Carl Archambeault: you sir, are a champion. We’re not exactly sure if you’re on a first-class seat to Redmond or not, but the boys and girls in Washington could probably stand to learn a thing or two from the Xbox 1080. ‘Course, that’s probably just the fanboy in us talking — after all, who wouldn’t want the powers of an Xbox 360 and a Zune HD merged into one beautiful handheld? — but could you imagine the market shakeup if this thing became real? Paging Mr. Benjamin J. Heckendorn!
What will mobile handsets look like in the next twenty years? We were lucky enough to see some futuristic prototypes on display here in Tokyo, and were blown away by the technological progress each one represents. KDDI’s Design Project has long been a forward-thinking experiment in mobile design, and this goes hand-in-hand with that spirit. Otherwise, how could we ever use our phones as drumsticks?
Down at the KDDI Designing Studio in Harajuku there’s a nice display from the design team at Daisan Matsue Elementary School in Edogawa-ku. They set out to make their perfect mobile devices and came up with some ideas that are nicely out of the box.
HIGHLIGHTS: The YS23 Baseball Phone turns into a baseball when you throw it, but that’s nothing compared to the fireproof and stylus-sporting L-109AC that enables you to fly when you push the “Fly” button. The KUMA222 sports more practical functionality with its “Home” button. According to the documentation, after pushing the button you go home. Nice!
The No123 sports a clover lucky charm so you’ll always be happy, and features a “happy camera” that makes you smile in the pictures. The phone in the middle (below) that looks like a smiley house with a cannon on it? It acts as a “warp” to teleport you from place to place.
Sounds like the Japanese kids today have pretty high demands for the future of mobile here, and I hope they aren’t disappointed, but there are a couple of points that stuck with me. First, they all pretty much stuck to the clamshell design that Japanese tend to like, and were pretty button-heavy, but at the same time they didn’t limit their handsets to “phone” features much at all. Mobile to them is about games, flying, teleporting, photos, and being happy. That, and the phones were pretty cute as well, and that might be more important than anything. More KDDI prototypes from the past can be seen HERE.
Perfection down to the smallest detail: let the new LETTERMAN XXL by Radius Design surprise you with all it can hold! Under its generous upper flap is a practical holder for newspapers and magazines, protecting everything from the wind and rain with its capacious format. The striking peephole makes this model a real eye-catcher – and is also practical. It means that you can tell at a glance whether that love-letter that you have been waiting so impatiently to receive has finally arrived.
Let me be honest, I don’t want surfboards to be designed on computers, sent to factories in Thailand and shipped back to us en masse without the shaper ever touching the material. I’m not a purist – really I’m not. And as someone who doesn’t make surfboards, and will never try, I have no right to expound righteously on this subject. But still, a big part of me – I think the part that wishes we all grew a different rare vegetable on our windowsills and bartered with each other from our front porches at meal time – wants surfboard shapers to be people who still draw their visions in the sand and give boards away from banana leaf huts.
To anyone actually trying to make a living from designing surfboards, which have notoriously low profit margins, that’s unfair. But you should know my bias, and know that as I drive to meet this former Apple designer guy, Thomas Meyerhoffer, the man who designed that translucent eMate for Apple in the 90’s and has become recently renowned for using his technology chops to design some revolutionary type of surfboard, one that looks like a compressed hour-glass alien spaceship, I have my reservations. It doesn’t help that Meyerhoffer, a very hip man with a Swedish accent, a thin goatee, and a shaved head, meets me in the parking lot of his home break in Montara in a shiny white BMW.
Man, this is not how it should be, I’m thinking from the smelly confines my rusting van with 230,000 miles on it (you do detect a hint of jealousy). This is just not, not – not wholesome.
But neither would it be wholesome for me to judge this man so early in our daylong relationship. I have to give him a chance. It’s our first date. And since the waves are slop here in Montara, we decide to drive up to Ocean Beach, San Francisco, for a better shot at testing out his gizmos. (And no, I don’t like calling surfboards gizmos, and yes, I’m feeling a little bitter that Meyerhoffer wouldn’t let me take photos of his Miami Vice looking home to remember the scene. I mean, what surfer cares about that kind of stuff? But the drive will give me a chance to drop into a less judgmental space. We are all one, all one.)
We are rounding the bluffs on Highway 1, chatting casually now, and while Meyerhoffer explains about quitting Apple 10 years ago and starting to surf everyday, I’m not really listening. I’m thinking about the fact that I too am so dependent on technology, recording our conversation on my iPhone. I’m forcing myself to see myself as the same as Meyerhoffer. These are the exercises strange people have to do to feel normal. And surprisingly, it doesn’t take long.
For starters, Meyerhoffer is nice. And I like nice people. And he doesn’t seem at all weirded out by the fact that the doors on my van don’t work, which goes a long way in my book. Also, he went to art school. One I haven’t even heard of. And he’s deep. “A surfboard is a very complex shape, a never-ending curve,” he says at some point in the conversation, and I like this statement. With his accent, it sounds like a sort of koan. Can curves really never end?
And like this, five minutes into our drive, Meyerhoffer has transformed into a sort of bohemian guy who just happens to have lots of money, a friend you might want to give you advice on your love life or what sort of refrigerator to buy or whether to quit your job and take up oil painting.
In other words, I can finally listen to him.
So let’s start over, shall we?
Curves are a good place to start. Meyerhoffer is all about them. He recently designed the first “soft computer” for a start-up called Chumby, which is like a little beanbag with Wifi. It’s very cute. He also designs bubbly ski goggles, snowboard bindings, expensive chairs that look like something George Clooney would model in, windsurfing sails. He is a refiner, taking stuff that already works well and making that stuff work better, in an out of the box kind of way of course.
That’s cool. Whatever.
But a surfboard? This is sacred terrain. Every surfer knows that real shaping is an art that only a select few – usually hand-craftsman who have been surfing since they were in the womb and who have been anointed by the Hawaiian gods – really excel at, and even fewer become innovative enough to design something that is profoundly innovative and functional. Meyerhoffer started surfing later in life and he designed these alien boards with CAD software, which would be the equivalent of making French wine in steel barrels. You might get away with it in Napa, but you’d be barred from Bordeaux for life.
Meyerhoffer is clearly used to the heavy skepticism. “I never did this to get famous,” he says without my prompting. “I did it so people could enjoy a different feeling…People see the board and they think that I made it like this to differentiate it from other surfboards. Or they think, ‘oh parabolic, it’s like a ski.’ But it has nothing to do with that. I didn’t design the board to look like this. It just became like this. I started to take away, and I took away a lot of mass. So where do you take away? You take away where you don’t need.”
Meyerhoffer determined that what you don’t need is all that rail, and he basically scooped out chunks at the waist of the board and took in the tail drastically, making it long and narrow.
The idea came over five years of trial and error at solving a problem. Meyerhoffer loved longboarding because of the momentum you get with a big boat-like plank. But he missed the agility of a high performance shortboard. He also liked single-fin hulls, a sort of in between model, for their speed and glide. But those boards, Meyerhoffer found, really only work well on point waves that usually have a predictable way of peeling down the line. Most of us surfers find ourselves in the same predicament and so spend enormous amounts of time and money acquiring just the right combination of boards to fit the changing conditions and our fickle moods. Meyerhoffer set out to make a board that could do it all. He was bound to be criticized, at least by those closed-minded surfers, whoever they are.
The model he has started to settle on, the one we are about to ride, is the result of letting himself make a lot of boards that simply failed. “Sometimes I’d go out on these really weird boards that I know won’t work at all and I look like a total kook,” he laughs. “But I still have to take them out to test a theory.” Anyone who has suffered the stink eye one gets from surfing poorly on a good wave knows what a sacrifice that is. But it appears, at least from the press, to be paying off with this model, which has been receiving praise from the likes of pro surfer Peter Mel. Retired pro surfer Mike Tabeling has gone so far as to buy one Meyerhoffer in every size. He recently told Surfer Magazine, “That’s what the Meyerhoffer does-it brings back the fun of your shortboard days, as you can make this longboard really turn.”
But this is all rhetoric. I may like Meyerhoffer after our friendly drive, but I still think his alien babies in the back of my van are likely dripping radioactive material into the bag of stale chips I’m planning on salvaging for lunch. And since I’m not a longboarder, I wonder if Meyerhoffer’s claim that I can surf it like a shortboard will be even close to true. Doubtful.
We’ve arrived at Ocean Beach, which is basically slop as well: two to three feet and disorganized. Meyerhoffer doesn’t seem like the stressed out type, but he is visibly uncomfortable from this. Even after good press in Surfer Magazine, The Surfer’s Journal and some The New York Times, Meyerhoffer seems to be trying to convince the surfing community that his works of art are worth around $800 a pop, not to mention worth every single person you meet on the beach asking, “what the hell is that?”
“It’s just going to feel like crap if we go out here,” he says.
And there is no time to keep looking for waves. So, after fielding 10 or 15 questions from surfers who approach with their heads cocked – “are you the Apple surfboard guy?” –in we go, paddling over the rough, textured deep green lines, through wisps of fog, on our brand new Meyerhoffers, which, to my surprise, feel really good to paddle: light, streamlined, comfortable.
I have a theory that any good board feels that way from the very first paddle. So far, I have to admit that the alien board feels down right proper. And fortunately, it’s not as bad as it looked from shore. A relatively clean line churns toward me.
Game time.
I get in easy, just like I would on a longboard, minimal paddling, and begin cruising down the line of a waist-high crumbler. I do some pumps along the face and – wow, ok — it bobs along the face much more easily than a normal board this length. Less responsive than a shortboard, but still, impressive. Without much rocker, the board is certainly fast and as the wave peters out, I edge toward the nose to hang five. That works too. Damn it, these things actually surf – like, well.
I paddle back unable to conceal my grin, but trying. Meyerhoffer grins back. He can tell I like it. Technology is winning. Maybe a dolphin will come and bite the nose off. Yea, that’d be cool.
And besides, that was just one wave. I didn’t need to turn. I’m pretty sure that when I do the board will just topple over with all that rail missing. But, on my next wave, as I go to cut back, the thing just flips around in a 180, like one of my little twin-fin boards would. And that’s just weird. Boards this long and buoyant don’t turn like that, not the ones I’ve ridden.
This is – I admit – very, very fun.
And so I surrender to the superiority of the machine. My crusade is over. Insert a chip in my head and get it over with. And the icing on the cake is that you can feel how the Meyerhoffer works while you’re riding. If feels just the way he described it to me in the car. “Once you’re on a steeper wave,” he explained, “you ride on the back of the board, the tail, so you don’t need the stuff on the front of the board and it will feel like a shortboard. But you still want to be able to nose ride it and have that length, plus have the board transition so that once you paddle into a slightly steeper wave it has the drive of a shorter board too. And that’s it.” I get it: a shortboard inside a longboard. It’s sort of like, oh screw it, an iPhone.
And there’s your sure sign of the apocalypse – comparing a surfboard to a mini computer. We might as well, as Stephen Colbert recently put it, go have “end of the world sex”.
I’m still holding out some hope that Meyerhoffer will stop having his boards manufactured in Thailand and start hand shaping them from recycled egg carton foam and sell them only to Tibetan refugees within a 10-mile radius of his garage. (He’ll have to make an exception for my friends and me, of course.)
But I have a hunch that his new design may be the beginning of a whole new wave of surfboards. I still think the design has something to do with aliens and radioactivity, but that will just be fodder for a cool comic book series where Meyerhoffer becomes immortal.
Trademark on that idea by the way. I’m not that much of a hippie.
[Video/Photos by Robert, who took many waves to the head to get them]
Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.
Inhabitat: Just because clothing is organic, doesn’t mean it has to be boring and bland. Case in point: Barley & Birch’s kids collection of tees and onesies which are brand new in the Inhabitatshop! Emblazoned with splashy graphics like prickly cacti, breezy trees and even the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, these designs are perfect for your little treehugger.
Barley & Birch was once just a gleam in founder Kyle Smitley’s eye. After earning her degree in environmental science, she wished that the “organic” clothing that she was purchasing for the children of friends and family was a little cuter and a lot more environmentally and socially responsible than what was currently available. She also felt a strong desire to continue to work and help the communities that she had gotten to know during her time in countries like Haiti, El Salvador and New Zealand. The solution? Kyle’s very own line held to the highest social and environmental standards with a portion of the profits going to organizations working to improve the lives of people all over the world – thus, Barley & Birch was born.
It might seem like Apple’s been ignoring its non-Pro MacBook line lately — even doing hardware updates on the sly — but consumers haven’t, and they’ve been lapping up that solitary SKU with unabated enthusiasm. No surprise then that Cupertino would have bigger plans on the horizon, and AppleInsider claims Apple’s engineers are already hard at work on an “industrial design overhaul” for the humble 13-incher, with some configurations expected to come in under the current $999 price point. Great news if you’re lusting after a Mac, but still want to be able to buy groceries — right, Giampaulo?
Women buy a lot of gadgets, but it’s easy for us to feel invisible in the world of consumer electronics. Gadgets — not to mention gadget blogs — often seem overwhelmingly marketed towards males. And that’s too bad, because the electronics industry is missing a big opportunity.
Although women spend less than men on gadgets overall, we are still a very significant class of consumers. Nearly 40 percent of spending in consumer electronics comes from women, says the NPD group. Other estimates are much higher. Women account for about 85 percent of all consumer purchases and represent the majority of shoppers online.
Yet gadget companies seem to find it difficult to design, produce and market products to women without resorting to stereotypes. The current strategy among most gadget makers is that if it is for women, it must be pink or sparkly.
Recently, I got an e-mail from ChicBlvd, a company that create electronics products for women. The Vista, California-based company, which was started by two women, said it has earphones and iPod cases that are available in colors such as Bubble Gum and Pomegranate Purple and studded with Swarovski crystals.
“All pieces are created for a woman’s needs in mind: a woman on-the-go looking for fashion, function and convenience in their electronics,” says the company in its press release.
So far so good. But a look through the company’s website and I was horrified. The earphones are sparkly, shiny and seem to play into every stereotype of products designed for women. The Love Buds earphones, for instance, have little hearts studded with crystals.
ChicBlvd is quite clear with its messaging. These are products, apparently favored by celebrities, and for women who want to look like celebrities.
Sure, Paula Abdul may love these ear phones, but is this really what women want from gadget manufacturers?
Want another example of how gadgets are made for women today? Take the Asus Eee PC 1005HA-V Seashell. It’s painted a Pepto Bismol pink. Unfathomable as it may be to these companies, I would bet a majority of adult women don’t want to carry a sugary pink PC to work.
If you think pink and sparkly strategy is lazy, so is slapping a designer label on a product for women and pricing it much higher than similar products. HP Vivienne Tam netbook, I am looking at you. The netbook hit some of the right notes. It’s a pleasant red, has a stylish exterior and comes with a matching Vivienne Tam designed clutch. But for those perks, women have to shell out $700, much more than the $350 for a comparable HP black or blue netbook.
There’s a raging debate among the digerati on diversity in technology and if women get fair representation when it comes to opportunity to speak at conferences and other tech events. When it comes to consumer electronics, I can say, women are a misunderstood and neglected community.
Designing and creating products for real women shouldn’t be so difficult. Real women want stylish products. They want products that are fashionable, competitively priced and easy to use. And marketing tricks such as MSI’s ‘boys catching a laptop with their butt‘ isn’t going to help send the right message.
There are a few companies, such as headset maker Jawbone, who get it right. Jawbone’s Bluetooth headsets are very well-designed, come in some gorgeous colors and there’s no differential pricing between the same product for men and women. And have you seen a Jawbone ad? It’s beautifully conceptualized, reminiscent of a high fashion photo shoot and, I would be willing to bet, irresistible in its appeal to most women.
Another example is Apple. Their advertising is catchy, their products are stylish and come in colors, which while vivid, don’t ever tip over into tween territory. A recent poll by SRG seems to agree, rating Apple as the top brand among women.
Dell is also taking a a step in the right direction. Dell’s latest netbooks come with some really nice designs, finishes such as rubber and choice of colors. And the company’s new ad that wraps notebooks like candies is sure to be liked as much by women as by men.
So it can’t be that difficult to create gadgets for women. Leave your prejudices at the door and think outside the pink, sparkly, shiny stereotype.
Joey Roth blew our collective minds way back in 2007 with his conceptual Felt Mouse, but now the designer is taking his creations to the next level by actually shipping a few. The simply named Ceramic Speakers boast only 10 watts of output per channel, though each 4-inch full-range driver is housed in an acoustically dead porcelain and cork chamber that should do quite a lot with quite a little. We can’t say we’re totally fond of the expected $400 to $500 price tag when these go on sale in October, but toss in a similarly designed subwoofer and we just might bite.
Iconoculture: Until recently, most fashionistas wouldn’t be caught dead in the same frock every day for a whole year. But that’s exactly what style-setter Sheena Matheiken is doing with the Uniform Project, her effort to showcase a sustainable wardrobe model and raise money for charity.
Every day, Matheiken dons 1 of her 7 identical little black dresses, but she switches up the look with accessories like hats, tights and shoes. Daily images are posted on her website.
She takes donations — and gives $1 per outfit of her own money — for the Akanksha Foundation, which helps educate underprivileged children in India.
Wearing the same dress every day is an extreme example, but cost- and eco-conscious fashionistas are interested in maximizing the use of the clothing they purchase to limit their dependency on throwaway threads.
Accessories are allowing consumers to experiment with different looks for a lot less than the cost of changing up the clothes.
We all know that those ink cartridge refills never really function perfectly as advertised, so rather than paying too much to have a lackluster printing experience, boxlightbox has decided to repurpose his empty Epson boxes into prepossessing lighting instruments. The simple (albeit masterly) lamps maintain the iconic presence of an ink cartridge while still fitting into the overall feel of an art deco home. At $350, the sensational Ink-Cartridge Chandelier shown above certainly isn’t the cheapest of fixtures, but for those who spend entirely too much time at Kinko’s, it’s totally worth the investment. Hit the read link for more ways to spend money that you don’t have — or, you know, to just get a few ideas for scratching that DIY itch.
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.
