This elegant seasonal food map on Epicurious shows what produce can be locally found in each state for a given month. Maps like this can make it possible to avoid the excessive shipping and stale flavors of commercial produce. In the future a map like this could have infinite granularity, to help people find the […]
Author Archives: leo
do-it-yourself radio
Last night I met Quiddities‘ Margaret Rosas who was awarded a grant in the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge for Radio Drupal, a project to create open-source internet radio software for streaming and community engagement to be possible even for small, locally-based radio stations. The web is struggling to be democratic, in part because publishing content […]
Posted in blogogracy, conviviality, free & open
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soft car
Now that buildings have been wrapped in soft materials for years, BMW is proposing that cars could replace their bulky bodies with stretchy fabric – with a lot of elegant consequences for those pesky door lines, headlights – not to mention the entire vehicle could now act as an airbag.
Posted in fabrication, fashion, livingbreathing, materials, soft/glowing
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sticky site
Despite the fact that glue should be avoided in manufacturing whenever possible, it can be sometimes necessary to use adhesives in prototyping. Which is why thistothat.com is a wonderful resource for finding out which kind of glue you should use when combining paper, plastic, metal, leather, cloth, or whatever else needs to be put in […]
Posted in fabrication
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free art
The works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres are unsettling in a number of ways: first, because you are encouraged to take a piece of the art on display (in these cases, at Art Institute of Chicago). It’s not common to touch, even less to take away artwork from a museum. Second, because the pile diminishes as you […]
Posted in art, exhibit design, open objects
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water towers
In Chicago last weekend I took the Chicago Architecture Foundation‘s boat tour of the Chicago river – probably the most invigorating 90 minute experience of a city and its architecture I have ever had. Along the way the city reveals itself through an unexpected perspective, but nearly all the buildings – including some of the […]
Posted in architecture, conviviality, livingbreathing
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holes in the wall
The Art Institute of Chicago houses a unique collection of meticulously fabricated miniature rooms, the so-called Thorne Miniature Rooms, to depict period interior spaces from the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries in the US, Europe, China and Japan. The 68 models a remarkably detailed at the scale of one inch to one foot (or […]
Posted in architecture, art, possessed products
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sustainable prayers
Deva Seetharam reminded me of an old project and we started talking about how prayer wheels could be appropriated for new purposes. Traditional prayer wheels are cylinders containing written mantras that are spun to recite the wishes within. They can be spun by hand, but some traditional prayer wheels are designed to be spun by […]
Posted in energy, environment, futurecraft, product design
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