The Statue of Liberty’s arm, building laws that were meant to be broken, and oh hey is there a Super Bowl tie-in in here somewhere? Imagine that. But that’s not all we have to feed your eyeballs this week. Check out the most beautiful items of the week or remain in suspense forever.
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Got boring wall syndrome? Worry not, young design enthusiast. These self-adhesive, fabric pattern wall tiles will solve your woes.
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3D printing can help you create prototypes or mockups quickly. Or should I say relatively quickly – it can take a 3D printer hours to print even moderately-sized objects. To speed things up, students from the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute tested adding LEGO to their workflow.
Researchers Stefanie Mueller, Tobias Mohr, Kerstin Guenther, Johannes Frohnhofen and Patrick Baudisch call their project faBrickation. The idea is to print just the crucial parts of a prototype, then build the rest out of LEGO. To do that, they wrote a program called faBrickator, where they can open 3D models…
…and “Legofy” it at the press of a button.
Then they just mark the parts of the model that will be printed…
…and build the rest with LEGO using instructions generated by faBrickator.
They can also use faBrickator to go back to a 3D model, modify it and then print only the parts that were changed, once again saving time.
The group claims that on average, faBrickation lets them make prototypes nearly two and a half times faster than using 3D printing alone. I wonder if they can make a reverse faBrickation scanner, so laypeople can start making a “3d model” out of LEGO instead of a modeling software, scan that LEGO model then run the resulting model through faBrickation.
[via Hasso Plattner Institute via PSFK]
It’s basically a Portlandia sketch: What if a city held a rally to save a building in trouble and no one came? As part of our series Preservation Battle, we look at significant structures at a crossroads, and today we’re examining Portland, Oregon’s very-endangered—yet almost-universally-hated—Portland Building.
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Heads up, Google Glass Explorers! Here’s a way to make your wearable computer draw even more attention to yourself. A company called GPOP is selling vinyl skins for your Glass. The skins are 3M vinyl cut to fit the various parts of Google’s tech.
There skins have a variety of designs, from simple matte white and black…
To skins with graphics printed on them.
GPOP also has fake carbon fiber and fake wood skins.
Okay browser, head to GPOP to buy the skins. Each set costs around $10-$16(USD). Just to show to you that its really ahead of the gadget skin game, GPOP also sells skins for the Pebble smart watch.
[via The Gadget Flow]
Despite the trash and half-finished buildings
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Most of us are lucky enough to live in peaceful places where landmines don’t threaten our lives on a daily basis. Unfortunately, many people still live in fear of stepping on landmines and losing their limbs – or worse, their lives. This is true for Colombia, where over 10,000 people have been maimed or killed because of these lethal weapons.
Well aware of this fact, design firm Lemur Studio came up with a landmine detector called “SaveOneLife” that fits right inside a person’s shoe.
As designed, it will use a small coil of conductive material that produces an electromagnetic field. This is key to how it works, as this field will be able to interact with the electromagnetic field of the landmines. When a landmine is detected, the user will get an alarm on the armband that works in conjunction with the sole – hopefully before they step on one.
Iván Pérez, Lemur’s creative director, explains: “The device was created with the goal of saving a life, hence the name, first by the families of the victims and second for the cost effects of military forces by the loss of his men in combat.”
SaveOneLife is still a concept design for now, but here’s to hoping it becomes a reality.
In the days before Home Depot paint departments, people slathered color onto their walls the old fashioned way: using a mixture of pigment, lime, and milk. Now, one Northern California farm is reviving this ancient tradition with the help of its resident goat herds.
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Muji might no longer be that minimalist Japanese brand none of your friends know about, but that doesn’t make its products any less cool. And if you’ve been holding off on buying a Bluetooth speaker until you found one that was less on the garish side, your hunt is over.
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Gijs van Bon’s Skryf machine is far from the world’s first
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