Bed Climate Control Wants You to Throw Away Your Alarm Clock
What if getting out of bed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed were just a question of temperature? That's what the new version of BedJet, a Kickstarter alumni project, wants to prove. This unique bed climate controller can both cool and heat under the sheets without the cumbersome wiring used by conventional mattress heaters—its only trick of the trade is a concentrated blast of air that makes a small pocket of air under your sheets, the temperature of which you can adjust to your liking.
BedJet v2, which is fundraising on KickStarter like its predecessor and has already raised $433,607—several times its goal—of $24,000, features updates to the firmware that take into account recent sleep research.
Our normal body temperature is 98.7º F, but in order to trigger sleep, it needs to dip to between 98.4 and 97.2 degrees. This is why it's so much easier to sleep in a slightly cold room. But our instinct to seek this type of environment clashes with the comfort we get from sleeping under snuggly blankets, which can raise the ambient temperature around our bodies to 98 degrees or more.
The new remote-control app for the device adjusts the temperature throughout the night to avoid these conditions and help you sleep better—and then raises the temperature in the morning to help you get out of bed more alert.
"Alternatively, everyone has different preferences or needs so you can manually program your own BedJet morning 'alarm,' which can include being woken up with a massive blast of the cooling air!" wrote founder Mark Aramli.
"BedJet v1 was a muscular brawny climate control machine for your bed with very little brains. Grab the remote, turn it on, turn the power up and down and set a shutoff timer," he continued. "We just didn’t have the engineering funds or the time to squeeze all that development [the sleep science features] in the first release of the product."
Though BedJet doesn't claim to be a substitute for an air conditioner or heater, it also can help reduce your utility costs by focusing its powers on the area immediately around your body.
Using two units, sleeping partners can also create comfortable individual zones for themselves. If you struggle with night sweats, BedJet even has a special mode that can help quickly wick the moisture off of your body.
By custom pairing with both your body and your bed, BedJet could mean an era of smarter, personalized sleeping environments.
Smartphone Time-Lapse Tripod Made From a Kitchen Timer
Smartphone cameras have been getting some powerful photography software and firmware these days. Take the iPhone's time lapse feature, for example, which allows you to create exciting videos of very slow-moving objects by filming them over a long period of time. Without a tripod, such videos will be very shaky, and depending on the angle, you might not be able to just rest your phone on a stable surface like with your old point-and-shoot camera. This is a job for special smartphone tripods like the new Hobie, a ring-shaped device developed by Overlab's Mattia Ciucciarelli that your phone can sit in while it holds it steady and rotates around.
Aside from being thoughtfully designed, Hobie also has some additional features that can make for some neat special effects as well.
Hobie's inspiration is DIY: its base was inspired by a mechanical rotating kitchen timer. Thus you can set Hobie to rotate automatically over a certain period time, capturing a wider field of vision and replicating an effect often seen in professional time-lapse videos (especially those astronomy videos).
"The choice to use that product, giving a new life to it, was the first constraint and all the developing of this project rotates around it," wrote Ciucciarelli. "I chose that timer because is the most resistant, his shape is the simplest, and is the most common to find in case of replacement... But also the timer itself has a mechanical engine inside, that means you don’t need to recharge any battery every time."
Using a kitchen timer is even suggested in some smartphone time-lapse how-to videos.
A stretchy bungee attachment on the inside of the ring allows you keep your phone securely in place and fine-tune its angle. It is compatible with wide variety of smartphones, as long as they are thinner than 8cm.
Hobie will come in four colors, white, blue, black and clear, making for a friendly "family" from which you can choose your favorite. A Kickstarter campaign to get it distributed on overlap.net, on Amazon, and in few selected shops around London has already exceeded its fundraising goal of $15,689.
3D Print a Midcentury TV Yourself
TVs were probably one of the first appliances to appear in the mid-20th century that enterprising handymen in the house couldn't account for, with their tiny circuitry and mysterious transmissions. But 3D printing and DIY electronics kits like Raspberry Pi have made electronics a much more legible realm for hobbyists. A modern interpretation of the Teleavia Matrix is a beautiful result of the accessibility and fun brought about by this technology, but the creator, 3D designer David Choi, also added his own flair.
The Teleavia Matrix is based on the Teleavia Panoramic 111, a French television set released in 1957 that is still celebrated for its sleek design.
Choi designed the case in BobCAD and combined details from a few different models that he felt were aesthetically pleasing and useful, such as side arms for stability. The finished monitor can rotate up to 120º to adjust to your viewing angle. He also added helpful features for people who try to recreate the project, such as snap-in fasteners and various pegs and connectors.
The Panoramic 111 was capable of 819 lines, which is considered HD even today. But the DIY world hasn't yet found its answer to the highly miniaturized LEDs that power today's displays. Choi's response to this challenge was to incorporate flexible NeoPixel strips, which more closely resemble the giant LED boards used in Times Square and at sporting arenas, with 32 LEDs per meter. He created a 32×16 LED matrix screen by using two 16×8, flexible NeoPixel matrices that he divided into 8×8 matrices apiece. Here's how it looks.
The firmware behind manipulating the LEDs to flicker and flux as is needed for a real TV is called FadeCandy, which is controlled by a USB driver and the FadeCandy server.
"Without dithering, LED matrices look bright, bold, and boring. Dithering results in higher quality images for an LED matrix," Choi explained to 3DPrint.com. "Since we’re restricted to a fewer number of pixels, image quality drops, but dithering essentially helps smooth out the image colors for our eye, helping to reproduce the detail that would be lost otherwise."
Choi added a little pizzaz to his decidedly low-res display by adding a custom-cut mirror and two-way glass, which produces an "infinity" mirror effect that makes the image appear to float in space. Choi was seeking a time-warp effect with this surrealism; future makers will no doubt add to that.
Projection-Mapped Sculptures Blink and Breathe
Maybe you've read the ecstatic words of an archaeologist or art historian who learns some crucial piece of information that "brings the sculptures to life." Or maybe you've just seen Night at the Museum. Either way, living sculptures have been a fantasy for ages, and now expert projection mapping by French digital production company Studio BK has made it happen at The Fine-Arts Museum of Lyon.
The Mirage Festival of art and innovation in Lyon invited BK's head creative, Arnaud Pottier, to design frameworks specifically for three sculptures at the museum, the Odalisque by James Pradier (1841), First funeral by Antoine Etex, and Perseus Slaying the Gorgon by Laurent-Honore Maqueste.
The finished renderings look at first glance like patches of dappled light from an unknown source falling on the sculptures from the small projector in front of them. This light merely highlights their contours in strange ways. But after a few moments, a knowing eye rolls toward the viewer and begins to blink. The feeling is a bit darker than Night at the Museum, but it leads you to question how great sculpture works, proving the illusion of life as well as things that are more ineffable.
Sometimes the projections put their own spin on dimensions of the sculptures that only become apparent when the light hits them. For example, the Odalisque usually wears a contented expression typical of her genre, but BK's projections have made her expression almost baleful. Similarly, the light brings a fearful expression to the Gorgon's eyes in the Maqueste sculpture.
The artists have said of the work's predecessor, Golem x Apollo, that it "is based on the lack of life inherent of virtual imagery and classical sculptural art." But that's something of an oversimplification; what really makes these works so fascinating is all the layers, living and static, that continually react with each other.
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Charge Your Phone Like You're Kindling a Fire
What are your daily rituals as a digitally connected citizen? You may think your smartphone or tablet makes you more independent, but in some ways, we are getting more disconnected from the basic forces that govern our everyday lives, and that we take for granted, such as electricity. A Zurich University of Arts student named Ramon Marc Zolliker decided to explore this with his project "IMTI: The Act of Charging as a Ritual of the Digital Nomad."
Making fire at will through kinetic energy is mythologized as one of the first skills that set us apart from animals, but many of us have lost that ancient art. Zolliker designed a mechanical device, or dynamo, made of layered wood called IMTI. This contains a drill chuck, or opening, that can be used with any "fire drill"—a water or wind wheel, for example, or any pointed device that can be twirled in the hole—that powers a connected device, such as a smartphone.
Zolliker goes one step further than just proclaiming the new self-sufficiency of the urban "nomad" carrying this device, however. He ties this ritualistic, future-primitive act of charging with the feelings many of us have for our devices; they are a source of information and reassurance, and thus we dote on them, often going out of our way to keep them charged as a busy day wears them down.
Zolliker also learned some unfortunate facts about the proprietary nature of many devices' charging hardware and firmware. "To make my working prototype I had to realize that such a simple principle as charging a phone today is made almost impossible by the manufacturers," he wrote in an email. "You need some tricks [so] that an iPhone allows charging from an unknown source."
As for the digital nomad lifestyle—hopping from one coffee shop to another with your computer and Wi-Fi as your constant companions?
"You actually really can travel and discover the world. In some ways I am truly unleashed," Zolliker wrote.
"Downside actually is that working over different timezones makes work a lot more exhausting and it is not something you would want to do forever... So for a period of time living as digital nomad is a interesting experience but I truly don't hope that this will be our future since it doesn't offer a lot of security."
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Perhaps having to restart the dynamo every time can get a little exhausting.
Tired of Screens? Adopt a Connected Strap for Your Dumb Watch
With the release of the Apple Watch, smart watches, once a futuristic niche, are becoming mainstream. But many reviewers are skeptical of the usefulness of a smart watch. For people in that camp, as well as admirers of the centuries of handcrafted refinement and design that have gone into the best analog watches, there's now a low-key alternative to the smart watch—the smart strap. Specifically, the Unique watch strap.
The Unique watch strap is both minimalistic and completely customizable. It features touch controls that allow you to accept and reject calls and send pre-written text messages, NFC capability, fitness monitoring, and tethering to your phone that reminds you if you're about to leave it behind. And it accomplishes all this with just a tiny multi-color LED light on its exterior.
Other smart bands like the Kairos and Montblanc's e-Strap do provide the benefit of using your Rolex or your Patek Philippe face, but with their brightly flashing screens mounted on the band, they seem more like an apology for wanting to stay connected than a smart way to filter information.
The creators of Unique are committed to the aesthetics of their product, yet they recognize that it would be impossible to manufacture enough different bands to successfully match every type of watch out there. That's why they have a sophisticated website and app that let you order a bespoke band, customizing everything from color and shape of the leather to the type of stitching to the buckles. They are collaborating with the factory MK Leathers to provide this wide range of options, as well as some sweet perks for supporters, like leather card cases and notebooks.
With their commitment to the aesthetics of the future wristwatch, Unique's Poland-based creator uBirds have truly hit upon something special.
Stone Slab Tables Provide Opposition to IKEA Philosophy
IKEA has taken the world of cheap furniture by storm, significantly improving the aesthetics of many a young graduate's first apartment. But there's also a disconcerting sameness to the spaces they've shaped. When Barcelona-based multidisciplinary studio AMOO was offered an opportunity to design the furniture for a local concept store, and their work was rejected in favor of using mass-produced IKEA tables, they decided to study the problem in greater detail.
The original design AMOO used was made from lacquered MDF, a wood veneer material that they customized to imitate stone. However, that failed to create a sufficient distinction from IKEA's similar materials, which are often designed to be lightweight so that they can be easily shipped and brought home unassembled by customers.
This advantage of using veneer was irrelevant to AMOO's one-off project. So instead, they decided to use repurposed marble and granite.
The tessellating deign of the final tables, which are called JUANOLA after the similarly diamond-shaped Spanish liquorice pastilles, also need the weight of real stone to work properly.
"Our design needs a heavy material, like marble or granite, to work right and support itself... It also allowed us to work with the marble plates and give it a monolithic look like if they were carved directly in the original block of stone," said AMOO studio's Omar Ornaque. "We think that these combinations are the clue for the visual trick."
They have a triangular base that makes them strong enough to stand alone, but their diamond-shape surfaces interlock with the table's "siblings," making them look even more like the candy.
The side tables are small, measuring 40cm or 16 inches. This increases the strength of the "triangular cantilever" formed by the solid base. When the tables are placed together, they play tricks on the eye, appearing to create three-dimensional forms. The interlocking surfaces and cantilever also create fascinating patterns of negative space underneath the tables.
There's no news yet on whether the JUANOLA tables will one day be mass-produced. AMOO certainly has set their sights on it, depicting the tables in a living room with none other than the 406 Alto Chair. But reclaimed stone is not an easy or cheap material to come by, and it will be interesting to see how far the designers will go to get their IKEA competitors out into the world.
Dark History on Roosevelt Island Inspires Technicolor Pool
Roosevelt Island, one of New York's most recently residential islands (until 1989, it was only possible to get there by tram), was once a place for quarantine and isolation. Its Smallpox Hospital is well known as New York City's "only landmarked ruin," but there are other parts of this past that are less visible. The Manhattan Park Pool on the island, in fact, is built on the site of the former New York City Lunatic Asylum.
HOTxTEA (given name Eric Rieger), a Minneapolis-based artist known for his colorful installations in yarn, was inspired by this history and, working with development firm K&Co, who owns the facility, covered both the deck and the bottom of the pool with a surreal sheen of rainbow ombre in an installation titled ASYLUM.
The insane asylum, also dubbed the "Octagon" for its distinctive shape, once held 800 cells for inmates that were filled to the brim. But now, with an expansion built out in 2006, houses an "upscale 500-unit residential community." According to Rieger, the name of the installation also reflects how the pool became the site for his toils.
K&Co (which was founded by Krista Ninivaggi, formerly of SHoP Architects), offered HOTxTEA the use of the site after deciding to close and renovate the entire Manhattan Park facility around it this fall. Though Rieger is fond of color, this was a "dream project" for him according to Gothamist, because clients usually don't let him use quite so much. The pool deck alone took 130 gallons of paint to cover.
Despite (or maybe because of) its ephemeral nature, ASYLUM became a visually striking destination this summer, starring in the Jamie xx video "Good Times" and spawning an Instagram hashtag. 12oz Prophet and Mosaic New York also collaborated on a drone-filmed video that showcases just how stunning the pool looks from the air.
But the pool remains somewhat exclusive, with weekdays costing $25 for a visit, and weekends running $35 per person. A season membership is $450 per person or $650 for a couple. It's a far cry from how things used to be.
Paint Tubes Stripped of Color Names Help Kids Learn the Rainbow
Color is often cited by philosophers and linguists as one of the aspects of our vision that is most imprecisely connected to language. It's impossible to describe the experience of seeing a color without relating it to some object that possesses that color. In some ways, that limits our ability to talk about color and create with it. But the Japanese design studio Kokuyo is enlisting kids to perhaps one day change this limitation.
Nameless Paints, instead of engaging in the endless (but very inventive) naming that companies like Crayola are infamous for, has decided to break down some of the fallacies that have for years led to uncreative misnamings of colors, like a 'blue ocean' or a "beige" flesh tone.
The paint tubes have no verbiage on them and display every color as a combination of the three primaries—red, blue and yellow—in various proportions, indicated by the size of each color dot.
Originally, the designer, Yusuke Imai, wanted to expand the palette by using the CMYK schematic, adding black and magenta to the color mix. But this would have resulted in 25 different colors per set, which would have been expensive to produce and somewhat complicated to use as well. Better to leave more of the color mixing to the user and leave the number of different paints in the box at 10.
Watercolor was also chosen as the type of paint so that white paint wouldn't have to be included in the set and complicate, or disturb, the schema. Users can instead use water to thin the paint.
The Nameless Paints design won a 2012 Kokuyo Design Award, which was a call for stationery designs that would be marketed under the brand name "Campus." The packaging is meant to convey the concept of clarity and simplicity
The set of watercolor paints retails for 1800 yen ($15) and comes in an oblong package with light-diffusing plastic that puts the spotlight on the bright dots of color.
Erase Tourists From Your Travel Photos
Today's tourism is often marketed as an experience of discovery, an opportunity to find locales previously unknown to yourself and your social group. And with image sharing now so easy online, anyone can claim themselves to be an expert on the places they've visited. But our photos would have much more authority if it weren't for those pesky, anonymous tourists in the background! Adobe recently revealed a feature called Monument Mode that will automatically do just that at its MAX Conference earlier this month.
A demonstration of the technology, one of the several Adobe is brewing up in their labs and decided to demonstrate, included Parks and Recreation's Nick Offerman and Adobe Communications Manager Kim Chambers.
As presenter Ashutosh Jagdish Sharma took multiple exposures, and Offerman enjoyed hamming it up and pretending to be an "annoying tourist," the algorithm, which appears to be able to distinguish between stationary and movable objects, worked its magic. By zeroing in on people (and perhaps, one day, other distracting background elements like cars) that flit across the frame, the feature, as shown in the demonstration, gradually diminishes them to small smudges and then to nothing.
Serious photographers have always, of course, had their way of doing this manually, usually with Adobe's main gift to the world, Photoshop. As PetaPixel pointed out, if you take enough exposures of a scene, it is possible to stack the shots and use Photoshop's median adjustment in conjunction with the clone and heal tools. This method has a flaw in common with Monument Mode: both require a tripod for consistent shot-to-shot quality. Perhaps this will be remedied as Adobe continues to work on the feature.
However, Monument Mode is more likely to be destined for a mobile app, considering its user-friendly nature and the fact that it can work in real time. And because Adobe is agnostic when it comes to its relationship with mobile devices, it could appear anywhere.
Along with features like Apple's Live Photos, this feature is just another example of how smartphone cameras, despite the consensus that they remain inferior hardware-wise to many standalone, continue to innovate with their software. This could possibly change the way many people take photos.
Making the Public Bench in Times Square Serve More Than Tourists
Public benches are usually the unsung heroes of public spaces. They are important for getting people to spend passive time in a park or public square, but dramatic designs for them are few and far in between, and mostly limited, sadly, to discouraging the homeless from getting too comfortable on them. But Norwegian design firm Snøhetta had a unique challenge when they were asked to design benches for New York City's Times Square, as several different purposes meet in that very spot.
This famous bowtie-shaped interaction has recently received attention for becoming, well, a little too vibrant. Amid costumed characters trying to accost children and get their parents to pay for photos, as well as the daring desnudas, Times Square is having difficulty serving that mundane purpose that thousands of New Yorkers who work in Midtown need it for: getting from point A to point B.
Snøhetta's design endeavors took this into account. The form of their benches is unusual: they are granite slabs that rise at various heights, sometimes at an angle, and their placement is unusual but strategic—with the goal of directing pedestrian traffic the way rocks direct fish in a stream. They also have a more covert feature that will help keep Times Square's entrepreneurial spirit alive: a discreet system of fiber-optic cables and conduits that will tap into the city's power grid, providing clean energy for food vendors, performers, and more.
The 400-amp, 200-amp, and 20-amp power sources aren't there for you to charge your iPhone, though, they will be protected by Department of Transit-issued locks and only accessible with a permit.
"The benches will service the over 350 events that take place in Times Square each year, ranging from rock concerts to Solstice in the Square, where hundreds of yogis gather in Times Square," said Snøhetta’s Anny Li.
"Twelve times as many events take place in Times Square as the next busiest square in the city." Perhaps, if you've grown tired of the place, it will be time to re-visit Times Square soon.
Deskwares Churned Out On Your Home 3D Printer for Cheap
Being a handy and creative person around your home used to mean lots of trips to the hardware store and figuring out the compatibility of various tools and hardware. 3D printing, in particular a line of consumer products called Parallel Goods, could change all that with a variety of functional 3D printable goods designed for less expensive personal 3D printers.
The distinction between Parallel Goods (which is named after a term for gray-market goods) and the massive cache of printable objects available on websites like Thingiverse is the professionalism and reliability of the designs. While professional printers often have features that can compensate for deficiencies in designs and just have more accurate printing, a home-printed design must be able to withstand any inaccuracies, such as warping, that may occur.
The 2015 Desk Collection includes well-designed, sleek accessories that would cost many times the price of their designs if they came fabricated and assembled. A self-watering planter for your desk (just $1.99) consists of a carefully shaped pot and reservoir that interlock and distribute water to plants over time. A small version is also available on Thingiverse for free.
A PLA push-pin organizer, meanwhile, resembles something that would cost $15 or more from a Scandinavian designer with its intricate engineering; it can attach to a variety of surfaces using just push pins and features a tray at the bottom for loose items like paper clips.
As a surface for all these lovely objects, you can also print four sawhorse brackets for $1.99 that only require screws, a screwdriver, and some lumber to create a DIY desk and work surface that can hold up to 150 lbs.
Parallel Goods was developed through a partnership between creative strategist Joe Carpita and industrial designer Craig Stover. “We both have backgrounds in industrial design, coupled with entrepreneurial spirits,” said Stover. “The limitations and affordances of 3D printing on low-cost printers was part of our design constraints, and a motivation to launch our company." It will be exciting to see what design themes they will tackle in the future.
Manipulate and Tug On a 3D Interactive Display With Your Hands
With so much of contemporary technology centering around touch screens, it's easy to lose sight of an important part of the world of three dimensions: touch and feel. Technologies like Ultrahaptics have used ultrasound to miraculously recreate the sensation of touching something. There's something even cooler afoot, though: Ultrahaptics is an outgrowth of a larger, EU-supported research project called GHOST (Generic, Highly-Organic Shape-Changing Interfaces) that intends to add a 3D interactive display aspect to these phantom experiences.
The project, spearheaded by English, Dutch and Danish researchers at various universities, aims to create deformable displays and build on the ultrasound technology to make those displays feel-able and even squishable.
You can already see the technology at work in GHOST's various prototypes. "Emerge," for example, allows data in bar charts to be pulled out of a screen by your fingertips. You can then use this method of interaction to rearrange data and break it down differently. The team is also studying the devices as a way of modulating and playing music, displaying information and allowing for interaction at the same time. Other applications envisioned by the team include neuroscience, where flat displays have begun to show their limitations in displaying the very complex, very three-dimensional organ known as the brain.
The GHOST team hopes to make this technology portable with devices called "morphees" that are made of lycra or alloys that bend and stretch according to use, expanding to make data bigger, for example, and shrinking down to fit inside your pocket. Another project called "LeviPath" uses the ultrasound technology to move and "levitate" objects across pre-determined 3D spaces.
"GHOST has made a lot of progress simply by bringing the partners together and allowing us to share our discoveries," Prof Hornbæk, of the University of Copenhagen, told Phys.org.
"Displays which change shape as you are using them are probably only five years off now. If you want your smartphone to project the landscape of a terrain 20 or 30 cm out of the display, that's a little further off—but we're working on it!" It's time to imagine even bigger ambitions for the iPhones and iPads of the future.
Colorful and Useful, Imagery and Animations Improve on QR Codes
QR codes have gained popularity on the packaging of products as well as in advertising, allowing users to access the URL of a brand without laboriously typing the address. But they were never very aesthetically pleasing—their big black-and-white blocks just made everything look all the more impersonal. But a new QR-type technology, developed by Israeli startup Visualead, with a $5-10 million investment from Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, could reinvent the technology and prepare it for a variety of future uses.
Dotless Visual Codes, which can easily be imprinted with imagery, branding or even animations, are designed to be particularly helpful in an era of global commerce brought on by companies like Alibaba—and the wave of knockoffs and frauds that can unfortunately come with it.
A somewhat goofy secret agent-themed promotional video for Visualead's Secure O2O Solutions, which include the Dotless Codes, enumerates some of the Dotless Code's eventual goals, including verifying products, linking devices and signing in, mobile ticketing, and social networking and identification.
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Just as they provide a "fingerprint" for products, they can do so for people as well, and O2O Solutions is marketing their product to companies, in part, based on the platform's security. The complexity of the labels allows Visualead to encode additional information in them that traditional QR codes cannot handle. This means that information is only available to those who have provided theirs in turn to a special app.
However, this security comes with a price. The new Visual Codes, unlike the standard ones that grace ads and packaging today, can't be scanned without downloading Alibaba Group’s Mobile Taobao application (or the Visualead app for Android or iOS in the US). This means that network effects will have a strong influence on the Dotless Codes' success—perhaps providing rewards for downloading the app and scanning could increase users' loyalty.
Then, and only then, would mobile OS developers consider including readers for the code as part of phones' basic functionality the way they have with conventional QR. However, the visual rewards alone seem good enough to intrigue and lure users. Only time will tell.
Newspaper Boxes Find New Work as Community Compost Bins
Composting can feel just as alien to a city-dweller as metro systems and concrete can feel to a country mouse. But Debbie Ullman, a graphic designer who until 2013 worked for the legendary (but embattled) newspaper The New York Daily News, has one interesting conceit for getting New Yorkers used to the idea of turning their organic trash into treasure: transforming street-corner newspaper boxes into attractive collection sites with the punny monkier "The New York Compost."
New York's Department of Sanitation reports that over a third of what New Yorkers throw away is food scraps. Recently, they have begun piloting a limited compost collection program in a few far-flung neighborhoods, and Ullman's "urban intervention" hopes to complement this movement and, with its wit, create something more than the sum of its parts.
Ullman's compost boxes have been placed at locations that can benefit from picking up the compost locally: Earth Matter on Governor’s Island, the Urban Garden Center on Park Avenue and 116th Street in East Harlem, and the East Side High School Community Garden (East 11th Street in the East Village). Ullman particularly wanted to support the urban gardening trend because she feels it has a variety of cumulative, positive effects.
"People tend to feel more connected with their food when they grow it themselves. I think people waste less food when they grow it themselves because they know how much time and effort and love went into growing it," she said.
"Using their own compost just completes the circle and keeps it going around. Composting on-site, even as opposed to trucking it to Brooklyn or Queens or another state, keeps it local, eliminating carbon emissions from transport. Win-win."
This project has a particular significance for a graphic designer whose background is in print.
"One of the first things I did when I was laid off from the News was apply for the NYC Compost Project's Master Composter certification classes. I had been composting for nine years but wanted to know more. I felt like I contributed so much waste in the form of paper that I wanted to offset that somehow."
The changes in her life brought on by the decline of physical newspapers have brought Ullman's inspiration into bloom.
Adjust Your Seat's Height With Hand Gestures
One of the most awkward aspects of learning how to drive, or using a rental car, is the fact that you're always using a vehicle that has been adjusted for someone else. Particularly if you're very short or very tall, there is no end of jerking, twisting and wiggling of the different mechanical levers and knobs around the vehicle to get you positioned at a comfortable height. Researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research and Isringhausen GmbH, however, have figured out the possible way of the future: gesture-based seat control.
This new interface allows drivers to adjust seat height and position as well as save settings if the car is used by multiple drivers. The entire interface lives in a single panel on the side of the seat. Since the system is very sensitive and it would be bad to mistake a driver's random hand movements for gestures, the system first must be switched on by pressing on a specific piezoelectrically charged point on the seat's synthetic covering.
Once the system is turned on, proximity sensors detect changes in the surrounding electrical field caused by the movements of the driver's hand. Users brushing the seat covering in different directions can adjust the seat's position as well as its inclination. An LED display on the dashboard has been designed to pair with the system and confirm with users that their commands have been received.
The system debuted at the Frankfurt Auto Show in September. Though it was developed for the high-end automotive market as well as professional truck and taxi drivers who have to sit for long hours, it's also interesting to think about what other applications this system could have. What if you could adjust your office chair without hopping up and down on the pneumatic adjustment, or even use this technology to accomplish usually difficult tasks, like unfolding a futon bed? Who knows what the future will hold.
A Social Network That Is Actually Just a Towel
With so many advertising campaigns urging people to break out from the crowd and discover their individuality, it seems somewhat rarer these days for brands to emphasize their association with connecting people (except maybe around the holidays). But Brazilian snack company Biscoitos Zezé has adopted an unusual strategy of social advertising that isn't digital—instead, it uses sharing physical objects as its medium.
Developed by Ramon Ballverdú of the advertising agency Markmais, the latest installation of the campaign, Toalha Social, involved offering up racks of special towels to picnickers on a sunny day. The towels used Biscoitos Zezé's distinctive red-and-gold color scheme and were printed with an invitation to sit, with the intention of getting people to sit together who normally would not.
"The reception of the public with the "Social Towel" was really cool. People thanked [us] because we were providing a place to sit, and commented that a long time [they] had no close contact with the grass and the environment," said Ballverdú. "There were also people who have used the towel to create new friendships, it was surprising for us because we thought that many would be embarrassed. It was really amazing to see people who did not know each sharing a towel on the grass."
One of the Social Towel's first locations was av. Dom Joaquim. in the city of Pelotas, and Markmais used social media to announce to the public where they were going to alight next. Fans have encouraged them to think bigger with the project and bring it to Brazil's largest cities. "After the first few weeks, many people asked through Facebook to bring the structures to other cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo," said Ballverdú.
He went on to say that the project is as much about city-dwellers rethinking the way they see themselves as it is about rethinking and sharing urban space. "We think that the Internet has stolen a lot of space in people's lives, so we always try to think of ways to make people see themselves through the city, in the bus, or sitting in a square, or crossing the traffic light," he said.
Apparently, self-consciousness and social awkwardness don't always have to go hand-in-hand.
What Does the Underlying Foundation of the Dinner Table Set Really Mean?
The traditional Western layout of the dinner table remains iconic and comforting, even as our taste in tableware has changed and designers of such objects have kept innovating. Though there have been many creative conceptual designs for dinner tables, few actually eschew functionality. Fasted, a piece created by the French designer team Studio Dessuant Bone, is of the bolder sort of design, reducing the table set to a bare wire schematic in response to a prompt from DWA Studio.
In Fasted, the table set is reduced to the barest iconography. Two spoons become circles on sticks and a knife becomes a triangle connected to a line. The pitcher and glass, depending on how you look at them, may only appear to be three-dimensional; though the top and bottom are round, they are only connected by single wires that don't exactly suggest roundness in the body of the bottle. A round gold 'frame' offsets this exercise in blue.
Fasted made its debut at DWA's exhibit 'A Stomaco Vuoto' ('On an Empty Stomach') in April in Milan. The theme of the exhibition, appropriately, was fasting, a stark contrast to the recent Milan EXPO 2015's theme of food.
"On an Empty Stomach does not only allude to a lack of food, it is actually a metaphor for emptiness. It refers to any kind of absence and fasting, to detraction, change and regeneration," reads the exhibit's manifesto by organizer Linda Ronzoni.
"It is a call for... freeing yourself from the superfluous, and for pursuing the essence... of all things. In the days of food, news and virtual connection bulimia, in the days of overfed and starving people, and of those who can choose to have an empty stomach."
Whatever your feelings about these issues, it is impressive that the exhibit encouraged viewers to seriously consider such a wide range of issues while viewing such striking work.
Could New York's Broadway Become a Linear Park?
he overwhelming success of the Highline has proved that in New York City, at least, old infrastructure can be made new, especially through the now-popular concept of the linear park. But what about letting foliage grow on the actual street grid? Perkins Eastman Architects decided to imagine a world where this was feasible. The 40-block park called the Green Line would run from Columbus Circle to Union Square — almost three miles. In the process, the ambitious renderings transform how we think about green transportation and infrastructure in a major thoroughfare.
With some New Yorkers already annoyed by the gradual loss of driving and parking room to pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, how might this proposal, in a very active space instead of a derelict one, be made feasible?
"There is not a lot of car traffic along this particular stretch of Broadway. It is not a bus route, but it is already an active pedestrian street and has subway lines running beneath it," said Jung Hyun Woo, a research fellow with the firm's Transportation and Public Infrastructure practice area.
"We see the Green Line as an obvious extension of a historic trajectory already underway. Most recently, the addition of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas seem to foreshadow a greater transformation, one in which space for human activities is prioritized as opposed to space for automobiles."
Emergency vehicles would also be able to use the Green Line as a shortcut, completing the team's vision of reclaiming space for pedestrians. The Green Line would also have some additional benefits outside this sphere, including enhancing Manhattan's drainage system by allowing water to be absorbed directly into the green surface instead of having to be channeled away from tarmac.
Principal Jonathan Cohn says the project emerged out of a "general focus on connecting public space in Manhattan." As such, the project is not meant to be immediately feasible; it is more of a challenge for future architects to respond to and improve upon.
"The project addresses the very real issue of the evolution of urban infrastructure, while addressing the city's public space challenges," he said. "It is informed by current requirements, but suggests how these may change in the future - if we can envision an ecological asset as a great public space."
Whether such spaces get perceived first as public spaces, or as necessary interventions for our future, remains up to urban planners — and a public that needs to both push more progressive ideas and adapt to future challenges.
Mood Lighting Takes a Step In the Right Direction
Do you have a room in your house, the uses of which are...in flux? Then a new lamp called FLUXO is for you. Using app-controlled LEDs, the Austrian-designed lamp improves upon recently popular smart lighting technologies like the Philips Hue, but adds a feature that's likely to win hearts for those seeking task lighting or displaying art: the dimension of direction.
The FLUXO lamp has a pendant design (measuring 11 inches in diameter), but instead of the usual single lightbulb in the center, it has over 300 white and colored LEDs spread over a flat surface and several sensors that interact with the environment, all without moving parts.
The large number of LEDs means that it is as bright as four smart bulbs.
FLUXO also arguably has better durability and 'contingency plans' than its rivals. It sports a carefully designed anodized aluminum heat sink to keep all these components cool, and internal components that allow the lamp to remain 'smart' even if your phone or internet connection become unavailable.
Another standout feature of FLUXO is the unique UX of its app. You can easily create a custom lighting scenario by swiping on the screen in the corner and direction you desire; the 'mark' left by your swipe forms the illumination source.
A 'stretch goal' that has been achieved thanks to the project's having reached $220,000 in donations is dynamic or 'animated' lighting scenes, which change over time in a pre-programmed manner. For example, the 'daylight' setting will follow the color of natural light over the course of the day (similar to the app f.lux, which is designed to adapt the color of a computer screen to the body's circadian rhythms). 'Party mode,' which sounds like a bit of a wildcard, will feature "changing colors of indirect light."
FLUXO has been wildly successful on Kickstarter, raising $273,391—more than five times its original $50,000 goal. It is expected to retail for over $600, but various early bird specials that are still available will allow you to nab one (or a pair) for much less.