when i wrote about the WOBO, the bottle’s designer john habraken wrote me to tell of another up-cycling project he did in the seventies, this time using discarded industrial materials like oil drums and car parts to build buildings (see his image above). i drummed up some images of the proposed designs: which reminds me […]
Author Archives: leo
upcycled architecture
Posted in architecture, fabrication, materials, open objects, upcycling
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perv tracker
ever since jessica’s law (the lunsford act) states are required to track sex offenders once they’re released from prison. pro-tech makes the tracking device that is used in florida, shown above. the unit consists of an ankle bracelet with tamper sensing (patent 5,959,533 ” Tamper detection for body worn transmitter “) and a GPS tracking […]
Posted in possessed products, surveillance
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sew local
the 100-mile suit is an attempt to build some of our simplest products – clothes – with only local resources. it was a 92% successful undertaking, with only the thread and soles of the shoes imported from elsewhere. it’s an impressively difficult task, if you think about it, and what is the point? well, the […]
Posted in conviviality, fabrication, possessed products, product design, soft/glowing
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apartment hunting
hbo’s voyeur is an on-line interactive that lets you spy on an apartment building, unit by unit, as strange things seem to happen involving the residents. it’s beautifully filmed, short and intriguing – probably because it seamlessly combines entertainment with the thrill of on-line research. as you try to piece together the events in a […]
Posted in architecture, surveillance, visualization
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useful packaging
reading stephen fenichell’s plastic about polymer history i was amazed by the story of cellophane. initially useless, it took some clever marketing to find a market for the transparent film. first, camel used it to wrap packs of cigarettes and ‘lock in flavor’ to regain market from lucky strike. then, cellophane became used for wrapping […]
Posted in marketing, possessed products, upcycling
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whose footprint?
produced by the packaging industry, this commercial helped usher in the modern environmental movement in the US. This anti-littering campaign, combined with ‘recycling’, convinced consumers to buy packaged products in bulk and carefully clean and return them for downcycling. today, the concept of ‘ecological footprint’ is used to urge people to use less energy for […]
Posted in marketing, possessed products
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foot fab fetish
for the past few hours i’ve been modeling a shoe and trying to get to the heart of what makes it so fascinating – this timeless object – and i decided it’s the opacity. not because it’s hard to use (although it takes practice) but because a shoe appears to be a homogenous, solid mass, […]
Posted in fabrication, marketing, open objects
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gratuitous kittens
ever since chris c showed me lolcats (now icanhascheezburger) i have been fascinated with the syntax and hilarity, especially during boring meetings. now true genius: lol:digg, a machup of flickr kitten pictures and digg article headlines. along with news arcade games i’m starting to think that information is going to have to piggyback on entertainment […]
Posted in marketing, visualization
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