Hasta La Ideas

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the British band’s’Tattoo You’ album engineers at Boston Dynamics programmed the versatile Spot robot to mirror the hip-snaking sorcery of Mick Jagger.

Spot, the dynamic robot developed by Boston Dynamics has more tricks up its sleeve than just the usual chores such as quadruped machines venture out on. This time around the highly acclaimed dog robot moves to the Rolling Stones’ 1981 hit “Start Me Up” to unbelievable perfection. Not only that, the lead singer mimicked by Spot is accompanied by other two Spot robots to emulate the moves of Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Charlie Watts!

This is not the first time Spot has surprised the tech world with its swaggy moves – earlier it twerked to the cover “Uptown Funk” and the classic “Do You Love Me?” Boston Dynamics has piqued the interest in such robotic machines worldwide with such creative initiatives, and we are loving it to the core. This is a clear example of the sophistication robots are capable of as the video shows the near-perfect movement and lip-sync (yes the robot actually does that) replicating the human counterpart. The clip begins with a split-screen having Mick Jagger and the solo Spot robot. Then as the dance moves get groovy the other rock band members enter the frame, mirrored by the other Spot robots.

In the video, the robot can be seen using its long neck and arms to mimic the rockstar’s motion. These dance moves further instill our faith in the flexible and stable nature of the incredible machine that’s already performing a variety of roles – things like jobs at Ford’s factory floor or oil rig inspection at BP. You can even buy one if you want, but the price is mind-numbing $74,500.

Designer: Boston Dynamics and Rolling Stone

Architecture offices Palma and Hanghar have inserted a “playful sequence of rooms” made from thermal bricks into an empty passageway that leads to a monumental chimney in Spain.

Called Types of Spaces, the project was a temporary installation commissioned as part of last month’s Concéntrico design and architecture festival in the city of Logroño in northern Spain’s Rioja province.

Mexico City practice Palma collaborated with Spanish firm Hanghar to create Types of Spaces, which was located within an unused public passageway that leads to the site of Fábrica de Tabacos, an old tobacco factory.

The installation comprised a series of geometric open-air spaces built from naturally terracotta-coloured thermal clay bricks, which the designers described as “an ephemeral and playful sequence of rooms.”

Arranged on a surface of discarded brick chips, the “rooms” provided an immersive gateway to a similarly-coloured red brick chimney that is located at the end of the passageway.

“When we were invited to participate in the festival, we were presented with several possible locations across the whole city to choose from,” Palma architect Diego Escamilla told Dezeen.

“The passageway wasn’t even presented in the first meetings by the organisers because they thought we might not be really interested in it,” Escamilla added.

“In the end, it was the perfect site for us. A discreet part of the city that could easily go unnoticed at first, but could awaken the curiosity of visitors and invite them to go through it.”

While the chimney is a remaining symbol of Fábrica de Tabacos, the factory is no longer in use. Today, its site is split between the Regional Parliament of La Rioja and a public library.

“The project took inspiration from both the site and the material we built it from,” explained Palma architect Ilse Cárdenas.

“The starting point for the design was to divide the long passage into a series of concatenated 3.6-metre square rooms in order to form a spatial procession of corridors and rooms of a domestic character in an attempt to reconstruct the void of the passage,” added Hanghar architect Eduardo Mediero.

Using 30-by-30-centimetre bricks, the architects say that they took advantage of the bricks’ interlocking system, only using minimal mortar reinforcement to secure them in place in order to ensure their reuse once the installation was dismantled.

Palma and Hanghar sourced the bricks from Cerámica Sampedro, a factory in Spain that accepted the bricks back after Concéntrico.

“Our main objective with the project was to not generate waste or trash by buying new materials, which usually happens with many ephemeral projects,” said Cárdenas.

“With brick as the main element, we decided to not use anything else, and build the whole pavilion with it. We think it creates a really nice dialogue with the chimney,” concluded Mediero.

Other recently designed playful installations include a colourful Lego laundrette constructed in London as a place for children to play by Yinka Ilori.

The photography is by Luis Díaz Díaz.

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When Bryce and Kurt first designed the All-Terrain Wagon, they didn’t even know they were inventing a new category of cargo-carrying trailers. The story of the world’s only ATW has an underlying ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ sort of message to it, although once Bryce and Kurt designed their ATW, they realized what an incredibly useful little contraption it was and decided to file a patent on it.

Designers: Kurt Maclaurin & Bryce Gibson of Earth+Kin

Click Here to Buy Now: $135 $210 (35% off). Hurry, only 14/50 left! Raised over $110,00.

The patent-pending All Terrain Wagon is the only wagon that’s designed to work on soil, sand and snow, while being able to be pulled/pushed by hand, bicycle, motorbike, and even a car. Like the quintessential wagon, it comes with three sets of wheels (like a tricycle), although the two primary wheels have much more heavy-duty treads that allow the wagon to operate even on unforgiving terrain.

Although, those heavy-duty 16″ Fat Tires aren’t the ATW’s only innovation. The entire wagon is designed from the top down to be versatile in terms of where it’s used, what it carries, how it carries it, and whether the wagon’s hand-operated or attached to a vehicle. The wagon itself sports detachable wheels for easy maintenance, as well as removable side roll-bars depending on whether you need them or not. The front of the wagon comes with a detail for mounting the ATW’s adapters let you attach your wagon to the back of a bike or even a car, while on the other end of the ATW lies a telescopic handle for easily pushing or pulling your cargo. Perhaps one of my favorite aspect of the ATW is also the way the telescopic handle is designed to not obstruct the car’s license plate when mounted on the back of your vehicle. Its looped form factor provides a clear view of the car’s rear license plate, going to show how much planning and thought went into the All Terrain Wagon’s overall design.

The entire wagon measures 37″ length-wise, and 29″ from wheel to wheel. It weighs 20lbs when empty, and can carry up to 100lbs of cargo when attached to a car or bike, or 150 when manually operated by hand. The wagon’s storage area comes made from 100% PCR ballistic nylon fabric, making it not just rugged but waterproof too, and features a fold-down front with a zippered storage pocket on it. Other accessories for the ATW also include a cargo-holding elastic net as well as a weather-proof cover for concealing your belongings in the rain or snow. The vehicle attachments include a 1-1/4″ or 2″ hitch adapter for mounting the ATW to the back of your car like a trailer, as well as two types of bike adapters – one for your seat tube, and another that directly connects the ATW to your rear axle.

Ultimately, the All Terrain Wagon was built to cover a versatile set of use-cases that are only limited by the user’s imagination. You could essentially take it camping, on a fishing excursion, a trip to the beach, or even use it in your garage or backyard to transport gardening equipment or workshop tools from one part of your home to another. Given its nature of use, the All Terrain Wagon’s designed to be incredibly robust and durable, and is even covered by a Lifetime Warranty and free repairs on any sort of manufacturing defects. The wagons are designed and tested by Bryce and Kurt’s Boston-based family business Earth+Kin, who not only pledge to begin deliveries for the wagon by May 2022, but are also committed to refunding backers 100% of their money if the deliveries fall through and don’t make it for some unforeseen reason… and if that wasn’t enough, Earth+Kin donates 100% of all their profits to registered 501c3’s that support Earth and Family. E+K is B corp. pending and on a mission to build “Gear that Gives”.

Click Here to Buy Now: $135 $210 (35% off). Hurry, only 14/50 left! Raised over $110,00.

There is no second thought about the future of mobility being fully autonomous, providing a sustainable and predictably safer way for people to move about at the touch of a button. When the future is here, we could have autonomous experience pods gliding on the roads with interiors alterable at will.

Future casting is a term used loosely to imagine whatever the will permits in order to stay ahead of the curve. But thoughtful designers are not liberal about the idea; they deliver upon concepts that set a base for getting things right in the future. They do not predict the future, they make tech and innovation flow in mannerisms best suited to grab people’s imagination and make their lives better in the future. The ease with which such artists and designers put forward an idea that could be a norm in the future leaves me perplexed every single day. It’s the interesting part of my job but things really become overwhelming with designs like the HOMM Autonomous Experience Pod that intends to make people’s lives better in more ways than one.

Leveraging upon the concept of autonomous vehicles – akin to the Volkswagen’s Sedric concept car – that sense their environment and operate without any human intervention; the HOMM envisions the future of such AVs as Experience Pods. The basic intention of the HOMM AV concept is to propose possibilities of how the space within a Pod-like autonomous vehicle can be used with greater flexibility. To give people various possibilities to conjure up their own layout, the HOMM starts out as a black canvas that can be customized for an unprecedented experience.

Since carmakers realize that autonomous vehicles are the future of transportation, they are shaping how the future would look like. In that scenario, the HOMM experience pods fit well for a reason: the pod-like design is not too far from how the Volvos, Toyotas or even Volkswagens foresee the future. Where it differs though is its three-wheeled design and the option to modify the interiors at will. This democratization of space permits users to plan a layout from select specific interiors. For this new concept of urban mobility (considering the three-wheel design will limit it to well-designed roads) and honoring an interconnected relationship between people occupying the vehicle, NOMM arrives with five presets. The pod experience can be tailored effortlessly for a kinetic tour, mobile party, multi-living, solitude or for work and adventure.

Before the AV’s are radically changed, we must contemplate the real-world scenario where the complexity and nature of our roads have rendered full anatomy in transportation still a dream we are chasing. But this distraction should not sway us to believe otherwise. Someday a large part of humanity would be traveling in driverless vehicles, and if those will allow the occupants to change the interiors to suit their travel – no other future can be more inviting!

Designers: Rodney Loh, Thomas Tellier, Jexter Lim, Sim Hao Jie, Winnie Lim