Some of us gonna be away for thanksgiving so don't forget your portable living rooms!
Walter Pichler, «TV-Helmet (Portable living room)», 1967
TV-Helm | © Walter Pichler
Showing posts with label concept design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label concept design. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Away for thanksgiving!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
A stackable electric city vehicle
I had previously posted on cars that fly, swim or shrink. I mainly referred to the retractable scooter that Bill Mitchell showed us at the Media Lab Open House'08. It is an impressive piece of gear that I cannot wait to get!
However the city car is pretty neat as well ...
The City Car is designed by the smart cities group at MIT Media lab directed by Prof. Mitchell. The project is created by Ryan Chin, Wayne Higgins, Mitchell Joachim, Will Lark, Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, Peter Schmitt, Andres Sevtsuk and Franco Vairani at MIT.
The City Car is the coolest idea: a stackable electric city vehicle for use in dense urban areas! Vehicle Stacks will be placed throughout the city to create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, the vehicle allows the citizens the flexibility to combine mass transit effectively with individualized mobility. The stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them. Similar to luggage carts at the airport, users simply take the first fully charged vehicle at the front of the stack. The City car is NOT a replacement for personal vehicles, taxis, buses, or trucks; it is a NEW vehicle type that promotes a socially responsible and more effective means of urban mobility!
I looked at the process and strategy used by Will Lark, one of the researcher working on this project. He studies and constructs physical representations of architectural details of varying sizes and materials, then apply shape grammar rules for new geometry generation. His strategy is to use the software CATIA, a parametric modeling CAD program, used to design the complex geometry. The shapes are then fabricated through various media: 3D rapid prototyping, 2D rapid prototyping with 3D assembly, and full manual construction. Comparisons are then made between the automated and manual construction.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Low tech color calendar
Designed by Oscar Diaz and discovered by the awesome Cuarto Derecha, numbers and patterns in a calendar gradually get colored as time goes by. Is the ink really pumped by the paper or is it a design concept? I don't know. However it is very nice, the ink seems to physically travel through the paper spongy material ...
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Blog Jouons 
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
For the next generation of e-baby
Do not forget me designed by Tomas Kral consists both of a brace for the cherished robotic dog Eibo, and a harness to show him the external world! This seems perfect for the next generation of e-baby, designed to provide convenience for the completely mental!
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Blog Jouons
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Virus love
Yazna and ++, created by Luca Bertini, are two computer virus in love, roaming from one computer to another computer to find each others. Their passage do not damage computers. Their passage is soft, invisible and extremely fragile. They live a few moments in your more instable computer folders, they leave a small sign of their presence and if they don't find each other, they go back. In the event of an actual meeting, maybe their will give birth to a wanderful color dot baby. Feel free to look at their posology.
Yazna and ++
Working on data narratives, Luca Bertini created Nacre, a synthesized creature stubbornly trying to protect itself from unmanageable amounts of data. Interferences and anomalies retrieved from the net are perceived as a hostile external body and thus analyzed and converted into a shield through a frantic, abnormal growth.
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Blog Jouons
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Placebo Effect + Design Solutions
You are getting better day after day.
I discovered these placebo pills by Broadhong Design on Idealist. The idea is that the more you take the pills, the more the pills get smaller. Each pill has the same effect, the only thing that differs is their size. The psychological effect happens when progressively the tablet-taker transitions from bigger pills to smaller pills. The taker might feel a physiological (mostly psychological) change as in they are getting better as the tablet become smaller. According to the designers, such Placebo effect actually helps patients to recover from physical injuries and psychological trauma.
I also found on the designer' site these intriguing pill-candy. The concept is that each patient has a right on his/her pill information, effect and prescription. Here the pills are wrapped in candy's paper, so the patient can easily recognize the pill's name. Apparently, it also works as a quick way to know what kind of pills they missed from their prescription.
Still implicitly working on the emotional attachment to pills and pharmaceutical treatment, the design team worked on Kisses Pills. You give a present such as kisess pills to your lover who just caught a cold. He/she picks and chooses a kisses pill according to his/her symptom.
Labels: Pink for a nasty cold. Blue for a runny nose. Green for a sore throat. Finally, they can take away the bitterness of the medicine by eating a real chocolate wrapped in silver color!
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Blog Jouons
Friday, March 14, 2008
Recycle your equipment!
The power of digital technology fundamentally transforms our lives. Materiality is being technically extended. The digital offers another variety of artifacts that impact remembrance. While expanding our experience, some things also get lost along the path to de-materialization.
For the contextual area of my general exams I research on the attachments to physical, digital and virtual objects. I explore the psychological trade-off between what we call virtual and tangible “attachments”: I focus on people’s attachments to things, and through things, their relations to people (virtual and digital).
I investigate the journey of the physical and digital object being appropriated, collected, hacked, transformed, possessed and shared on virtual environments and communities. I review the hacker’ skills in appropriating objects by transforming it: the Nintendo Wii becomes an umbrella with a map to provide real time directions while on the walk. The Roomba becomes a robotic dog, Guitar Heroe becomes Guitaraoke Revolution a learning system!
A hacked Roomba by Hacking Roomba dot com
With the industrial revolution we lost our ability to intervene on the design of our objects. Even if the old paradigm of mass production has been thrown away, dixit Pine, I believe that Mass Customization only allows few parameters in a product to be customized. There is no appropriation of the object as in the artisan-customer relationship. That is what came to mind while I was repairing my old mac, I had so much fun opening the machine, looking for tutorial and guides, ordering missing parts just to give a life to this machine.
A bit of nostalgia maybe, but recycling and reusing laptop parts, computer parts, and any objects in general would not only be good for the environment but also recreate this sense of ownership through creative use and appropriation. That is why I am so fascinated by hackers, custom car designers and also collectors. Everything could be recycled, reused, repaired, reinvented and investigated!
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Blog Jouons
Thursday, March 13, 2008
SMS stamps!
Disappointed by the fact that there’s no way to save the humorous, strange or loving text messages that we send and receive – and that ultimately they have to be erased – Martin Frostner & Johanna Lewengard came up with a novel method by which they could be retained. 
By designing a series of rubber-stamps, the designers allowed the best messages to be stamped anywhere, perhaps to be used again with the postman as courier this time!
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Blog Jouons
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Enjoying inactivity
Mouse Trap
The Society Of Happy Inactivity believes in the right to enjoy inactivity and being able to withstand the pressure of overactivity in todays society. The mouse trap is one of the company's supportive product.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Accessories for lonely men
My friends Burak, Yasmine, and Jonah mentioned an exhibition at the Moma that I checked online. I now plan a trip to New York to attend it. Among the many stimulating pieces, I selected this very funny set of electronic objects in the vein of Design Noir
The collection includes a Sheet Thief, which "winds the bedclothes up on the other side of the bed while you're sleeping". Other joys of sharing a bed are re-created with Cold feet and a Heavy Breather that breathes hot air down the user's neck. In the morning the Hair Alarm Clock swings hair across the user's face to wake him, while the steel finger of the Chest-Hair Curler gently swirls his chest hair in concentric circles. 
Accessories for lonely men by Noam Toran, photos Frank Thurston
Jonah's piece the WIFI-HOG is included in the show. The Wifi Hog is a tactical tool to liberate public WiFi Nodes!
"Wi-Fi Hog is personal system for a laptop or portable computer that enables people to gain complete control over a public access wireless network. The idea is presented as an alternative to the utopian vision of wireless networks being open, shared, and utilitarian for everyone. This project is a cautionary one, and comes as a reaction to the battle over free wireless spectrum where corporate pay-per-use and free community networks are fighting for signal dominance in public spaces. Wifi-Hog exists as a tactical media tool for controlling and subverting this claim of ownership and regulation over free spectrum, by allowing a means of control to come from a third-party."
Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition opens February 24th, 2008 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
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