Hasta La Ideas

Royal College of Art graduate Marcus Kung has designed a drone that can fly without propellers, with the aim of reducing injuries.

The Impeller Drone — Kung’s graduate project as part of the RCA‘s masters programme in Design Products — flies using four air blowers, instead of exposed rotor blades like most drones.

Kung created the product in an effort to make drones safer for casual users and bystanders.

“Drones are popular but they’re dangerous,” Kung told Dezeen. “The most common drone accident is people getting cut and hurt by the drones exposed rotor blades. A kid got his eyeball cut open by them.”

“So I started questioning whether there’s anything that in the future could replace rotor blades,” Kung continued. “I looked into different kinds of technologies and eventually I found this system, the blower impeller. I redesigned it, put it on the drone and started vertical takeoff tests.”

The impeller system sucks air in through the vents on the side of the drone and then accelerates it through a circular duct, creating an upward thrust as the air is pushed out through the bottom.

For now, the motor efficiency does not compare well with a standard drone, but Kung hopes that can be improved with more development.

He has already eased the load on the drone’s four motors by creating a lightweight design with the assistance of a structural optimisation algorithm. This enabled the minimal amount of material to be used to create a structurally sound object.

An additional benefit to the Impeller Drone is that it is quieter that one operating with rotor blades. But in Kung’s eyes, preventing injury was the primary goal.

“It can be used by non-professional drone users and filming [professional] drone users,” he said. “For non-professional drone users, because they don’t know how to control drone properly, they might hurt them self and the people surround them.”

“For filming drone users, when they do the filming at a concert or a sports game, they don’t have to worry about it hurting the audience,” he continued.

A concept design for a propeller-less drone was proposed in 2017 by Mexican designer Edgar Herrera, who won the Red Dot Design Concept Award with his idea, dubbed the Bladeless Drone.

Kung has managed to realise his take on the concept with a working prototype — although not without difficulty. Sixteen earlier prototypes failed to fly.

Drones were described as “potentially as disruptive as the internet” in the Dezeen documentary Elevation, released earlier this year. It documented the technology’s impact on architecture, infrastructure and everyday life.

Impeller Drone was on display at the Royal College of Art as part of their annual degree show. Other projects on show included Yu Li’s portable kitchen for millennials with limited space and Zhekai Zhang’s ceramics collection made using fabric moulds.

The post RCA graduate Marcus Kung designs propeller-less drone appeared first on Dezeen.

John Galliano’s Artisanal AW 2018 women’s collection for Maison Martin Margiela, features layers of sorbet-coloured garments worn back to front and iPhones clamped to model’s calves.

Galliano, who has been creative director of avant-garde label Maison Martin Margiela since October 2014, designed the collection for a “new tribe [of] neo-digital natives”.

The Artisanal Autumn/Winter 2018 women’s collection debuted on 4 July, during Paris Haute Couture fashion week.

According to Galliano, the collection was born from the idea of proposing “a new glamour”. This led to the concept of reverse dressing, or reverse swatching, inspired by the way we dress in haste and may put things on back to front.

Through volumes, layers, and various cuts in the fabric, Galliano takes Maison Margiela’s characteristic Décortiqué technique of reducing a garment to its core structure a step further, by cutting the image of one garment into another.

The collection obscures the purpose of individual garments, with coats and blazers put on in reverse to become dresses, and capes and skirts cut to be made into tail coats and jackets.

Galliano refers to this transformative process as “nomadic cutting” – evoking the memory of a garment in another garment through a series of swift cuts.

“The nomadic idea of taking life on the road is conveyed in abundant layering where garments interweave and mutate,” explained the fashion house. “Here, reverse dressing – a house term – allows for the exchange of pieces conventionally worn as top or bottom layers.”

“Through incisions, a cardboard-coloured t-shirt with pin-tuck pleats evokes the motif of a safari jacket,” it added.

Throughout the collection Galliano reveals the structures, interlinings and inner padding of clothes, which would normally be concealed, with the aim of showing the inner workings of fashion creation.

“I treat the Artisanal collection like the raw, raw, undiluted essence, the parfum, of the Maison Martin Margiela house,” he said.

The collection also took inspiration from Ge Ba, an ancient Chinese recycling method where discarded pieces of fabrics are bonded together with rice glue. This process was used to make the collection’s shift dresses.

Many of the items in the collection use modest lining materials like felt and foam in place of fine fabrics.

Galliano says this recalls an image of “nomadic glamour”, and also used materials such as bin-liners, stockings, upholstery furnishings and Velcro within the collection.

These more humble fabrics and construction methods are contrasted with futuristic clear materials, featuring x-ray prints by British artist Katerina Jebb, giving the nomadic collection a high-tech edge.

“Delicious and seductive” sorbet colours, such as coral pink, mint green and Yves Klein blue, are accented with high-shine blacks in a bid to refocus the shades that we recognise as pastel – resulting in what Galliano terms “techno-sorbet” colours.

Designed with today’s tech-driven generation in mind, the collection saw models walk the runway with iPhone clamps attached to their calves and wrists.

According to the designer, we are all “nomads” in our present day, and we move in “tribes” while being attached to our iPhones and iPads.

The collection is a representation of these tribes that Galliano calls “neo-digital natives.”

“Borne out of the contemporary primordial need for constant portable connection, they roam the virtual reality of electronic devices and social media, seduced by curated images of glamour,” said Maison Martin Margiela.

“This online illusion provokes a plugged-in desire for authenticity: the artisanal, organic and tactile. A new sense of awareness.”

According to Galliano the collection was a way of creating his own world within a world that is currently “very troubled”, with layers that are designed to feel protective, but at the same time inviting.

“I asked myself… what does ‘cool’ mean? I know that when I see people in layers, reflecting the life they lead, or choose not to live, they don’t want to live within the confines of society, I think that’s cool,” said the designer in a podcast.

“When they have their most precious possessions on them, and it’s layered and there’s a sense of history and emotion to the clothes, I think that’s ‘cool’,” he continued.

The show took place in Maison Margiela’s own premises on 163, rue Saint-Maur, in Paris. The set architecture was designed by Dutch architect Anne Holtrop in collaboration with Galliano.

Galliano is not the only designer to fuse tradition with high-tech. Iris van Herpen’s latest collection saw traditional weaving techniques combined with high-tech digital fabrication, to create a series of garments featuring complex parametric patterns.

The post Maison Margiela’s Artisanal couture collection is designed for “neo-digital natives” appeared first on Dezeen.

Tara Strong makes her living rolling off cliffs and fighting villains … of the animated variety. You might not recognize her face, but you likely have heard her in hit cartoons like “The Powerpuff Girls,” “Rugrats” and “The Fairly OddParents.” Step inside the studio with one of most prolific voice actors in the game…(Read…)

Ignore its vape-sized proportions, because the Atmotube is, in every sense of the word, the very opposite! Designed to measure the quality of the air around you and alert you when the quality falls below a given qualitative standard, the Atmotube protects your lungs from the toxins around you with every breath you take.

Humans take as many as 20,000 breaths per day, and the Atmotube was created to make each one count. A personal pollution monitor, this slick little device fits in palms, bags, purses, and even pockets, measuring air for carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and other impurities, while also checking air temperature and humidity, and distinguishing between air quality indoors as well as outdoors. While indoor air quality isn’t usually measured, tests show that air indoors can be staler than the air outdoors, often containing toxins and VOCs that contribute to illness and can trigger asthma in sensitive patients. Atmotube’s state-of-the-art design features a unique multi-gas sensor with ultra-low power consumption, high sensitivity and fast heating times, allowing it to measure the air in real time around it, giving you stats on the air you breathe wherever you go, not just the air outdoors.

Its small size makes carrying it around easy, while its titanium-coated construction allows it to withstand the stress of being carried around in your pocket or bag every day. With a single button to power it, the Atmotube needs no user manual, and all the data it collects is sent directly to your phone, giving you an accurate representation of the air you breathe wherever you are. With a USB Type-C charging port and a half-ring for easy hanging/suspending, the Atmotube can easily be carried and charged along with your smartphone, allowing you to be in control of the air you breathe no matter where you are… because just like the food you consume, the quality of air you breathe plays a major role in your long-term health.

Designer: Atmotube

Have you ever frantically designed a project over the weekend only for it to be shot down the following Monday? Well, Elon Musk and his team of SpaceX engineers feel you. In light of the flooded cave incident in Thailand, Musk put his team to work on Saturday designing a solution for the rescue mission in the form of a tiny submarine that could maneuver through the tight passages of the cave. On Saturday, Musk tweeted out the following details:

“Got more great feedback from Thailand. Primary path is basically a tiny, kid-size submarine using the liquid oxygen transfer tube of Falcon rocket as hull. Light enough to be carried by 2 divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust.”

Once the rescue device was complete the next day, the team tested it for a few hours before Musk got on a plane to Thailand. However, by that point, around eight of the twelve boys had already been rescued. Thai officials team deemed Musk’s submarine unnecessary, as the method they were already using proved to work just fine and the third and final rescue mission had already been planned. 

Image via ars.

Image via ars.

In terms of specs, Musk responded to the following tweet saying that the tube is only 31 cm (around 1 foot) in diameter—a few cm smaller than the cave’s reported tightest points. One of the main goals of the device was to ease panic for kids with no experience navigating through tight passages.

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I’ve seen some reports that the narrowest part of the cave is roughly 72 cm by 38 cm (see attached diagram for instance). What is the diameter of the tube? If it’s over 38 cm, wouldn’t it get stuck in this spot? Or are these diagrams wrong? pic.twitter.com/ppO6wRJROb

— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) July 8, 2018

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