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.

This is Chris Natt’s take on a lamp:

The Stimuli light draws inspiration from the behaviour of plants and how they respond to changes in their environment such as sunlight exposure. The device communicates changes in its immediate surroundings using semantics associated with changes in colour, movement and shape. The differing effects of the light creates an atmosphere reflective of the subtle changes happening around it.

Or, as Yanko Design have had him explain:

“[Stimuli 3.0 is] a lighting system whose shape and therefore light output sensitively varies inversely with the surrounding natural light intensity. For example, at dusk, illumination gradually increases as natural light recedes. At the heart of this device is a unique 3 axis gear box which enables this subtle alteration of lighting through an attractive and striking change in form of the device.”

via electro^plankton.

Photo and link via dvice.com.

Francesca Lanzavecchia‘s LightMate:

Can electric energy fill the void of human absence?

LightMates are soft anthropomorphic pillows and warming lamps. This awfully attractive creature heats, lights and provides company. Their different sizes answer to everyone’s need of heat; a mate to hug or a huge companion you can lay on.

Well, we might not have President Schwarzenegger just yet, but the world of Demolition Man is a little bit closer now, thanks to Cree’s SAM vehicle:

a Swiss award-winning and patented Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) of a new generation designed and developed by Cree Ltd. SAM is at prototype stage and approved for all public roads. 80 vehicles initially produced for public testing in the cities of Zurich and Basle are currently running mainly on Swiss roads and owned by private consumers.

via ectoplasmosis!

The beautiful work of JOANNA M HAWLEY:

Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace. Often, they look much like landing gear and make the wearer uncomfortable, self aware, and sometimes depressed. By channeling the Eames’ use materials and iconic style, we designed a leg with Steve McQueen in mind. We sought to convey a creative use of positive and negative space, a balance of materials and a reflection of the wearer.

Or as Bruce Sterling tweeted it: Eames-Punk.

Ready for some interface design pr0n? Then prepare yourself for Aurora:

…a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

This is, to my mind, quite a linear extrapolation from current usage. A pretty fair guess at the world we will all reside in within a few years.

For more detail, click through to the site, where they have chunked up the video into four parts, with a helpful commentary explaining the technologies they see intersecting to accomplish the scenes depicted in the video.

UPDATE – Adaptive Path have put up some background on this in their blog, including the scenarios that were developed and how they workshopped this vision of the future:

Through a series of group exercises, we identified three major trends that we thought would have the biggest impact on the web:

• Augmented Reality: The gap is closing between the Web and the world. Services that know where you are and adapt accordingly will become commonplace. The web becomes fully integrated into every physical environment.
• Data Abundance: There’s more data available to us all the time — both the data we produce intentionally and the data we throw off as a by-product of other activities. The web will play a key role in how people access, manage, and make sense of all that data.
• Virtual Identity: People are increasingly expected to have a digital presence as well as a physical one. We inhabit spaces online, but we also create them through our personal expression and participation in the digital realm.

John from Shapeways has contacted us with the following offer:

We’d love to give your readers 150 beta codes. They can go to www.shapeways.com/beta and use the BETA code GrindBeta.

Thanks John and all the rest of the Shapeways crew!

Soon your design could be instantiated on their Objet printer, just like this one:

Previously:

• Shapeways – a new 3D fabrication service

Gomi Style is a recent addition to the growing world of Maker-friendly television.

As they say in their manifesto:

GOMI is tech-positive and sees the benefits of continued technological development. As more new and interesting technologies become available, the ways to rethink their usefulness also expands. It’s the unexpected secondary uses of a technology that feeds GOMI. Cars, motorcycles and other vehicles, energy production, the evolution of humanity, personal technology and the Internet – All of the things that we can’t live without are embraced by GOMI. I.e. Vehicles can be greener, energy can be off-grid, our bodies and lives can be enhanced, etc … GOMI doesn’t say, “Cars are bad”. GOMI says “you can make your car better”.

In this episode they make an Aqua Mirror:

I sure dig their style and will be watching to see what they come up with next.

thanks for the tip-off sauceruney!

Ah, games today. Check out this one, it is basically a world in a cube:

This is levelHead, “a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver“:

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.

This diagram shows the set-up:

The best part is that Julian is releasing this as “a fully open-source project soon under the GPLv3 License”. So you can start building your own, just in time for Christmas!

thanks for the tip-off George Rohac, Jr.!

From Mashable:

Enter, Shapeways, a new startup molded by Philips Incubator Project and currently tagged as a private beta service.

..

The promise of Shapeways is to enable consumers to make stuff, virtually anything of reasonable size and detail, and have it in hand in 10 days or less for an average cost of $50-150.

…

Users are asked to import files from 3D modeling software in STL, Collada, or X3D formats. At that point, one is able to specify material and size. Shapeways describes current options as “White Strong & Flexible (SLS), Cream Robust (FDM), White Detail and Transparent Detail (Object). Additional choices will come soon.

Interested? Mashable have a limited number of invites to the closed-beta, so get over there quickly and grab one!

As Jamais Cascio notes:

This won’t be for everybody. You’ll have to do the hard design work, in a 3D program that outputs their preferred formats, so I really don’t expect this to be the Next Big Web 2.0 extravaganza. Make an app that will convert Second Life (or other Metaverse environment) objects into fully-qualified X3D files, and we’ll talk. I’m just fascinated by how fast this market evolves.

From BusinessWeek:

Through his development of the Palm (PALM) Pilot and Treo smartphone, Jeff Hawkins helped change the way people access information computers. Now he may have come up with a way to alter how we comb through that data.

Hawkins’ software startup Numenta is trying to replicate the thinking patterns of the human brain in an effort to recognize subtle patterns in immense streams of data. Researchers, of course, say such tools could lead to advances in data-rich fields from drug discovery to law enforcement.

- image via treehugger.com

- image via treehugger.com

- image via treehugger.com

The stairs are stainless steel, water-jet cut from sheets, and hung from stainless steel rods , which act also as the guards. Landings are glass. “We desired to give a ‘technological’ impression to the entire structure, which would correspond with the exactness of a scientific institution,” Sesták says. To invoke the correspondence more literally, the glass landings are printed with an antislip grid in a pattern derived from DNA-sequence-registration-machine outputs.”

Link and photos via treehugger.com

- image via yankodesign.com

- image via yankodesign.com

Link and images via yankodesign.com

- image via io9.com

As rising gas and oil prices turn driving into the transportation equivalent of Prada bags, it makes sense that gas stations will start to look like high-end boutiques. Here is a perfect example of a twenty-first century gas station in Los Angeles, built with “green” materials to look like a modern art museum.

Link via io9.com

- image via inhabitat.com

In Arabic, Masdar means “the source,” and the the latest development to spring from the city’s upwelling of green tech is a futuristic transit system that will serve the city’s six square kilometers. Realizing a concept straight out of sci-fi, the system consists of a fleet of solar-powered programmable vehicles that seat six and keep streets congestion free.

Masdar’s ultra-efficient city plan makes no allowances for fossil fuel vehicles, favoring a new breed of mass transit – a personal rapid transit system. “You program what station you want to go to, and [the vehicle] will directly take you to that station . . . If you look at things like Blade Runner, etc., that we had 15 years ago, it’s really bringing that to the fore now,” says Scott McGuigan of CH2M Hill, the construction firm that’s building Masdar City.

The vehicles are set to run beneath the city like a subway minus the tracks, creating an aboveground infrastructure that is pedestrian-friendly and free from gridlock. Ease and efficiency are key features, since the programmable cars can take you anywhere you need to go, and energy won’t be expended running multiple railways on off-peak hours. Roughly 1,500 stations are planned, and no point in the city will be more than 200 meters from the system.

– image via inhabitat.com

Link via inhabitat.com

See also Dharma Masdar Initiative

- image via io9.com

Agustin Otegu thinks the future of green buildings lies not in the giant wind turbines we’ve seen in so many other projects, nor in huge solar panels. Instead his new design proposal, called Nano-vent Skin, would incorporate tiny, biological self-repairing wind turbines into the outer layer of a building. As wind played over the building’s “skin,” the turbines would spin and create energy that would be fed into the building’s electrical grid. They would also absorb carbon dioxide.

[He says] “The outer skin of the structure absorbs sunlight through an organic photovoltaic skin and transfers it to the nano-fibers inside the nano-wires which then is sent to storage units at the end of each panel. Each turbine on the panel generates energy by chemical reactions on each end where it makes contact with the structure. Polarized organisms are responsible for this process on every turbine’s turn.

The inner skin of each turbine works as a filter absorbing CO2 from the environment as wind passes through it.”

Link via io9.com

In the mood for some design/future pr0n? Or just want to see what Daft Punk’s new look might be?

Behold frogConcept: A Digital Escape

Increased processing power and emerging technologies will enable holistic computing systems to be stored in wearable devices, providing a more immersive personal media experience. In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension – a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world…

Within the mask, smells, sounds, even air quality would be imitated to create a full sensory experience. The facial expressions of those wearing the device would be detected and projected onto personal avatars visible to others also living behind the shield of the mask.

Two interesting concepts from Provoke are on display at Hardcore: New Finnish Design.

Share urban extreme sport challenge

Technology will enable new forms of intellectual networking and augmented reality. The Share concept enables communication and sharing of information through personalized codes formed in subgroups of likeminded individuals.

By tagging content to locations, group members can challenge each other. Actual and virtual worlds will blur. In this example, the Share concept is customized for skateboarders.

Feel the touch of your loved one

Touching is a very intense and personal form of communication. People share their deepest feelings by touching. Feel is a phoneset concept for couples. Tactile sharing trough simulated touch. Real physical communication – what if you could touch your loved one via your mobile phone?

In the future, the user interface will eventually step out of the display. Feel has a specialized user interface and touch simulation to enable deep communication.

I like these a lot! Everyone’s saying these will most likely come to market via Nokia. Guys, if you need a beta-tester.. ping me!

via yankodesign | engadget