Make the World Your Digital Notepad
Ever had the feeling of wanting to take notes but not having a surface to do it on? The creators of Phree, a stylus that can record your scribblings on any writing surface using motion-sensing technology, feel your pain. Their solution allows you to "write" on any surface, interacting with the world more directly and practicing the endangered art of handwriting. Phree's crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter begins today.
The stylus's breakthrough characteristic is its use of a technology called Optical Translation Measurement, which tracks motion over a much wider range of surfaces and with a wider dynamic range than other kinds of motion sensing. It uses a compact 3D laser interferometer (a laser beam projected on the writing surface that creates reflection). A small processor then translates this information to X-Y-Z motion. This creates a crisp facsimile of one's handwriting on your device.
Phree can also lend a helping hand when you're away from your device thanks to a tiny integrated screen, which allows you to read text messages and then scrawl back replies. The screen can also change the pen to a highlighter, change the writing color, or even change from messaging to dialing. Handily, the Phree's case also doubles as a smartphone stand.
“We live in a world of screens that we’ve come to rely on for everything from our work to our personal lives, but often times our imaginations are confined by these same screens,” said Gilad Lederer, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of OTM Technologies, the creators of Phree. “Phree goes beyond the screen to help your imagination go digital, free of constraints.”
Though writing offscreen in some ways resembles older forms of interaction, such as a computer trackpad, it also brings back the advantage of being able to see your entire screen while writing—not a trivial perk if you're writing on an iPhone. And science is increasingly suggesting that writing by hand is good for remembering what you've written—a point to remember for students, or anyone who's traced a name on their thigh to remember it.
Phree is available now for pre-order on Kickstarter for the early-bird price of $129 and is compatible with all major platforms including Android, Windows and iOS via a Bluetooth Smart connection.
Sculptural Pavilion is Crafted from Curved 3D-Printed Blocks
Companies like Makerbot, and countless examples in engineering, electronics, and science, have proved that 3D printers are great at making tiny stuff, like scale models and component parts that fit just right. But as architects are finding, 3D printers can also generate durable and environmentally friendly architectural materials as well. An Oakland-based MAKE tank called Emerging Objects has proved this with an outdoor sculpture/tempietto called Bloom, which measures approximately 12 feet by 12 feet and is composed of 840 customized 3D printed blocks.
Bloom's curvilinear shape is inspired by several other examples in architecture and the arts, including "the thin masonry structures of Uruguayan architect and engineer, Eladio Dieste, particularly Iglesia Cristo Obrero, Jefferson’s serpentine brick walls at the University of Virginia, and Torqued Elipse, by Richard Serra, which inspires its form."
The cruciform shape rises nine feet to meet a version of the same shape, this time rotated 45 degrees. This makes it look a little like an elephant's foot, or the traditional mud houses of the Tiebele people in Ghana, which inspired some of the company's earliest projects.
Each brick in the Bloom structure is unique and designates its position in the overall structure. Instead of being designed using a blueprint, the architects used a spreadsheet to position blocks and held them together using stainless steel hardware.
The blocks of the structure were printed by 11 powder-based 3D printers using a special filament that, though it contains some plastic, consists mainly of iron oxide-free Portland cement. Iron oxide can darken the material or lighten it if it's removed from the mixture. The plastic component of the polymer is ecologically derived and UV resistant, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 50 percent compared to traditional petroleum-based epoxies, even those that use plant-based sources. The variegated pattern allows shifting light to pass through in surprising ways.
Bloom was assembled on the UC Berkeley campus in March, then disassembled and shipped to Thailand, where it will be exhibited for several months and then embark on a journey around the world, perhaps meeting with the original countries of many of its influences.
Magazine Designed to Be Read with Your Feet
As the sandal season of spring and summer starts, we start to think more kindly of the lowly extremities that support us in our daily activities: namely, our feet. A special magazine created by foot product manufacturer Hansaplast and the creative studio BEING France imagines a foot-centric world, one where reading is done at a leisurely pace and pages are flipped with manicured toes.
A promotional video showcases some of the magazine's special features. These include a thick, varnished paper stock selected by BEING so that the pages can be easily turned by the hands' less prehensile counterparts, and a larger type that allows you to read from further away.
"When we researched about footcare and the target, we discovered that the typical footcare consumer was actually younger and more active than the traditional Hansaplast band-aid target (families, 35-50 yo)," said BEING's Marie Reynaud. "To attract this younger target audience, we had to help the brand switch its brand perception from a serious healthcare plaster brand to an aspirational care brand."
The lighthearted magazine's content includes foot fashion, foot art (which includes interesting details from well-known paintings of expressive feet), foot society, foot fun and games and a foot horoscope.
The fashion magazine aesthetic brings some needed cachet to a particularly unglamorous section of the drugstore. A set of whimsical photos feature some fancy footwork as models adroitly perform tasks usually done with the hands, such as holding a deck of cards and blowing a kiss.
The magazine and promotional video were created to promote a new product range called FootExpert, which includes an anti-callus cream, a deodorant, an antiperspirant, and a regenerating foot cream. A website that is linked from the shareable YouTube video offers a €1.50 coupon on these four products – and a PDF of the magazine that you can peruse yourself, albeit on a monitor or touch screen rather unsuited to our forgotten appendages.
The transformation from a boring product brochure to a luxury magazine brings a typical drugstore brand to a glamorous level for people who are interested in the form of their feet as well as their function. Perhaps there will be more foot fetishists in the future.
SpotiBear is a Children’s Toy Powered By Spotify Music
Swedish designer Andreas Lindahl, who also happens to work for Spotify, decided to bring the popular music service into the hands of young children with a friendly toy bear—and with his coworker Pär Johansson, who took on the hardware and coding, he was able to take on the job independently from start to finish. Spotibear may just be a fledgling experiment but it looks sleek and attractive as well as safe for young children.
To prototype the product, Lindahl and Johansson started with hand-drawn and Illustrator sketches but used Strata 3D to design how they wanted the bear to look, as well as the individual pieces for its limbs (numbering up to six for the arms). Everything was then printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2. It was then that they realized they would need to use threaded inserts for the joints as opposed to screws with taps. The body consists of four pieces, which had to be sanded after printing to get their smooth look (Tamiya spray paint and primer helped as well).
Lindahl and Johansson used a Raspberry Pi B+ to bring the physical workings of the toy to life, running Spotify through the Spotify client spopd. A lithium battery with charger is included as well. The components were mounted with zip ties instead of screws because the creators found it easier.
The collaborators had the most trouble with the front piece of the toy, which is quite complex with its speaker and holes for buttons. They ended up having to print the speaker hole piece separately and use plastic filler to attach it. The buttons and a micro USB for charging polished everything off.
As 3DPrint.com points out, "Often it’s the relaxing little side project that wasn’t meant to be anything other than an experimental one-off that turns into quite the surprising hit." An iPhone app that's in development will allow users to connect their Spotify accounts and assign certain playlists to buttons—and then we'll see about the future.
Responsive Street Furniture Anticipates Pedestrians' Accessibility Needs
For most able-bodied people, navigating a hectic urban environment, especially when they are unfamiliar with it, can be a challenge. But the blind, deaf, and elderly can have twice the difficulties. With Ross Atkin and Associates' Responsive Street Furniture, however, street lights and crosswalks can momentarily step forward to meet the needs of individuals using them.
Users of the service, which was created in partnership with U.K. landscaping manufacturer Marshalls, would create a unique account on a website and select their preferences for accessibility, including brighter streetlights with better tonal contrast, more places to sit, and audio information in different languages. The site stores users' data, as does their smartphone or key fob; the responsive street beacons then detect the phone or fob as they walk by, automatically adjusting these qualities accordingly.
"Working on research shadowing disabled people as they move through public space I was struck by how much of the design of our streets was defined by a tradeoff between the needs of different people," said designer Ross Atkin. "When a device or application can adapt it can meet the needs of an individual much more completely, rather than trying to be the best compromise between everyone."
[embed url="https://vimeo.com/123081985" contenteditable="false" uuid="7a4754261a67497fbfaf84fd304c7590" provider="Vimeo"]https://vimeo.com/123081985[/embed]
Though it would take decades to put such equipment everywhere that it is needed, there is plenty that architects and planners can do to make spaces more comfortable for all: in 2012, for example, Gallaudet University released a set of DeafSpace Guidelines designed to make vision easier for those communicating with sign language.
Atkin has been working for a year and a half, and they installed their first outdoor responsive item (a talking bollard) as part of the 'Never Mind the Bollards' exhibition on Store Street in London. For now, a demonstration of Responsive Street Furniture is on view as part of the 2015 Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum in London from the 25th of March to the 23rd of August.
"The system we are building can advantage anyone who might need a street experience different from 'the average person'... Many of the assistance the infrastructure can provide is not just helpful for people who identify as disabled, the longer crossing timing can also help people with small children for example," added Atkin in an email.
Thermoformable Material Allows Bed to Be Room's Focal and Functional Point
Forget wood slats or heavy inner springs. The bed of the future is made out of plastic and it integrates into the room in space-age style. Designed by the Austrian team of WHO CARES?!, Ice Bed, inspired by an igloo, was a custom job for a client and features the advanced composite material DuPont Corian.
The bed, despite sitting in the middle of the room, is attached to the wall, creating a sense of security from an unconventional source—most people would rather have their headboard against a wall instead. A built-in LED light allows the client to modulate the lighting conditions in the room, from a cool white reading light to a sultry red. The structure that connects the bed to the wall also includes two types of storage areas, one for exhibition and one for hidden storage.
Corian, which was introduced in 1967, is composed of aluminum-tri-hydrate, pigments and acrylic resins (PMMA) and was designed as a multi-purpose design surface. It has a matte surface and can be used to construct shapes virtually seamlessly because the joints can be inconspicuously glued together. It is also non-porous, making it easy to keep clean, and it is easy to build on edges with the material and make them look thicker.
The Ice Bed also seems to be mattress-agnostic. Johann Szebeni of Who Cares wrote in an email, "Our client and user of the Icebed has his favorite mattress. He use this kind of matress for many years. So we designed the Icebed that you can use your own loved mattress."
The Ice Bed offers an intriguing mixture of seclusion and openness, taking every part of the room under its wing and offering functionality usually lent to other furniture. Hopefully we will begin to see other multi-purpose beds like this on the consumer market in the future.
Designs for a Linear Bike Park in Miami
With New York having received both the landmark High Line, built from a freight rail, and in talks to get an underground Low Line, what about something in between that uses another underutilized aspect of the street infrastructure? The concept of the Underline in Miami, which was conceived in 2013 by Meg Daly, is based around the 10 miles of dark and cool but underutilized space under the elevated MetroRail.
The Underline hopes to not only beautify this space but improve pedestrian and bicycle safety in the shade of the concrete rail structure.
Daly first became acquainted with the space when she broke both her arms and thus couldn't bike or drive to her physical therapy sessions. She would take the MetroRail to the Coconut Grove station and walk under the tracks to her final destination, and this was when she noticed that despite the space being well sheltered from the sun in the middle of July, there was virtually no one walking under it. That was when she realized the space could become an "enhanced urban trail" as well as a linear park. An online survey is helping Daly's team plan possible uses.
The University of Miami School of Architecture has offered planning resources, including pro bono student work in Spring 2014 and 2015, to the initiative. Many of the renderings developed by students emphasize the usefulness of the Underline instead of its final foliage and appearance; for example, Bird Road might feature a protected cycling area, while Vizcaya would be transformed from an area barely covered with lawn to a true jogging and exercise path. Out of 19 applicants, James Corner Field Operations has been selected as the master plan design team, and they will use the more in-depth student work to help launch their initiative.
The Underline will be the "spine" of a planned network of bike-friendly infrastructure in the Miami-Dade area. Though projects of a similar scope have taken around a decade to complete (New York's High Line, by comparison, is only 1.45 miles long), interested parties can donate to the 501(c)(3) to speed up the process of planning and building the Underline, joining several illustrious partner foundations.
Raised Bike Lanes Offer Space-Saving Safety to San Fran Riders
Many municipalities are promoting bicycling as an environmentally friendly way to get around that doesn't require them to invest money in much new infrastructure. Bike lanes have become part and parcel of this movement, varying in design from a stripe on the side of the road to a fully protected pathway beside parked cars.
But a little-used design that might better protect cyclists while taking up less room is receiving consideration by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and the SF Public Utilities Commission: a raised bike lane, which aside from being protected provides a built-in 'speed bump' that keeps motorists from straying into cyclists' territory.
The lane, which runs alongside the curb, will be raised about two inches above the road surface, and will be 11 feet wide between the lane itself (six feet wide) and an additional five-foot "buffer zone" on the traffic side of the road. If this sounds wide, it doesn't take up nearly as much space as more typical forms of "protected" bike lanes that include obstacles like bollards.
"While the specific design is not yet complete, normally the raised bike lane will lower back down to roadway level as it approaches or reaches the intersection to allow for seamless turns for people biking," adds Community Organizer Chema Hernández Gil of advocacy group the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
The raised bike lane is currently being pioneered on a single-block stretch of the hip Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission district. But the city is eager to add these lanes to areas of the city with high rates of bicycle injuries.
"We're really excited about bringing [the lanes] to San Francisco," says Tyler Frisbee, policy director at the coalition. "Like all protective bike lanes, they help people feel safe on the road, create more predictable traffic patterns, and encourage people who otherwise might be nervous to ride on busy streets."
Raised bike lanes have proved their mettle in European cities, where bicycling culture is a little more relaxed, as well as Chicago, Milwaukee, and Bend, Oregon. San Francisco is eager to catch up with its neighbors to the east, and it's doing pretty well; in 2010, 3.5 percent of the population was cycling, and it hopes to reach 10 percent by 2018.
Artist Auctions Off His Facebook Password to Strangers
Social media has given us endless enjoyment—but social media also has become a billion-dollar business by selling our personal information to advertisers and spying on our online activity. But one freelance art director-turned-conceptual-artist, Nick Hugh Schmidt, has turned the concept on its head by trying to auction his Facebook password on eBay. And the authorities on the site weren't happy.
After the account raised $200 from 34 bidders, eBay shut down the auction, saying it violated their terms of use. So Schmidt took to the streets, holding an IRL auction at the pop-up space Shwick in Brooklyn's Bushwick. Despite coming complete with a starting bid reset to 99 cents, a keg of beer and a certified auctioneer, the event somehow rendered the merchandise a little more abstract, coming up a little short compared to its Internet counterpart at $140.
Schmidt, who describes Facebook's role in his life as "like genitals on a pubescent teenager," finds the site to be an unfortunately addictive necessity, and he admits that one of his more selfish motives in the project is to pay someone to take the burdens of the website off his hands. But he's also interested in exploring the roots of digital agency and identity.
Unlike a related project earlier this year that led Schmidt to leave his unlocked iPhone at the mercy of strangers, who could pry into his digital life and join conversations with his contacts, this Facebook game is for keeps; Schmidt doesn't plan on making one again.
And as Schmidt remarked, his Facebook might be worth more dead (and reanimated) than alive. Facebook accounts and the hypothetical eyeballs associated with them are counted even when accounts are inactive, and the company assumes a neat correlation between one account and one person, which it tries to enforce by forcing users to use their "real names."
In a move that could lead to some seriously recursive projects, the winner of the auction, Andrew Ohanesian, also describes himself as a conceptual artist. Both artists, who seem to have some bad publicity on the web, seem to see the act of declaring themselves artists as an act of radical self-invention; as Schmidt has put it to Bushwick Daily, he wants to expose the hypocrisy that "I can’t sell myself but the social media sites can." What happens when two such personalities come together, though, has still yet to be seen.
Furniture That Questions the Impact of Tech on Human Interaction
Fortunately, students can buck trends without worrying about profitability, and one particular group of MFA furniture design students at RISD, in an exhibit called Face to Face: Searching for Authentic Experiences, is challenging assumptions about the unsocial direction connected home technology seems to be headed in.
The Illume table light has a simple but clever electronic function, taking advantage of a common gesture that people unwittingly use when they have space in common. Designed by Mayela Mujica, it switches on when two users place their phones on it, encouraging face-to-face conversation.
Simple beechwood folding chairs called Transit from Ross Kellogg do this without any fancy extra functions: they provide a "comfortable, attractive alternative to the standard folding chair" that "focuses the user’s attention on simple details and connections."
Other pieces offer a more explicit commentary: Linus King's "Privacy/Curiosity" recreates a panopticon scenario. In a classic panopticon (Jeremy Bentham's design for an ideal prison), the guards are concealed yet able to look in on hundreds of inmates who are in turn unable to see them. King's pieces allows the user to hide their head in a tinted acrylic helmet, concealing their identity while still allowing them to look out on others. Though they have an illusion of privacy, the user's body is exposed and therefore vulnerable.
Other pieces focus on the pleasurable sensations of being truly alone, such as Sam Newman's "shell phone," which simulates a conch shell and its ocean sounds in an angular device made from stainless steel and oak, materials whose look is more that of a cell phone.
And perhaps most cleverly of all, the +1 chair reverses the idea of a seesaw, requiring two people sitting on it to be balanced—but alas, the chair is designed for them to face away from each other. Emre Bagdatoglu's portable music-box video conferencing device called Permalink, meanwhile, is meant to be sold in pairs, turning human interaction with loved ones into a Pandora's Box.
Pavilion Made of Beverage Cartons Breathes Life into Waste as Construction Material
According to the EPA, in 2012, the United States generated about 251 million tons of trash. Statistics like this make us uncomfortable waste is neither a resource nor a product, and thus we force it out of our consciousness. What if we didn't have to push our waste—even our recycling—aside?
This concept has, of course, has become very commercially appealing with all the recycled goods now available to customers, but ETH Zurich, the science and tech-focused university in Switzerland, recently took the concept to a new level of ambition at the IDEAS CITY Festival in New York's Lower East Side.
From May 28-30, members of the university's architecture department brought The ETH Future Garden and Pavilion, the brainchild of Architecture Professor Dirk E. Hebel, to the First Street Garden.
The Pavilion is made from paper, polyethylene and aluminum—the materials typically used in beverage cartons. If these don't sound like the kind of materials that you can built a large structure out of, you would normally be right but the special catenary shape of the structure follows the flow of the forces it exerts, resulting in an unusual level of strength. Triangular sections in its arches also give the structure added depth for its thickness and weight.
The variegated materials of the structure's roof were extruded by the U.S. company ReWall, which presses boards (usually intended for interior wall cladding) out of 100 percent reused, shredded beverage cartons. The process isn't easy or carbon-neutral, requiring great water and energy use to separate the laminated layers from the paper, and such inventive reuse of materials draws attention to the fact that only about 40 percent of U.S. households have access to facilities for this type of recycling at all.
The upshot of such a strenuous manufacturing process is that the ReWall material is waterproof, making it perfect for the great urban outdoors. But not all structures like this need to be durable. In one particular presentation of the project called "In the Future There Will Be No Waste," Hebel and his collaborator Phillippe Block introduced audiences to inspiring projects like the Living's Hy-Fi, a structure made out of biodegradable materials that returned itself to the earth at MoMa PS1 last summer.
And as Hebel pointed out in his documentation of the project, the ReWall material can be repeatedly re-compressed and re-configured after it has been manufactured. It's a new way of thinking about architecture: as a process that lives and breathes, but also hopefully yields resources as well, not just waste.
Capture Colors as Raw Color Values
he device works through an internal spherical light source, which picks up the surface color in a controlled sequence and sends the reflected light to an integrated color sensor. A flash of a green light lets you know the process is done. Then the Cube can store the color in its onboard memory—it can keep track of up to 20 colors—or send it to a Bluetooth-paired iOS or Android device.
The SwatchMate Cube has uses for anyone who is visually creative, but it's especially useful for those who frequently hop between the digital and and the actual. For example, fashion designers can check color variance in samples, and graphic and web designers can use real-world inspiration as a jumping-off point. Color is even important to coffee blenders, and the Cube can help a coffee blend fit in among already known varieties.
With everyone perceiving color a little differently, and some more precisely than others, the Cube also helps you keep projects continuous—for example, graffiti artists can seamlessly extend their work.
The colors captured by the SwatchMate cube are matched to a wide variety of color palettes in paints, markers, pens, and more; by using Cube Link and linking the cube to Photoshop, you also get a host of digital color profiles available to you, including ANPA-COLOR, DIC Color Guide, FOCOLTONE, HKS swatches, PANTONE, TOYO Color Finder 1050, and TRUMATCH. And of course, natively in the phone app, SwatchMate supports all the standard color spaces for raw color values, such as RGB and CMYK.
A device like this bridges the gap between the colors we see naturally and the constructed colors we spend time looking at on computer screens. In that way, it helps designers, decorators, and everyone in between shuttle, as they increasingly must, between those two worlds.
SoHo Building Facade Design Crowdsourced Via Facebook
Many 'starchitects' are criticized for imposing their vision on various locales without regard for the surrounding community. But as a building facade project in SoHo's Thompson street by designer Karim Rashid shows, social media has allowed individuals to provide their input on what would otherwise be imperious monuments. Rashid, who is better known as a product and interior designer, posted five different designs on his heavily trafficked Facebook fan page and allowed followers to vote on their favorite.
The wacky options included option B's faceted triangular panels, option C's flat glazed surface with a biomorphic graphic, and option D's space-age oval windows. Though the block is slightly afield of SoHo's famous wealth of cast iron, all the proposed choices stand out loudly next to the brick arched windows, fire escapes, and cornices of the adjacent buildings.
The ultimate design chosen by Rashid, his developer Mavrix Group, and the Facebook users, was option A, with its protruding parallelogram-shaped windows. It bears some resemblance to the Citroën showroom in Paris, which led to some criticism even from Rashid's fans. According to the Real Deal, though fans could engage with the project, the opinion of the professionals ultimately trumped their input.
Rashid's outreach was, in part, fueled by difficulties he has had in the past with pushing projects through.
"I have had too many failures and have learned that design is a collaboration. One must listen and work within that culture or nothing will go to market or get built," he told DeZeen.
But considering the strong preservationist forces at work in Lower Manhattan, Rashid's structure still faces considerable obstacles getting built, not least beleaguered neighbors skeptical of the usefulness of another 10-unit condo on the block.
However, one of those close neighbors is the unique townhouses designed by Home by Novogratz stars Bob and Cortney Novogratz. It is now owned and being rented out for $37,500 a month by NBA giant Zydrunas Ilgauskas. Considering the heavily commodified nature of the block, it could at least become a garden of interesting contemporary design—if not a truly residential block.
Exploring Humanity From a Bench in Barcelona
Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself, "if only this bench could talk?" Specific objects and street furniture in the city landscape can sometimes take on an importance beyond their unimposing appearance. For Hungarian freelance photographer Gabor Erdelyi, this moment came when he started living near an unusual square-shaped bench in Barcelona's old fishing village Barceloneta. For more than a year, pointing the camera out his window, he documented the dramas that occurred on and around it.
"Barcelona is a wonderful city," he wrote on Bored Panda. "The camera is always ready by the window. Sitting on the balcony is like being in a movie theater continuously. I made more than a hundred different photographs of the special life of the bench."
So far, he has documented the bench as a picnic spot, a lovers' retreat, a skateboard surface, a place for parents to patiently watch their children, and a gathering for demonstrations (a gaggle of bicyclists seeming to be part of one of those) and the police presence that follows.
"This is a small point of the fisherman's village lively, vibrant life," says Erdely. "[It's] an integral part of everyday life, of love, of life, of birthdays, of loneliness, of joint activities and of games," he told Huh Magazine. "This is one of the many thousands of similar sites of community building."
He has also added that the project is ongoing. "A few important, characteristic scene is missing in order to complete this series," he wrote on Bored Panda. What could that be—perhaps an interaction between the photographer and his multitude of subjects? Or even a bird's-eye view of Erdelyi himself as he would normally sit in such a place?
“For me the city, the street and the people are the main subject," said Gábor in an interview with DIY Photography. “I see pictures and little stories everywhere. I could not describe these moments in words. I hope I can do it with my photos." With one of his other projects a series of portraits of contemporary artists, it seems time for him to turn the camera on himself.
Replace Yesterday's Hefty AC Unit With a Room-Cooling Dining Table
As we switch on our noisy air conditioners for summer, it may do us well to keep in mind that many of the materials we wear on our bodies and keep in our rooms actually have subtle but noticeable effects on how cool we feel. Synthetic materials like polyester, for example, are notorious for making us sweat. But now two French engineers have come up with some ideas as to how furniture can reverse these familiar annoyances. The ZEF Climatic Table uses a combination of a special wax and heat-diffusing aluminum panels to absorb and release heat, keeping your room at a comfy 71 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Climatic Table, despite its sleek oak plateau, hides under its chassis a "climactic damper" that uses PCM (phase-changing) wax formed into balls to take in excess warmth. An aluminum sheet keeps this material tucked away and diffuses its effects across the table. Designers Raphaël Ménard and Jean-Sébastien Lagrange claim the table can reduce energy bills by up to 30 percent, and heating bills by up to 60 percent, in air-conditioned environments, though in conditions where the temperature fluctuates, such as homes without thermostats, its effects are decidedly hampered.
However, the table might be of great use in expensively cooled and heated offices, where in a meeting room, for example, it could absorb the heat generated by people's bodies to keep the room cool while a meeting is in progress, then release the heat afterward to maintain a consistent temperature.
One of the inspirations for the table is the Japanese Kotatsu, which also leverages the large surface area of a table to provide local heat—though its effects are decidedly not as radiant, and it is reliant on some sort of heating element or motor hidden under its surface.
Though the ZEF Climatic Table might not be a game-changer on its own, it could work with a variety of other objects—the creators plan on designing a whole ecosystem—to regulate a room.
ZEF Design
3D Printing Brings Imaginative Children’s Drawings to Their Playrooms
Did you ever make up some fantastical creatures as a kid that you wished existed as actual toys? Maybe you tried to put your parents to work helping you mold them out of clay? MOYUPI promises to make kids' creatures even more real through the magic of 3D printing and a little hand-painting.
The company uses digital modeling software to prepare your creature (or MOYUPI) for 3D printing, and then renders them in kid-friendly, durable ABS plastic. Due to the rudimentary nature of color 3D printing and the creators' desire to precisely follow directions, color is carefully added to the designs by hand. MOYUPI can be rendered in three different sizes (15cm, 10cm and 7cm) and two types of boxes designed by Brazilian artist and illustrator Mayra Magalhães, and can also be shipped without paint so kids can do it themselves.
The limitations of 3D printing that the creators have encountered also happen to sync up fairly well with many children's drawings; for example, irregular shapes are considered ideal for making a MOYUPI, but stick figures and other designs below a minimum thickness can't be accepted. The MOYUPI project also encourages children to be original, as the creators can't print licensed characters like Spongebob or Elsa (but they can print designs inspired by them).
"A team composed by artists... is the opportunity to get creative in the design process," said MOYUPI founder Juan Ángel Medina in an email. "'How did the kid imagine his Moyupi?', 'is that an arm or a horn?', 'is this element part of the shape or just something drawn on it?'. These questions aren't always easy to answer, so we need to put our minds in a kid-like state to imagine what the kids wanted to portray and design it in the most accurate way."
So what's the big-picture mission with MOYUPI? The young team of six designers says they are interested in donating a portion of the company's proceeds to organizations: "ASPACE, ALES, PÍDEME LA LUNA and ASPERGER, each one linked to one of MOYUPI mascots."
An early-bird special allows backers who pledge $34 or more to receive a small MOYUPI figure as well as a Maxi Pack; a special XXL size (30 cm high) for $114 will also only be available during the special Kickstarter campaign. A variety of other configurations, some geared toward multiple kids and families, should be a great opportunity for kids and adults alike to unleash their creativity.
"The material I would like to use for the Moyupi is a rubber-like one, in order to make them even more friendly and resistant. That's a possibility we are currently researching," said Medina. Stretch goals also include a video game, YouTube series and research into making posable, articulated figures: all promising ideas for a kids' brand.
Furry Facial Recognition Finds Lost Pets
Anyone who's lived with a cat or a dog can tell you that their face would be unmistakable to them in a crowd. John Polimeno, realized this when he was sitting in a coffee shop and looking at all the lost pet posters. He also had a deeply personal memory of a lost black labrador that he spent days putting up posters about, with his children crying in the back seat of the car. All this, and two-plus years working with The University of Utah software development center, led to Finding Rover, the ultimate app for finding lost dogs.
This continuously updated app allows you to photograph your dog so that its face can be analyzed for easy recognition in case it goes missing in the future. The app features an interactive map with lost-and-found posters and sends push notifications if a dog is lost or found within a five-mile radius.
The in-app camera feature is specially adapted for photographing dogs, with a button that makes a squealing puppy sound to get your pet to snap to attention for a front-on shot.
The facial recognition software zeroes in on more than 125 points around the face. Polimeno told the Star Tribune that the software is more than 98 percent accurate with dogs and 99 percent accurate with cats.
Partnerships with more than 91 local shelters around the United states and in Australia have allowed the app to make a difference at a faster rate than the typical "network effect"—a direct function of the number of people that have downloaded it. Humane societies send the app's team photos of animals that arrive every hour, making it possible to find your pet without ever doing any digital or physical legwork.
Thanks to the app, which is available for iOS, Android, and the Web, more than 620 dogs have been reunited with their owners as of this month. And if you're a cat lover, never fear: a version of the app for felines is expected next month.
Messaging App Lets You Text On Locked Screen Mode
The Power of Chat Debrief, a new report from PSFK Labs, explores trends in communication, text and messaging platforms. We found, most prevailingly, that what people demand in messaging today is simple: efficiency and immediacy.
Instead of writing out I love you, even language experts will opt for a single <3 icon. We text our peers, colleagues and family expecting the shortest timeframe for a response in comparison to all other modes of communication. An app called ScreenPop proves that some people don't even want to go through the effort of unlocking their device screens to send a message.
The messaging service is essentially Snapchat for your lock screen: it allows people to communicate with each other without even entering the rabbit hole that is their full array of smartphone apps and features. The app allows you to draw on pictures in a similar manner to Snapchat, and is changing the way friends communicate by encouraging them to volley photos back and forth.
The Locket team, the parent company to ScreenPop, used the service for internal communication and realized its potential as a way for people to communicate. Consequently, developers adapted the idea to a wider audience, dealing with a different and younger demographic who use images and ephemeral messaging to carry on entire conversations. Founder Yunha Kim told PSFK:
Locket is doing very well (in fact featured as a Best App of 2014 by Google), and by launching ScreenPop and allowing photo sharing on the lock screen, it just allows us to use the same technology and platform to reach a different target audience. While Locket is for 20-30s who are interested in news and content in general, ScreenPop is for younger demo that loves sharing photos daily and communicating with friends consistently.
The contrasts and overlaps between these two groups, one traditionally characterized as consumers and the other as producers, is something that apps like ScreenPop will continue to wrestle with in fun and inventive ways. An iOS version is said to be in the works, but its functionality is a "secret." In the meantime, let's get popping.
Learn more about trends in communication, text and messaging platforms in The Power of Chat Debrief. The report from PSFK Labs tackles how SMS, messaging and chat are once again prevalent and even integral to delivering best-in-class brand experiences to customers.
Illuminate Your Future Room With Superfood Decor
Photosynthetic algae are very possibly the companion organism of the future. Because they eat our waste CO2 and produce energy, they are considered a leading potential source of biofuels. Spirulina algae, in particular, with its high protein and nutrient density, has gained popularity as a "superfood." But algae doesn't do PR, and there's no appeal in its usual appearance, which is a dark green slurry.
However, two recent Carnegie Mellon graduates, Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier, are ready to help it shine in an exhibit called Living Things, which brings the microorganisms into a sphere they've yet to visit much: the human home. The intricate exhibit at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh sends algae through more than half a mile of piping into glass vessels filled with alkaline water into various areas of a hypothetical home.
High functioning photobioreactors provide heat, light, agitation, air supply, nutrient and waste control to the living algae inside, allowing them to keep growing.
"It keeps the biomass from coating the interior surfaces of the vessels and also provides each little photosynthetic organism varying access to light, which simulates the natural environment of a lake or ocean where currents or waves move algae closer or further away from the surface and therefore sunlight," explains Douenias. The water medium continuously moves, reminding us that there's life inside in the absence of the "superstructure" that most plants have.
The exhibit is arranged into three "vignettes" of life amid the algae – a dining room, a living room and a concealed control center. In the living room, the orblike vessels act as reading companions, ceiling fixtures and tabletop orbs. At the control center, 3D-printed knobs that resemble mushrooms actuate 18 valves that allow the spirulina to be harvested when the culture becomes dense enough and cycles fresh water into each vessel.
And best of all, in the kitchen, spirulina will be integrated into various drinks and dishes by culinary experts and will be served at various events throughout the exhibition. Before embarking on this project, Douenias was engaged in a startup involved in creating food waste energy and nutrient recovery system for restaurants; perhaps some of his expertise in this area will fit right in.
Living Things is now installed at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until March 27, 2016.
Why We Need Emojis for Food Allergies
Emoji tend to be associated with the more positive things in our lives: shopping, fun sassy expressions, dinners out. But emoji also make it easier to communicate for many people—especially in Asian countries, where complex written characters have had difficulty transitioning to tiny onscreen phone keyboards. And those cute food icons, which have been expanded with the release of Unicode 8 and may appear with iOS 9, have some heavy lifting to do—especially with a proposal, sent to the Unicode Consortium by a Google engineer, that could one day see food allergies represented in emoji form.
You would think that the wealth of existing food-related emojis would mostly cover this, but a chart of "weak alternatives" in the proposal shows just how inadequate these are. The icon that comes closest to representing "milk," for example, is a baby bottle. And as the several "tiers" in the proposal—according to the strength of existing alternatives—indicate, most common foods in our diets aren't always to easy to represent visually.
Adding these emoji could change the way we communicate about this increasingly widespread health problem. With the climbing rate of food allergies recently, a common statement now used around foo, both packaged and in restaurants states, the many common allergens that may unexpectedly appear in foods. This is done sometimes as a courtesy to the customer and sometimes as a legal requirement, but it's both imprecise and verbose. Allergens may be referred to by different names, and the various standards around mentioning the presence of their traces—for example, if they were present in the factory that the food product was made in—can be confusing to act upon for those with food allergies and sensitivities.
Using standardized iconography to help communicate these issues may help clear things up for the food-intolerant. This population, which so often feel they have to apologize for being picky with food and holding up orders at restaurants, can now talk about their problem as a normalized part of life.