Designer R.D. Silva has created the most bare bones record player you’ve probably ever seen. I mean just look at it. A motor that turns the platter sits in the middle, the pivoting arm and needle hang off to the side, and the built in speaker and controls are housed in small compartment below. Its minimalist design is simply elegant…and I want one.
[Via Engadget; YankoDesign]
Rhythm of Light, a psychedelic lamp created by Dutch designer Susanne de Graef, is made up of five concentric aluminum rings with hundreds of multicolored strings attached. These strings, which are threaded throughout the lamp and are spaced slightly apart from one another, move up and down since there’s a counterweight that hangs at the bottom. Says de Graef, “Light is movement, it has its own rhythm. I designed a lamp with its own rhythm. The user decides the rhythm of the lamp by moving the lamp up and down, the layers mingle, the light gets diffused and the layers turn into a game of colours.” The strings represent the properties of light, and the lamp taken as a whole comments on the cyclical rhythm of time. Neat-o. Pictures below, video after the break.
[Via Gizmodo; DesignBoom]
“Ring” is a futuristic lamp created by Italian designer Loris Bottello and obviously inspired by the world of Tron. It’s lit by bioluminescent polymers and its intensity can be adjusted by rotating the disc. By design, the energy is transferred by brush contacts on the outer copper ring. Aesthetics and functionality aid each other in this bold concept that I want by my bedside stat.
[Via Gizmodo; Designboom]
A gang of game design students hailing from Munich shot this “History of Gaming” piece. The first-person perspective takes us on a journey spanning from 1958’s Tennis for Two (played on an oscilloscope) through 1996’s Super Mario 64, and up to 2008’s Rock Band. Although it doesn’t include every video game console invented it does cover the wide gamut. And as much as this is a tour of video games it also reveals the steady progression of television screen technology (ranging from the old CRTs to the modern LCD flatscreens). Click the Vimeo source link to learn more about the making of this video.
A fellow by the name of Chris Marion modified a Guitar Hero controller to interface with valves attached to a propane tank. In his words:
I thought of using a microcontroller to sync the fire to the beat of music – now that would be pretty cool, and the patterns would always be different, so it wouldn’t get as boring as fast. Then I thought of the game Guitar Hero, which uses five frets, and I had my idea! Simply interface a Guitar Hero controller to a microcontroller that would power some relays which would in turn fire off solenoid valves on five individual fire poofers! Now this could be cool; a large fire “sculpture” that is playable by anybody.
Head over to Chris’ website to follow his instructions if you suddenly feel the urge to construct your own FireHero. For Version 2 he’s planning to introduce color-changing flames, Star Power (“which would boost flame height or fire off additional fireballs”), and play “Through the Fire and Flames.” But for now, enjoy his inventiveness in the video above. After listening to AC/DC on fire, hop after the break to watch Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart” in action.
[Via Gizmodo; ChrisMarion] Continue reading FireHero–it’s what it sounds like
Facebook gave profile pages a new look, and an employee from the Stinson Design agency quickly figured out how to create the coolest profile, period. I believe it was French artist Alexandre Oudin who figured out how to visually express himself in this manner first, and the Stinson man ramped it up with the embedded YouTube video. Look after the break to see Oudin’s profile page. Continue reading The new Facebook profile page design put to good use
Digital-imaging and CGI artist Michael Tompert is fascinated by the destruction of Apple products. Ever wonder what an iPad would like after a sledgehammer beating and torch treatment? Your inquisitiveness get resolved in the image above titled “Book Burning.” Sick and tired of antenna issues and feel like pounding your iPhone 4 with an eight pound sledgehammer? Don’t do that–just flip through the gallery below and visualize it. There you’ll also find “Breathe”, a MacBook Air with 12 rounds in it (damaged by a Heckler & Koch handgun); “Liquid Crystals”, a sledgehammered and torched MacBook; “You’re So 2000&L8”, a disfigured iPhone 3G; and “Caltrain Fatalities: Left Track/Right Track”, a rainbow of iPod nanos ran over by a train.
All of these disturbing images are part of Tompert’s 12LVE photography exhibit located at the WhiteSpace Gallery in Palo Alto, California. “The images are large-scale yet microscopic, providing a canvas for contemplating our relationship with fetish, fashion, freedom, and bondage,” says Tompert. The inspiration behind the gallery is rather simplistic; when Tompert got tired of his two sons fighting over an iPod touch, he took it from them and smash it on the floor. “They were kind of stunned — the screen was broken and this liquid poured out of it. I got my camera to shoot it,” he told the LA Times. “My wife told me that I should do something with it.” And the rest, as they say, was history.
It’s important to note that Tompert is not anti-Apple; in fact he calls himself “an Apple fan from Day 1”. If that doesn’t do it for you, he’s a former Apple graphics designer.
Again, take a look in the gallery below to gaze at the beautiful destruction and head over to Cult of Mac to gain insight into the making of the gallery.
[Via CNET]
The G-Men started to think how can we make tech demos fun so people would actually watch and learn from them? Demo Slam is their answer. Google is relying on everyday people (ahem, you don’t need to be a fancy developer) to submit personalized demos that feature Google tech. Using Android phones or Google on the computer, people can show off their creative side by coming up with ways to demonstrate Google tech like search by voice, updates in real-time, and universal search. I’ve included my top five favorite Demo Slam videos in this post. The one embedded above is called “Extra Spicy” and it features two girls using Google Translate to call a real Indian restaurant and order in Hindi. Never thought of giving that a try, now did you?
Look after the break for the others; a group of friends recreates Mt. Rushmore and uses Google Googles to identify the them as the real deal, three brothers see how many marshmallows they can shove into their mouths until Google Search by voice cannot recognize the query “chubby bunny”, Maria Sharapova uses Google Search to answer questions in English and Russian, and then there’s the epic Google Docs animation.
Want to see more tech demos? They are so much fun to watch right? Head over to the official Demo Slam website where you can view all the submissions and vote for your favorites. The contest is still happening, so unleash your creative side and show the world what you’ve got!
[Via GoogleBlog] Continue reading Google Demo Slam contest gives ordinary people the chance to creatively shine
From a melancholic loss to a tangible idea the C60 Redux was made.
In the book I Miss My Pencil, co-authors Martin Bone and Kara Johnson of design firm IDEO conceived twelve design experiments through collaboration, sketching, and prototyping. One of these concept designs is called the C60 Redux and it begs the question, “Does the mix tape still exist in a digital world?” Bone shares his thoughts: “I feel strangely melancholic that in this shift from analog to digital we somehow lost something; we traded connection for convenience.” And he gloomily concludes: “Ultimately this experiment won’t change anything; technology marches on, teenagers in love today play out their courtship online in their Facebook pages, not browsing record stacks. But I feel much better for having done it.”
This particular experiment inspired a group at IDEO to make a real working model of the C60 Redux and their efforts are revealed in the video above. Something was “somehow lost” in the technological shift from analog to digital, thought Bone. That something is physicality, and so the designers marched on to create a working model with this question in mind: “What if we could touch our music again?” Using Arduino Pro Mini boards and RFID tags the concept came to life. The designers constructed a small box that takes design cues from a record player, and built inside are Arduino boards that can read RFID (or radio-frequency identification) cards. Embedded inside custom-made cards are two RFID tags, each tag representing a song. When you place a card on top of the box, the circuitry inside the box instantly reads the RFID tag and plays the song stored on it. Flip a card over to play Side B. Place multiple cards on the surface to create a playlist (the cards are read in a clockwise order).
And just like that a mere concept born out of a need to bring back the physicality of music was made into a real product. Beyond the final product, what’s important to glean from this story is the tale of technology and how it can bring exciting advances and at the same time disregard staples of the past. In the move from vinyl to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s, the convenience of throwing a couple hundred songs on an iPod has managed to make most forget about the materiality of music and what that brought with it. The days of collecting piles of vinyl and what Bone calls the “joy and love” of creating personal mix tapes are way behind us, but something like the C60 Redux might just have the power to bring it all back to our digital world.
[Via Engadget; IMissMyPencil]
DYI handyman Marc DeVidts has gone ahead and create the coolest door I’ve ever seen. (It’s certainly not the biggest or most aesthetically pleasing, but’s it’s the coolest.) He’s created a switch that opens the door (and can hold it open or closed), above the door is an air vent and that’s where the air from the air compressor (located in the attic) gets released when the door closes, and next to that is a control panel that allows him to disable the door and shut off the air supply. So go on, click play and watch the door open and make the “whoosh” sound when it closes. DeVidts succedded in what he set out to do: construct “the perfect, most geek-ified entryway for [his] bedroom.” If you are feeling the urge to build a door like this in your home, head over to Instructables where you’ll find a step-by-step guide authored by DeVidts himself.
[Via Gizmodo]
In collaboration with Disney and seating manufacturer Cappellini, New York-based designer Dror Benshetrit has focused all his Tron: Legacy excitment and created this awesome Tron-inspired armchair.
Dror’s mission on this project was to articulate the complex meaning of objects in the simplest of ways; their uses becoming a part of their narratives, expressed in transformations that are both metaphorical and literal. Raw data forms a jag and angular landscape for the chair, which is comprised of intersecting layers and textures of ‘digital’ rock. The armchairs will be constructed from composite materials that consist of impregnated fiberglass with polyester resin, processed with manual layering.
Each armchair produced will be individually hand-finished by the designer and they’ll be presented at the Milan Furniture Fair in April 2011. There’s no word on price or release date, but mass production is being promised. Um, I want one of these now! Look in the gallery below to browse through the multiple funky color options.
[Via DesignBoom; Core77]
The Mercedes-Benz BIOME symbiosis vehicle is made from an ultralight material called BioFibre and tips the scales at just 875.5 lbs (around 394 kg). This material is significantly lighter than metal or plastic, yet more robust than steel. BioFibre is grown from proprietary DNA in the Mercedes-Benz nursery, where it collects energy from the sun and stores it in a liquid chemical bond called BioNectar4534. As part of this process, the vehicle is created from two seeds: The interior of the BIOME grows from the DNA in the Mercedes star on the front of the vehicle, while the exterior grows from the star on the rear. To accommodate specific customer requirements, the Mercedes star is genetically engineered in each case, and the vehicle “grows” when the genetic code is combined with the seed capsule. The wheels are grown from four separate seeds.
If you haven’t deduced this by now, the BIOME is an eco-friendly hybrid “vehicle of the future” that can be grown in a lab. While it’s in use it produces oxygen, like plants, thereby contributing to improving air quality. And when the car has reached the end of its lifecycle, it can be fully composted or used as building material. But don’t hold your breath; a concept car like the BIOME won’t become a reality for quite some time simply because its fantastical feature set is downright impossible to implent today. But one can dream, no? Read more about Mercedes’ crazy ideas for the future after the break, and look in the gallery below to view the BIOME from various angles.
