two graphs show sales figures among mass-market and luxury retailers, gathered from Mint's own records of consumer spending. Both are well over the moribund stats they posted in 2008.
But maybe the most helpful of the three graphs is the first one. Mint looked at their users' spending at several major retailers, and used that to calculate an average spend per user. The dotted lines show the trend in 2008; the solid line shows the trend in 2009. In 2008, the average spend was flat or declining. In 2009, things are trending back up.
Now, economists have reached a broad consensus that consumer-spending is a pretty dicey way to rescue us from a recession--it's better to invest, and let innovation create more jobs. Nonetheless: American Consumer, to the rescue!
Fresh off of a landmark exhibition at MoMA, furniture-designer Ron Arad is rounding on another milestone: In January, he'll complete The Design Museum Holon, in central Israel.
Arad was born in Israel but made his career in London. Though trained as an architect at London's Architectural Association in the 1970s--a hot house period that also saw Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas studying there--his furniture business took off first in the 1980s, after Jean-Paul Gaultier bought one of his chairs, made from the gutted seating of a car. He's toyed with architecture since then, but has never built anything approaching the scale of the Holon museum.
It's hard to miss the fact that the building looks like the love child of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim New York, and a Richard Serra sculpture. The latter similarity goes beyond looks, too: The building is clad in five twisting bands of cor-ten steel, the same stuff that Serra uses in his pieces. It's intended to be the center piece of a 16-year urban revitalization for the tiny city, which lies on the coast south of Tel-Aviv. It's neighbors will include the National Cartoon Museum, theaters, and a libraries.
It would be fun to be a fly on the wall when the famously prickly Serra first gets wind of this one.
A rendering of the building, which gives you a better sense of the overall design:
Diller Scofidio + Renfro has completed another stage in their massive overhaul of Lincoln Center: A new home for the famed Julliard School.
The new 45,000-square-foot development occupies the upper floors of the building that houses the recently completed Alice Tully Hall. Apropos of a school for the performing arts, the space puts all of its inhabitants on display, like a fish tank or a stage (depending on your perspective).
Maybe the best example is the main public space, a huge set of stairs that double as seating--which face out onto Broadway and turn the social life inside the building into a living tableaux:
And from across the street, the drama rises. A glass-walled dance studio looks cool enough from the inside...
... but actually, the best feature is the outside. The dance studio itself hangs from the underside of the building, and creates what amounts to a picture box and a free show for passersby:
The superb detailing throughout:
The beautiful, monolithic box office:
The cleverly designed public benches outside. Note how the backrest of the lower-level seats becomes the seatpan for the higher levels:
