opportunity carbon cost

By leo | Published: April 21, 2008

Another beautiful product (soon to be released) from KithKin‘s “Some Rights Reserved” open-source design collection is Matthew Appleton’s “Afterlife” poster – it builds on the growing trend of product dissections for good by depicting the relative geometric footprint of a printer’s many parts as compared to a pencil. The project claims to show how complex a printer is to design and build when compared to a pencil – although there is nothing really so simple about a pencil either). But the overall footprint of the product makes itself clear: hours of engineering and dozens of parts are necessary to make something, all of which could have been diverted to other (better?) uses. Then again, I’ll need a printer when I can finally download a copy of this gorgeous image…

Posted in 2d, energy, environment, materials, possessed products, product design, traceability | Comments closed

light blocks

By leo | Published: April 18, 2008

Yesterday at the Salone Satellite in Milano in the taro & sarah booth I was struck by this modular lamp: you can add polyhedral modules in any direction to change the shape and brightness of the chandelier in crystalline fashion. Each module is made of folded translucent plastic with magnetic contacts acting as both structure and wiring. You turn it on by adding to a central node, and you turn it off by destroying your creation.

Posted in customization, fabrication, product design, soft/glowing | Comments closed

Clear Conscience

By leo | Published: April 17, 2008

Philippe Starck is showing his concept for a transparent home-sized electricity-generating windmill at the Interni Green Energy Design exhibit at the Statale in Milano for the next two weeks. It is a small prototype windmill that is designed to function in urban settings, and it has even been designed to be transparent so as not to offend the neighbors.

Posted in energy, environment, materials, product design | Comments closed

open books

By leo | Published: April 16, 2008

The best part of the China China China! exhibit at Florence’s Strozzina is the reading room: unlike all the boring, walk-by-and-out-the-door reading rooms you see at every art exhibit in the world, this particular room captivated us. Why? Because there was a photocopier in the room – a wonderful breach of copyright law, an encouragement to copy and steal and – most importantly – to sit and read the books. Which is exactly what I did, even though I would never do it without the photocopier. And it’s not because we made lots of illegal copies: in fact, we flipped through nearly a dozen books on Chinese art and only made one copy. This was just another example of how making information free and open encourages consumption, expands markets, and ultimately fosters consumers who are better informed, more curious and much, much more likely to support the arts.

Posted in hyperexperience | Comments closed

baby fendi

By leo | Published: April 15, 2008

DSC_6939

fendi + baby = ? please comment

Posted in children, marketing, product design | Comments closed

animated paint

By leo | Published: April 11, 2008

Flickr introduced high-quality video to its amazing array of social image sharing functionality – a new medium for the web (see the best videos here). To celebrate here is Orit Zuckerman‘s freshly uploaded video of Moving Portrait 2 (above) and this AWESOME three-dimensional image (if you cross your eyes)(below).

Posted in animation, blogogracy | Comments closed

recording elegance

By leo | Published: April 8, 2008

HARUO OBA presented “special moments” today at CHI 2008 – two brilliant tangible recording interfaces mapped to physical phenomena. The BOOK RECORDER consists of two clips – one in the shape of an owl and the other in the shape of the moon – placed on the front and back covers of a child’s book. When the book is closed, the owl is in front of the moon and does nothing. But when the book is opened, the owl records audio – such as the sounds of the parent reading the book to their child. Then, the child can replay the parent’s voice by opening the book on a lonely day. The CANDLE RECORDER is a regular candle that would be lit at a dinner table. Once lit, it begins recording the sounds of the dinner party. It records until the candle is blown out. To replay a party, you can turn over the candle and turn its base – now a speaker – to replay the conversations of individual evenings. These spectacular mappings of function to form make ambient audio recording a voluntary, visible and beautiful part of everyday interaction and help make a special statement about capturing our precious moments of interaction with each other.

Posted in children, product design, soft/glowing, tangible | Comments closed

tragic toys

By leo | Published: April 8, 2008


Healthy Toys keeps track of the deadliest children’s products on the market – in terms of lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, bromine, and antimony (in parts per million). You can check out the ratings of your children’s belongings, ask for toys to be evaluated, or use the site to shop for less-toxic options. Good luck!

Posted in blogogracy, children, fabrication, possessed products | Tagged | Comments closed