I’ve covered Kram/Weisshar‘s Breeding Tables before, and they’re now available for sale at Moroso. I was finally able to see them up close – including process documentation and parts splayed out – at the Pompidou center a couple of weeks ago. To recap, the tables are generated using a genetic algorithm; its parts are cut […]
Author Archives: leo
generating flat-pack furniture
Posted in 2d, 3d, fabrication, furniture, livingbreathing, product design
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diy camera
The Miroslav Tichy exhibit at the Pompidou Center shows a unique kind of outsider art: voyeuristic photographs shot by the Soviet artist using exclusively hand-made cameras pieced together from trash and household odds-and-ends to take complex if imperfect tele-photo and otherwise surprise visions of human nature. You can see all of his hand-made cameras and […]
Posted in art, customization, fabrication, free & open, futurecraft, product design
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banana propaganda
Turns out that bananas are evil – the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) was a force of imperialism in Latin America, and now they’re being decried for being a monolithic monoculture based on artificially low costs, achieved mostly through cheap labor in destabilized countries. But it wasn’t just the supply side of bananas that discovered […]
Posted in food, possessed products, traceability
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freaking surveillance
Annina has found a way to confound the watchers and make them think that the machines they are using against us have turned against them. link
Posted in art, augmented reality, evil robots, futurecraft, possessed products
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black tin
Glory is at it again with this amazing report on how tin metal is largely mined and exported against the law. Since the 18th Century tin has been mined and exported from the Indonesian island of Bangka, named after the word “wangka” meaning “tin.” Mining expanded until the 1990s when it was banned by the […]
Posted in conviviality, environment, fabrication, materials, possessed products, supply chain, traceability
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shill pill
Counterfeit medicine will amount to a $75 billion market in 2010, leaving death and disease in their wake, but it’s unclear whether Authentix‘s system for verifying pharmaceuticals are genuine is the right direction. Their method works by adding a chemical with a distinctive signature to the inactive ingredients – so that the suspect medication can […]
Posted in human2.0, livingbreathing, supply chain, surveillance, traceability
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designers = form-givers
The IDSA provides a suite of readings on ecodesign, including this 2003 survey on the ecological performance of electronic products (pdf), in which a survey of product designers sought to reveal the mechanisms for indluencing sustainable design in consumer electronics. This bar chart struck my eye because it represents exactly what needs to change in […]
Posted in energy, environment, fabrication, marketing, materials, possessed products, product design, supply chain
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farm map
We all know that eating local is not only more efficient, but also more delicious – unfortunately it can be hard to find the variety of foods we eat without resorting to a large supermarket. LocalHarvest is a web resource for finding local farms and farmers markets, including a map of all the farms and […]
Posted in blogogracy, conviviality, energy, environment, food
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