Socially Assistive Robots Take Over Los Angeles

September 28, 2010, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Well, Whose Shoulders Should We Stand Upon?

≪ Previous: An escalator that gets its swerve on

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"I am having too much fun!"

This October, the Los Angeles Convention Center will be host to the first public demonstration of the Socially Assistive Robot developed by the USC-Vertebri School of Engineering as part of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging's Idea House.

Developed by Dr. Maja J. Mataric, professor and senior associate dean at the University of Southern California, the robot is designed to assist older people in exercises, either as part of a daily routine or rehabilitation. Unlike previous robotic technologies, the robot is socially interactive, and is able to detect and respond to a person's emotion or physical movements.

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Well, Whose Shoulders Should We Stand Upon?

September 28, 2010, 1:30 pm

≫ Next: Decide on Good Design for the 2010 People's Design Award

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

In our first post in the Veer series, we observed that inventions flow as iterative progressions built upon previous work more often than they appear as sudden bolts of insight. Even for those fortunate enough to be roused from a pleasant nap or a frolic through wildflowers with a sudden revelation, that singular moment is built upon days or weeks of tedious research. We spoke a bit about Newton in the context of calculus but didn't leave readers with much insight into what to do when they seek inspiration. Fortunately, Newton knew something about this, observing that if he had "seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." A major backdrop of our articles in the Veer series has been the availability of information in the digital age. When we have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips and monitors, it seems appropriate for thinkers seeking inspiration to ask, "Well, whose shoulders should we stand upon?"

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Decide on Good Design for the 2010 People's Design Award

September 28, 2010, 1:45 pm

≫ Next: Amazing Life arrives at Lodz Design Festival in Poland

≪ Previous: Well, Whose Shoulders Should We Stand Upon?

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Don't forget to make your vote and submit nominations for this year's People's Design Award hosted by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. There are already plenty of ideas to vote on and check out the dedicated People's Design Award Facebook page to share and discuss your thoughts on what constitutes good design.

The winning design will be announced Oct. 14 at the National Design Awards Gala in New York City, which will be streamed live on Cooper-Hewitt's website at 9:00 p.m. EST.

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Amazing Life arrives at Lodz Design Festival in Poland

September 28, 2010, 2:52 pm

≫ Next: London Design Festival 2010: Yuri Suzuki and His Musical Fish

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Lodz will host its fourth International Design Festival from 14th to 30th October 2010 based on the theme AMAZING LIFE.

The organisers invited Agnieszka Jacobson-Cielecka, design curator, and Oskar Zieta, innovative formmaker, to curate works for two exhibitions as part of the main festival programme. Crumple Zone and Underpressure will present different stages of the design process, the uses of untypical materials and ways in which artists search for and gather ideas.

As explained by Agnieszka Jacobson-Cielecka:

Every year the Lodz Design festival touches upon the relation between a human being and an object. The theme of this year's edition of the Festival is AMAZING LIFE. Immersed in the everyday humdrum, we fail to register the obvious phenomena: the sun, rain, clouds and wind, warmth, cold, melting and stretching - aren't those extraordinary? Most of us can only admire them but some are able to make use of them and benefit the society.

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London Design Festival 2010: Yuri Suzuki and His Musical Fish

September 28, 2010, 4:03 pm

≫ Next: Mayo Clinic is seeking a Service Designer in Rochester, Minnesota

≪ Previous: Amazing Life arrives at Lodz Design Festival in Poland

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Jellyfish Theremin at Sound Interjections!, Yuri Suzuki's solo show at the KK space.

Yuri Suzuki's multitude of experiments with sound fill the KK Outlet on Hoxton Square. 'Sound Chaser' deconstructs vinyl records to form 'tracks' for stylus trains to run along, tiny fish swim across sensors to trigger sounds that get more complex as they dart across each other (Jellyfish Theremin), and a five-stylus record player brings a new dimension to mixing music .

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Mayo Clinic is seeking a Service Designer in Rochester, Minnesota

September 29, 2010, 6:40 am

≫ Next: London Design Festival 2010: Table for two? Hel yes!

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Service Designer
Mayo Clinic
Rochester, MN

The selected individuals will use human-centered and participatory methods of Design Thinking to identify unmet patient, provider and institutional needs to create new service concepts and/or business strategies. To complete projects, most of which are cross-functional in nature, the incumbents will conduct observational research, interviews and workshops; generate conceptual frameworks; formulate insights related to research data synthesis; and communicate findings/concepts to project sponsors.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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London Design Festival 2010: Table for two? Hel yes!

September 29, 2010, 6:54 am

≫ Next: Room Within a Room: An Enviable Home Office

≪ Previous: Mayo Clinic is seeking a Service Designer in Rochester, Minnesota

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During the London Design Festival, a magical temporary restaurant sprung up in East London. There are tables with canopies of branches and food foraged from imaginary urban forest served on a very special collection of plates gathered from the people of Helsinki. A few weeks ago, far away in Finland, the people of Helsinki were invited to bring a plate (and its story) in exchange for a lovely meal. The plates collected throughout the event form the crockery collection of the restaurant at Hel Yes, and their original owners' stories are available to all.

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Room Within a Room: An Enviable Home Office

September 29, 2010, 7:30 am

≫ Next: Adobe's impressive and relentless drive to go green

≪ Previous: London Design Festival 2010: Table for two? Hel yes!

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If you work from home and live somewhere that's blessed by cold, long winters, you'd probably agree that keeping the home office warm during the day, when no one else is home, is both a challenge and a waste of energy, often requiring heating the entire house. Fed up, Berlin-based Davidson Rafailidis decided to amend the situation and built a smaller, insulated room inside a larger one, framed out with lumber, lined with plastic, and connected to a window, with a regular, hollow-core door for entry.

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Adobe's impressive and relentless drive to go green

September 29, 2010, 9:21 am

≫ Next: Alternative sleeping surfaces, part 1: Sleeping on steel

≪ Previous: Room Within a Room: An Enviable Home Office

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Because of their ubiquity I'd use Adobe products whether I like the company or not, but luckily there's plenty of reason to like them. Adobe's efforts to be a green company are persistent and multifaceted; they recycle, they compost, they even pee in waterless urinals. And they actively pursue alternate energy sources.

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Alternative sleeping surfaces, part 1: Sleeping on steel

September 29, 2010, 9:50 am

≫ Next: Valencia Design Week 2010: NUDE Young Designers Fair

≪ Previous: Adobe's impressive and relentless drive to go green

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One of the most surprisingly comfortable surfaces I've ever reclined on was in a teepee-like Sami structure in Sweden's Arctic Circle. The "floor" was thickly layered with birch branches covered in reindeer hides. The dense collection of branches provided a surprising amount of spring and bounce; it was like lounging on an enormous circular bed, and opened my eyes to the fact that you needn't sleep on a mattress to be comfortable.

Speaking of which, Gothenburg-based Wranne Fahraeus Design (working in conjunction with Chalmers University) has designed a mattress-free bed made of upholstered sprung steel, shown above.

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Valencia Design Week 2010: NUDE Young Designers Fair

September 29, 2010, 9:55 am

≫ Next: Core77's Live 1 Hour Design Challenge this Friday at A Better World by Design

≪ Previous: Alternative sleeping surfaces, part 1: Sleeping on steel

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Skip past the rows upon rows of office and hotel furniture at the Feria Habitat Valencia this week, and head for the NUDE Young Designers Fair to catch a glimpse of what the Valencian design scene might look like over the next few years. Hardly a milanese Satellite or a swedish Greenhouse, but there were definetly a few signs of promise.

Of course, the fair was keen to express it's "international" credentials. Fortunetely, this gave recent graduates from Goldsmith's College in London a chance to exhibit a few quirky pieces—a collaborative, threesome balloon and a double handed table tennis paddle being, perhaps, the most curious.

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Core77's Live 1 Hour Design Challenge this Friday at A Better World by Design

September 29, 2010, 11:00 am

≫ Next: Maker Faire NY: Celebrating Process

≪ Previous: Valencia Design Week 2010: NUDE Young Designers Fair

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We're delighted to be returning this Friday to host our second Live 1 Hour Design Challenge at A Better World by Design. Organized entirely by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, the conference takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, October 1-3. An impressive line-up of speakers, panels, and workshops will explore the role design and the design process can play to impact social change — and quite simply — just make the planet a better place for everyone.

This year's 1HDC is tough one but really exciting, we'll be putting conference attendees into teams of 4-6 people, announcing the theme exam style, and starting the clock. Our only tip: find yourself a really smart partner, and another one who can draw if you can't.

See you there!

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Maker Faire NY: Celebrating Process

September 29, 2010, 12:00 pm

≫ Next: Alternative sleeping surfaces, part 2: If you want a real Japanese futon, you'll need this tool, too

≪ Previous: Core77's Live 1 Hour Design Challenge this Friday at A Better World by Design

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Top: Cokementos demo by Eepybird.

The first Maker Faire NY wrapped up on Sunday, leaving many happy home-tinkering New Yorkers in its wake. The exhibitors and attendees come from a mix of niche groups, but Make Magazine's string of Faires provide the connection for all of these wonderful and nerdy interests. Coexisting in this realm are: technology, crafting, electronics, science experiments, and carnival stunts, all living and somehow making sense together. The connection is DIY culture, but deeper and more simply, the whole ethos that leads to DIY: questioning a given, and messing with it.

Even the showiest events at Maker Faire have this as their core. A performance by ArcAttack and their Tesla coils that shoot lighting was impressive, and they were great performers. But all of their equipment, from the electronics they use and the chain maille suits they wear to conduct lighting were cobbled together, which is all part of the charm. (In this video of ArcAttack, check out the foil around the goggles, and you might spot a paperclip holding together part of the guy's headgear.)

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Alternative sleeping surfaces, part 2: If you want a real Japanese futon, you'll need this tool, too

September 29, 2010, 1:17 pm

≫ Next: Soapy Pigeon Poo and Nano-Gold Particles at the London Design Festival

≪ Previous: Maker Faire NY: Celebrating Process

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In the quest for good sleep, last year I saved up for a real Japanese futon. The real deal is thinner and fluffier than the ridiculously dense slabs that most Americans think of as futons, and I could only find one workshop in all of New York City that makes them the traditional way. In Japan futons are traditionally meant to be folded up each morning and placed in a closet, freeing up useable square footage in a space-tight country; thick American futons are impossible to fold at all.

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Soapy Pigeon Poo and Nano-Gold Particles at the London Design Festival

September 29, 2010, 1:26 pm

≫ Next: Concrete Cloth material: "A building in a bag"

≪ Previous: Alternative sleeping surfaces, part 2: If you want a real Japanese futon, you'll need this tool, too

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During the London Design Festival an exhibition entitled Further Instructions showcased new work by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen; two designers with an interest in where synthetic biology and nano technology meets design and speculation.

The show featured two new projects, Genetic Heirloom and Pigeon D'Or and were funded with the help of the Wellcome Trust Arts Fund and the Flemish authorities. Both exhibitions reflect an approach to design that goes further than the artefacts on display and propose fragments of a future, which, although fictional, are not far-fetched. Genetic Heirloom explores the use of tumour targeting nano-gold particles as hypothetical family heirlooms and Pigeon D'Or proposes the use of feral pigeons and synthetic biology for aesthetic interventions in urban metabolisms.

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Concrete Cloth material: "A building in a bag"

September 29, 2010, 1:32 pm

≫ Next: Drzach & Suchy's Shadow Clouds (or, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Rapid Prototyping)

≪ Previous: Soapy Pigeon Poo and Nano-Gold Particles at the London Design Festival

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The Hesco Bastion we showed you yesterday was a sort of flat-pack building system; Concrete Cloth is similar in that it stores flat but can be ballooned into a much larger structure, for disaster relief and the like.

Called "A building in a bag," the material is essentially cement-impregnated canvas that can be stored flat, and inflated on site using a compresser. Then the builder simply sprays it down with a hose, and after the concrete sets, you've got a waterproof and fireproof shelter. Here's a vid of the process in action:

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Drzach & Suchy's Shadow Clouds (or, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Rapid Prototyping)

September 30, 2010, 7:15 am

≫ Next: Japanese rooms, the meaning of Mu, and Kenya Hara on emptiness

≪ Previous: Concrete Cloth material: "A building in a bag"

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In Raiders of the Lost Ark there was an amulet attached to the Staff of Ra. When you placed the staff in a particular place in the Map Room and the sun was in a certain position, it would shine a beam pointing directly to the hidden location of the Well of Souls.

Drzach & Suchy, the architect & cryptographer/software engineer behind the wicked Ombrae display we showed you last week, have taken the idea of light + shadows + timing + location a few steps further with their Shadow Clouds project. A written description would be complicated, but the vid explains it succinctly:

Drzach and Suchy envision their RP'd cubes being used for signage, but we think the architectural possibilities would also be cool, a la Raiders; you could get different interior projections at different times of day, depending on where the sun was. I'd start simple, with a frowny face at the start of the workday and a smiley face at quitting time.

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Japanese rooms, the meaning of Mu, and Kenya Hara on emptiness

September 30, 2010, 7:39 am

≫ Next: Umeox Mobile's Solar phone: Chinese cell phone designs finally striking off on their own?

≪ Previous: Drzach & Suchy's Shadow Clouds (or, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Rapid Prototyping)

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I received an interesting note in response to yesterday's post about living with a traditional Japanese futon. The author of the note, Ko Nakatsu, took exception to my oversimplified blog-ready description of why futons are folded and put away, and wanted to set the record straight in greater detail (which should be of great interest to architects and designers of environments):

The futon's fold-away function is not [just] for "freeing up useable square footage in a space-tight country". That notion is merely a benefit from the true meaning and original philosophy of a futon. The true reason for the fold-and-store-away function is so that you can create an "empty space".

By creating an empty-space, it allows for limitless potential of reasons for the room's existence. It could become a tea room, dinner room, bedroom, entertainment room... the empty room creates "potential" to be any room. Traditional rooms in Japan (which are becoming rare) often have nothing that is permanent, even the "walls" or fusuma, slide away to create a larger expansive empty-space. The people, wall, furniture, and artwork, enter and then leave the room, to return it to empty-space, full of potential....

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Umeox Mobile's Solar phone: Chinese cell phone designs finally striking off on their own?

September 30, 2010, 9:22 am

≫ Next: Brilliant, and green, guerilla marketing by Green Street Media

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We're finally starting to see Chinese product designs that don't look exactly like something else we've already seen. Check out Shenzhen-based Umeox Mobile's Solar phone, which is waterproof, dustproof, comes with its own integrated rubber bumpers for shock protection, and boasts an array of solar panels on the back for juice.

Despite the ID 101 renderings provided on their website in lieu of actual photos, as far as we can tell this product is real and has been on the Chinese market since last month. And it's being marketed with what must be the longest, loudest cell phone commercial in history:

(Warning: If working in an office, turn your speakers down first!)

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Brilliant, and green, guerilla marketing by Green Street Media

September 30, 2010, 9:54 am

≫ Next: Ralph Caplan at the Cooper-Hewitt next Thursday!

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City sidewalks and curbs are filthy, and U.K.-based Green Street Media, which provides "sustainable, eco-friendly advertising solutions," takes advantage of this in a clever way. When a client wants a sidewalk advertisement, rather than using chalk or spraypaint GSM uses laser-cut stencils and a high-pressure hose to blast a clean spot out of the stencil's negative space. The only materials used are the stencil and plain water.

GSM estimates that depending on foot traffic, in 3-5 months the advertisement will fade as the sidewalk goes back to being its filthy old self.

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