When you see and touch the massive furniture of David Kiss, you feel something sensational, something deeply ancient and radiantly modern at the same time. I recently joined the Hungarian product designer and sculptor for a day, to watch his process—which verges on alchemy.
It’s architecture awards seasons right now, with honors and medals being doled out with what seems like daily regularity. Thankfully, the AIA’s 2014 Housing Awards breaks up the march of zillion-dollar projects with something a little more real: Places where normal humans actually live.
Concrete pipes never looked so inviting. At the Prahran Hotel, a pub in Australia, stacks of pre-cast concrete tubes have been turned into cozy, wood-paneled booths for sharing a pint or two. From the outside, they look like kegs (get it?) or portholes—in any case, nothing remotely as dystopian as the phrase "concrete pipes" might evoke.
The Olympic Games are often a bittersweet milestone for a city, filled with economic and political ups and downs
Picnic season is upon us: Time for outside snacking, beers on the grass, sun on the face, and wind in the hair. These good times are often—and unfortunately—punctuated by the scourge of ground-sitters the world over: the inevitable wet butt mark that comes from settling down on damp earth. If only there was something to protect you!
As far as newspaper ads go, the classifieds are an especially boring section of tiny text and identically spaced columns. But it doesn’t always have to be so! This ingenious little ad for Corona’s kitchens by Colombia-based designer Felipe Salazar plays with the geometry of classified ads. An entire kitchen, complete with gas hood and stove, pops right out at you. You can’t do that with Craigslist.
In somewhat of a departure for the lofty French designer, Philipe Starck’s new range of furniture is produced in collaboration with a company called TOG—which prides itself on making all of its designs open source.
Hey, let’s all take a quick minute right now to acknowledge those brilliant beacons of books—free books, for goodness sake!—that dot towns across the country. The Public Library, a new hardback by photographer Robert Dawson, offers a poignant look at the incredible architectural range of these community hubs.
After creating a robot bird and dragonfly, automation company Festo shows off with another impressive animal replica. Like real kangaroos, Festo’s BionicKangaroo is not only great at jumping and keeping its balance, it can also store the energy generated from landing and use it for the next jump.
BionicKangaroo uses a combination of pneumatic actuators and electric servos to move and keep its balance.
According to Festo, the robot has an rubber elastic spring element that acts like an Achilles tendon: “It is fastened at the back of the foot and parallel to the pneumatic cylinder on the knee joint. The artificial tendon cushions the jump, simultaneously absorbs the kinetic energy and releases it for the next jump.”
To make the robot even fancier, Festo also made it so it can be controlled with gestures. The company uses the Myo armband to make BionicKangaroo move, stay or rotate in place. Watch BionicKangaroo hip hip hop and not stop:
It would’ve been way cooler if they made a BionicTigger instead. Check out Festo’s report (pdf) if you want to learn more about BionicKangaroo.
[via Ubergizmo]
Carolina Ferrari, Ilaria Vitali and Mengdi Xu designed Diffuse, a lamp designed to make laptop screens easy on the eyes in two ways. Diffuse can provide complementary ambient light or it can compensate for a dark environment with a soft white light. It’s Ambilight and F.lux in one.
Diffuse consists of a felt diffuser and a wooden box containing its electronics, which are mainly an Arduino Uno, two RGB LED strips and a light sensor. The box also houses a 12v rechargeable battery and a switch between the “Eye Pleasure” and “Eye Relief” modes. The felt diffuser attaches to the box via two magnets.
To use Diffuse, you just connect it to your laptop via its USB cable, turn it on and select which mode you want to use. In Eye Relief mode, Diffuse’s light sensor will analyze the brightness of the area immediately behind your screen. The lamp’s LEDs will then emit a white light to balance the brightness of your screen and your surroundings. To use Eye Pleasure mode you also need to install an application on your laptop. The application will read the average color of your screen in real time and relay it to Diffuse, which will then match the given color.
Sit back, relax and check out the Diffuse Team’s website for more on the lamp.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
