This week Apple CEO Tim Cook took to Twitter to announce the company is making face shields, at a production target of one million per week, for healthcare professionals. (This is on top of the 20 million facemasks that supply-chain wiz Cook managed to summon up for donation.)
Like many of you, I screenshotted the crap out of the video, hoping to get a definitive look at the design:
Alas, it’s not possible to see much detail:
It does look like they’ve done away with the bulkier forehead strip of the incumbent design, which makes me quite curious. I’m also wondering whether what you see above is the finished object, or if they will be adding some type of foam on the forehead strip. Any guesses?
It didn’t take long for society’s norms to shift so drastically that we’ve now got indie creator-made solutions for our modern-day problems. Meet the Hygiene Hand, a Captain Hook-inspired piece of EDC that lets you interact with the world without, well, physically interacting with it. Machined from a brass billet, which is known to possess anti-microbial properties, the Hygiene Hand acts as a keychain that you can use to push, pull, and generally maneuver objects without actually touching them. Designed by a retired New York paramedic, the Hygiene Hand is what you get when Everyday Carry meets Personal Protective Equipment.
It isn’t as in-your-face as wearing a mask in public, but it performs the crucial task of preventing germs from getting on your person. Given that your hands touch thousands of surfaces through the day, and you subsequently touch your face an average of 20 times each hour, the Hygiene Hand and its ‘neat’ (literally and figuratively) design allow you to navigate the world without having your hands ever touch a potentially germ-ridden surface.
The Hygiene Hand’s hook shape was designed to get you through most of life’s interactions hands-free. The hook comes with a slight bump at its tip that works as a metal fingertip, enabling you to press buttons on an elevator, or your PIN number into an ATM without using your hands. The brass build allows the Hygiene Hand to work as a conductive stylus too, letting you tap touchscreens or sign against tablets to fulfill deliveries.
The hook detail facilitates pulling, sliding, and turning objects like door-handles with ease – probably the only caveat being spherical doorknobs that may need grabbing and turning. The anti-microbial nature of the Hygiene Hand’s brass build reduces, if not eliminates, the chances of any germs making it to your fingertips, effectively protecting you from catching something nasty… plus, it also holds keys!
The Hygiene Hand is manufactured in the USA to help expedite delivery to one of the hardest-hit countries in the pandemic. Arriving at an incredibly opportune time when products desperately need to guide human behavior to help them stay healthy, the Hygiene Hand helps navigate through life while limiting contact with germs, comes with a lifetime guarantee on its build, and ships as early as May 2020. Kickstarter backers even get a free retractable keychain along with each Hygiene Hand, allowing you to secure it to your person or a backpack.
Hygiene Hand – An Antimicrobial Brass EDC Door Opener & Stylus
The Hygiene Hand keychain tool offers a better way to open doors & use shared surfaces like checkouts or ATMs. Designed by a retired NY City Paramedic, the Hygiene Hand is made entirely from a solid piece of brass which is inherently antimicrobial, to help decrease the spreading of germs while performing some of your everyday tasks.
Retractable carabiner keychain included.
Made From Brass
The composition of brass is 70% copper and 30% zinc. The benefits of brass:
– Inherently antimicrobial. – Sustainable and 100% recyclable. – Corrosion-resistant and holds up very well against harsh elements and repeated use. – Will oxidize over time leaving a natural patina that gives it a classic, refined look.
The Back Story
“Literally a week and a half ago in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City I went to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription and was asked to use their stylus to sign for the purchase. When I pointed out to the pharmacist that the stylus must be full of germs from all the people picking up prescriptions before me they said they are out of hand sanitizer so I should just wash my hands when I get home,” Goldstein told Yanko Design.
“As the days went by and the coronavirus spread I became more and more aware how many times I have to touch things that must be full of germs.. elevator buttons, buttons to pay by credit card at stores and gas pumps and of course pulling open doors to public bathrooms. I went back to the office and met with my design team and decided we would immediately start designing and prototyping a solution to this problem,” Goldstein continued.
So like the rest of you, I’m distracting myself from worst-case COVID-19 scenarios. My latest mental escape of choice is looking at photos of dome houses, which look cool as hell.
Well, of course they always look good in photos–a professional photographer could’ve made my first Brooklyn apartment look good. But when I start looking at floorplans of round houses, I’m thinking that living in them would actually suck.
In these panicked times, there is no room for nuance, grey area or anything but total allegiance to one of two extreme viewpoints. You must decide whether living in a circle would be Awesome or would Totally Suck. Here is a sampling of floorplans to help you decide.
Minuses:
– Visual discord at trying to reconcile rectilinear furniture with curved walls, and/or weird trapezoid-shaped rooms
– Wasted space where rectilinear furniture meets curved surface
– Can pay for built-in furniture to meet curves, but that gets pricey
– DIY’ing built-in furniture to meet curves will require tons of scribing
– Unusable space where walls meet floor at weird angle
It looks like you have to build a big-ass circle, one so large in footprint that you essentially flatten the curve (sorry to use that phrase) of the wall, before the issue of rectilinear furniture in a curved space starts to go away.
I didn’t realize that folks who pre-ordered a Tesla Cybertruck have already set up a fan website. CybertruckOwnersClub.com has a well-trafficked forum section, and it is there that we encountered these two camper concept renderings by an owner-to-be:
A surprising repercussion of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the accuracy of weather forecasts has gone down.
Weather is a big deal on a farm, and I use both the Dark Sky and AccuWeather apps to prepare for what’s coming. But a couple of weeks ago, I noticed the forecasts going wonky. They’d say a week of rain was coming, and it wound up being clear. Or vice versa. And temperatures were off.
Now I’ve learned why: The mass grounding of flights. I had no idea weather forecasters harvested data from commercial airlines, but according to the World Meteorological Organization,
“The significant decrease in air traffic has had a clear impact [on forecast accuracy]. In-flight measurements of ambient temperature and wind speed and direction are a very important source of information for both weather prediction and climate monitoring.
“Commercial airliners contribute to the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay programme (AMDAR), which uses onboard sensors, computers and communications systems to collect, process, format and transmit meteorological observations to ground stations via satellite or radio links.”
United Nations News gets into the actual numbers, and points out that things are worse in Europe than in America:
“Before the COVID-19 era, commercial airlines took around 700,000 daily readings of air temperature, wind speed and wind direction. This data and much more is fed into WMO’s Global Observing System, which supports weather and climate services and products provided by the 193 WMO Members.
“In Europe…air traffic readings are down by 85 to 90 per cent…. The impact has been less severe in the US, where commercial airline traffic data is down by 60 per cent, WMO said.
“‘At the present time, the adverse impact of the loss of observations on the quality of weather forecast products is still expected to be relatively modest’, said Lars Peter Riishojgaard, Director of WMO’s Earth System Branch. ‘However, as the decrease in availability of aircraft weather observations continues and expands, we may expect a gradual decrease in reliability of the forecasts.'”
While we still have satellites, ground-based weather stations and weather balloons, it appears the massive amounts of data harvested by airplanes is pretty crucial in meteorological modeling. With less planes in the air, there’s a lot less data. Guess I’d better do what the older folks do down here, and start relying on my own joint pain to warn me of when a storm’s coming.
Mexican architect Delfino Lozano has turned a family home in Guadalajara into four apartments detailed with blue-painted beams and arched doorways.
Lozano created four one-bedroom residences in a two-storey property located in the Santa Teresita neighbourhood of the Mexican city.
The architect said he designed the complex, called House B836, to follow as much of the existing layout as possible. Features include a pair of courtyards that allow for natural light to penetrate into each of the apartments and an internal staircase in the middle of the building.
“The original structure of the house was conserved, achieving the perfect distribution of the four studios and demolishing only the necessary elements to generate much more open spaces,” he said.
The stair connects the four units and leads up to a small volume that Lozano erected on the roof to offer residents access to a rooftop patio. The structure has concrete and glass walls, and a curved brickwork roof that is covered in terracotta tiles.
The arched roof mirrors the numerous archways seen in the project, such as arched windows and doorways.
White walls feature both on the exterior and inside House B836, which was previously coloured a dark yellow outside. Lozano said the colour is a way to mix Mediterranean architecture with Mexican elements to create a new style he calls “Mexiterraneo”.
Photograph by Erle Marec
“The design intentions reaffirm the searching of the office for picking up the line of the “Mexiterraneo”, in which materiality was selected by its freshness and sobriety they provide in each of the spaces,” he explained.
At House B836, a rough stone wall in one of the courtyards offers a contrast to the texture of the smooth concrete floors inside the units.
The interiors combine the industrial quality of exposed steel beams and concrete, which is also used to create benches and tabletops, with softer surfaces. Plywood clads interior walls, forms built-ins for seating and serves as kitchen cabinetry.
Photograph by Erle Marec
Lozano has also painted a number of the doors and exposed beams blue to match the colours of windows and doorways.
“This way, using concrete, wood, blue-painted ironworks, and clay elements such as the vault that culminates on the top level of the building, honouring the range of local materials,” Lozano said.
Photograph by Erle Marec
Details that round out the 250-square-metre project are woven rugs, globe light fixtures, pillows and potted plants.
Ample natural light is provided with different window shapes, from long rectangular portions to gridded, arched designs.
A survey conducted by the Royal Institute of British Architects has found that 45 per cent of architects have lost income due to the coronavirus pandemic, while almost quarter are struggling mentally.
The survey found that the disruption caused by the necessary measures to slow the spread of coronavirus Covid-19 are having a huge impact on the profession.
“The findings of this survey show how that Covid-19 is having a severe impact on architects, professionally and personally,” said RIBA CEO Alan Vallance.
“For many architects, their work is more than a way to earn a living, and to see decades of hard work threatened by circumstances none of us can have foreseen is a disaster.”
Cancelled projects and cash flow shortages
Almost 80 per cent of respondents reported project delays, with over a third seeing their projects cancelled entirely.
Of those surveyed, 59 per cent reported a drop in workload for their practice, and 57 per cent had seen decreased cash flow.
Only one per cent had been made redundant, but 45 per cent reported a loss of income and 33 per cent are looking into applying to HMRC for an extension on their tax bills.
Over 80 per cent of the 1,000 architects surveyed are now working from home, but almost a third said that the disruption of family or caring responsibilities was affecting their ability to work.
Mounting pressure on mental health
Isolation and stress over the uncertainty had 23 per cent of architects reporting a negative impact on their mental health.
“During this extremely unsettling time, I call on employers to prioritise the welfare and wellbeing of their staff,” said Vallance.
“This means enabling them to work from home flexibly where possible, and taking advantage of the Government’s Job Retention Scheme,” he added.
“Above all else, we must all prioritise our own physical and mental health, and seek support if needed.”
The RIBA said it was lobbying the government to protect architect’s incomes and asking for grants for practices to rent computer equipment for staff that need to work from home.
As part of Virtual Design Festival, we’re calling on readers everywhere to send us short video clips with their messages to the world.
The best ones will be published on Dezeen as part of VDF, which starts on 15 April and runs until 30 June. This will include a special montage of video messages to launch the festival, which will be soundtracked by musician Beatie Wolfe (above).
If you want to contribute, please carefully follow the instructions below! Please note that video messages must not contain any commercial or promotional messages.
If you want to promote your work, we are offering an affordable product launchpad as part of the festival. We’re also looking for sponsors and commercial partners to help us make a success of VDF. Drop us a line at virtualdesignfestival@dezeen.com for more details.
Here’s the brief for your video messages:
Please record a continuous clip with no breaks or edits of 45-60 second in length. Longer clips will be rejected.
Start with a greeting and say who you are and where you are.
After a short gap (to allow for editing), please explain how you are faring during the restrictions where you are, what you are doing, and giving a positive message to the world. This is your chance to be creative so feel free to do something entertaining!
Finally, after another short gap, please end with a signoff. This could be a simple “Goodbye” or “Cheers” or similar.
Important: please hold your phone or camera horizontally to record in landscape format and try to ensure your clip has good audio and lighting.
Avoid background noise and don’t include anything to which you don’t own rights; for example, don’t record TV, radio or music tracks that are not yours to share.
Please look into the camera when you’re recording the beginning and end bits, but you can also move around and pan the camera around your surroundings during the middle section if you like.
That’s it! Please upload your clip to dezeen.wetransfer.com. When uploading the clip, be sure to include your email address so we can contact you, as well as your name, the name of your company, your location and any other key details in the message field.
There’s no deadline, but the sooner you send us your clip, the more likely it is that we will choose to feature it.
Daily coronavirus briefing: today’s architecture and design coronavirus briefing includes an Iranian shrine being used to make masks, Foster + Partners‘ design for a face shield and a ventilator prototype by Tesla.
Foster + Partners designs open-source laser-cut face shield
The Shah Cheragh shrine in the Iranian city of Shiraz has been temporarily converted into a mask manufacturing workshop. Photos released by Fars News Agency show people working on sewing machines and assembling the masks in the highly decorative shrine (via IFP news).
Tesla unveils ventilator prototypes
Tesla has shared a new video on its YouTube channel showing two versions of the ventilator the company is building to address the shortage caused by the coronavirus crisis. One is a prototype model, with its components laid out across a desk, the other a packaged model that shows how the ventilator could look when used by a hospital (via The Verge).
Lindsey Adelman and Apparatus auction off designs to raise money for PPE
The online auction At Home will raise money for Direct Relief, which is working to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to New York’s health workers. Lindsey Adelman and Apparatus are among 40 local design studios and makers that have donated to the cause (via Dezeen).
Helpful Engineering creates design collective
Non-profit organisation Helpful Engineering has established a global network of volunteers to crowdsource designs that can be helpful in the fight against coronavirus. The first product created by the group is a face shield that can be made using a home 3D printer (via Helpful Engineering).
The Hastings Contemporary art gallery in the south of England is offering virtual tours of its exhibition of British abstract artist Victor Pasmore in real time, led by a robot (via Guardian).
Self-isolating is a luxury says New York Times
Lower-income workers across the USA are still moving around the city while wealthier residents are self-isolating, according to smartphone location data analysed by The New York Times (via New York Times).
RISD graduates prototype mask and face shields
Five alumni of Rhode Island School of Design have joined the effort to create face shields and masks to meet the growing demand for medical supplies during the coronavirus pandemic (via Dezeen).
Female-focused co-working club The Wing closes its doors indefinitely
The Wing, an international co-working club famous for its female-focused membership, has laid-off or furloughed the majority of its staff. The announcement came three weeks after the club closed its doors and suspended its memberships. “We simply don’t know when we will reopen,” said co-founder Audrey Gelman (via Instagram).
Grimshaw starts 3D printing face masks
Grimshaw is the latest architecture studio to start 3D printing face masks as part of the UK’s National 3D Printing Society campaign (via Grimshaw Twitter).
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