greenpeace is at it again, after successfully bullying apple for its environmental carelessness by ranking it as the worst PC manufacturer in terms of environmental impact (march ’07) and motivating job’s new recycling program, a new greenpeace study reveals the presence of (banned) brominated fire retardants in the iphone – which is leading the state […]
Category Archives: possessed products
stop&chop
i’ve been posting for a long time about open design, or the free dissemination of design knowledge. ponoko is a site that allows you to share designs for furniture cut out of sheet material like the plywood pepe baby’s chair (above). on the one hand, paying $120 for a tiny plywood chair seems expensive, on […]
Also posted in customization, fabrication, futurecraft, open objects, product design
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voodoo chat
schulze and webb’s availabot is an ambient reminder of whether your friend is logged in to chat. it’s a good idea to take non-essential functions off your computer desktop, but it’s too bad you have to connect the doll via USB and keep it on your physical desktop. i’ve always imagined a set of dolls […]
Also posted in evil robots, livingbreathing, surveillance, tangible, visualization
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improvisation
open-source design promises a lot of invention but has trouble motivating a lot of people to contribute design work. but one kind of distributed design is flourishing: improvised explosive devices, which are the most effective tool against the american military in iraq. () one video demonstrates the user experience:
Also posted in customization, futurecraft, guerilla, open objects
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by a long sea and a long land carriage
the supply chain of a laptop computer Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, […]
Also posted in conviviality, product design, visualization
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toddler tangibles
for only $30 fisher price sells the easy link internet launch pad, a tangible gateway to the internet that replaces the keyboard with a physical token-based, limited gaming interface to specialized webpages on their home site. for decades now tangible interaction through physical tokens has been proposed as a way to, among other things, make […]
Also posted in marketing, product design, surveillance, tangible
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waste more!
just when i thought that the computer industry would follow google’s proposal to adopt a standard power supply to reduce inefficiency and waste, a new apple patent is revealed that actually keeps a device from turning on with a third-party adapter. along with their refusal to allow people to remove their own batteries, why does […]
Also posted in fabrication, marketing
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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 […]
Also posted in surveillance
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