Last week, Nike unwrapped a project it has been working on for two years, and which will go on sale next month: Nike Fuelband, a rubber wristband that aims to track your every move, and how active you’ve been throughout the day. If that sounds both a little bit awesome and a little bit suspect, we’re with you: We reported on Jawbone’s ballyhooed attempt to create something just like that.
The dirty little secret about energy-efficient architecture is that it requires a whole lot of work. You can build what seems like the greenest house in the world, but it won’t live up to its potential if you don’t manage the sun screens and adjust the thermostat and flip off the lights religiously when you leave.
At this point, we should probably retire the word "smartphone" and just call the touch-screen-equipped real-world tricorders we all carry "phones." They’re the market standard in both functionality and form factor.
In Measuring Angst, artist Jonathan Schipper has designed a robot that holds fragile pieces of beer-bottle glass in its knuckles, pulling them apart and putting them back together again in an endless loop. But because glass is so cheap, the break isn’t so much drawn from life because if you throw a bottle against a wall, it just smashes into thousands of little pieces.
The folks at the London-based “ideas agency” Syzygy just sent us this illustration by their creative director, Peter Jaworowski, of the “20 greatest, funniest and most insane internet events from 2011.” Here’s the thing: You have to guess what they are by decoding the visual clues.
This year was the last Microsoft keynote at CES and by most accounts the bright spot was the expansion of the Kinect line with a new Kinect for Windows.
In October 2011, designer Frank Tjepkema (a.k.a. Tjep) attended Dutch Design Week. "I was struck by how little the design world seems to react to the immanent economic crisis threatening Europe and the world," he says.
In an effort to make up for his colleagues’ deficiencies, Tjep created the Recession Chair.
Sweden loves its experimental education, but here’s a venture that’s far-fetched even by Swedish standards: It’s a school without walls.
That’s right. Vittra Telefonplan, in Stockholm, was designed according to the principles of the Swedish Free School Organization Vittra, an educational consortium that doesn’t believe in classrooms or classes.
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