Hasta La Ideas

Looks cool…

When I used to work for an artist who specialized in photorealistic portraiture, I remember watching the assistants use a projector to draft the preliminary pencilwork for his medium-to-large scale (30”×40”+) paintings. Since we were working with digital compositions, it was a simple matter of lining up the image with the canvas or archival paper, then painstakingly tracing the photograph and background onto it.

Now that software has democratized and simplified the tools of creating images, I imagine this is a common practice in artists’ studios. But what about drawing from real life? Most everyone has seen or at least heard of camera obscura, but it turns out there’s a somewhat more, um, obscure tool that draftsmen of yore had at their disposal.

Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin (Art Professors at SAIC and CMU, respectively) note that “long before Google Glass… there was the Camera Lucida.” The device is a “prism on a stick,” a portable lens-like device that is affixed to a drawing surface, allowing the user to accurately reproduce an image before them by hand.

We have designed the NeoLucida: the first portable camera lucida to be manufactured in nearly a century—and the lowest-cost commercial camera lucida ever designed. We want to make this remarkable device widely available to students, artists, architects, and anyone who loves to draw from life. But to be clear: our NeoLucida is not just a product, but a provocation. In manufacturing a camera lucida for the 21st century, our aim is to stimulate interest in media archaeology—the tightly interconnected history of visual culture and imaging technologies.

According to the well-illustrated history page on the Neolucida website, the device was invented by Sir William Hyde Wollaston in 1807, though the Wikipedia article suggests that it was actually developed by Johannes Kepler, whose dioptrice dates back to 1611, nearly two centuries prior.

Selections from Pablo Garcia’s personal collection of vintage camera lucidas

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Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s no denying that Nooka has pioneered a design language unto itself. Founder Matthew Waldman and his team have successfully reinvigorated a familiar form factor with novel UI elements to essentially remix the wristwatch for the digital age and beyond. But if his latest venture seems like a radical departure, it’s worth noting that it’s not the first time he’s explored eco-conscious design: back in 2010, they unveiled a packaging design that can be reused as tupperware.

Indeed, Waldman cites Nooka’s experimental packaging—as well as their 2012 Dieline Award winner—in the Kickstarter pitch for his latest venture. We can only imagine that the concept behind his new product, Pothra (rhymes with Godzilla’s sometime nemesis), was a virtuous cycle of coffee-fueled ideation about what to with the coffee grounds. (There must be a joke about a watched pot never boiling, but your humble editor happens to be a bit overcaffeinated to focus on punning at the moment.)

It’s definitely food for thought (or rather, food waste for thought), though I’m curious as to whether there are other benefits or disadvantages to using coffee grounds They’re certainly a staple of household compost systems, but I imagine the resin precludes the possibility that the raw materials might be converted into fertilizer. Conversely, they note that they’re looking to use biodegradable resin, which raises questions about the lifespan of the product.

Detail – each Pothra is unique, depending on the roast of the beans

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UK illustrator and designer Kelly Angood has developed a cultish following from DIY and analog enthusiasts ever since releasing diagrams and a how-to video for creating a camera at home in 2011. Using 120 film, the…

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Shel Kimen loves a good story, and hers is a tale of a grassroots effort to support a creative community in their time of need. She dreamt up Detroit Collision Works, a multipurpose boutique hotel, co-working space and venue for all-around awesomeness, in Summer of 2011, and they’re hoping to Kickstart a prototype of a converted shipping container in time for Flower Day in the country’s longest running farmer’s market—exactly one month out, on May 18. With just 36 hours to go to raise $11,000 for First Container, Kimen was kind enough to take the time to tell us why we should care.

Awesome needs a place to be.

As people are all too eager to tell you, Detroit has some problems, with the economy, crime, and fractured communities. So when I was thinking about a move to Detroit after 14 years in New York City, I knew that whatever I was going to do had to address some real needs. Coming from the design world, I know that making a good product means understanding, intimately, the people that are going to use it. So the first thing I started doing when I got to Detroit was talk to people. Lots of them.

It started with a hotel. Amazingly, there was not a modern, boutique hotel in all of Detroit! Yet creative people from all over the world visit to work on design an innovation projects—for the auto industry, for bio-tech, for the city (we are an urban planners dream thesis), and to perform at or attend one of our legendary music festivals that combined bring in half a million people annually. Those are creative travelers!

So, ok, we need a cool hotel.

But a cool hotel isn’t enough. We need a place for coming together, with our immediate communities, as a city, and inclusive of the many people who visit us. We need a place to accelerate the growth of our communities.

Collision Works is a creative space needed by the people living in Detroit now and the people coming to visit us. It’s an artful 36-room boutique hotel, co-working facility, and public event space that uses storytelling to connect and engage travelers and locals alike. Our whole lives are stories—truth and fiction, history and imagination. Stories connect us, help us learn, and catalyze personal and community growth.

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When it comes to blog submissions, bike-related projects are probably second to only mobile device accessories here, and a fair share of these ever-trending products happen to be Kickstarter projects. The BikeSpike is easily one of the more worthwhile ones we’ve seen lately, and with less than 24 hours to raise the last $10K of their $150,000 funding goal, we’ll keep it short and sweet: “The BikeSpike is backed by the world’s smallest GPS chipset with a built-in antenna, an on-board accelerometer, and a connection to a global cellular network.” The cheeky spot illustrates its anti-theft functionality:

The reference to the Allstate commercials is duly noted, and if the pricing seems a little steep, I suppose you should think of it as an insurance policy: at $7/month, it comes in at less than an AppleCare protection plan… assuming you value your bicycle as much as your laptop or phone. (Although my renter’s insurance covers my bike and laptop from theft for about $13/month, the $500 deductible means the bike should be worth substantially more than that for it to be worth it.)

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