The world’s first major public exhibition of ‘green design’ treehouses, TreeLife will bring the biggest names in international architecture, design and art into the one public place for the first time.
The Sydney launch of the event will showcase cutting edge green and sustainable design set in beautiful Hyde Park, one of Australia’s most iconic and highly trafficked public spaces located in the heart of the city.
VIA: coolhunter.com.au
The legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames made films, houses, books and classic midcentury modern furniture. Eames Demetrios, their grandson, shows rarely seen films and archival footage in a lively, loving tribute to their creative process.
Eames Demetrios is the creator of Kymaerica and the Kcymaerxthaere, an alternate history of the world. He is the grandson of the legendary husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames. Full Bio
via TED.com
Yves Behar and Forrest North unveil Mission One, a sleek, powerful electric motorcycle. They share slides from distant (yet similar) childhoods that show how collaboration kick-started their friendship — and shared dreams.
VIA: TED.com
When I am drawing concepts for a new product I often start with a side, top and front elevation. It can often be frustrating trying to transform those elevation drawings into an accurate 3D representation.
In this drawing tutorial Kevin Hulsey illustrates, step-by-step, how to use information from top and side elevation drawings and transform them into an accurate 3D representation.
VIA: khulsey.com
“In 1981, a 37-year-old factory worker named Kenji Urada entered a restricted safety zone at a Kawasaki manufacturing plant to perform some maintenance on a robot. In his haste, he failed to completely turn it off. The robot’s powerful hydraulic arm pushed the engineer into some adjacent machinery, thus making Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot.”
In situations like this one, as described in a recent study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, most people would not consider the accident to be the fault of the robot. But as robots are beginning to spread from industrial environments to the real world, human safety in the presence of robots has become an important social and technological issue.
Currently, countries like Japan and South Korea are preparing for the “human-robot coexistence society,” which is predicted to emerge before 2030; South Korea predicts that every home in its country will include a robot by 2020. Unlike industrial robots that toil in structured settings performing repetitive tasks, these “Next Generation Robots” will have relative autonomy, working in ambiguous human-centered environments, such as nursing homes and offices. Before hordes of these robots hit the ground running, regulators are trying to figure out how to address the safety and legal issues that are expected to occur when an entity that is definitely not human but more than machine begins to infiltrate our everyday lives.
VIA: physorg.com
Designer Ross Lovegrove expounds his philosophy of “fat-free” design and offers insight into several of his extraordinary products, including the Ty Nant water bottle and the Go chair.
Known as “Captain Organic,” Ross Lovegrove embraces nature as the inspiration for his “fat-free” design. Each object he creates — be it bottle, chair, staircase or car — is reduced to its… Full bio and more links
VIA: TED.com
Not so much about ID but rather interaction design showing some amazing uses/hacks for the Wii rimote.
Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.
VIA: TED.com
Artist Theo Jansen demonstrates the amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures he builds from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles. His creatures are designed to move — and even survive — on their own.
VIA: Ted.com
In the recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace there is a scene in which M, Bond and other agents share information and briefings around a multitouch table. Just three or four years ago this would have seemed as sci-fi as the now infamous scene in Minority Report, but this time it felt like MI6 was almost behind the curve.
From the work of Jeff Han to Apple’s iPhone, Nintendo’s Wii and slew of larger multitouch interfaces such as Microsoft’s Surface and MultiTouch’s Cell, the era of gestural interfaces is here. Physical and screen-based interfaces have collapsed into each other and both industrial and interaction designers have a whole new set of issues to grapple with.
VIA: Core77
The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch talks to Mick McManus, CEO of design consultancy/tech research lab MAYA, about how to “Innovate to survive.” McManus’ central point is that the economy should bounce back within two years, and given most companies’ two-year product cycle, now is the time to invest in design.
VIA: Core77.com
