From the BBC:

A giant “digital cloud” that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.

The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

…

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

“We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”

…

The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.

“We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.

…

The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.

“It would be a zero power cloud,” he said.

As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.

That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.

I was going to call this 50mins of pure mind candy, but that doesn’t quite capture it.  Mind superfood might be a better description.  Matt Webb’s opening keynote for Wedirections South is an mp3 superfood capsule for your brain.  You just can’t unhear his ideas, it is true synapse rewiring material;  this description barely does it justice:

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web - breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero - for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design - playful and rational all at once - to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

So grab the mp3 and load it onto your prefered player, or just hit play on this embed:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Bonus Content!

As Matt says on his blog, this was an extension of his Reboot 11 presentation:

You should watch this too.

I want this on my desk right now:

Click through to see the full glory of Frank Buchwald’s Machine Light series, and decide which one goes on your covet-list.

From A Distinctive World:

The Autonomobile (ATNMBL) is a concept car is designed around passenger, rather than driver, experience with architectural styling, a lounge-like interior and fully glazed sides

New Scientist brings us the work of UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau. They believe that “if robots are ever to be welcomed into people’s homes, they’ll need to fit in with the rest of the furniture, and earn their keep”.

This lampshade is just one of their designs.

Insects are lured into the shade by ultraviolet lights - which are lit only at night - and become trapped.

Trapped insects eventually fall into the fuel cell below.

This generates electricity to power the ultraviolet LEDs, which can then switch on to trap more flies when the house lights are off.

Keep reading for more such interesting designs.

This is some serious industrial design/car pr0n. From Pink Tentacle:

In Mazda’s vision of the late 2050s, advances in molecular engineering have rendered metal-based manufacturing obsolete. The rise of ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence drastically accelerates the automotive production cycle…A “haptic skin” suit consisting of millions of microscopic actuators enables the driver to experience the road psycho-somatically while receiving electrical muscle stimulation from the onboard AI guidance system…The vehicle’s entire structure is comprised of a 100% reprototypable, carbon nanotube/shape memory alloy weave with a photovoltaic coating, which allows the vehicle to mimic the driver’s body movements while powering the in-wheel electrostatic motors.

Keep reading for more..

via Futurismic

by Pouyan Mokhtarani

via BoingBoing | Street Anatomy

From PlayMeDesign:

Master student Hans Alexander Huseklepp at AHO, have made the concept “Immaculate” that explores new possibilities for prosthetic devices. Instead of imitating a normal arm he wants apply the same philosophy used in eyewear. And make the products go from being purely functional to become objects of fashion and identity!

via Medgadget

My friend Skot Deeming has just come up with this neat design for the tx:style carpet design competition; QaRpet:

As a design concept, QaRpet becomes a physical link to virtual spaces, media content or perhaps even other physical spaces.

The integration of QR code generation into carpet tile design encourages the user to investigate further.

It adds an element of interaction to a space that otherwise has not existed previously. QaRpet pushes the functionality of traditional carpeting.

It transforms carpeted floor space into a multi media and interactive experience.

Pretty neat in my book. If you dig it, why not swing by and give him some votes.

From w3sh.com:

W3sh.com is a French-language site, so we have to rely on the helpful Google translator-bot to get more info on this. Apparently:

The Italian company offers a Lumina lamp designer Ettore Cimini of beauty. It has a metal structure and polymer and the design draws heavily on snakes that illustrated the stories of ancient Egypt.

The light is transmitted via fiber optics and lamp has a switch to control intensity.

via digital pill

Bruce Sterling’s got his design-fiction/Futurist hat on again, giving us Big Mama, Greifswald, Rebel kids, Brixels: The People of kashklash.

This explores “possible futures, based on two important variables…The first is the stability in exchange systems…The second variable is telecommunication technology.”

Which he illustrates nicely with this graphic:

So that’s four tales, or scenarios, of living in four different ‘worlds’.

Here’s an excerpt from the fourth scenario:

A brick house was a byword for solidity. “Solid as a brick house.” For a brick house to be malleable, temporary, gaseous, was a weird, crazy, extreme idea — as crazy as a trip to the moon. But a brixel was a brick: a mobile brick. A smart brick that was also a phone. A brick built around a phonechip, phones so high tech, so cheap, that they were cheaper than bricks. So that yesterday’s crown jewels, mobile phones, because building blocks.

Brixels locked together like children’s toys, and they were picked up and dropped, not by honest union bricklayers, but by little blind robots like an iPod lashed to Roomba. It took very little machine intelligence to move “brixels” around or to stack a huge wall out of “brixels.” A wall of brixels grew overnight. It was extravagantly patterned, like a computer screensaver. It was gorgeous. It was magnificent. It was very Italian.

Crazy, huh. Go read them all!

Do I have to rant again about how much sense it makes to grow your food in the city you’re supplying? K, cool.

Check out this beautiful concept art, cherry picked from TIME’s slideshow on Urban Farming:

This one is my favourite though:

And yes, they’d all look much better on Mars. But we have to practice here first.

via MAKE

From Dezeen:

London-based research and design company SolarLab is developing a solar-powered rickshaw.

…

The solar generator will create 75% of the total power need to drive the vehicle, while the remaining 25% will be provided by the drivers’ pedal-power. The physical exertion needed will be dramatically less than that of even a standard bicycle, much less a traditional rickshaw, allowing any driver, not just athletes, to drive the vehicles.

In these days of Heavy Weather, as “the world becomes uninsurable” (and other Bruce Sterling quotes) people are losing their homes for a wide variety of reasons.

Which makes Treehugger’s excellent round-up of temporary/portable housing solutions excellent reading.

The Pump & Jump is my favourite of those listed.

Not only would they be perfect for festivals, but they would make for far more civilized temporary autonomous zones in general.

If we are increasingly going to be forced into tent cities, we must try and make the best of it.

via MAKE

Back in 1998 Bruce Sterling launched his Viridian art/design movement. This week he ended it, with his final Viridian Note.

It’s reflective piece in part, drawing on how his own life has changed over the past decade.

It’s also chock full of good advice, like this part; his ode to the multitool:

…a multitool IS a set of keys. It’s a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

I miss the days when it was less problematic to travel with such an item. Fortunate was I to travel the world pre-9/11. But I digress.

Bruce also lays out a great way to construct a workable 21C house, which once applied also dovetails perfectly with Zoetica’s Be Your Own Supervillain guide from Coilhouse magazine #1 (which you’ve all bought / requested for xmas, yeah?!)

The following quote sums up the philosophy for living in, nay surviving the future that he advises (emphasis mine):

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today’s. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

This is conscious consumption, something very different to the conspicuous consumption that was railed against recently in the webcomics Xutraa posted.

This is our obligation. Our less tech-savvy friends turn to us for advice constantly, we must continue to guide them wisely, and adjust their selection criteria.

We must do whatever we can to create a Post-Industrial society designed to cope with the extremes, since it’s clear to anyone paying attention that our Industrial society, with it’s emphasis on the normal, just isn’t cutting it anymore.

On display at the International Biennial of Seville. That is until I swoop down from my stealth zeppelin and take this back to my Pirate Utopia. I wish. S.w.o.o.n!

via Beyond the Beyond

Anab Jain has made RFID into something rather pretty:

via MAKE | Neo-nomad.

From Gizmodo:

It’s called the walking chair, but we know better. This four-legged wheelchair replacement, on exhibit at Robo Japan 2008, is not about traversing uneven terrain or allowing mechanical creations to move more like organic beings. It’s about man fusing with both insects and robots to create a new race founded on pure 80s cartoon awesomeness

Oded Ezer is one interesting cat. These are two of the images from his new ‘Typoplastic surgeries’ project.

Want to know more about the cutting edge of typography? Here’s a great interview.

via You Will Be Assimilated

When I finally get around to the lifetime of debt you need to buy a house these days, I want Jonathon Ben-Tovim to design my kitchen.

His “all mesh microwave, which releases cooking aromas yet completely contains microwaves” is a thing of industrial design beauty:

Check out the rest of the items in his safely dangerous kitchen.