hyperexperience

The brilliant Schulze & Webb have done it again with the Metal Phone, a completely recyclable cell phone enclosure developed for Nokia. The project is a complete cradle-to-cradle life cycle process: a cell phone encased in a lead alloy (ok, solder) can be disassembled and melted down to be re-cast into a new cell phone in an injection molding machine (below). As for recyclability, it’s ideal: a material that retains its quality through repeated, theoretically infinite life cycles. As for toxics, it could use a little help…

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As Mako Hill argued in his presentation at CHI 2008, the best software is made by users and not by designers. The best examples are targeted applications made for niche applications, such as odontolinux, a free and open dental office management software based on Debian. Together with Open Dental (pictured), another open-source (but not free) dental office management program, this points the way towards democratization of the medical institution, from greater access to medical information to the increased accessibility of the software that manages our health.

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The hundreds of millions of electronics thrown out each year are depleting precious resources and creating vast deposits of toxic materials, most of which are difficult or impossible to isolate almost by design. Active Disassembly is a promising technique for recycling electronics that relies on shape-memory connectors inside devices to pop apart under heat, separating valuable components without any manual labor required. Screws have been prototyped that lose their threads, as well as screen housings for laptops that pop apart to separate glass from LCD substrate. A typical cell phone can be broken down in seconds without any need to handle the toxic components (see a video demonstration of this technique here). This technique is already promising at the scale of snaps, enclosures and parts assemblies. Now if only it could be employed at the microscopic level, so that the myriad materials within circuits and could be recovered and re-used instead of being locked away forever in their fiberglass and epoxy coffins.

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Despite the plethora of personal footprint calculators out there, I have always had the nagging feeling that personal choices make almost no difference on the environment - that the shift of responsibility for environmental woes to individuals is a corporate strategy meant to reduce pressure on producers and legislators to regulate radical improvements to industrial practices. A recent MIT study headed by Timothy Gutowski showed that, in fact, even a homeless person in the United States has a carbon footprint twice the world average. This is due to enterprise- and government-level decisions and practices, such as the military, road construction and the way services such as electricity and water are distributed. The study took special care to account for the “rebound effect,” which looks at how money saved on gas - by driving an efficient car, for example - is then spent on another product or service with a potentially greater footprint. He proposes a carbon tax on consumers as the solution - once again neglecting the most powerful decision-makers: the producers and legislators who are themselves empowered to make decisions on a national scale that will reduce the footprint of even the most ascetic of Americans.

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We’ve seen do-it-yourself kits for wearable technology; now Studio 5050 has released the first open-source modular wearable technology collection, a series of hardware components that can be used to create computational clothes such as the temperature sweater which contains a discrete luminous numerical display in its cuff (pictured below), the masai dress which generates music when a beaded necklace strums its conductive threads , and embrace me, jackets that illuminate when their wearers hug each other. By making these and other modules available for anyone to use, new and unforeseen kinds physical and social interaction become possible for anyone to discover.

The schematics for six modules have been released under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license: a power module (called the garment board)(picture up top), a physical contact detector (called the hug board), a light module (the LED module), a general purpose input-output module with clothing snaps on a board (the masai module), a speaker/microphone board (the sound module) and a temperature sensor / numeric display package (the temperature module).

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A the Lexus installation at the Salone del Mobile there was an interesting installation about generation of mesh structures which provided hints for their eventual re-generation and re-use. The chair above was manufactured using a 3D printer from 2kg of fused Nylon powder. As part of the exhibition a series of models depicted how the surprisingly sturdy seat’s form was derived from the molecular structure of a crystal molecule (below). In the last case was displayed the raw material from which the entire chair was molded, in a glass beaker (bottom), suggesting that the mesh structure is an effective way to use a single material efficiently for a variety of applications and leave it in a state that can be cleanly re-fused for a completely different, later use.

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When is the last time you worried whether your furniture was locally produced? I saw this tag on a lamp at the Milan furniture fair, where the whole world comes to find which furniture to import. My favorite part about it is that the lamp was not only made in Italy; it was conceived there. Which means that maybe one day we’ll worry about being able to source knowledge locally - not just materials and labor.

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Aside from the rare up-cycled or open design project at this past week’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, there were very few radically new concepts and a lot of kinda-pretty-but-useless stuff. Very few designers targeted the environment in radical new ways, and almost none contributed significant inventions. One booth, however, had two promising new materials on exhibit: a laminate made from paper which could be structured into a chair (above) and a moldable material based on cellulose without synthetic binders which was made into a lamp (below). Material inventions of this nature could allow designers the freedom to experiment with form without all of the damage it usually ends up causing.

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Another find from Last week’s Designersblock: these wallets made from old cassettes split in half, gutted and joined with a zipper (by Marcella Foschi). She also authored these brilliant chandeliers made from tank tops:

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Last week at the Fuori Salone the most memorable event was designersblock: held at a dilapidated public pool in Milan’s Tortona neighborhood, it featured booths by designers and collectives organized under the London-based design collaborative. One of the exhibitors was KithKin’s “Some Rights Reserved,” a kiosk offering creative commons-licensed digital wares at low low prices in the form of CDs carrying members’ work. I’ll continue to post about them over the week: the projects are quite beautiful. Let’s start with Postler Ferguson’s Graphic Grenade, which Amanda bought for Ale for 7 Euros (it’s only 5 euros on-line). It’s a papercraft grenade that you can make yourself by printing, cutting and gluing the enclosed pdf. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons (by-nd) license.

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Another beautiful product (soon to be released) from KithKin’s “Some Rights Reserved” open-source design collection is Matthew Appleton’s “Afterlife” poster - it builds on the growing trend of product dissections for good by depicting the relative geometric footprint of a printer’s many parts as compared to a pencil. The project claims to show how complex a printer is to design and build when compared to a pencil - although there is nothing really so simple about a pencil either). But the overall footprint of the product makes itself clear: hours of engineering and dozens of parts are necessary to make something, all of which could have been diverted to other (better?) uses. Then again, I’ll need a printer when I can finally download a copy of this gorgeous image…

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Yesterday at the Salone Satellite in Milano in the taro & sarah booth I was struck by this modular lamp: you can add polyhedral modules in any direction to change the shape and brightness of the chandelier in crystalline fashion. Each module is made of folded translucent plastic with magnetic contacts acting as both structure and wiring. You turn it on by adding to a central node, and you turn it off by destroying your creation.

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Philippe Starck is showing his concept for a transparent home-sized electricity-generating windmill at the Interni Green Energy Design exhibit at the Statale in Milano for the next two weeks. It is a small prototype windmill that is designed to function in urban settings, and it has even been designed to be transparent so as not to offend the neighbors.

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The best part of the China China China! exhibit at Florence’s Strozzina is the reading room: unlike all the boring, walk-by-and-out-the-door reading rooms you see at every art exhibit in the world, this particular room captivated us. Why? Because there was a photocopier in the room - a wonderful breach of copyright law, an encouragement to copy and steal and - most importantly - to sit and read the books. Which is exactly what I did, even though I would never do it without the photocopier. And it’s not because we made lots of illegal copies: in fact, we flipped through nearly a dozen books on Chinese art and only made one copy. This was just another example of how making information free and open encourages consumption, expands markets, and ultimately fosters consumers who are better informed, more curious and much, much more likely to support the arts.

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fendi + baby = ? please comment

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