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Can architecture help ensure one's cultural survival? Considering that according to a 2007 YouGov poll less than half the population of Britain consider themselves British, architecture graduate Gemma Douglas presented her conceptual design at the Royal College of Art Show Two recently.
For UKHQ, a combined Ministry of Defence headquarters and integration centre for immigrants, Douglas explores imagery of cross-stitch needlepoint and heraldry, which she feels represent ideas of Britishness as symbols of national heritage.
But, one wonders if fabric identity will really help the Ministry of Defence to discover their softer side...
If it's not bad enough having to look through a sea of back-lit mobile phones and cameras at concerts, the proposed interactive wireless touchscreens built into each seat at Cisco Field, future home of the Oakland A's takes us one step closer to the Buy n Large utopia envisioned in WALL-E.
Attendees at this weekend's hacker-event-of-the-year in New York, The Last HOPE will receive RFID badges to improve physical networking at the conference.
...the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests.
The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests. Old-school hackers, network security experts, cryptographers, political activists, law geeks, lockpickers, reverse engineers, bloggers, privacy advocates, and far more--visitors can label themselves with multiple interests, to become discoverable by fellow visitors from around the world with similar interests, in the same room or across the building. Attendees can then use email or text messages to "ping" the people they discover on the site--new contacts and old friends alike...
...participation is voluntary. And attendees who do participate can choose to reveal as much or as little personal information as they desire. Users can see other users' handles, but contact information is not divulged until users send or reply to pings.
Sounds awesome but really, how many people in the room outside of the FBI do you think are going to be competing for the real identities of visitors.
In one of the most poorly-written press releases we've ever received--complete with photos that look like they were shot with a cell phone circa 1999--apparently "Illleana" (sic) Douglas is doing a web series with Ikea and a "Celebrity Cast:"
IKEA and SXM are pleased to announce the all-star cast for their new web-show Easy To Assemble. Created by and starring Illeana Douglas the new show will also feature Jeff Goldblum, Justine Bateman, Tom Arnold, Robert Patrick, Ed Begley Jr. and Greg Proops.
In the emerging world of online video there are few rules. These celebrities took part in the project because they were offered complete creative freedom to go against their type casts and experiment with improvisational material within the context of the show. Whether it was Jeff Goldblum doing a 10 minute improv monologue to a growing crowd of shoppers or Robert Patrick doing a scene with a real-time family chosen from within the store, in which he tries to prove that he actually tries to tell a joke.
And someone tried to prove that he actually tried to write a press release.
Which company do you think has won more IDEA awards, Samsung or Apple? Motorola or Nike? IDEO or Antenna Design? Art Center or Seoul National University?
For the answers, some of them surprising, check out Businessweek's charts of "which companies, schools and design firms have won the most medals in the past five years of the International Design Excellence Awards."
And of course, don't forget to stay current and take a gander at the just-announced 2008 IDEA Design Award Winners, with tons of purty pictures and descriptions.
Finally EU competition is also affecting Italian train service. Twenty-five red high-style trains, each with 11 carriages and 460 seats, will soon travel at 360 km an hour on the Italian tracks. Run by Nuovo Transporto Viaggiatori (ntv), an independent company, the trains will compete directly with Trenitalia, the main Italian train company.
AT&T recently announced a contract with Spring Water On Tap, an Atlanta-based natural spring water supplier that maintains fresh spring water supplies in large local tanks for all of it's customers' personal uses.
The solution which attaches ultrasonic sensors and interlinked cellular-based modems to 65-gallon water tanks, allows the company to discern water levels and alert delivery trucks to bring more of the wet stuff. Claiming that "AT&T takes a very broad holistic view of RFID." Percy Jones, CEO of SWOT, says:
AT&T has enabled our company to provide customers with a seamless supply of fresh spring water at all times while unobtrusively monitoring the water levels in our customers' homes.
Ummm, given the fact that Georgia is experiencing severe to moderate drought in all but 5 counties, I'm wondering: shouldn't they be using this for monitoring the aquifers instead?
This clip's being doing the rounds but it's too good not to post. Japanese company Kajima demolish skyscrapers one floor at a time, the ground level is jacked-up on massive computer-controlled pillars, cleared out and lowered, the process repeated until the whole building is gone.
The technique is known as 'daruma-otoshi', named after a Japanese game where players have to skillfully knock out the bottom parts of a column without letting the whole thing tumble over. Kajima claims this process reduces the environmental impact of demolition as it's easier to separate materials for recycling and minimizes noise and dust released into the air.
Responsible for leading the design and development of specific Belkin products and product lines. Oversee the design and development process, from initial research through production. Ensure that Belkin products are recognized for quality and innovation. Strive to create inspiring designs that challenge the market place, while developing around manufacturing and financial constraints. Ensure that product development objectives and schedules are met. Develop products through conceptual sketching, 3D model studies and computer software.
There isn't much that can relieve one of some malodorous buttface getting all up in your window seat space, but if you've had the chance to fly Virgin America, you at least know that distractions are your best friend. From mood lighting to snacks and booze at your fingertips, music, games, television, and seat-to-seat chatting, the new Red in-flight system creates an environment that passengers actually want and like to be in. Buttface who?
"If you see a hot girl in 22A, you can text message her...but she might decline," explained Charles Ogilvie, Creative Designer and Inventor of Red. But beyond the lovely novelties and comforts, Red's networked system is designed to be flexible so as to improve your experience the next time around and around and so on and so forth. Unbeknownst to the common passenger, the Red remote, used for controls, typing, and what you can't do on touch-screens, performs objective consumer research by recording the choices people make and laying it all out for analysis to produce learnings that make the cabin a cozier, happier, snappier place to be.
VA travelers can soon look forward to WiFi in the sky, with A/C outlets already in place and waiting at every seat.
You're more likely to recognize the work of London-based Morph duo Bill Holding and Ben Cox in the projects they've done with Peter Saville then their kitchenware for Joseph Joseph. Nest 8 is a bold color explosion as much as it is functional, consolidating non-slip mixing bowls, measuring cups and a juicer russian-doll style for easy storage.
Today's 2008 PSFK Conference in San Francisco got some smiles from the morning crowd with a panel gathered to toot the horn of said city for a good 40 minutes. So what keeps SF, whose footprint is microscopic compared to other global hubs, on the innovation forefront? Amit Gupta (Jelly, Photojojo, CommandShift3) argues it's exactly that--being good at being on the forefront. "L.A. exports movies, New York exports hipness, and we export startups." Liz Dunn (Funny or Die) says the city holds its own, not despite, but thanks to its bite-sizedness. "When a city has a lot of money and power at stake, change is very scary. When you're small and have nothing to lose like us, you can just freestyle it."
Then there's this phenomenon of community where people here can't seem to get enough of each other and build tools to stay together online and in (real not Second) life to ensure their connectedness. "There's water and electricity and Twitter," chuckled wise guy Jeremy Townsend (Ghetto Gourmet), as he pointed out how Bay Area residents treat access to communication and collaboration as a vital utility.
The best quips were blurted when comparing SF to the "other" cities: "L.A. is filled with common people who attempt to appear presumptuous and SF has a bunch of presumptuous people who try hard to be seen as common," noted Townsend. Dunn elaborated by explaining that "L.A. gets all the beautiful people, New York has all the rich people, and we're the nerds left over who said 'well we didn't want to hang out with them anyway.'" True that. But in the end, the general attitude of always wanting to make something better and embracing the strange and unknown, which feeds the city's notorious tie-dyed, hippie-dippie rep, is a true indicator that success and leadership can certainly be had while smoking some optimism.
Date: 18 July 2008 - 02:06
