Cradle to Cradle Motor Glider
Roland Cernat won the first prize at this year's Lucky Strike Junior Designer Award for his final-year project "Oriens", a sustainable and energy-saving motor glider. Based on the cradle to cradle principles, Cernat's design combines sustainable materials with an ecological energy concept including solar panels on the wings and body that create enough energy to power the motor. Don't worry, he included a back up fuel engine if needed. Cernat graduated from the University of Applied Sciences Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany this year and currently works as a freelancer.
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A Pair of Flying Slippers: Phil Patton reviews the Buckminster Fuller exhibition at the Whitney
"An exhibition is a verb," writes Whitney museum director Adam Weinberg bravely, in his introduction to the catalog of the museum's Buckminster Fuller show, Starting with the Universe.
He is echoing Fuller's own famous phrase "I seem to be a verb." But in fact, a museum show is necessarily more like an arrangement of nouns. And this one includes nouns like drawings, photographs, and models, with a few verbs of video of Fuller talking.
"His vision is difficult to approximate and present, much less encompass in an exhibition," Weinberg continues. The show does the difficult ably enough, providing a good chronological sample, thoughtfully arranged.
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RCA Show 2008
Super-human toasters! Cell-phone scales! Chameleon cars! This and more graced the floors of the RCA's 2008 show (June 21 - July 5). Core-o-spondent, Victoria Kirk, sent us a bunch of snaps from the Design Interactions exhibition. Click through to see evidence of what these UK creatives are up to....
>> more photos
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Book Review: Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte
After just posting a rather lengthy sustainability diatribe, reviewing Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It seems a little like environmental overkill, but her work is as much a classic David and Goliath adventure as it is a polemic. She opens with an interview with Dr. Michael Mascha, a self-proclaimed bottled water connoisseur, who advocates the careful pairing of pedigreed ground and glacier waters from around the world with meals during fine dining. While it would seem that such rampant consumerism virtually guarantees he's to be the easiest target in the book, the truth is a little more complicated.
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SF uses wireless sensors to enable smart parking
This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation's most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment.
Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.
Read full article [New York Times]
Technical article [RFID Journal]
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New Core77 Gallery : Hamburg Harley Days
Custom details, tailpipes and tattoos! More than 75,000 bikers attended one of the biggest Harley Davidson events in Hamburg from June 20-22. Be sure to check out this gallery of rock n' roll of design by Core 77's Aart Van Bezoyeen.
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I.D. 2008 Annual Design Review Exhibition Photos
To celebrate I.D. Magazine's 54th Annual Design Review, Parsons The New School for Design is hosting an exhibition featuring innovative design work from the past year. There are eight design categories: consumer products, graphics, packaging, environments, furniture, equipment, concepts, and interactive media.
The exhibition translates exceedingly well from the printed magazine and is a remarkable improvement on last years efforts. The layout of the space ensures large crowds can easily get access to view work and small items that would otherwise be lost are cleverly presented in repetitive clusters to create visual impact.
Located in the recently renovated Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, the exhibition opens to the public today and runs through till September 28th, 2008.
>> more photos
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Praized - Trust Your Tribes
Praized - Trust Your TribesCongratulations to the guys over at Praized who's site officially made it's debut last week after 2 years of development. The new city search platform is designed specifically to be integrated into blogs and social networks allowing communities to rate and comment on businesses in their city, the example they give:
A Praized installation on a vegan blog will have completely different restaurant recommendations than on a meat-lovers' blog because the two groups have fundamentally different tastes.
Praized CEO Harry Wakefield run's MoCo Loco where you may have seen a beta version they've been testing called MocoLocal. The platform is free for publishers to install and comes pre-loaded with over 17 million US and Canadian local business listings, complete with contact info and location maps.
Learn more here
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photo: Splodge
8 Keys to Writing a Killer Job Ad for Creatives, by Carl Alviani
You never get what you want, unless you ask for it. "A job that's well-defined is easier to fill, and a job posting (if that's how you choose to publicize) that's clear and compelling can raise your quotient of good candidates dramatically," says Carl Alviani from his most recent article on Coroflot's Creative Seeds. Here are some other good tips we found while reading through:
Avoid marketing speak.
Long lists of non-specific company characteristics (dynamic, insightful, engaged, consumer-driven, etc.), or applicant characteristics (hard-working, self-starter, team-player, etc) are generally ineffective. Not that these characteristics aren't important--because they are--but if you want to target the right job-seekers, you need to pick the few things you're really looking for and describe them, using examples if possible: if your position requires 60-hour weeks and the generation of 20 concepts a day, say that, not "hard-working and prolific."Be flexible.
Teaching someone a new software package is much faster and easier than teaching them to lead a project team, or come up with innovative concepts, or perform well under a deadline. Too often, a job listing takes the form of a laundry list of skills: must use a Wacom tablet; must know Pro/Engineer; must code in Flash. While it's true that some jobs are so dependent on expertise with a particular tool that it's non-negotiable, long term success is often decided by more nebulous qualifications like enthusiasm, thought process and learning ability.
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Ergonomidesign, Sweden: human-centered since the sixties
Ergonomidesign is Sweden's oldest established full service design studio. Founded in 1969 when Design Gruppen merged with Ergonomidesign, they have a long history of releasing award-winning human-centered design solutions based on a strong philosophy of user-centered innovation espoused by the founders.
Housed in a former missionary school in Bromma, a suburb of Stockholm, their space is as inspiring as it must have been designed - soaring ceilings, high rose windows, a sense that here is a home for grounding the beliefs and values that underpin their work.
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Malaysian scientist reduces cost of producing Aerogel by 80 percent
Aerogel has remained in domain of government funded and commercial high-tech projects for years due to it's high cost. A new technique using the silica found in disposed rice husks after harvest could be the answer to making this material widely available.
Nicknamed "frozen smoke" because of its cloudy appearance, aerogel is made from silica, the basic ingredient in sand, and is 99 percent air by volume. The result is a nearly weightless and translucent material with a white powder that seems to float inside.What makes aerogel so attractive is the combination of light weight with incredible strength and insulating properties...
...Aerogel can withstand mechanical pressure 2,000 times its own weight, making it suitable for bombproof panels. It makes good soundproofing material. Aerogel also can absorb oil spills and pollutants in the air -- NASA fitted a space probe in 1999 with a mitt packed with the substance to catch the dust from a comet's tail.
While the process is still a couple of years away from being ready to sell this new material commercially, the Malaysian government is funding a US$62.5 million project at Halimaton's university to speed things along. Good news for ID students who can now legitimately spec this material in their concepts.
View Article: International Herald Tribune
via Treehugger via PSFK
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Touched echo: Invisible Memorial for the Bruehlsche Terrasse in Dresden
Using bone conduction, a technology developed for hearing devices, the "touched echo" installation in Dresdon transmits sounds of the cities devastating 1945 carpet bombing through the visitors arms when they rest their elbows on the balustrade and hold their ears. Several custom made sound conductors mounted to the railing send sounds of the airplanes and bombs exploding through vibrations, it's completely silent unless you touch the rail.
Synopsis
"touched echo" is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl's Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction).
touched echo
Performative Installation
By Markus Kison
03.10.2007 - 31.10.2008
Brühlsche Terrrasse, Dresden
via notcot
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Changing the Change - a call to action
Bill Moggridge (IDEO), John Thackara (Doors of Perception), Josephine Green (Philips Design), Geetha Narayanan (Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore), and Luigi Ferrara (Institute without Boundaries, Toronto) were only some of the speakers and guests at the highly stimulating Changing the Change conference that took place in the impressive Molecular Biotechnology Research Centre of Turin, Italy, July 10-12.
This outstanding conference "on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability" was the brainchild of Ezio Manzini (professor of industrial design at the Milan Polytechnic). Jointly organised by the Polytechnic universities of Milan and Turin (with extensive support from their masters and doctoral students), Changing the Change was part of the programme of Turin World Design Capital 2008.
In this longer article I have tried to open up this important conference to those who were not there, which is made easier by the fact that all 138 papers are already online.
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Another Three-Letter Green Apparel Business Starts Up in Portland
While many of us up here in the Pac NW breathe a sigh of relief that Nau's grand experiment in green apparel is getting a second chance, another major entrant in the category is just gearing up. END Footwear stands for "Environmentally Neutral Design," and like Nau, it's got an illustrious Nike alum on board, it's got a deep commitment to sustainable manufacturing practices, and it's got a cool logo with three letters in the name. The major difference is that where Nau took high-performance outdoor wear and made it calmer, sleeker and greener, END is working the same voodoo on shoes.
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Dolphin Inspired Fully Submergible Watercraft
And finally, ditch the jet ski this summer and pick yourself up the Innerspace Sea Breacher to fulfill those 007 childhood fantasies. Constructed with a F-22 Raptor canopy, the three-quarter-inch thick solid polycarbonate can withstand hard inverted landings and the sliding mechanism is tough enough to drive the Sea Breacher at full speed with the canopy wide open.
>> more
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Special thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken and Niti Bhan for their contributions to this week's newsletter!
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