Pininfarina: you may know it as the high-end Italian firm that designs fast, expensive cars like Ferraris. Now, for the first time, its designers are branching out into residential design with a condominium in Singapore. And it looks like the cars they design.
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Japanese toilet company Toto has a bike that runs on poop. If you want to save on fuel and produce your own fuel instead, this is the bike for you. The toilet you see there is just decorative, but the engine does run on poop.
It’s called the Neo and it took three years of research, development and design. It is basically a 250cc trike, with a built-in toilet for a seat. However, I was just kidding about you contributing to the fuel supply, which is actually purified and compressed livestock waste. So it still runs on poop – just not yours.
The bio-gas that it uses comes from the Shika-oi, in Hokkaido where waste and household water are converted to methane gas via fermentation. The methane gas is then converted to bio-gas by purifying. The bio-gas is what ends up in the bike, so there’s no actual manure anywhere, but it’s a fun design that gets the word out about alternative energy.
[via Neatorama]
We’ve seen loads of pop-up urbanism over the past few years, from parks to libraries, all designed to turn dead urban space into lively ones. But how do you stop people from immersing themselves in their phone screens in public? By building a larger screen, where they can be immersed together!
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When someone brings up silk-screening, you might think of hand-made t-shirts or concert posters. What you probably don’t think of is electric current and glowing surfaces. But at the University of Pennsylvania, traditional screen-printing and high technology are colliding to create incredible, eye-melting artistic experiments.
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Finally putting an end to the gag where someone unscrews the lid of a salt shaker, Jaemin Jaeminlee’s Sogum HuchuHuchu is a radical re-thinking of how we season our food at the table. They still require a bit of shaking to get the spices out, but instead of dumping it directly onto your food, the salt and pepper spills into a small scoop. Using your fingers you’re then able to select an exact amount of seasonings for your meal, while the unused bits can be returned to the shaker.
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There’s no question that solitary confinement—the nebulous, undefined, and largely undocumented practice that Amnesty International, the NYCLU, and the UN call torture—can cause horrific psychological damage to prisoners. But are the architects who build these structures responsible for them?
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As part of a recent ad campaign, Canadian beer company Molson Candian took a fridge full of its special adult beverage all around Europe to share with the thirsty masses. But there was a catch—the only way to unlock the boozy treasure was by scanning a Canadian passport. And though you may have already seen the commercial itself making the rounds these past few days, chances are you haven’t seen what’s actually the coolest part of the whole campaign—how a Canuck-specific cooler gets made.
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Yesterday, we celebrated after the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. But you know what a victory for marriage equality means? More weddings. And more places to celebrate them. Here are 12 beautiful chapels, gardens, and barns—one for each state where marriage is for all.
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When you said someone was “social” fifty years ago, they were probably friendly, outgoing people who would talk up a storm and go out of their way to get to know everyone in the room. When you describe someone as being “social” nowadays, you probably mean they have accounts on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare.
This is one change brought about by technology that isn’t all good. Sure, it’s great that you can talk to people and connect with them through the Internet, but people often take it a bit too far, choosing to go on their online networks when they’re out and about, ignoring the people they’re actually with instead.
Brazil’s Salve Jorge Bar, for instance, wasn’t too pleased with this anti-social social phenomenon, so they had design firm Fischer & Friends create the “Offline Glass”, which was meant to “rescue people from the online world” and bring them “back to the bar tables.”
At first glance, the Offline Glass looks just like any other glass, except for the smartphone-shaped notch at the bottom. Turns out this little notch makes all the difference, because the glass is highly unstable because of it. The only way to make the glass stand up straight is if the patron inserts his or her smartphone into the notch, stabilizing the glass and forcing people to keep their hands off their phone sat the same time.
So the glass design is more of a novelty, because I doubt people would regularly put their phones at risk of spillage or breakage on a regular basis.
The Offline Glass kind of makes you think about how “social” we’ve all become, which was the main purpose of creating the glass in the first place.
[The Telegraph via TAXI via Food Beast]
What you’re looking at above is Motorola’s new logo, which apparently drifted into the wild ahead of a major rebranding effort. In case you didn’t already know, Google owns Moto and dictates much of its company policy. Oh you didn’t know?
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