For their latest creation, the folks at Signal Snowboards traveled to Italy where they took advantage of skilled local artisans to create what has to be the world’s first functional glass snowboard. More »
If you live outside the UK or haven’t got access to the Britain-based Blue Peter television program for whatever reason, you’ll be glad to see that the full chat they’ve had this past week with Jony Ive is now available in full. The Blue Peter program hosts a variety of engineers, inventors, and famous people of all kinds and has done so over its record-holding span of years actively broadcast on television. Apple’s own Jony Ive’s appearance included chats about three different designs created by children who rose to the challenge provided the week before, and showed Ive receiving a special badge in his honor.
The Blue Peter gold badge is a pin, or a button, if you like, that’s given by the program to people of particular influence on the design community. As it was given to Ive, so too did he reciprocate with a custom-made large version of the token back to the program. This extra-large Blue Peter badge was made of pure Aluminum – or Aluminium if you’re from that side of the sea.
Apple’s Chief Designer spoke up about how influential the Blue Peter program was on him as a child as well. He made it clear that he was particularly struck by the way the program took everyday objects and turned them into new, more useful inventions each time they appeared. Re-using objects otherwise seen as throwaway was also mentioned as being especially memorable by Ive.
You’ll also notice in the video that the host and Ive are using two iPad minis to work through the segment. It’s with these that they watch video presentations of the designs the children have made and make a point to tap through throughout the program. The whole Ive segment, too, takes place inside Apple’s own campus in Cupertino – fun stuff!
BONUS – extended edition!
Jony Ive Blue Peter video up now: chatting on gold and aluminium is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
How many times have you lifted that little cardboard cup to your mouth, only to recoil in pain once the hot coffee touches your lips and scalds your tongue? If it’s a number higher than one, then I’d say that’s one time too many.
Designers Yang Dongyun, Wu Yichen, Sang Xinxin, Gu Zhiyu, and Lin Xia must agree, since they designed the Nohot interactive cup to put an end to coffee burns once and for all.
It looks just like a regular coffee-to-go cup, except that it’s got a lid that’s made from heat-sensitive materials. When the drink is still too hot to drink, a circular lump in the middle of the lip expands, so that the person can’t drink the coffee without bumping his or her nose that lump on the lid.
As the coffee reaches a safe drinking temperature, the lump on the cover slowly flattens, so that it’ll look like the regular lids that you see so often on your own daily cup of coffee.
Pretty nifty, isn’t it?
The Nohot cup is a red dot award: design concept winner.
[via Yanko Design]
The Itisy table looks like one of these Very Hungry Caterpillar toys, and it can be configured however you like. Forget putting stuff on it; I just want to play with it. More »
This Pac-Man chair named the Pac Seat would look perfect in my living room. I’m a sucker for retro Pac-Man stuff. This seat, designed by Bruno Marques is great. I love the clean and simple design. Plus, when you are seated, it looks like Pac-Man is eating you.
Anyone can sit on this chair safely, unless you are a ghost. If you are a ghost, this Pac-Man seat will eat you and then probably belch. Also, I don’t advise sitting on one if you are a cherry, strawberry, orange, apple, melon, bell, key or a Galaxian spaceship.
Bruno designed this chair for kids, but let’s be honest, this is for us geeks who are old enough to have played the game back in the 80′s. Give me some ghost tables now, and I would be completely happy.
[via Albotas]
Taking a page from Tokyo Flash’s bewildering design playbook, Romain Jerome’s latest watch—the Spacecraft—takes an unconventional approach to displaying the time. But thankfully it’s not as difficult as deciphering the array of dials and switches on a NASA-designed craft. More »
Along with a lot of publicity, Project Glass from Google has generated a bevy of approved patents and applications, but the latest one shows that the search giant’s trying to wrap up the whole kit and kaboodle — replete with detailed diagrams and descriptions to back it up. Specifically, Mountain View is claiming the design of the frame itself including the bridge, brow portion, transparent display, input device plus the means for affixing everything. There are detailed descriptions of how the device can be configured — for instance, one claim states that the screen could be adjusted “normal to the focal center of the eye,” and the position of the electronics placed “over a first side of the ear.” It goes on to explain the need for a balancing weight “over the second side” of the same ear in the latter case, such that “a majority of the overall weight is applied” to one side, which certainly jibes with some of what we’ve seen. That’s just for starters, though — head after the break to see more diagrams and details.
Filed under: Wearables, Google
Source: USPTO
Celebrating its 16th year, the Japan Media Arts festival is taking place from February 13th to 24th 2013 at the National Art Center and other venues in Roppongi, Tokyo. Over 3000 works of art were submitted for the festival and jury members selected the best entries to be exhibited in each of the four categories; art, entertainment, animation and manga.
Works came from around the world including a fair number from Japan and ranged from multimedia displays to new video games.
In particular we wanted to share some of the exhibits we thought were interesting.
Desire of Codes by Seiko Mikami is an interactive installation which combines the live footage taken by 90 small fixed cameras and 6 moving cameras on mechanical arms hanging and slide across the ceiling projected onto a large circularscreen. This display is supposed to express the blurring of the boundaries between our physical bodies and how they are depicted by data.
Winner of the Grand Prize for the Entertainment category, Perfume Global Site Project celebrates the worlwide debut of the techno-pop group Perfume. 
An open-sourced project in which fans, artists and group members collaborated to create and organize promotional content, live performances and this multimedia exhibit which featured cutting edge motion sensor based animations. Crowd-sourced multimedia events focussed on a particular idol seem to have taken off in Japan ever since the Hatsune Miku phenomenon. 
Kuratas from Sudiobashi Heavy Industries is the closest thing to a real life Gundam; a giant four meter tall and four-ton robot that you can actually sit inside and operate. Since being unveiled last year at Wonder Festival 2012, Kuratas has already received mass amounts of media coverage but it was cool to see it part of the Japan Media Arts festival as a showcase of Japanese entertainment technology.
On the Fly Paper, part of the Chiba Institute of Technology Campus Exhibition and Tokyo Sky Tree Town lets you experience the latest in infra-red and projection technology.
Staff hand you a piece of card with a blue print of a robot and several dots printed on top. You place the card underneath the projector and the infra-red tracker detects the dots from your picture, recognises the code and projects a real colour image onto the blue print of your robot. Several images can also be projected at the same time as long as the dots don’t over lap.
Presented on an ipad, Rrrrrrrrol is an interactive photo project using animated GIF images where a young woman or an object close to her is constantly rotating. You can to alter the speed of the rotations and flip through the photo album where the woman spins in various locations. Some of these images are often uploaded to tumblr.
The Japan Media Arts festival delivers unique and exciting exhibits every year and this one was no exception. If you are in Tokyo and have the time we recommend you check it out before it ends.
Jony Ive is the guy who probably designed the computer you’re reading this on. And here he is on Blue Peter, a beloved British children’s TV show, talking lunchbox redesigns. Awwwww. More »
We’ve featured a couple of designs for backpacks with speakers built in, but I have to say the latest concept design looks like the best of the bunch.
Designer Massimo Battaglia’s Boompack backpack not only has a boombox built in, but it includes a tiny projector too. Basically, this thing is a portable rave on your back.
The design calls for 100-watts of power, with 8 speaker drivers, a built-in rechargeable battery – good for at least 6 hours, a 200-lumen pico projector, and Bluetooth wireless connectivity for your smartphone. The pack is also designed to be impact and water-resistant, and could stand on its own if you set it down on the ground or on a tabletop.
It’s even got a hidden compartment for docking your smartphone, as well as an SD card slot and USB port, as well as audio connections for external devices.
As is so often the case with these sort of things, the Boompack is merely a design concept at this point, and there’s no indication if or when it will be produced.
[via Klonblog(DE)]
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