A sales receipt generally does two things: It tells you what you bought and how much you paid for it. But since cash registers can already spit out a yard's worth of coupons, why couldn't they also dispense a fortune-cookie surprise: a factoid, say, that might make you chuckle?
As an industrial designer and the CEO of a design agency with experience across many fields, I am struck by how difficult it has been for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry to successfully innovate to meet the needs of the ever-changing marketplace. How did that happen?
Imagine if I came up to you with the following business proposition: I have a bunch of tools. I want you to make Product X with them. Then, when Product X is finished, you'll get to use it. But I'll get to keep all the money that the product ever makes.
The average American wedding costs $24,000. The larky contraption you see here lets you say "I do" for $1.
Many fashionable women have become famous for their hats -- from Jackie O. and her demure pillboxes to the style icon Isabella Blow and her outrageous concoctions. And yet few, if any, designers have become household names for their millinery. So it's heartening to see the hatmaker Akio Hirata get his due, in Akio Hirata's Exhibition of Hats, a brilliantly produced installation on view at Tokyo's Spiral Garden until July 3.
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[Due to a trademark dispute with The New York Times, Project No.8 no longer sells the candle.--Ed.]
Perhaps it's fitting that we pause amid all the excitement around e-reader sales and mourn that one quality of the paper, which no Kindle may ever reproduce: the distinctive whiff of its genius. Granted, it's probably been a while since you bought a printed newspaper. So why not remember that sensation, with a candle that smells like newsprint when burned?
Science fiction is usually the province of filmmakers and novelists. But designers can get in on the action too, imagining products and services to meet needs that don't quite yet exist, but could soon. Ludwig Zeller has done exactly that with his Dromolux, a speed-reading training device that flashes single words onscreen in quick strobing succession. Who would want or need such a thing?
Architects are famous for going overboard on metaphors. Consider Becker Architekten, a German firm, which describes a recent project as summoning "a smoothed river stone" and 'a frozen wave.' Also: "a stranded whale."
Have you ever punched up a Google map on your laptop to get directions right before rushing out the door, and fumbled with the mechanics of getting it off your laptop screen and onto your smartphone? Tsung-Hsiang Chang feels your pain. He and Yang Li created an app called Deep Shot that uses your smartphone camera as a way of "migrating tasks across devices" -- or, as I like to think of it, teleporting your stuff from one screen to another. The demo video does a much better job of explaining it:
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