Papyrus Classroom Tablet Concept Does Something Good with E-Ink

Apparently, when Cincinnati-based Kaleidoscope, Inc has some spare time on their hands, they do something besides drinking and YouTube-browsing. The latest installment on their blue-sky concept blog TheGreenerGrass.org is a piece of classroom technology that seems almost too good to be true. A tablet e-reader dubbed Papyrus, it leverages the E-Ink technology made famous by Amazon's woeful Kindle book, but in a very student-specific way.

Judging by the descriptions and mock-ups, it looks like they put some real thought into this one: Papyrus serves many of the same roles as the student laptop, but blesses it with a longer battery life, owing to E-Ink's miserly juice consumption, and removes most of the distractions that still make laptops the bane of many high school teachers' existences. The concept also spells out some clear examples of the kind of real-time student-teacher interaction it hopes to enable, and it feels quite viable (to this former high school teacher, anyway). The $100 price tag seems a little out of reach at the moment, but isn't out of the question in a year or two, making it the sort of purchase 8th graders could grab along with textbooks and Trapper Keepers.

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FUND THIS PRODUCT: Lifestraws for Mumbai, a Project H Design initiative

Lifestraw--the cigar-sized personal point-of-use water filtration device produced by Vestergaard Frandsen--has captured the imagination of everyone who's seen it, and now it has a Family System counterpart that provides 15,000 liters of clean drinking water to one household. What's more, core-fave Project H Design, an organization founded by Emily Pilloton that supports, inspires, and delivers humanitarian and life improving product design solutions, has set up an initiative to fund 100 Lifestraw Family systems for a slum community in Mumbai. For $25 you can sponsor one system, which will be delivered this summer directly to the Mumbai community by Project H.

With more than a billion people lacking access to safe drinking water, and five million people dying of water-related disease every year, here's an opportunity to make a small but very real difference.

The project is a joint venture with Berkeley-based Haath Mein Sehat (Health In Hand) Mumbai, who will be on-site in Mumbai this summer to conduct testing, user acceptance interviews, follow up visits with families receiving the Lifestraw systems.

More about Lifestraw:

The Lifestraw Family system is an amazing point-of-use water filtration device designed and manufactured by Vestergaard Frandsen. It does not require electricity or batteries, making it ideal for use in both rural and urban contexts in the developing world. It eliminates 99.9% of waterborne disease bacteria, parasites, and viruses, bringing clean drinking water quickly and reliably, and preventing life-threatening disease from spreading through unclean water. One system effectively filters 15,000 liters (about a 2 year's supply) of drinkable water.

Donate online via Project H Design here.

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RSS Alert: New Article up at Coroflot's Creative Seeds: Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Always Do, by Carl Alviani

Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog Carl Alviani has written the antithesis to his previous article--what not to do. His new list features six things to always do within a portfolio website. When you are done making sure you haven't made any mistakes, see what you've done right. Here's a few:

2. Get your own domain.
It's true that there are plenty of places to get your site hosted for free, and they'll give you a domain name too. But the fact is, if you're trying to look professional, yourname.blogspot.com feels kind of like a business card printed at home on bond paper: fine for students and newbies, but lame otherwise. Getting your own domain is so cheap and so easy these days (ten bucks and 15 minutes, typically) that there's really no excuse not to. Not sure where to start? Here's a list of registrars.

4. Make sure at least some of your images are professional quality.
This one's mostly for the ID folks. No, not every single photo you upload needs to have been shot in a studio under $12,000 worth of strobe lighting, but the difference between a crappy snapshot and a carefully lit and post-processed photograph from a decent SLR is tremendous. If you've got the inclination to learn, a little product photography skill can reap some great rewards. Get a reasonable camera and a tripod, build yourself a lightbox, and spend a few days experimenting. If that doesn't appeal, get some pics from marketing if they've had some done, or pay someone better than you to take care of it.

>>read full article<<

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Virtual Wall: traffic light of the future?

Hanyoung Lee's clever "virtual wall" traffic light concept provides a visually strong barrier that would hopefully prevent motorists from blocking the box. And if the visual barrier isn't incentive enough, perhaps they could up the wattage of the lasers....

via yanko design

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Los Angeles getting Cleveland Art's "recycled industrial design"

Designer Jason Wein's company Cleveland Art, a leading producer of "recycled industrial design," is opening a West Coast showroom. The Ohio-based company, which repurposes industrial artifacts by combining and transforming them into furniture, already has branches in New York and Ohio, and their new 7,000-square-foot space in downtown L.A. makes their coast-to-coast expansion complete. Check out their stuff here.

via fox business

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IDSA Western District - First Night

The IDSA Western District Conference is happily located here in Portland this year, in a broad gray space above the Pearl District. Keynotes last night featured a pair of long-established designers: Max Burton (at left, below) from Nike Tech.Lab (and formerly Smart - he's responsible for about 30 of the Good Grips SKUs), and Howard Meehan (at right, below), a former Tektronix designer turned public installation artist.

photo: Kirill Shelayev

While both talks were essentially tours through the designers' personal portfolios, they held some serious attention: Max's for its sheer beauty and consistent theme of making technology into an experience accessible to the uninitiated consumer; Howard's for the rare opportunity to hear a cantankerous, opinionated old-school designer talk passionately about what makes a good life, not just good design.

Most striking moment of the evening: Howard relating the story of a personal radio he did for Panasonic in 1970. What started as a charming story of a young designer defying convention to come up with something unique and compelling (it was a sphere, and eventually sold four million units), transformed into something completely different when he spied one on a colleague's desk 15 years later, who was about to get rid of it. "Four million units sold" became "four million pieces of landfill," and started the longer story of Meehan's move away from consumer product and toward art for public spaces; a move he credits as responsible for his most fulfilling work.

The theme of sustainability is, as you might expect, strong and persistent this weekend, featuring a speaker from Nike's Considered initiative, a bike-oriented design charette on Sunday, nods toward sustainability from practically every student presenter so far, and recyclable everything in the conference venue.

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LG's weird product for toast-lovers with small kitchens

Spotted on an appliance blog: LG's bizarre combination-microwave-toaster. Will this product be successful? You tell us--it came out two years ago, have you heard of it or seen it before?

via home appliances

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A better-designed screw

If you've only got one drill, you know what a pain in the neck it is to repeatedly fasten wood without splitting it--you've got to pre-drill a hole, swap to a driver bit, drive the screw, swap back to a drill bit, then rinse and repeat. An alternative is to have both a drill and driver handy, but then you're dealing with two tools.