You step out of bed. Why? Because your alarm clock tells you it is time. A quick glance at the alarm clock tells you that you are still on schedule. First you take a shower and then breakfast. The clock helps you back to reality, “So late already?”, and you think by yourself; “Tomorrow I should shower shorter…” You wanted to clean up before you leave, but decide to leave the mess where it is; all to get back on track. Also the clocks on your way to the office help you to stay on the strict time schedule. When you enter the office-building you wonder if there is still time to get a coffee. Your watch gives you the answer…as always.
Related: Office garden rebellion, Virtual money – cows, coins, credit, airtime, The Nocturnal life of diurnal birds. Picture: Freakingnews.com
Recently were introduced, the OOMouse…
…and the Magic Mouse. Both tools are developed to browse the ones and zeros more easily.
It almost seems unfair to compare them, so I won’t. But what I would like to compare instead is both companies’ mission statements:
Open Office: Our mission statement is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
Apple: Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.
The first reads in one word: “community” (building and sharing together). The second reads: “ego” (look how good I am). Now look again at their mices.
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To draw attention to a stand at the publishing house of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, a publisher hired some flies. The paper mini-banners — attached with self-dissolving wax — were designed so that a fly could fly with it, but low and for short distances, constantly landing on the visitors.
Via: Scaryideas.com Related: Branded Butterfly Wings, Robo-fly, Cyborg Insects.
Though the example product seems a little far-fetched; growth assembly could be quite revolutionary. Worldwide shipping of manufactured things is very inefficient. Why not ship devices and utensils in a single envelope? As seeds.
“Our idea of industry will grow to include nature. Genetically altered organisms will be an everyday thing. Introducing diversity and softness to a realm once dominated by heavy manufacturing. Shops will evolve into factory farms. Licenced products are grown where sold. We will no longer ship products around the world. Only seeds will be shipped as they contain all the manufacturing instructions encoded in their dna.”
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Avatarian Graveyard supplies a service for virtual addicts – people who excessively or compulsively spend time in virtual environments – to help them reintegrate into everyday society.
Avatars, digital identities, alter egos and other digital shadows of their psyche can be uploaded to the Avatarian Graveyard. Once this upload is completed a compound within ignites, causing an internal burnout of the compound material and thus also destroying the circuits that hold the virtual identities. All is lost and to provide a way of coming to terms with this loss and thus helping the grieving process it is possible to scatter the ashes and use the Avatarian Graveyard as urn to place somewhere meaningful as a reminder of ones past or as the coffin shape suggests, one can also burry the object.
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No, this is not some solar system far, far away. Closer than you think, this is is a visualization of a botnet storm. For all you know this malicious virus, or one of its siblings, is controlling your computer – spamming thousands of innocent internet users on your behalf – at this moment. Feeling paranoid already? Yes, next nature can be harsh sometimes.
Old nature provided us with a wide variety of food: fresh milk, crispy vegetables, nutritious meat. Yet this is not enough, we want more:
We want a printed steak, square fishsticks, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola, hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers and hypernatural tomatoes. We want vitamine+Q10 yoghurt that makes you loose weight. We want to hear the sound of a sausage when we bite it – we want notice how well designed that sausage sound really is.
Already for thousands of years people have been food designers. How will food technology develop itself into the 21th century? The Philips Food Design Probes investigate how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
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Tags:
Bionics,
Design for debate,
Designed by Evolution,
Feed Back,
Food Technology,
Hypernature,
Image Consumption,
Made to debate,
manipulating growth,
Officegarden,
supermarket
Looking at a banana from a design perspective, one immediately notices the fruit is highly ergonomic and sophisticated: Bananas fit perfectly in the human hand, they come with a non-slip surface, a bio-degradable packaging that is easy to open, and they have an advanced informative skin that turns yellow when the product is ready for consumption – green means not yet, brown means too late.
The design of the banana is so good, some evangelists – like the one in the video – present it as evidence that an ‘intelligent designer’ must have created the fruit. These evangelists however, makes a quintessential mistake on the static origins of ‘nature’, as they ignore that the bananas we eat today are hardly products of old nature. Rather, they are the result of thousands of years of domestication by people.
Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence suggests that banana cultivation goes back to at least 5000 BCE. The design banana’s we eat cannot even reproduce without the hand of man, as they have no seeds – they are all clones, which makes the species highly vulnerable to diseases.
Wild bananas are still around, yet they are much less ergonomically adjusted for human consumption as they have have numerous large, hard seeds. Perhaps in the far future evangelists will present coke bottles as evidence for their ‘intelligent designer’ argument?
Related: A designers take on intelligent design, Banana Juice box, Banana inspired harddisk casing. Thanks Billy.
These peculiar illustrations are part of a sixteen-page pamphlet produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company: A manual to get a life.
Source: centennialsociety.com | via boingboing.net | Related: Join the Neolithic Revolution | Caravan Garden | Is it a bird? | Brain needs Nature
Autimacy [aw-tih-muh-see] - noun, plural - cies. The term was coined by Simona Kicurovska.
