We've already seen just how stupid design clients can be; now designer David Thorne has added an amazing email exchange with one of his dead-beat, would-be clients. Summarizing it doesn't do much--just click and enjoy.
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, Dumb Clients, Angry designers, info graphic, infographic, data viz, data visualization, David Thorne, funny, Innovation, Technology, David Thorne |
Folding, flat-pack chairs make sense in our carbon-conscious age. They require relatively few materials to make, and they're far more fuel-efficient to ship. Here are seven takes on the theme:
The Flux, which debuted this year at a Dutch furniture fair, is easily the best-looking of the lot. Made from a sheet of plastic, it folds up so that you can carry it like an over-sized briefcase:
One classic assignment for student industrial-designers is to make a chair out of cardboard. James Schaffroth, a student at RISD, managed to create this amazing chair/desk that supports 200 pounds:
Eric Ku's Chair/Chair is made of five pieces, which spell out the word:
Another carboard chair, by Elias Kulukundis, which was inspired by origami:
Another cardboard chair, but you can buy this one. The unfortunately named Flexible Love Chair sounds like something you'd find at an orgy, but it's nonetheless a miracle of adaptability. The accordioned, honeycomb structure can be fit into almost any shape:
Andrej Blazon's Charity Chair was designed to resemble the hat traditionally worn by an order of charitable nuns. The project is open-source, so anyone can download the plans and make the chair themselves from found materials, thus making it uber-local, and carbon-light:
Sara Paculdo's Flat Chair won't win any beauty pageants, but it's a fascinating experiment. The piece is made just of laser-cut foam; the final shape emphasizes the way that the chair distributes the sitting forces--the entire structure is (purportedly) under constant tension, which allows it to support weight:
Omri Barzeev, a recent design-school graduate, has a knack for folding stuff into chairs. The back of his Zaza chair starts as a single sheet of plastic, which he then covers in felt and folds into shape. The legs of the chair are basically one huge clamp, holding the backrest/seatpan together:
Christian Desile's folding chair was an award-winning standout at September's Maison & Object, France's largest furniture fair. It folds remarkably flat for storage, in a cart or on a wall:
You weren't tired of cardboard chairs were you? Whew. Tom de Vrieze's Kraftwerk chair, which recently won DesignBoom's carbboard chair competition. (He kind of cheated though--the chair is filled with expanding foam.)
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, Flat-pack, folding chairs, Flex chair, Eric Ku, Design Concepts, Ethonomics, Innovation, Technology, Tom de Vrieze, Kraftwerk, James Schaffroth, Eric Ku, Elias Kulukundis |
Have you noticed how ugly motorcycles are becoming, what with all the grotesquely overgrown choppers and ridiculous-looking crotch rockets? It's time for a design intervention--and Carefully Considered is here to help.
The design firm was recently tasked with creating a new type of motorcycle for a U.K. start-up, Mac Cycles. The responded by taking the design back to the cafe racers of the 1960s and 1970s. As they write, "The intention was to create something new in a category overwhelmingly garish with logos and neon graphics."
In all, they created eight prototypes, each of them finished with laser-etched detailing and screen-printed graphics:
Actually, this is the second time that Carefully Considered has taken note of a design culture gone haywire: In 2006, they produced a series of show bikes for Trek intended to combat the "NASCAR stylings," "horsey logotypes," and "lightening bolts" of modern bike design:
Check out all the motorcycles here.
[Via Core 77]
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, Eye Candy, Carefully Considered, Motorcycles, cafe racers, Mac motorcycles, transportation, design porn, Innovation, Technology, United Kingdom, NASCAR |
Architectural Review has tapped four projects by young architects in its annual Emerging Architecture Awards. The projects include one gorgeously rustic school in China; a lovely, sylvan research office in Spain; an elegantly minimal friar's quarters in Ireland; and also...a door.
Granted, the door had to be pretty damn cool to win out over entire buildings.
Created by Matharoo Associates for a diamond merchant in India, the door is a whopping 17 feet high and five-and-a-half feet wide, and comprises 40 sections of Burmese teak, each of them nearly a foot thick. Each section revolves around some pretty complex machinery: The door's single pivot hides a counterweight, 80 ball bearings, and 160 pulleys.
But they all work together invisibly. Push on any one plank, and all 40 sections reconfigure themselves into a sinusoidal curve, revealing an opening into the house.
For more pics, check out Architectural Review.
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, Door design, Matharoo Associates, architecture, interior design, Emerging Architecture Awards, Architectural Review, Innovation, Technology, China, Ireland, Spain, India, Design |
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?
Leave it to the hyper-rational Austrians to skip all the noise about futuristic traffic solutions or road trains--instead, one group of students has offered up a rolling office, located on a bus.
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.
Please, let's all pray it doesn't come to this.
[Via Core 77]
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, Sprawl, commuting, Mass Transit, Office Design, Bus office, Innovation, Technology, Vienna |
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.
[Via World Architecture News, which has more images and info]
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, architecture, Ethonomics, green building, green architecture, architectural concepts, C. F. Møller, C.F. Moller, Innovation, Technology, Aalborg, Denmark, Science and Technology, Technology, Energy Technology |
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?
[Via Creative Review]
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, Future of Advertising, Short films, Marketing, advertising, Mother London, Stella Artois, Innovation, Technology, Stella Artois, Media, Entertainment, Television, YouTube LLC |
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.
Related Stories: | Topics:Technology, Design, fedex, supply chain, Shipping, senseaware, seanse aware, real-time monitoring, medical supplies, logistics, RFID, tracking, Innovation, Federal Express Corporation, Hamm, Science and Technology, Technology, Information Technology |
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!
Meanwhile, one of the commenters over at Design Yearbook opines:
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!
Ouch.
[Architect's Journal via Design Milk]
Related Stories: | Topics:Design, rapid prototyping, jewelry, Joshua DeMonte, Vomitorium, Barfy Design, architecture, Innovation, Technology, Joshua DeMonte, Tyler School, Philadelphia |
