Western Civilization, You've Been Served - Chinese Olympic Opening Ceremony Best Ever
If you watched it, you know it. If you missed it, take a look.
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Flic your bic after you're done calling home
Desperately hoping not to become known as the "disposable phone company" BIC, wellknown makers of disposable razer blades, lighters and ballpoint pens have just launched the first 'off the shelf' mobile phone in France.
The BIC phone will cost 49 Euros (US$78) and is capable of just making phone calls and sending text messages. It comes with a SIM card, 60 minutes of free calls, a phone number included in the packaging and a fully-charged battery. Extra minutes can be bought through the use of a mobicarte and works the same way as most pay-as-you-go schemes. The phone will initially only be available to buy in France.
The BBC has a video announcement while others wonder how the phone will be disposed and whether there are any recycling facilities. A disturbing product to join the "throwaway and replace" category, although one could muse on the benefits of catching a lobbed iPhone 3G...
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(Re)make it New, by William Bostwick
Nostalgia is a tricky thing. Do we really miss what we miss, or do we just like missing it? Who among us would voluntarily go back to middle school, that dismal cornucopia of bad hair, braces, and trapper keepers? And yet...the '80s are back. It's not just music, and it's not just the last couple decades. Design has been going retro for years now as the recasting bug has swept the ID world, and everything's fair game, from turn-of-the-century hunting-lodge chic to baroque ornamentation. But enough is enough.
Design is a pendulum that swings from then to now as designers look for inspiration in old forms and new ideas, alternately embracing and rejecting the past. It's been this way forever. In the 19th century, they went nuts for ancient Greece: houses had columns and furniture was decorated with ropes and lion heads. Then Gropius and his cronies turned up their noses at history and riffed on the contemporary factory aesthetic. Post-modernism swung back again, and today designers are at the apex of that curve, recasting anything and everything from the past in modern materials. But things are about to change. They have to, because historicist design, in all its ironic, witty, and just plain cheesy incarnations, has jumped the shark.
>> view article
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Jan Chipchase on why Lagos is more interesting than London
The always insightful Jan Chipchase has a short and amazing essay up at Receiver, Vodafone's blog on user experience and mobile technology, and it manages in just a few paragraphs to make not one but two startling but hard to refute arguments.
First, a fresh perspective on user research in developing markets. There have been two common viewpoints on this topic for a while now: either a)it doesn't matter that much, because most of the money is still in the hands of the developed world, or b)it's going to matter soon, because the developing world is growing and adopting technology rapidly, and we're fools to ignore such an opportunity--and anyway, it's the nice thing to do. Chipchase offers a third that trumps them both:
Today over 3 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why, as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn.
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Environmentally friendly materials for future technologies produced from plants
To reduce amount of products in stores that are manufactured of unrecyclable or poorly recyclable materials, a lot of world leading companies look at a farmer's fields to find an appropriate solution today. And they are not only guided by green tendencies. By using environmentally friendly materials companies can bring down taxes and costs of productions.
Five plants that are presented in Gadgets Reviews are essential for the future technology and they can be accessed in any part of the world.
>> read article
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Core77 Photo Gallery: Farnborough Airshow
From the 14th to the 20th of July, the greatest display of military, commercial and private aircraft on the planet -- oh yeah! -- gathered in Hampshire, UK, for a glimpse at the future of our skies in the Farnborough Airshow. Core-o-spondant Britt Leissler was on hand to capture every last bit. Check out her comprehensive coverage here.
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1 Hour Design Challenge: CYCLING SHOE WINNERS!
Carlos Sastre just spent 3 weeks of his life cycling over 3500 Kilometers (2200 Miles) to win the 2008 Tour de France. How better to celebrate with him than to spend an hour to design a spiffy new cycling shoe? That's right, this month we asked Core readers to design the next greatest cycling shoe. We even got Bill Cass to join the judging crew. He works for Nike designing cycling shoes for guys like Mark Cavendish and some guy named Lance Something-or-other. The results should make any pro proud.
First place:
Garmin-Chipotle American team, by fede21us (top)
Second place:
Classic International Bike Shoe, by beartoe (middle)
Third place:
Padilla Shoe, by cpvt1987 (bottom)
Honorable Mention:
Barloworld Cycling Shoe and Crampon, by tbaker (after the jump)
Click here to see the rest and get the inside scoop on Bill Cass' thoughts...
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LEDs everywhere, but has their time really come?
By now, plenty of us have read the NY Times' lengthy examination of the future of Light Emitting Diodes as low-consumption replacements for incandescent and fluorescent lighting. The article from last Monday's paper cites a number of indicators, from the famed New Year's Eve Ball in Times Square (pictured) to more pedestrian applications like factory and home lighting.
US fast food chain Chipotle has announced that it's currently installing all LED lighting in its new Minneapolis store, and a spokesman "expects LEDs to be in the overwhelming majority of new restaurants next year." In Detroit, a local bar uses LEDs and claims to light the entire place with the equivalent consumption of two incandescent bulbs (which they quote at "130kW" -- my physics is a little rusty, but I think "130W" might be more correct).
LEDs are enormously appealing to designers for lots of reasons: the aforementioned efficiency, of course, but also their amazing flexibility and longevity.
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Innovation made simple
Kevin Kelly's CT2 blog (Conceptual Trends, Current Topics) has an interesting entry up about innovation:
How to Make New ThingsPaul Graham, an engineer who can write and think clearly, derived a reliable way to make new things: work on overlooked problems. I found the following bit of advice to not only be true, but profound.
Graham describes his strategy precisely: "Find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly." That seems simple, but it is not.
Definitely worth a read.
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Small but powerful
The Financial Times salutes the designers who focus on the 'supernormal', even as what they refer to as 'designart' makes too much noise and often drowns out the quality work quietly going on around the world. Here's a snippet,
A few years in, it is clear that designart, despite its bulky name, is here to stay. Larger manufacturers might be holding discreet credit crunch meetings but the panic has yet to trickle down to affect any tightening of purse strings when it comes to big-name creatives making lavish design. Yet, the often overpowering noise of designart does tend to drown out much other design. Which is why Wallpaper* has taken this opportunity to salute the designers that have trodden a more functional path: one that hasn't necessarily brought them fame, stardom or column inches but whose pieces are quietly being seen and, more importantly, being used every day.
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Bad product design: "We are the losers when form equals dysfunction"
Like many of us, Seattle Pi's Lawrence W. Cheek has been getting burned by poor product design, and is sick of it. He turned to Drew Carlson and Jerry Yamamoto, the industrial designers and founders behind Seattle's Slipstream Design, to figure out why bad design plagues us.
Their findings, in a nutshell:
- Product developers don't necessarily investigate how people use things in the real world.
- Consumers aren't demanding the right things.
- Feature creep has reached epidemic level.
- Novelty is masquerading as good design.
- So why buy a briefcase from a knife maker?
Of course, reading the bullet points alone won't do you (and the consumers you design for) nearly as much good as reading the entire article, here.
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Nike's 6.0 Ill Mobile Truck
Nike converted an amphibious armor-plated war-truck from 1959 into an extreme sports mobile HQ for Mountain Dew's Action Sports Tour.
The 8-wheeled ill-mobile is capable of crossing deserts, climbing mountains and taking the team to any secret spot. Racks for bikes, surfboards, wakeboards, skateboards, mean going anywhere for any scene. Rails to grind are featured on both sides, and a quarter pipe folds down for impromptu sessions. The stereo system requires 2 car batteries, a set of jumper cables and a little luck, but once it's blasting, it's like a stick of dynamite in your eardrum.
It's been picked up everywhere (that was the intention after all), via dvice.
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Artificial Cornea Shows Promise
Dvice points us to a new kind of artificial cornea developed by researchers at Stanford University published in May this year. The polymer-based cornea has not been tested in humans, but has shown promise in animal studies.
Developed by chemical engineer Curtis W. Frank, PhD, the cornea is made of two interwoven polymer gels, similar to the materials used in soft contact lenses. One layer is exceptionally strong while the other is able to absorb a tremendous amount of water. The result is a transparent, highly permeable substance with a water content similar to that of the natural cornea.
It's estimated that 10 million people worldwide suffer from blindness due to corneal disease. It's still early days though, the search for a safe and effective artificial cornea goes back as far as the French Revolution.
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2008 Australian International Design Awards Exhibition
Coinciding with the opening of Sydney Design 08, the Powerhouse Museum presents their annual selection from the Australian International Design Awards. Also on display are some favorite award-winning products from the past to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the award
Powerhouse Museum
From August 8th, 2008
Hours: 10.00am - 5.00pm daily
500 Harris St, Ultimo
Sydney
>> continue reading to get the details on the above images
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New Hamilton C2 Ventilator Breathes Hope
RKS, the Southern California-based ID consultancy, has just announced the launch of their new C2 ventilator, designed for Hamilton Medical. Based on recent studies from the Yale School of Medicine that emphasize, "the role of psychological factors [play an even bigger part in recovery] than expected," the C2 ventilator uses friendly shapes and minimal design to create a softer, more humane experience for the patient and visitor. Ravi Sawhney, RKS founder and C.E.O. noted,
When you see someone you love hooked up to these huge, industrial-looking machines, no matter what doctors say, a piece of you starts making funeral plans. That feeling can't help but affect everyone in the room.
It's always a welcome change to hear a design process inspired by emotions rather than dollars, and from the looks of this lil C2, we can't wait to see what the friendly futures of hospitals will look like...
>> see more images
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Living, Reinvented
ETech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, goes green with its upcoming conference about "the tech of abundance and constraints".
We live in two worlds: one filled with abundance and the other with constraints. Each has its own favorite -- or essential to survival -- inventions and directions. Each has been deeply affected by technology.The abundant world has access to the Internet and other educational tools, to the latest advances in medicine, to culinary choices from around the globe, and up until recently, access to "plenty of" energy. This abundance can lead to waste since most everyday objects are easier and cheaper to replace than fix. But sometimes this excess can lead to creation -- a reinvention of waste -- as we see in the pages of Make magazine.
The constrained world has to make do with what's available. Why scrimp and sacrifice for a computer when most people have mobile phones with an SMS server that can do the job just fine? With limited food, water, fuel, medicine, it's the people and their ideas that are often the cheapest part of the equation. Their technology looks to collaboration and connection with fewer resources -- almost the opposite of the industrialized world which seeks to make each individual as effective as possible.
What technologies cross the divide? How do the two interact and cross-pollinate?
Alex Steffen of Worldchanging is excited and so are we.
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Cows Herded With Headsets
And finally, cows and more cows! 2008 is turning out to be the year of bovine-methane-manipulation (poor things!) But things might be looking up for our fat-boned friends with the introduction of the Ear-A-Round, stereo earphones that transmit sounds directly into the cow's ears to guide its movement. Researchers are currently working on developing the prototype which has, as a goal, to "give farmers a much finer control of pastures, finer management of where animals are and a better use of the land," not to mention finding "out what the animals do all day." (Ahem....rock out to Madonna?).
Here are some choice sound bites from the lab:
The technology won't eliminate the need for cowboys; instead, the focus is to shift their labor from physical to cognitive.Ranchers and cowhands will no longer have to spend time building and repairing fences.
[Lead researcher Dean M. Anderson] has sung his song during training exercises to get the animals to move. If they pause for longer than a few seconds, he will use the song cue to get them moving again.
If the sound cues fail, the headset can give a small electrical shock to move unresponsive cows.
[Andersen and his partner Daniela Rus] also plan to test other sounds as possible cues, including naturally repulsive sounds for cows such as barking dogs and hissing snakes.
Oh...you poor cows...What will they think of next?
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Special thanks to Niti Bhan and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this week's newsletter!
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