Hasta La Gadget!

A new robot concept is raising the hopes of the building industry that the high-tech future will be populated with smart excavating robots that will easily replace the high-cost of insurance-needing human contractors.

If the Eddy machine comes to pass, it also appears that gravediggers soon will be looking for a job.

The Eddy is a useful robot in the same tradition as the iRobots used by the U.S. Army. It is remote-controlled and can serve as a physical extension of its operator. It’s supposed to suck up dirt, debris, and other nasty stuff in the endless, joyless fashion of super tough engineering materials.

According to the designers, the key to the design is the wide pipe embedded within the center of the robot. Because it is flexible (exact materials aren’t specified) the robot can extend its reach mid-dig at larger angles than regular big digs, has greater flexibility, and also better maneuverability and speed than current digging operators.

Probably the best part of the design, however, is that it fits in a modular outlook to excavation, with a dash of robot individualism. Smaller Eddys can be used throughout a construction site and when they need more power, they can jack up to a large Big Daddy suck-up machine. This means you can continue using some Eddys strategically while using one for the dig that needs the most power.

This will also be useful in case you find a dead body on the front porch and don’t want to get your hands dirty.

Before you get all “Oh, that comment was so heartless” on us, we will say that the spectacles you’re peeping above are still a concept for now, though we wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that Kanye himself eventually funds their commercialization. At any rate, designers Hyun-Joong Kim and Kwang-Seok Jeong should be mighty proud of their concoction, which integrates dye solar cells into fashion-forward sunglasses in order to power your pocketable gadgets. Put simply, the SIG (Self-Energy Converting Sunglasses) convert the sunlight that they’ll obviously see into usable energy, though it should be understood that these could give the impression that you’re rockin’ a head-mounted display. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?

[Via Engadget Polska]

Filed under: Wearables

Solar panel-packin’ sunglasses power your gizmos, make Kanye inordinately envious originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wood paneling and silver-painted plastic used to be cool; so I wonder when our current metal and glass gadgets will go out of style, and if so, what will future gadgets be made from?

I asked several designers what they thought, but Kara Johnson, the lead of the Materials Team at design company IDEO, had the final word based on her focused expertise related to the question at hand. Her answer is a bit heady, but I won’t get in the way of what she’s telling us about tomorrow’s gadget materials.

“Plastic as we know it is kind of on the way out, especially when it’s painted. No one likes the way your phone’s paint chips at the corners after a few months of use. Unpainted plastic is the future. And we need to move beyond injection molding, look at sheet processes to build structure from a series of 2d layers, instead of molding a complete 3d structure.

Glass, as a part of the screen, won’t go away very quickly. But maybe we’ll find ways to use glass so that it’s more difficult to create cracks with an accidental drop on the kitchen floor. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from automotive glass windshields or scratch resistant coatings on eyewear. And why not etch the glass?

Metal will continue to be a player in the world of gadgets. It’s beautiful and appropriate to create thin, mobile, technology-based products. Extruded aluminum is a design opportunity that has not yet been fully explored in terms of form or function. With the introduction of laser etching or chemical etching or a detailed craft process like wire filigree, we should be exploring the use of pattern on metal or to create surfaces. This is more evident in large-scale products or architecture where metal is used to create elegant structures or to create a frame for other elements of pattern. By translating innovations in metal from a large scale to something small, we will find new design opportunities, too.

So what’s next?

I think we need to experiment with how we design the buttons that connect hardware and software experiences. This is a design element whose materiality has been relatively unchanged, and there is more opportunity here to create ceramic or wood details (where the drop test requirements can be quietly avoided)…What if the power button was made of stone? What if the LEDs shine thru a thin layer of bamboo? We also need to experiment with the screen itself, this element has been limited to the display of information. What if the screen folds or unfolds? What if the glass is textured or etched with communication icons or pattern? Finally, in the future, I think that we should experiment with creating decoration or function by introducing incredibly surprising technologies (high-tech or low-tech) – like ferrofluid or starch-based plastics.

If the next generation of gadgets is about experimenting with materials or materiality, then it will only be not about what materials we use but how we use materials to tell stories.

What does vinyl mean to music and media players? Can phone be made of fabric so it is ready-to-wear, like the clothes you keep in your closet? What does traditional craft mean to high-tech products? What is the physical connection between these objects of fetish and the internet buzz that proceeds/follows each product launch? How do we create real and tangible advertising for the next CE products? And look for the introduction of “new” materials in the small details of each product…the platform of these devices is relatively standardized by its components, phones and laptops are a commodity. The design is in the details and the story you tell.”

—Kara Johnson, lead of the Materials Team at IDEO, is the co-author of Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design and the forthcoming book, I Miss My Pencil

Our friends at Luxist first reported this one and we just had to share it. Louis Vuitton offers their bespoke art in the form of this decadent custom iPod carrying case.   So if you need a way to carry around 20 ipods and a JBL subwoofer, then this is the iPod case for you!

Made of black Taiga leather with brass fittings and a red microfiber interior, a custom case like this can be ordered and tailor made to accommodate any configuration of accessories.  However, it will take four to eight months and cost you tens of thousands of dollars.  Hand it to fashion kingpin Karl Lagerfeld to commission Louis Vuitton to take something designed to be as small and portable as possible and encase it inside a huge piece of decadent luggage!

Fans of artist Hannah Stouffer can check out her newest work in a collection called “Darkness Falls Forever” presented by Foreign Family at Gallery Five Four Four now thru December 10th in Los Angeles.  

At Etchstar you can choose from Hannah’s collection of graphic designs for laser engraving that come directly from her most well-known pieces. Laser engrave Hannah Stouffer’s unique graphic aesthetic with a design from her collection at Etchstar, JournalEngraver or NotebookEngraver.