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 […]
Category Archives: possessed products
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 […]
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 […]
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yellow spies
many color laser printers leave an invisible tracking code printed in yellow dots that encodes your printer’s serial number and the time of printing down to the minute! fortunately mako hill at the medialab’s computing culture group has started an action to protest this invisible surveillance. but now that EFF has provided an interface to […]
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product anatomy
now that the craft of technical drawing has been replaced by computer-aided drafting, there’s something uniquely human about painstaking hand-drawn illustration, elevating it to an almost-art and imbuing the drawings with personality and worth they didn’t have before. these painstakingly rendered anatomical drawings of a furby are part of kelly heaton‘s work which culminated in […]
Also posted in evil robots, open objects, visualization
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banana roots
dole has been giving its produce a voice: organic bananas are labeled with farm codes that, when typed into http://www.doleorganic.com/, provide information about the farm where it originated. these are the happy farmers from farm #759: if you peer deeper into the page, you can also download the farm’s coordinates for google earth and see […]
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scrap shoe
patagonia’s DIY mocassins are an amazing product: made from leather scraps, delivered in pieces and it’s up to the buyer to stitch them together using provided thread in the perforated patterns. no wonder it’s only $30!
Also posted in product design
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clothes off!
buzz off makes insect repellent clothing by permeating fabric with permethrin, a pesticide that can endure 25 washings (the ‘product life’ according to their site). this pesticide is only a ‘possible’ human carcinogen according to the EPA, for whom this is the only approved repellent clothing today. now that repellents can be part of clothes, […]
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