Category Archives: 2d
Prison Flight Maps
At the MoMA last week I stumbled across the elegant map-based visualizations of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia’s School of Architecture. The Million Dollar Block project (pdf) explores the impact of incarceration on specific neighborhoods of New York City and Brooklyn in particular. The staggering visualizations at once depict the incredible expense of [...]
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Lego Papercraft
Goro Motai pointed me to this collaboration between Muji and Lego to augment plastic building blocks with papercraft figures. Using a custom paper puncher, sheets of construction paper can be made to clip onto the plastic nubs on regular lego blocks. Although the construction paper is treated as a flat medium, this merging of 2D [...]
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Electronic Pop-up Book
One of my favorite pieces at this year’s Ars Electronica / MIT Media Lab exhibit is an electronic pop-up book made by Leah Buechley’s student Jie Qi of the High-Low Tech research group. She has layered the traditional materials with copper films, conductive ink and lights and speakers to add a digital dimension to the [...]
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Corrugated Cardboard Cubby
I saw this beautifully crafted electronic parts drawer cubby at Distance Lab the other day – a great example of upcycling old cardboard packaging into a very useful piece of furniture that feels and works much better than the cheap plastic alternative.
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paper windows
This is an old idea, but it remains relevant because of its elegance in treating the windows desktop as a physical space with paper windows: you can fold back the corners of any sheet to move items between various layers. It is a navigation technique called ‘Fold ‘n’ Drop;’ I saw Pierre Dragicevic present it [...]
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steampunk servo
Fabricator extraordinaire Peter Schmitt designed this plywood servo from laser-cut plywood. The elaborate mechanism includes the circuitry to drive a motor to precise angles so it does double-duty as an object that teaches about physical fabrication and electronics. Instructions for the plywood servo can be found at the website of the Medialab class ‘Techniques for [...]
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animal alphabet
Last time I visited Japan I came upon a fascinating book by Shiho Ishikawa called Alphapet – an alphabet made of animals that you cut and fold from the pages of the book. The richly illustrated pages are scored to provide for elaborate folds. The web site is rich with videos and instructions for folding; [...]
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Fashion without Trash