As a creative response to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuous destruction of the planet’s natural resources, Nicolas Abdelkader presents a series of photo montages that question our relationship with mobility. By turning planes, ships and trucks into huge green planters, ‘the urgency to slow down’ imagines an alternative future after lockdown, one in which these symbols of excessive energy consumption have been left behind, only to become something beneficial for the environment.
“Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing an audio reading device to be worn on the index finger of people whose vision is impaired, giving them affordable and immediate access to printed words.
The so-called FingerReader, a prototype produced by a 3-D printer, fits like a ring on the user’s finger, equipped with a small camera that scans text. A synthesized voice reads words aloud, quickly translating books, restaurant menus and other needed materials for daily living, especially away from home or office.”
Our ancestors could spot natural predators from far by their silhouettes. Are we equally aware of the predators in the present-day? Drones are remote-controlled planes that can be used for anything from surveillance and deadly force, to rescue operations and scientific research. Most drones are used today by military powers for remote-controlled surveillance and attack, and their numbers are growing. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicted in 2012 that within 20 years there could be as many as 30.000 drones flying over U.S. Soil alone. As robotic birds will become commonplace in the near future, we should be prepared to identify them. This survival guide is an attempt to familiarize ourselves and future generations, with a changing technological environment.
This document contains the silhouettes of the most common drone species used today and in the near future. Each indicating nationality and whether they are used for surveillance only or for deadly force. All drones are drawn in scale for size indication. From the smallest consumer drones measuring less than 1 meter, up to the Global Hawk measuring 39,9 meter in length.
Humans have spent the last 10,000 years mastering agriculture. But a freak summer storm or bad drought can still mar many a well-planted harvest. Not anymore, says Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura, who has moved industrial-scale farming under the roof.
Working in Miyagi Prefecture in eastern Japan, which was badly hit by powerful earthquake and tsunamis in 2011, Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.
The farm is nearly half the size of a football field (25,000 square feet). It opened on July and it is already producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day. “I knew how to grow good vegetables biologically and I wanted to integrate that knowledge with hardware to make things happen,” Shimamura says.
Could you send olfactory messages in the future? Could you capture the scent of a delicious meal or something unpleasant and share it? Probably soon but for now, we are beginning to hear (or smell) about devices able to diffuse over 300,000 unique aromas. Among some of these devices entering the market and our consciousness, there are the apparently real, like the oPhone; and the hoaxy, like the Google Nose. Designer Lloyd Alberts has created an speculative product based on the Google Nose. It is called the Sniffer and it is featured in Next Nature.
“There is a landfill somewhere filled with all the products that have miserably failed in their quest to deliver a high quality aromatic communication experience (Smell-O-Vision, Odorama, iSmell, etc).” Lets take a smell at the Ophone. Developed by the inventor and Harvard professor David Edwards and his ex-student developer Rachel Field. According to their Indiegogo writeup:
What is the oPhone?
The oPhone is a revolutionary device that, in combination with our free iPhone app “oSnap”, allows you to send and receive electronic aroma messages. Think of it as a kind of telephone for aromas. With the oPhone, you can now bring complex scent texting into your mobile messaging life, and share sensory experience with anyone, anywhere.
How it Works
The oPhone DUO is able to diffuse over 300,000 unique aromas thanks to the small, inexpensive circular cartridges we call oChips, that fit inside the device. The oPhone DUO works with 8 oChips and each oChip contains 4 aromas – so the oPhone DUO works with 32 primitive aromas. They last for hundreds of uses, sort of like link cartridges, but for aroma. You can swap them in and out and capture any scent for which we have designed an oChip. And while we are starting with oChip families (what we call “aromatic vocabularies”) around specific foodie and coffee experiences, we will soon be diversifying these in exciting ways.
Using oSnap with oPhone is like using an aroma palette with a paintbrush and canvas. You will want to try your hand at it, or as we say, “aroma doodle”. And with the oPhone, you’ll quickly get the hang of how it all works.
The TellSpec laser scanner appears, at least in its demo form, to have potential. The device is a raman spectrometer that uses an algorithm to calculate what’s in your food. You point the laser at a potato chip for instance, and the accompanying app on your smartphone gives you a read-out of the ingredients.
The creators raised more than $380,000 on Indiegogo at the end of last year. Now the company has to take some big steps towards getting the device on store shelves.
According to TellSpec: TellSpec is a three-part system which includes: a spectrometer scanner, an algorithm that exists in the cloud; and an easy-to-understand interface on your smart phone. Just aim the scanner at the food and press the button until it beeps. You can scan directly or through plastic or glass. TellSpec analyzes the findings using the algorithm and sends a report to your phone telling you the allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients in the food. TellSpec is a fast, simple, and easy-to-use way to learn what’s in your food. We need your help to make it smaller and manufacture it as a handheld device.
A 12-year-old student from California has created a Braille printer by repurposing parts from a Lego set. Shubham Banerjee, a seventh-grade student from Santa Clara, Calif., developed the Braille printer using toy construction Lego pieces. The low-cost invention could be an accessible solution for blind and disadvantaged people across the globe, Banerjee said.
The printer, dubbed Braigo (short for Braille with Lego), was created from the Lego Mindstorms EV3 set, which retails for $349. Banerjee also added $5-worth of additional materials, which means the finished product costs about $350. This makes Braigo much more affordable than other Braille printers, which can retail for more than $2,000, according to Banerjee. [10 Inventions That Changed the World]
The innovative youngster developed Braigo to prove it is feasible to make an inexpensive Braille printer, he said. Banerjee now plans to make the project open-source, by releasing the design free-of-charge to the online community.
“I’ll make this Braille printer and make the steps and the program software open to the Internet, so anyone who has a set can make it,” Banerjee said in a YouTube video about the Braigo project.
The printer is programmed to produce the letters “A” through “Z” in Braille. It takes roughly seven seconds to print each letter, according to Banerjee. In a video uploaded to YouTube, Banerjee demonstrates how to print the letter “Y,” and then shows how simple it is to combine letters to form words, like “cat.”
“This is so easy even my little sister can do it,” he said. Enhancements can be made to the printer’s software, and Banerjee said he now plans to program Braigo to print the numbers one to 10.
The Lego Group has already voiced their praise for the project, tweeting: “We’re very proud. Impressive work for a great cause!” An estimated 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide, and 90 percent of these individuals live in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization. An inexpensive Braille printer could bring affordable, 21st-century computing to millions of people facing visual impairment, Banerjee said.
The relationship between bodily pleasure, space, and architecture—from one of the twentieth century’s most important urban theorists
Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, the first publication of Henri Lefebvre’s only book devoted to architecture, redefines architecture as a mode of imagination rather than a specialized process or a collection of monuments. Lefebvre calls for an architecture of jouissance—of pleasure or enjoyment—centered on the body and its rhythms and based on the possibilities of the senses.
Lukasz Stanek’s work has already taken scholarship on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space to an unprecedented level of philosophical sophistication. With the discovery of the new text, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, Stanek escorts Lefebvre to the center of architecture theory since 1968. Lefebvre’s conceptual text and Stanek’s exquisite introduction together enable the possibility of thinking not about architecture, but thinking architecturally about how we inhabit our world. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment takes us toward a concept of the architectural imagination that is a powerful mediator between thought and action.
—K. Michael Hays, Harvard Graduate School of Design
“I Tradizionali” are illustrated tattoo-recipes which can be applied on one’s forearm. Not only does the tattoo emphasize the common gesture of “rolling-up one’s sleeves” before cooking, but it also helps the cook to remember the order in which the recipe is to be prepared.
Passing down recipes is part of every country’s traditional culture. With “I Tradizionali”, however, exchanging recipes becomes an even more enjoyable experience.
Not only do they assist older generations in passing down family recipes to their children, but they also introduce a new way of spreading traditional, good and healthy recipes to literally anybody.
The idea of combining recipes with the traditional tattoo-culture is what inspired the project’s name and the tattoos’ illustrations. For this first time in history, this project has added tattoos to culinary culture. To create a new jargon to combine these two cultures, the project has creatively mended the tattoo-tradition with traditional recipes.
Sometimes an office is just an office. But if you’re a psychoanalyst, the presentation of your work space has to be impeccably thought out, designed to foster a sense of sanctuary and privacy. Since Sigmund Freud’s Victorian consulting room, with its oriental rug-draped couch, analysts have learned to use interior design as a therapeutic tool. In his ongoing series “In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch,” Mark Gerald, who’s both a photographer and a psychoanalyst, offers a look inside the offices of analysts all over the world.
“One of the things I’m interested in with this project is showing the diversity within the field of psychoanalysis,” Gerald tells Co.Design. “Not every analyst is a bearded white man with a European accent in a Park Avenue office. Though there are certainly some that are like that.”
A small consumer-level molecular scanner lets you analyze the objects around you for relevant information, from food calories or quality, medicine, nature, etc.
When you get your SCiO, you’ll be able to:
Get nutritional facts about different kinds of food: salad dressings, sauces, fruits, cheeses, and much more.
See how ripe an Avocado is, through the peel!
Find out the quality of your cooking oil.
Know the well being of your plants.
Analyze soil or hydroponic solutions.
Authenticate medications or supplements.
Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself.
The Kickstarter was launched a few day ago and made it’s $200,000 goal within 24 hours – the potential for this tech is huge. Watch the video embedded below to see the potential:
Desktop interface plugin developed from 2011 by Oliver Hamann has a file management system which requires zooming in and out the folders you wish to access.
Eagle Mode is an advanced solution for a futuristic style of man-machine communication in which the user can visit almost everything simply by zooming in. It has a professional file manager, file viewers and players for most of the common file types, a chess game, a 3D mines game, a netwalk game, a multi-function clock and some fractal fun, all integrated in a virtual cosmos. Besides, that cosmos also provides a Linux kernel configurator in form of a kernel patch.
By featuring a separate popup-zoomed control view, help texts in the things they are describing, editable bookmarks, multiple input methods, fast anti-aliased graphics, a virtually unlimited depth of panel tree, and by its portable C++ API, Eagle Mode aims to be a cutting edge of zoomable user interfaces.
Eagle Mode is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux (and possibly one for Android too).
You can find out more at the project’s website HERE
German based watchmakers NOMOS Glashütte are known for their high caliber of watchmaking and this video proves it. Aptly titled Look over the watchmakers’ shoulder we get an intimate look at the intricate process that goes into the making of a watch.
They say: “Plenty of tradition and handcraft—combined with high-tech, where it outperforms handcraft: That is NOMOS Glashütte. All our movements are built in-house and by ourselves in Glashütte. This also applies to our watches—Tangente, Orion, Zürich and all the other models—many of which are already considered classics. You can find out how we do this by visiting us in Glashütte and taking a tour. In the meantime, this short film can give you a first impression of what we do.”
Proximity Designs is a Myanmar-based social enterprise that designs products to improve poor people’s lives. Some of the affordable creations they’ve made include foot-powered water pumps, drip irrigation systems, solar lanterns and even infrastructure projects like bridges.
An integral part of their design and manufacturing process involves putting prototypes through trials with robots that use them until they break. The group says their line of farming aids all get pushed to failure by their lab’s robot farmers, which helps improve how they’re made.
Building a reliable product is important if it is to be used under the strain of daily life in rural Myanmar. A product like a manual water pump relieves farmers of the backbreaking work of carrying up to 10 tons of water a day on their backs from distant wells.
The country’s farmers are showing their approval by opening up their wallets—Proximity Designs reports that they will sell 31,000 irrigation products in fiscal year 2013. They say their work has also resulted in a 10 to 15 percent increase in rice yield.
“Including the newest one I bought, I have three treadle pumps,” said farmer Aung San. “I made about $1,200 last year, so I bought more land to expand my plot. That’s why I bought another pump.”
Echo Yang explores the current popularity of generative design processes, where computer software iterates endless variations, by turning old school analog devices like tin windup toys, a Walkman, an alarm clock and other machines into instruments of self-generated output.
Portuguese designer Susana Soares has developed a device for detecting cancer and other serious diseases using trained bees. The bees are placed in a glass chamber into which the patient exhales; the bees fly into a smaller secondary chamber if they detect cancer.
Scientists have found that honey bees – Apis mellifera – have an extraordinary sense of smell that is more acute than that of a sniffer dog and can detect airborne molecules in the parts-per-trillion range.
Bees can be trained to detect specific chemical odors, including the biomarkers associated with diseases such as tuberculosis, lung, skin and pancreatic cancer.
20 of the world’s best architects and designers build a dolls’ house for KIDS, an organization working with disabled children, young people and their families. HERE is where you can find details on all of the dolls’ houses, the architects behind these unique creations and place your bid.
The online site will be frozen at 12pm on Monday 11th November and further bids taken only at the auction event that evening. Highest bidders will be invited to attend the event or offered the opportunity to make a proxy bid. For further clarification on the bidding process, please contact info@adollshouse.co.uk
AMODELS. Creative architectural model makers
ADJAYE ASSOCIATES. In collaboration with Base Models and artist Chris Ofili
DRMM. In collaboration with Richard Woods Studio and Grymsdyke Farm
This house is located in the mountains of Almaty, among the forest of fir trees. He created for that would feel more fusion with nature and give up some unnecessary conditions and things. The house has to be something that can only develop your spiritual and creative development.
Text and Images via A. Masow. A project by A. Masow.
A number of recent map publications have incorporated terms like Radical, Counter, and Alternative in their titles, but it is unclear exactly what a radical (or counter, or alternative) cartography would be. This paper postulates some characteristics such a cartography (termed radical for convenience) might possess, and explores analogous phenomena in other fields, in search of a paradigm or model for recognizing cartographic radicality.
The term mapicity is proposed to instantiate that quality which all maps must possess in order to be recognized and employed as maps, and the term radicality is introduced to identify a quality that would set a radical cartography apart from one that was not radical.
Three collections of maps that are identified by their authors or publishers as radical are examined for traces of radicality as defined in this paper. In addition, the early Twentieth Century painting movement Analytic Cubism (approximately 1907–1914) is forwarded as a model or paradigm for radicality.
Franz Reichelt wearing the parachute that he designed and invented before ascending the Eiffel Tower.
Reichelt standing on platform high up on the tower preparing to jump he hovers on the brink for some time and then eventually jumps falling straight down to his death.
Police and small crowd around the body of Reichelt as it is carried away, they then measure the depth of the hole made by his fall.
The film has French intertitles.
Cataloguer’s Note: Old record suggests this event happened 4th February 1912.
With millions of tons of garbage dumped into the oceans annually and repeat incidence of oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, it’s the Ocean which has taken the brunt of unsustainable methods from man. In effect, it’s estimated almost 100,000 marine animals are killed due to debris entanglement and continually rising pollution.
To a degree, individual lessening of consumerism and utilizing sustainable methods to re-use and eliminate waste is very beneficial. However, reducing the already-toxic state of the Earth is the biggest concern of environmentalists and engineers, seeking to utilize the technological advances already available. To this avail, it was 19-year-young Boyan Slat that ingeniously created the Ocean Array Plan, a project that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic from the world’s oceans in just five years.
Slat’s idea consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Working with the flow of nature, his solution to the problematic shifting of trash is to have the array span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel as the ocean moves through it. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from smaller forms, such as plankton, and be filtered and stored for recycling. The issue of by-catches, killing life forms in the procedure of cleaning trash, can be virtually eliminated by using booms instead of nets and it will result in a larger areas covered. Because of trash’s density compared to larger sea animals, the use of booms will allow creatures to swim under the booms unaffected, reducing wildlife death substantially.
Excerpt from an article written by Amanda Froelich at True Activist. Continue THERE
To the best of our knowledge, the mechanical gear—evenly-sized teeth cut into two different rotating surfaces to lock them together as they turn—was invented sometime around 300 B.C.E. by Greek mechanics who lived in Alexandria. In the centuries since, the simple concept has become a keystone of modern technology, enabling all sorts of machinery and vehicles, including cars and bicycles.
As it turns out, though, a three-millimeter long hopping insect known as Issus coleoptratus beat us to this invention. Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, a pair of biologists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., discovered that juveniles of the species have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant, causing the tiny creatures jump forward.
Excerpt from an article written at The Smithsonian. Continue THERE
Copenhagen Suborbitals is a suborbital space endeavor, based entirely on private donators, sponsors and part time specialists
According to them: “Our mission is to launch human beings into space on privately build rockets and spacecrafts. The project is both open source and non-profit in order to inspire as many people as possible, and to involve relevant partners and their expertise. We aim to show the world that human space flight can be different from the usual expensive and government controlled project. We are working full time to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles – designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft. The mission has a 100% peaceful purpose and is not in any way involved in carrying explosive, nuclear, biological and chemical payloads. We intend to share all our technical information as much as possible, within the laws of EU-export control.
They work in a 300 sqm storage building, called Horizontal Assembly Building (HAB), placed on an abandoned but yet historic shipyard in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The areas around HAB provides them with enough space to test their own rocket engines, and being situated close to the harbour of Copenhagen makes it easy for them to go into sea for our sea launch operation.
They have no administration or technical boards to approve our work, so they move very fast from idea to construction. Everything they build is tested until they believe it will do. Then they (attempt to) fly it!
Some of their main design drivers are:
– Keep as much work in-house as possible
– Choose mechanical solutions over electrical
– Use “ordinary” materials for cheaper and faster production
– Cut away (anything), instead of adding
How does a machine verify the identity of a human being? Irises, heartbeats, fingertips and voices, for starters.
Authentication has been a tough nut to crack since the early days of the Web. Now comes a batch of high-tech alternatives, some straight from science fiction, as worries grow about the security risks associated with traditional user name and password systems.
Apple on Tuesday introduced two new iPhones, including for the first time a model with a fingerprint sensor that can be used instead of a passcode to open the phone and buy products. The new feature is part of a trove of authentication tools being developed for consumers, and not just for phones.
Some of these, like the fingerprint sensor, involve the immutable properties humans are encoded with, while others turn our phones into verification devices.
Excerpt from an article written by SOMINI SENGUPTA at NYT. Continue THERE
Since 3-D printing technology has become more accessible, the magic of manifesting an object before your eyes has yet to lose its luster. When Dewar’s decided to create a sculpture to mark the launch of its Highlander Honey whiskey, however, it took the concept of 3-D printing to a whole new level, employing the services of nature’s original three- dimensional crafters: bees.
A chart of 870,000 scientific studies so far. Paperscape shows each scientific paper as a circle, with the size of each determined by how many others cite it. Users can toggle the heat map, which colors each study according to its age. ArXiv began in 1991. A cluster around the topic dark energy shows that it spans multiple fields, including quantum cosmology, quantum physics, and condensed matter.
The study of the universe is a universe itself. An infographic designed by two physicists maps the hundreds of thousands of studies in arXiv, an open repository for physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, finance, and statistics papers that is maintained by Cornell University. The category of a paper’s research determines the color of its circle, and the more cited the paper is, the bigger its circle. Each marker is placed according to the number of references it takes to get from it to each other paper. Accordingly, papers are clustered around topics, such as extrasolar planets, dwarf stars, and superconductivity. Some multicolored clusters show where disciplines intersect around topics like neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy, and networks. Toggle the heat map to color each study according to its age to see which topics are getting the most attention. To learn more about how the infographic works, see its blog.
Previous centuries have been defined by novels and cinema. In a bold manifesto we’re proud to debut here on Kotaku, game designer Eric Zimmerman states that this century will be defined by games.ore
Below is Zimmerman’s manifesto, which will also appear in the upcoming book The Gameful World from MIT press. We invite you to read it, to think about it and even to annotate it. Zimmerman’s manifesto is followed by an exploration of the ideas behind it, in an essay by author and professor Heather Chaplin. In the days to come, we’ll be expanding the discussion even further with perspectives from other gamers and game-thinkers. But let’s start with the big ideas. Let’s start with a manifesto by gamers, about games, for the world we live in…
Games are ancient.
Digital technology has given games a new relevance.
The 20th Century was the century of information.
In our Ludic Century, information has been put at play.
In the 20th Century, the moving image was the dominant cultural form.
The Ludic Century is an era of games.
We live in a world of systems.
There is a need to be playful.
We should think like designers.
Games are a literacy.
Gaming literacy can address our problems.
In the Ludic Century, everyone will be a game designer.
Games are beautiful. They do not need to be justified.
Scientists have grown miniature human brains in test tubes, creating a “tool” that will allow them to watch how the organs develop in the womb and, they hope, increase their understanding of neurological and mental problems.
Just a few millimetres across, the “cerebral organoids” are built up of layers of brain cells with defined regions that resemble those seen in immature, embryonic brains.
The scientists say the organoids will be useful for biologists who want to analyse how conditions such as schizophrenia or autism occur in the brain. Though these are usually diagnosed in older people some of the underlying defects occur during the brain’s early development.
Human brain ‘organoid’ grown from human pluripotent stem cells. This is a cross-section of the entire organoid showing development of different brain regions. All cells are in blue, neural stem cells in red, and neurons in green. Photograph: Madeline A Lancaster.
The organoids are also expected to be useful in the development and testing of drugs. At present this is done using laboratory animals or isolated human cells; the new organoids could allow pharmacologists to test drugs in more human-like settings.
Scientists have previously made models of other human organs in the lab, including eyes, pituitary glands and livers.
In the latest work researchers at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna started with stem cells and grew them into brain cells in a nourishing gel-like matrix that recreated conditions similar to those inside the human womb. After several months the cells had formed spheres measuring about 3-4mm in diameter.
Text by Alok Jha, science correspondent at The Guardian. Continue article THERE
In the city of Tokyo, a building stands as an anachronism in relation to the surrounding urban landscape. The building in question is the Nakagin Capsule Tower designed by Kisho Kurokawa (1934 – 2007), who was one of the leading members of an influential architectural movement in the 1960s called Metabolism. The group’s aim was to formulate flexible designs that facilitate continual growth and renewal of architecture. As the first capsule apartment in history constructed for everyday use, the Nakagin Capsule Tower is considered an example that came closest to embodying the principles of Metabolism. Kurokawa designed the building with plug-in capsules to promote exchangeability and modifications to the structure over time, theoretically improving its capacity to adjust to the rapidly changing conditions of the post-industrial society. When the building first opened in March of 1972, it was advertised in the media to signal “the dawn of the capsule age.”
The irony presented by the story of the Nakagin Capsule Tower is the fact that it became the last architecture of its kind to be completed in the world. Furthermore, the building has never undergone the process of regeneration during the forty years of existence. Not a single capsule has been replaced since 1972, even though Kurokawa intended them to sustain a lifespan of only twenty-five years. The design in reality proved to be too rigid in adapting to the unforeseen political and economic developments in the years that followed its construction. With the building’s system in stasis without fulfilling its original mission of continual growth and renewal, it stands like a monument to a future that never arrived in the 21st Century.
Due to the pressures of the city’s real estate market, plans have been discussed for the Nakagin Capsule Tower to be demolished to make way for a conventional apartment complex. Yet, the building today has coincidentally assumed a new role in the city, becoming a poignant reminder of a path ultimately not taken. This project examines “the future” as imagined by Kurokawa in 1972 and its current condition through the medium of photography. Moreover, the photographs capture scenes within the Nakagin Capsule Tower at a time when its very future is in question. With the building as an embodiment of an architectural vision that was thought possible at that moment in history, the photographs reflect on the significance of that vision potentially disappearing today from the landscape of Tokyo as a crucial form of cultural memory.
WANDERLUST 