Hasta La Ideas

“In the world of math, many strange results are possible when we change the rules. But there’s one rule that most of us have been warned not to break: don’t divide by zero. How can the simple combination of an everyday number and a basic operation cause such problems?”..(Read…)

Dezeen promotion: Shigeru Ban, Lucy McRae and Carlo Ratti are among speakers taking part in the first and& conference in Belgium, which will explore the impact of health, technology and creativity on cities.

Taking place between the from 2 to 5 May 2018 in Leuven, Belgium, the inaugural and& summit will feature speakers from the design and architecture industries, alongside music performances, art interventions and a start-up forum.

The speaker programme will focus on how technology and creativity can be used to influence the cities of tomorrow, with talks on subjects including artificial intelligence, active ageing and the future of work.

Science fiction artist Lucy McRae and Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban will take part in a panel entitled We Are Still Human After All, while Italian architect Carlo Ratti will speculate on the future of city life.

Other speakers taking part in the four-day event include Dutch artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister and Tiffany Pham, founder of news aggregator Mogul.

The summit will include a “demo day”, where a selection of Belgium start-ups will present their ideas and innovations to an audience of entrepreneurs, media and potential investors. Prizes worth £43,000 (€ 50,000) will be awarded to innovations that the audience deem most promising.

The event programme also sees a number of public installations curated by Samir Bantal, director of OMA’s research arm AMO. Installed across the city, these will act as a continuation of the conference’s theme – exploring the interfaces between technology and city life.

Works will be created by Harry Nuriev, founder of Crosby Studios, Studio LA, an architecture studio founded by Lorien Beijaert and Arna Mačkić, artist Dries Depoorter and AMO.

Headliners at the corresponding music festival include BICEP, Joy Orbison and Jordan Rakei.

On 5 May a free children’s festival named and& play will have installations to encourage the younger generation to learn about subjects including drones, robots, virtual reality, 3D-printing and laser cutters.

Tickets for the full summit & festival cost £218 (€250). Day tickets are available for £130 (€150). Dezeen readers can receive a 15 per cent discount by using the promotional code “dezeenlovesyou”.

Visit the event website for more information.

The post Inaugural and& summit will explore technology, health and design appeared first on Dezeen.

London studio PearsonLloyd has unveiled an aeroplane seating concept that would give more space to passengers flying economy class.

As part of an ongoing research project into how aircraft seating can be improved, PearsonLloyd has developed a seating design that makes better use of limited space, so that travellers flying on a budget can be more comfortable.

“Innovation in aircraft seating is largely focused on the lucrative business class sector. Our intention in this project is to shine a light on the more challenging but more democratic environment of economy travel,” studio co-director Tom Lloyd told Dezeen.

“In this design, we have been experimenting with small modifications to the layout of the seat to help enhance the sense of space for each passenger, and the ergonomic performance of the seat itself.”

Created to be slender, the seating would be constructed with a carbon-fibre internal structure. The seats themselves would be lined with foam covered with fabric made from recycled wool in two tones of grey, complete with an orange stitched trim.

According to the design team, a key improvement to the standard seat is made by separating the headrest from the chair to improve sight lines for passengers.

“The elevated headrest and narrow backpack transform the way you read the space around you and allows us to play with material applications that are informed by other sectors such as fashion and the home,” continued Lloyd.

The rear of each of the seats would be covered with recycled plastic made from sunflower seeds, with aluminium elements made from recycled aircraft. Along with a screen, the back structure would contain a table that folds out and extends sideways to maximise its size.

Two storage compartments would be included to help reduce movement within the cabin by allowing passengers to store all the items they need for the flight.

PearsonLloyd was founded in 1997 by Lloyd and Luke Pearson. Although the studio has also designed business-class cabins for Lufthansa’s upcoming Boeing 777-9, its primary focus is furniture for offices.

According to Pearson, this workplace-focused background helped the studio approach the project in a different way to a typical transport designer.

“Aircraft seating is predominantly designed by aircraft seating designers and manufacturers who specialise in the discipline. In our view, this leads to a certain kind of technical product,” he explained.

“A much broader culture of furniture lies at the heart of PearsonLloyd’s practice, and in this project we wanted to test how our work in other sectors could influence something as pragmatic and spatially challenging as an economy seat,” he added.

Other recent innovations in aircraft seating include a concept for sleeping quarters in aircraft cargo compartments, complete with bunk-beds and meeting rooms, and a design for a first-class cabin with full-size beds.

The post PearsonLloyd redesigns economy-class aeroplane seating to make better use of space appeared first on Dezeen.

The Metropolitan Opera, NYC..(Read…)

The year is 1999, the month, September. There’s panic at the NASA headquarters because they’ve just lost contact with their Mars Climate Orbiter. The orbiter entered the Martian atmosphere, but the thrusters fired too late, resulting in a crash with a loss estimated at $125 million. The problem? NASA was working in conjunction with England-based Lockheed Martin. Lockheed sent over navigational commands for the thrusters to NASA in imperial units (pounds of force), and NASA’s software inputted that information assuming it was in metric units (Newtons). Singlehandedly the biggest dimensioning unit related blunder, the Mars Climate Mission is an example of how frustrating it is working with different units across different systems that are prevalent in different countries.

Inventor Joanne Swisterski has had her share of problems too. Often working with clients across the world, she’s had to work with data that was sometimes imperial or metric, or even worse, not to scale (I sympathize too; a client sent me blueprints that he said were to scale, but he happened to click on the “fit to page” option while printing, resulting in a small yet significant difference in output, resulting in a loss of time, material, and eventually money).

Dimensioning is such a major part of what we designers do, and accuracy is everything as far as it’s concerned, so why are we still battling such primitive problems? This pushed Joanne to design the Smart Scale, a scale with a screen and the smarts to help resize, convert, and divide, allowing you to work with alien data, but a system that you’re more familiar with. The Smart Scale works in three ways making your life as a designer, architect, engineer, or plotter INFINITELY easier while working with measuring units that you may be unfamiliar with, or may be of a different scale.

Designed to look just like the triangular scales we’ve worked with in the past, the Smart Scale comes with a slender, horizontal screen where you’d see the measurements, and a row of buttons on top. Switch it on, and its 12-inch e-ink display powers up showing you a scale in a measuring unit of your choice. Cycling between inches and millimeters is as easy as pushing a button… however, here’s where things get better. The Smart Scale allows you to create a custom scale depending on what you’re measuring. If you’re working with a scaled down set of prints, the Smart Scale allows you to input one reference measurement using a slider on the back, and it creates a brand new scale using that reference, allowing you to measure scaled up or scaled down models in their native unit without having to sit with a calculator, multiplying or dividing away to get accurate data. A simple convert button allows you to cycle between imperial and metric measurements, depending on a system you use, or your client uses, allowing you to collaborate with countries with varying national standards without having your own version of the Mars Climate Orbiter crisis. A third and rather interesting function is its ability to work as a divider. The slider on the back allows you to measure a given area, then simply use the keypad to choose how many divisions you want it in and the screen divides the given length into the inputted amount of divisions… while always presenting you with the data you need on the left-hand side of the screen, telling you exactly what unit you’re measuring in, etc.

The Smart Scale notices a problem we’ve never really worked on solving effectively. Looking and behaving exactly like the scales we’ve used in the past, it’s the equivalent of a digital vernier, albeit much smarter and definitely more useful. The screen on the Smart Scale comes with a beautiful contrast, and a high resolution making it accurate and legible, while its aluminum body keeps things classy and protects the electronics inside. The Smart Scale comes with a MicroUSB port for easy charging and an incredibly long battery life, given the e-ink display’s minimal energy footprint.

Speaking from personal experience, the Smart Scale is probably the most innovative step we’ve taken in the recent past in making sure our tools for problem-solving ‘don’t have any problems themselves’. The Smart Scale saves time, energy, material, and eventually money too, making work for designers, engineers, and architects much more efficient, whether you’re working across borders, or with someone who’s used to a different unit system than you. An absolute must-have for everyone who uses linear measurements in their day-to-day lives, the Smar Scale eliminates chances of human error, making you as a professional much more effective, efficient, and valuable!

Designer: Joanne Swisterski

Click here to Buy Now: $149.00 $159.00 Hurry, 8 days left!

This function allows you to take a drawing that was printed out of scale and measure it as though it was perfectly to scale. This is made possible by using the sliding pointer. Line up the start of a known dimension (point A) with the fixed pointer. Move the slider to the end of the dimension (point B). Input the distance it represents, your desired units and hit enter. The screen will regenerate itself to the new custom scale.

This function allows you to convert the screen between metric and imperial. For example, if you’ve received a drawing in imperial, and you’re more comfortable with metric, tap the convert button and the long screen regenerates to the metric version of whatever was on the screen previously, or vice versa.

This function is applicable when you need to divide a space into a number of equal sections. For example, if you have to make 4 equally spaced lines on a drawing, instead of working out the math separately you simply follow the same steps as the with the custom scale section above. Move the sliding pointer across the distance that requires dividing. Input 4 on the number pad and the ruler will display 4 equally spaced notches on the screen.

Click here to Buy Now: $149.00 $159.00 Hurry, 8 days left!