Radian, Affordable Time-lapse Technology

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We love seeing meaningful projects reach their Kickstarter funding goals, and we really love it when those projects involve innovative, high performance technology—like Radian, a motion time-lapse device and smartphone app aimed at bringing pricey photography equipment to a wider audience. Normally a remote timer alone costs around $130, but Radian is set to sell for just $125. As a completely self-contained product you don’t even need a tripod, let alone the cabling. That’s partially because Radian’s inventors have streamlined the manufacturing process, but also because if you use an iPhone or Android you already own the remote timer, no tethering required.

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The device itself is a traditional tripod mount (though it also works alone on a tabletop), but the real genius here is in the app. The easy-to-use interface allows you to program tilt direction and speed; The app will even automatically change the exposure so you can shoot seamlessly from sunrise to sunset. And not only can you exit the app during the time-lapse, you can even turn your phone off without interrupting the process.

“To make things even simpler, our app makes valuable real time calculations – giving you a good feel for what the resulting time-lapse would be based on your settings. This allows you to quickly and easily adjust your settings to get your desired output while simultaneously saving you multiple trips to the calculator app.We have integrated bramping (bulb-ramping for smooth night-day-night transitions, currently only for Canon cameras), speed ramping, and a range of time-delay settings. Our app combined with Radian allows you to take on previously difficult feats, such as day-to-night and sunrise-to-sunset time-lapses.”

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More Than a FLASHr in the Pan

Smartphone cases serve two purposes: besides the obvious protection that they provide, cases are also a way to personalize one of one’s most personal possessions. From graphic treatments to sheer utility, it seems that new options are available by the day. It’s a cottage industry that’s hit its stride, for better or for worse, with the rise of Kickstarter as a product design platform: I’d make a conservative estimate that the ol’ inbox sees at least one new KS case per week.

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Of course, many of these cases are, as they say, nothing to write (or is that text?) home about… which is precisely why a new contender on Kickstarter caught my eye. New Orleans-based Phaze5 has an interesting take on a pocketable iPhone 4/4S case with a bit of funky functionality: designer Trey DeArk and musician Terence Green hope to launch the company with the FLASHr case, which is just under 30% funded (with four weeks to go).

By adapting the built-in “LED Flash for Alerts” feature—an accessibility option on each and every iPhone 4/4S—to illuminate the trim around the edges of the case, the FLASHr is a sort of hardware-enabled software hack: Phaze5’s repurposing of the phone’s LED is almost MacGyver-like… if Richard Dean Anderson’s character had access to injection molding and aluminum stamping.

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Astro

A panning companion for time-lapse photography
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The past year has seen the kickstarting of heaps of useful camera tools for photographers and videographers, and the hits just keep on coming. Astro joins the pack as an intervalometer and motion control device for time-lapse photography. Three stacked aluminum disks control the range, duration and interval for your shot with a design as clean as an egg timer. Astro promises to take time-lapse footage to the next level with panning for a more dynamic effect.

The usability of the device is the real clincher. Virtually any camera with a remote output can pair with Astro to control shutter release intervals if the time-lapse function isn’t built in to the camera’s software. The panning functions—range and duration—are run independently of the camera. Two buttons below the disk are used to determine the direction of Astro’s rotation and speed while mounted to a tripod. Astro is also developing an app for Android and iOS that will allow users to program a full time-lapse plan and upload it to the device directly—expanding Astro’s capability from simple panning to include accelerated and slowed movements to ease in or out of a scene.

On our recent trip to Zambia, we had plenty of chances to take in Africa’s luminous night sky, and a panning option would have helped to take in a broader landscape. While Astro has already blown its $50,000 goal out of the water after a few short days, the device has 31 more days to fill pre-order slots for an initial run of production. Currently, people can pledge to receive Astro in silver and limited edition black for $180 and $200 with delivery expected in December 2012.


A Cross-Country Motorcycle Journey Births a Product Designer: Mike Bratcher’s Riseful RollPro III

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From the open road…

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…to the open roll

I love hearing about the various paths people take to become product designers, particularly the more unusual ones.

Last year Mike Bratcher rolled out of L.A. on his motorcycle, a Honda dual-sport XR650L loaded up with traveling gear. In his rearview mirror was the job he’d recently quit at the Parts division of a major auto manufacturer. During his five-year stint he’d risen to Sales Manager and learned a lot about business, before ultimately deciding the demands of a career in sales were not for him.

But Mike wasn’t fleeing L.A.; he was taking time off to see America. Nearly four months later, he rolled back into town with 17,048 more miles on his bike and the URL for a Tumblr page where he’d photo documented the trip. “The United States is much bigger and beautiful than I could have ever imagined,” he concluded. “Three-and-a-half months is not nearly enough time to soak up this country, but it was a good overview at the least.” Perhaps most amazingly, he’d not spent a single night of the trip in a hotel or motel, but instead carried everything he’d need for life on the road.

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You can see a detailed breakdown of the insane amount of things he had to carry here, but there is one item in particular that’s most relevant to this entry:

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That’s a simple tool roll Mike made for himself. “There’s a lot of tool rolls out there, for like 10 or 15 bucks, but none of them were exactly right for me,” he explains. “They were all way too generalized, so I just made my own.” Bratcher had been making things for himself since growing up on a farm in Indiana. By junior high his classmates were surreptitiously making bong parts in shop class; Mike, more interested in chess than weed, made himself a chess board and the 32 playing pieces to populate it. “It wasn’t easy,” he laughs, remembering. “Sixteen pawns, four knights, four rooks….”

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Designing Chicago: Greater Good Studio’s Crowd-Funded and Crowd-Designed Transit App

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Although some people might doubt the wisdom of crowds, Greater Good Studio is putting the future of their Chicago transportation app in the hands of the masses. Their plans for a crowd-funded and crowd-designed transportation app integrates bus and train and uses real-time arrival data for both, but the real fun is where you come in.

By donating to their Kickstarter campaign, citizens from around the world can participate in shaping the future of their Chicago transportation app. For $25, the project’s “Urban Scouts” are sent out in their respective cities with research or design assignments—their notes, stories and insights will appear on the DesigningChicago.com website and will shape the vision and execution of the final app. For $300, Chicago citizens can become an “Urban Icon” by participating in two hands-on workshops that involve ordinary people in the brainstorming and prototyping stages of the app.

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As Massimo Vignelli, an advisory board member for the project, notes in the video below: the role of design is to respond to needs over wants. Although sometimes its hard to distinguish between the two, the city of Chicago is in great hands with Greater Good Studio.

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Game Controllers, Part 2: Yves Behar’s "Love Letter to Console Gaming"

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Yes folks, Yves Behar himself has designed not only a game controller, but the console for a new X-Box and Playstation competitor called Ouya.

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We designed the controller to be a love letter to console gaming. It has everything you’ve learned to love: fast buttons, triggers, laser-precise analog sticks, a D-Pad—and we’ve added a touchpad for any games making the trek from mobile or tablet to the TV. It’s just the right weight. Everything just works. We call it ‘the Stradivarius of controllers,’ and we hope developers will be inspired to take gameplay to a new level with it.

What sets Ouya apart, from a business standpoint, is that they don’t have a corporate giant like Microsoft or Sony behind them; they’re attempting to get their open-source gaming system going on Kickstarter.

Behar and co. have mostly kept quiet on the project—the fuseproject site’s not been updated for a couple of months—but he does make a brief appearance in Ouya’s pitch vid:

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Get TAKTIKal: The Be-All, End-All iPhone Case from the One and Only Scott Wilson

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By Gearhungry

If your job, hobbies or extreme clumsiness make big, bulky protective iPhone cases a must, you’ve got to check out LunaTik’s TAKTIK. MNML‘s Scott Wilson, the immensely successful creator of the TikTok + Lunatik and the Touch Pen, is now on his third Kickstarter project, with current pledges tripling the original $150k funding goal with a week and a half to go. Can’t say we’re all that surprised.

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The TAKTIK‘s bold, faceted shape is a loose adaptation of Wilson’s 2004 (before Kickstarter was a glimmer in Yancey’s eye) speculative design project for WIRED Magazine. Enlisted to conceptualize “device singularity in 2014,” Wilson and two colleagues dreamt up the Nike EyeD, a wearable gadget that kept tabs on one’s fitness parameters and spoke wirelessly to other devices, which was essentially a fusion of things nonexistent at the time: the FuelBand + large-screen smartphone. (And lest his collaborators go uncredited, Joe Kosinski went on to direct 2010’s Tron Legacy and Stefan Andrén was the design director for Nike+ at launch.)

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While that original concept was largely unrestricted by current technical and material limitations—i.e. component size, weight and thickness—Wilson has astutely translated the design language into an outboard case to complement the technological prowess of the wizards in Cupertino. Insofar as good design rarely lives up to functionality, Wilson and his team at MNML have once again achieved their distinctive aesthetic with TAKTIK, which is loaded up on both.

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Kickstarter to launch in the UK – The Telegraph


Dezeen Wire:
American crowd-funding site Kickstarter will launch in the UK this autumn – The Telegraph

The internet platform has provided a source of investment for over 20,000 projects since it started up in 2009, but until now has only been available to businesses registered in the United States.

The most successful project on the site to date is the Pebble smartwatch, which had over 68,000 backers and raised over $10 million, but other new designs launched via the platform include a bookmark that finds your page for you and the Luna Tik kit that converts an iPod Nano into a touch-screen watch.

Readers can get 40% off LunaTik watch kits at Dezeen Watch Store online, over the phone or at our pop-up design shop Dezeen Super Store at 38 Monmouth Street, London WC2. Go to the Dezeen Watch Store summer sale »

See all our stories about Kickstarter »

The post Kickstarter to launch
in the UK – The Telegraph
appeared first on Dezeen.

Tigere Chiriga’s No-Coaster-Necessary Floating Mug

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The finish on my Singer Art Deco writing desk was already rough, but I was plenty bummed when a houseguest left his mark on it (above) by failing to use the provided coaster for his drink. I blame myself for not being insistent enough during said houseguest’s Orientation meeting. I also blame all designers of all mugs, for devising a product that requires another product underneath it to catch the condensation.

One designer I couldn’t blame is North-Carolina-based Tigere Chiriga, whose awesome Floating Mug concept obviates the need for a coaster:

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Clever, no? Self-professed “huge tea drinker” Chiriga initially designed the mug and had it manufactured for his own use, back in 2008; but after years of his friends continualy asking where they could get one, Chiriga turned to Kickstarter to have them mass-produced.

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The mugs ain’t cheap—buy-in starts at 40 bones—but they will be, manufactured in the U.S. now that Chiriga has hit his $15,000 target. (He’d just reached his goal as of press time, with just under a month left to go.)

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The Une Bobine Charging Cable/Stand Coils Its Way to Success

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This invention is the opposite of the Schticky situation we posted about earlier, where you’ve got a mundane product and need to spice it up with a lively video; the Une Bobine coil is such a good idea, with merits so instantly obvious, that the boring video (below) does nothing to increase its appeal.

A great example of exploiting material properties, the Une Bobine takes the segmented, flexible metal cables of the sort used in industrial light fixtures and adapts it for iPhone charging, allowing the cable itself to serve as a stand.

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While the idea is simple, manufacturing it isn’t so easy: “Each end of the connector requires multiple injection molds to create the custom fitting in the housings that we need to securely attach to the flexible cable,” writes designer Jon Fawcett in his Kickstarter pitch. “The connector housings are also sonically welded together, which requires additional tools to produce each end. Your pledges will directly pay for these startup costs required to produce the cable.”

Perhaps he should change “will directly pay for” to “have directly paid for;” at press time this was yet another wild Kickstarter success, with the $25 device garnering $70,000, handily smashing its original sub-$10,000 goal with 29 days to spare.

And now for aforementioned boring video:

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