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.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
A stackable electric city vehicle
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
All you can eat!
... and you can eat even more!
In the spirit of eating your keyboard, your pencils, eating candies in the form of pills, drinking latte with laser printed patterns, up to making coded silverware ... the field of food products is quite large by now!
I recently found a tie that is made of breakfast cereals by Bryony Birkbeck. The artist proposes a series of eatable ties exploring the redundancy of the tie in modern society by giving the garment a new set of functions!
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Crayons en chocolat / Chocolate pencils
Following up on the work of Oki Sato (at Nendo), I found these chocolate pencils in his earliest work (2007). Nendo collaborated with patissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu, the mastermind behind popular dessert shops like Mont St. Claire and Le Chocolat de H. So these pencils must be delicious indeed!!!
The process: Tsujiguchi created a new dessert based on his impression of Nendo after their conversations, and the designers proposed new tableware for them, including plates presenting the the beauty of meals and desserts like a painting on a canvas, thus the creation of the chocolate pencils.
Interaction: The "chocolate pencils" come in a number of cocoa blends that vary in intensity, and chocophiles can use the special "pencil sharpener" that comes with the designed plate to grate chocolate onto their dessert. Pencil filings are usually the unwanted remains of sharpening a pencil, but in this case, they're the star!
Check also the chocolate keyboard!
Monday, May 12, 2008
Portable Life Size Camera Obscura
Passionate about photography, I am excited about this project, the perfect portable camera obscura designed by Allison Roberts also discovered on Zones of Emergency.
Capturing large format pictures is the dream in photography. Making a lightproof "tent" to captures the life-size outdoor is a fantastic idea. Allison explains that this is meant as a solution for an urban gardener to still be able to have a greenhouse, or simply anyone else who wishes to do indoor gardening: this portable alternative to a permanent grow room can be assembled in about 25 minutes without any tools! Once assembled, you have an indoor greenhouse that is completely sealed and virtually light proof.
DIY videos by young artists
New Urban Arts is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary arts studio for high school students and emerging artists that promotes youth voice, collaboration, and self-directed learning toward a lifelong creative practice. It provides studio, exhibition space, and mentoring for young artists who explore the visual, performing, and literary arts through yearlong free out-of-school programs. Founded in 1997, New Urban Arts serves 125 high school students in the Providence Public High Schools and 15 artists each year. They have been named one of fifty premiere arts and youth development programs in the country for four consecutive years.
Discovered on Zones of Emergency, New Urban Arts offers online videos for DIY explorations. For instance How to Screenprint? How To Sew A Ruffle? or How to make a silicone Mold (below):
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Sunday, May 11, 2008
Happy mother's day
... to all mothers and mothers of mothers of mothers!
By Wikipedia:
In the United States, Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.
When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Originally the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
A chair to peel
The Cabbage Chair, 2008
Nendo designed the cabbage chair for XXIst Century Man exhibition curated by Issey Miyake to commemorate the first anniversary of 21_21 Design Sight in Roppongi, Tokyo.
Miyake asked the designers to make furniture out of the pleated paper that is produced in mass amounts during the process of making pleated fabric, and usually abandoned as an unwanted by-product. The designers' solution to his challenge transformed a roll of pleated paper into a small chair that appears naturally as you peel away its outside layers, one layer at a time.
Resins added during the original paper production process adds strength and the ability to remember forms, and the pleats themselves give the chair elasticity and a springy resilience, for an overall effect that looks almost rough, but gives the user a soft, comfortable seating experience.
Photo by Masayuki Hayashi
Since the production process is so simple, the designers thought that eventually, the chair could be shipped as one compact roll for the user to cut open and peel back at home. The chair has no internal structure. It is not finished, and it is assembled without nails or screws. This primitive design responds gently to fabrication and distribution costs and environmental concerns, the kinds of issues that face our 21st century selves. Thus, the cabbage chair fits active, optimistic and forward-moving "21st century people", the kind of people who, to borrow a concept Miyake expressed during a meeting with Nendo, "don't just wear clothes, but shed their skin".
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure.............................................................................................
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Friday, May 09, 2008
Biojewellery
The aim of Biojewellery is to strike up a range of relationships with an audience over the issues that surround biotechnology, tissue engineering in particular. The collaboration is between a core team of a bioengineer and two designers. By using an invasive medical procedure to procure cells the creators of Biojewellery are then manipulating these living organisms to produce designed objects.
A model of the ring using a combination of cow marrow-bone and etched silver. The inscription reads Ab Intra, "from within".
Tissue engineering is one element of scientific study, which is beginning to have a profound effect on how disease and physical disorders are treated. What are the implications of medical research and how do we introduce the issues surrounding them? Creative responses perform a critical function in terms of challenging/raising public awareness, whilst engaging with the technologies themselves to create new methods of producing work. Biojewellery uses the device of a recognizable social custom to open a debate about new medical technology.
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Blog Jouons
Online platform to trade concert tickets!
Finally a site that works as a ticket hub between buyers and sellers of concert tickets, sports tickets and theater tickets. How convenient to have the info gather into one site, especially when the platform invites seller and buyer of tickets to trade with one another. I have not tried to get some tickets there yet, but I wonder how hard it is to get some tickets for Wimbledon.
This online exchange is for Europe only, so this site can be especially useful for the ones of you who live in Europe, and I wonder if there is a similar service for the United States. I still find difficult in Boston to know what's going on and an online system to trade tickets for shows, concerts, art events is a fantastic approach.
The viagogo web site sponsors the following weekly UK events list:
Rock and Pop Concert Tickets:
· Celine Dion Tickets · Boyzone Tickets · Bruce Springsteen Tickets · Foo Fighters Tickets · Nickelback Tickets · Madonna Tickets · James Tickets · Queen tickets · Paul Rodgers Tickets · Van Halen Tickets · Oasis Tickets · Michael Jackson Tickets . Alternative and Indie Concert Tickets · Coldplay Tickets · Radiohead Tickets
Festival Tickets:
· T in the Park Tickets · Leeds Festival Tickets · O2 Wireless Festival Tickets
Sport Tickets: Wimbledon Tickets
Buy Concert Tickets and Tennis Tickets.
So lucky you UK ones, not only you have pretty cool events coming up, but you know how to get there. The platform goes beyond the sponsored list of events above and proposes comedy, opera, ballet and dance, flowers shows ... and even Avenue Q!!! Get back in time with West End musical Avenue Q. Experience the fun you had with Sesame Street as a child from a more grown up perspective today. All but three of the characters in the musical are puppets who parody the famous Muppets of Sesame Street. Princeton, a young graduate with a "useless" major in English, arrives in New York with big hopes and a very small bank account which leaves him no choice but to move into the not so fine but friendly Avenue Q. He soon discovers life and love in the Big Apple with his new neighbours.
Mini tech in fashion
The Masai dress!
Discovered via Stumbleupon, Studio 5050 makes really cool products: from a dress that generates musical patterns as the wearer moves, to the moi "a light to wear, a light to share!
Inspired by Masai wedding collars, this dress salutes both our global provenance and our desire to create our own soundtrack as we move in mysterious ways. With every step, strings of hand-formed silver beads that hung from the collar brush against conductive threads sewn into the dress, generating a series of sounds. A leisurely walk or a night at a cocktail party turns into an improvisational performance.
A long asymmetrical swoop in the back of the dress recalls Balenciaga’s famed wedding dress – an homage to a maestro that visually and aurally blends cultures, traditions and emotions. The dress comes in a luscious deep-sky blue silk jersey and white nourishing Sea-Tiva (75% cotton, 25% algae).
The company also design modules, a series of electronic building blocks for creating systems that sense and respond. The modules were originally created to help them rapidly develop new wearable applications but they now are available to the public to create any interaction design project!
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
