Coolhunting
Introducing: Sony’s Open Planet Ideas
Sep 1st
We’re excited by the recent trend toward open-source design approaches, with Continuum’s Open for Branding project, Betacup on the Jovoto platform, and the recent announcement of Open IDEO. So, we’re especially thrilled to be able to announce and track, first-hand, Open Planet Ideas, a promising collaboration between Sony and global conservation group WWF, utilizing the Open IDEO platform.
This challenge is a great one for designers: using existing Sony technologies, either on their own or in unique combinations, how can we address key sustainability issues in new ways? Sony provides information about all their available tech, the WWF provides all the latest environmental facts and figures, and participants provide their fresh inventor minds. Casting a wide net, Sony is betting on the myriad of ideas that can come from a community of people both interested in environmental issues and capable of re-purposing anything from GPS units to dye-sensitized solar cells. Participants can also propose disruptive new applications from nine ‘seed’ technologies, used alone or in new combinations.
Today kicks off the initial inspiration phase, open through October 1, in which participants upload inspirations and observations in the form of photos, stories, or videos. With community input, the best insights will be synthesized, and the challenge will be re-framed to kick off the concept phase.
Delft Design Guide posted online
Sep 1st
The Delft University of Technology’s Industrial Design Engineering department has posted their “Delft Design Guide” online, for free PDF download. The content in the guide is drawn largely from five of their design courses: Introduction to Industrial Design, Concept Design, Fuzzy Front End, Materialization and Detailing, and their Final Project course.
Posted alongside the guide is this video interview with Jeroen van Erp, an alumnus, faculty member, and part of the Dutch creative agency Fabrique. (Warning: The sound is horrible, as if it were recorded with one of those snazzy DSLRs with amazing video capabilities but a terrible microphone. Get ready to lean in close to your speakers.)
Hit the jump to learn more about what’s in the Guide.
Puma’s new Mopion cargo bike
Sep 1st
Danish industrial design firm KiBiSi and Danish bicycle manufacturer Biomega have teamed up with Puma to release the Mopion cargo bike, a sort of pickup-truck version of the Puma Boston bike:
[The Mopion] mixes city bike features and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.
The stretch two-wheeler will officially launch in mere hours at Eurobike and goes on sale in Spring of next year.
Champagne bottles getting a subtle re-design
Sep 1st
I once accidentally shot a girl I was trying to date in the head with a champagne cork. She was standing next to me as I opened the bottle; the cork slipped my grasp, shot straight up, hit the ceiling, and came down squarely atop her noggin. It all happened in a second and I didn’t even realize what had happened–I basically opened the bottle, heard a pop and then she fell down, holding her head and going “Fuuuuuuck!” (Afterwards she was fine, though our budding romance was not.)
The amount of pressure inside a champagne bottle, in addition to being calibrated to destroy my relationships, is much greater than what’s inside a bottle of beer. To prevent explosions, champagne bottles are made extra-thick and extra-heavy, nearly two pounds each. Multiply that by the 300 million bottles of Champagne that France ships every year and you’ve got a lot of carbon emissions. To combat this, the French are developing a new, slimmer-walled champagne bottle that weighs less.
Jack Zylkin throws his hat into the retro-tech ring with a typewriter-keyboard
Sep 1st
On physical objects becoming less and less physically weighty: Nowadays if you drop your phone, it may not survive. The other day I caught a snippet of GoodFellas, the part where Robert Deniro uses a 1970s-era telephone receiver to bludgeon a crony. Try to do that with your iPhone or Droid X and you’d have a confused, unbloodied crony and a cracked touchscreen.
Keyboards are less substantial now too, and typing on my laptop doesn’t make the racket an old metal-on-metal typewriter did. But just as we’ve seen old phone receivers nostalgically connected to cell phones, David Schultze’s Philco PC, Mac Classic iPad holders, and J. Stephenson’s wonderful retro computers, here comes Jack Zylkin’s Instructable for a typewriter USB keyboard.
Ars Electronica 2010 Kicks Off Tomorrow!
Sep 1st
“There’s no time left for warnings. We’re in it up to our necks right now–in the climate crisis, Surveillance Society, the bankruptcy of the financial sector … We’ve passed the points of no return.”
Ars Electronica 2010 is more than just a festival – it’s a call for action! The festival for art, technology and society will dive into the “mess we’ve gotten into” in order to move things back in the right direction.
This year’s festival titled REPAIR takes place from 2-11 September in Linz (Austria) with more than 200 exhibitions, productions and events at the Tabakfabrik, a former tobacco processing plant. Core is on site to bring you the necessary lifesavers.
Ars Electronica is a yearly festival which made its debut on September 18, 1979. Since then, Ars Electronica has developed itself into one of the world’s most recognized media art festivals packed with symposia, exhibitions, performances and interventions. You can check the full program here.
"Politics Please, We’re Social Designers," by Cameron Tonkinwise
Sep 1st
On August 5th, the Parsons DESIS Lab (of which I am a member) opened an exhibition at the Abrons Arts Center in the Lower East Side of New York City. The exhibition, running until September 15th, is part of the DESIS Lab’s Amplifying Creative Communities research project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2009 NYC Cultural Innovation Fund. (DESIS = Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability, an international network of researchers.)
The exhibition is not a curation of findings at the end of the project, but a research tool in the middle of a project. It is one of a number of initiatives that are part of the Amplifying Creative Communities project to find examples of people who have taken it upon themselves to innovate new ways of resourcing their everyday lives, normally involving some sort of sharing. The assumption is that people around the world are giving up waiting for government or business to develop more sustainable (both ecologically and socially) ways of living and working, and so are starting to do it for themselves. Having found these sorts of innovations, the project is then exploring how design can enhance their effectiveness, and how design can help others take up similar innovations.
