Car Navigation – just follow the red cable
Via Ubergizmo via Ohgizmo (so you know it’s a gadget).
Related: Need for Speed
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Archive for the ‘staff favorite’ Category
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Retro Future: Magic Highway USA
Nothing makes a person more modest about future speculations than Retro Future. Want proof? Here is a 1958 video entitled “Magic Highway USA“. No, they didn’t anticipate traffic jams or feminism (can you find all the male chauvinist details?), the sheer optimism is just overwhelming: “It will be our magic carpet to new hopes, new dreams and a better way of life, for the future” (Yes, they’re talking about highways here).
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Lego Towers
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Giant Plush Microbes
The bear is a wild animal, a predator and hostile to man. Yet somewhere in the beginning of the 20th century someone caught the idea of making a cuddly toy out of it. Perhaps that’s why in our time, the bear is no longer a threat but a museum-piece and so it seems that we are in need of new natural enemies to conquer.
So what are the ‘new’ threats? What are we afraid of? It’s MICROBES, VIRUSES and FAT CELLS!
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Future beauty: Hyperbreasts?
Let’s talk about hyperbreasts. Have you ever wondered why men like women with large breasts? Historically large breasts are presumably sexually attractive for men because they represented a womans capability of breast feeding an infant (read: large breast evolutionary means your off-spring will survive). Of course, in a world of supermarkets and overconsumption this is no longer relevant. Large breast have lost their functional benefit in the survival of the fittest and have become pure decoration.Besides the change from necessity towards entertainment we can see another evolutionary process in play: Nowadays plastic surgeons routinely sculpt breasts in any ordered size or shape. Large breasts are no longer a born feature, they can be bought. As a result, large breasts become a symbol of wealth.
What if we extrapolate these developments towards the future? Once large breasts become default, it will no longer be a distinguishing feature. Some women might want to move on to the next level in order to attract men and equip themselves with hyperbreasts; softer, bigger, better than the real thing.
Agreed, these ‘wealthy’ breasts are entirely unpractical in everyday life. Men who fancy these type of women should not expect them to do any cleaning in the household and no child will dare to suck on them. They might even be a burden for the women who wear them, but -similar to the feathers of a peacock- thats all part of the evolutionary trade off, no?
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IVY – hard disk cover evolves with your data
IVY is an external hard disk which shows the content of the hard disk on its skin. When no data is stored on IVY, its skin will remain blank. When you purchase IVY, it appears to be a normal hard disk, but when you start using it by storing data, it will alter its skin visualizing the content of the hard disk, using an OLED screen. Instead of buying a custom cover design to personalize the industrially manufactured device, the hard disk casing will automatically change along with your content on the disk. Automated personalization through information decoration! The visualization of the data is based on the Sequoia View hard disk visualization software.
The IVY harddisk concept was developed by Irene Joris, Linda de Valk and Bram van der Vlist as a demonstrator products in their Green Banana design vision developed during the ‘Designing for Next Nature’ workshop at TU/e Industrial Design in Eindhoven. Read more »
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Friending, Ancient or Otherwise
By ALEX WRIGHT, Published in NY Times December 2, 2007
The growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.
We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?
Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.
“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”
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Mushrooms come from Trucks
Where do mushrooms come from? Most people think from the forest after a good rain if we’re talking about wild mushrooms, or from manure piles in some deep dark cave if we’re talking about cultivated ones. But mushrooms could come from trucks, and not in the sense that they are delivered by them, but actually be grown on board on the way to the supermarket. Distributors could become farmers turning their trucks into high density growing facilities and reprogramming what is normally a waste of time into essential growth time.
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Fake for Real: Sim City
At right is a picture of the city of Toronto seen from a 45-degree angle. At left is a screen shot from the computer game Sim City, in which the player’s objective is to develop and maintain a city, including traffic streams, utilities, population and so on. Yes, it’s just a game, but remember, the young gamers of today will grow up to be the urban planners of tomorrow.
From our Fake for Real series.
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Google 2084
Tongue in cheek speculation on what Google’s home page may look like in 2084, created by Randy Siegel for NY Times. Frankly, I don’t think this is very realistic: We don’t have to wait that long for most of this.
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10 Biomimic Gadgets
Coming across an image like this, makes one wonder at first: is it a giant punch-bag? Some sort of soft water-drop-sculpture?
No, it is the Emergency Outdoor Survival Cocoon, designed by John Moriarty; a place to find shelter in extreme conditions and environments. Hang it off a tree or a cliff face or anywhere else you need to. Inside, the user is comforted by warming colors and materials that will ensure he/she stays warm no matter what the conditions are like outside. And after a while, out crawls the hiking butterfly, just awoken from its metamorphosis!
Isn’t this a nice example of a Biomimicmarketing product? (in short “biomimic”) What nature has provided, man can copy, improve (or borrow characteristics from) and put on the market. That process is applied anywhere in the world and it is proved to be a very successful formula. More examples…
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Fake for Real: Virtual Miss
Which of these women do you think is more beautiful? At the 2002 Miss Germany pageant, the eight finalists were photographed from the same angle without makeup. The portraits were then mixed into a virtual Miss Germany using computer graphic techniques. The picture at right is of the woman who later won the competition. Decide for yourself which beauty pleases you most. The research was conducted by Dr Martin Gruendl of the University of Regensburg.
From our Fake for Real series.
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Walking Energy Cells
Remember this one? Body heat is used to power machines in The Matrix. Nine years after the first of the trilogy came to screen, a company comes up with a body-powered-battery. In tests, M2E Power has found that two hours of motion (what an average person produces) is enough for 30 minutes to one hour of talk time on a mobile phone.
M2E Power has recently raised $8 million of funding for further development. It focuses on two markets: the US army and implementation in mobile consumer devices. The micro generators actually fit inside existing batteries, can double the battery life and can eliminate 30 to 40 percent of toxic heavy metals used in normal batteries – the company claims.
Via smartplanet.com | see also: earth2tech.com
Related posts: Chewing = browsing | MDI Air Car | Energy tree | Power Aware Cord | The Money Matrix -
Fake for Real: The Money Matrix
It’s fascinating how stock traders can get so excited about a few abstract numbers on an electronic display. These numbers represent real money, and every small fluctuation can mean the difference between being rich or poor.
What we usually don’t realize is that money itself is already a virtual phenomenon: a representation of value constructed to replace the awkward, imprecise trading of physical goods. Indeed, paying $50 for a pair of sneakers is much easier than trading two chicken or a basket of apples for them. As long as we all believe in its value, money works fine. But once we start making money with money, the system feeds back on itself, and things start to get peculiar. Money is just a representation, but nevertheless it makes the world go round. What started as a symbolic representation has now become a kind of reality. It’s almost Platonic; almost like in the movie The Matrix.
From our Fake for Real series.
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A hunt for hightech
In “A Hunt for High Tech”, Bart Hess seeks to harness both nature and technology and create armoured skin and fur for a new human archetype incorporating animalistic and fetichistic instincts. Also watch this video.
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Philips Wake Up Light – Sunrise Alarm Clock
Philips hits the shops with a product that aims to naturalize alarm clocks. The annoying buzzing machines were once invented to cultivate our day/night rhythms, formerly connected to the cycles of the sun. But now they are transformed into some kind of natural phenomenon again. The Wake Up Light simulates a wakeup with a sunrise, when sunlight gradually begins to peek through your closed eyelids. That sends signals to your brain to stop producing melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone that sometimes seems to kick in at the most inopportune times. This seems to be a much more humane alarm clock than the regular buzzing alarms.
As you would expect their advertising campaign is entirely biomimicmarketing based.
Related: Real Nature is not Green. Watch the One Minute YouTube Review. -
Tulip Island – Design a Polder
A proposal to gain 600.000 m2 of land near the Dutch coast recently came from the CDA (Dutch Christian-Democratic political party). The idea is to create a tulip-shaped island that will provide agricultural space, clean energy, a new national airport and protect the current coastline all at once. The proposal must be seen as a teaser to market the idea of creating such an island. However it is not entirely unthinkable that it may become realized; Dutch contractors already built a Palm-shaped island located off the Deira coast of Dubai.
Trouw article (Dutch) | Related posts: Artificial Island Dubai | Artificial Island Dubai #2 | Tropical Dome
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Sunflower Satellite Dish
Have an unsightly satellite dish? Time to pimp it with a giant all-weather sticker designed by The White Room.
satellitedishsticker.com | schotelsticker.nl | also available at: neighbourshop.com | Related posts: Hotspot Bloom| Schöne Aussichten | Sixties last | Seperating streets and words
