Hasta La Ideas

News: researchers in America have developed a friction-based miniature generator that could enable mobile devices to be charged by typing or stroking the screen.

The generator created by nanotechnology expert Zhong Lin Wang and his team at the Georgia Institute of Technology produces electricity when two sheets of a specially adapted polymer are rubbed or pushed together.

Actions such as tapping, swiping, stroking or even the movement of a device incorporating the material in the user’s pocket could generate electricity, making external power sources redundant.

The technology is based on a principle called triboelectricity, which produces a charge similar to static electricity when two materials touch or rub together.

By adding microscopic patterns that increase the level of friction, the researchers have developed a triboelectric nanogenerator, or TENG, which is capable of producing a power output density of 300 Watts per square metre – enough to illuminate 1000 LED bulbs with the stamp of one foot.

“The amount of charge transferred depends on surface properties,” said Wang. “Making patterns of nanomaterials on the polymer films’ surfaces increases the contact area between the sheets and can make a 1000-fold difference in the power generated.”

The TENG technology can be applied to other materials, from paper to metal, plastics and cloth, and has already been incorporated into shoe insoles, whistles, floor mats, backpacks and ocean buoys to harness the power created by movement.

The team presented the project earlier this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas and is currently working on commercial applications including chargers for mobile devices.

Wang believes the technology will be able to contribute significantly to global energy production within five years by using tiny generators to harness energy from ocean waves, rain drops or wind power.

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charged by stroking them appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Google-owned communications company Motorola is working with Design Academy Eindhoven graduate and Phonebloks creator Dave Hakkens to develop open-source modular mobile phones.

Yesterday Motorola revealed on its blog that it has been working for a year on a scheme named Project Ara, a “free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones,” which will allow users to develop, swap and replace modules for their phones to create customised handsets.

“We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines,” Motorola Advanced Technology and Projects group leader Paul Eremenko said.

The phones will comprise a structural base frame and modules that lock on to it, which could include an extra battery, additional screen or keyboard.

Motorola also announced it has teamed up with design graduate Dave Hakkens, who developed his Phonebloks concept for a modular phone where mix-and-match components clip onto a central board while studying at Design Academy Eindhoven and saw his idea go viral earlier this month.

“My idea succeeded from day one; I got a lot of responses to it,” Hakkens told Dezeen at the preview of the academy graduate show during Dutch Design Week earlier this month. “I’ve got a lot of people interested in developing it: engineers, technicians and companies.”

Hakkens’ video demonstrating his concept received over 16 million views on Youtube and Phoneblocks has almost a million supporters online.

“We’ve done deep technical work. Dave created a community. The power of open requires both,” said Eremenko.

Motorola hopes to share its technical development work with Hakkens’ widespread social media communities and will be releasing a developers’ kit this winter, so people can begin designing their own components for the phones.

Using volunteers known as Project Ara research scouts, Motorola will continue to develop the idea in a similar way to how Google trialled its voice-controlled wearable Google Glass technology, where the public was asked to try out the headset then offer feedback on the hardware and its features.

The move from Motorola follows on from its project called Sticky, where the company took a van full of hackable Motorola phones and 3D-printing equipment to top tech universities including MIT and Caltech for a series of experimental workshops.

“On that trip we saw the first signs of a new, open hardware ecosystem made possible by advances in additive manufacturing and access to the powerful computational capabilities of modern smartphones,” Eremenko said. “These included new devices and applications that we could never have imagined from inside our own labs.”

Read a full interview with Dave Hakkens in our earlier story.

The post Motorola teams up with Phonebloks
to create modular mobile phones appeared first on Dezeen.

News: designer and entrepreneur Gwendolyn Floyd has launched an e-commerce platform that allows female artisans from developing countries to overcome “economic discrimination” and sell jewellery using just a mobile phone (+ movies).

Named Soko, the platform is aimed at turning women in places like Africa into entrepreneurs, selling their creations directly to customers rather than through traditional supply chains that leave them with little profit.

“Women in Africa produce 60 to 80 percent of the continent’s goods, yet they earn only 10 percent of the incomes,” said Floyd. “Soko empowers craftswomen to become global entrepreneurs by transforming the ubiquitous mobile phone into a tool that expands access to economic opportunity for women, giving them a greater share of the profits of the global craft industry.”

By using Soko, makers are able to upload a vendor profile, product images and descriptions to the website using SMS, allowing them to trade even in areas without internet services.

Consumers can then browse, order and pay for the designs on the website. The credit card payments are transferred into mobile money, which is sent via text message to the retailers on purchase of their goods.

They then claim the cash at designated kiosks where they also deliver the goods to be posted anywhere in the world. This means the retailers receive the maximum amount of profit for their wares.

“Soko disrupts the traditional export supply chain, removing the middlemen to enable direct peer-to-peer exchange of goods and money between global artisans and online consumers,” said Floyd, who graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2005 and co-founded Soko with MIT graduate Ella Peinovich and ICT developer Catherine Mahugu.

The service is open to men as well as women, Floyd explained, but added: “Women face economic discrimination that leads to disproportionate representation in the informal economy, leaving them unable to access financial services such as banks, loans, or credit, and vulnerable to the dangers and limitations of the cash economy.”

The lack of economic opportunities for women is one of the greatest barriers to sustainable development, Floyd added. “When women are able to overcome the institutional discrimination they face in the workforce and earn incomes, they make more equitable decisions about sons and daughters’ diet, education and health, they favour sustainable environmental practices, and domestic violence rates go down.”

A video promoting Soko (above) explains further how the site can help women. “Although these women are poor economically, they are rich in cultural capital,” it says. “Millions of women across Africa attempt to earn a living by supplementing meagre incomes by making and selling crafts – a skill that roots them deeply in culture and community. However, due to a costly export supply chain, their crafts are limited to the local economy with inconsistent demand.

Earlier this month design strategist Tim Kobe told Dezeen that women are the world’s “fastest emerging market” and will transform the design of everything from products to interiors.

Mobile phones have also been used in Africa to redesign to bus routes in Ivory Coast. See more stories about mobile phones »

Floyd sent us the following information:

Introducing Soko: A Global Platform for Innovation, Style, and Impact

Soko is the online destination for shoppers to discover stunning handcrafted accessories from around the world and purchase directly from the makers. Using Soko on a simple mobile phone, designers and artisans in the developing world can upload and sell their jewelry pieces online, with no need for a computer or a bank account.

Innovation

Soko’s unique technology platform allows artisans in the developing world to create online storefronts, sell to global shoppers and get paid, all using their mobile phone, even if they do not have access to a computer or bank account. This innovation, and our drive to continue building innovative solutions to promote the work of artisans, is at the heart of Soko.

Style

With Soko, you can discover incredible design and creative ingenuity made in communities that lay outside of the digital economy. Soko brings you exceptional style in the stunning handcrafted jewelry designs created by artisans the world over, directly to your door.

Impact

This unprecedented direct access, created by transforming the mobile phone into a tool, expands access to economic opportunity for women in underserved communities creating real, immediate impact and disrupting the traditional export supply chain.

The post New website helps African craftswomen
become entrepreneurs appeared first on Dezeen.

Interview: struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry hopes to wrestle back lost market share with a new touchscreen keyboard that will eradicate the “embarrassing” mistakes common on rival smartphones. “Sometimes it’s kind of scary when you get your own emails back and you read them,” said BlackBerry’s head of design Todd Wood.

“Text input is something that we knew a lot about and we thought, let’s apply all the intelligence, all the technology we have to make writing and composing and communicating much more efficient and more professional,” Wood told Dezeen.

Canadian company Blackberry, which changed its name from Research in Motion at the beginning of the year, is launching two models that use the new BlackBerry 10 operating system – the fully touchscreen Z10 (top and below), available since January, and the forthcoming Q10 (bottom), which has a full QWERTY keyboard as well as a touchscreen.

According to Wood, the new operating system is a response to the growing number of users who had taken to carrying two phones with them – a BlackBerry for business and an iPhone or other touchscreen for personal use. “We solved it with a feature called Balance, where you can easily switch between the environments of business and personal and you can have different apps and different content on both,” says Wood.

But for those unwilling to make the switch to a touchscreen device, BlackBerry will still be developing QWERTY phones like the Q10. “As a design we almost own the category,” he adds.

Read the full interview below.

Emilie Chalcraft: BlackBerry is launching two phones this year that use its new operating system – the touchscreen Z10 and the touch with keyboard Q10. What do they offer that older models don’t?

Todd Wood: These are the first products running on our new operating system, BlackBerry 10. This is something we’ve created from the ground up. It’s built on an operating system that we acquired two years ago called QNX, and it’s really suitable for multi-tasking.

We believe it’s the future of not only mobile communications, but something we’re calling mobile computing. Because you can do virtually any of the multi-tasking apps or services on the go, while you’re mobile, and that’s quite unique.

All of your communication and social feeds shows up in the hub. You can glance, or “peek” at the hub to see if you have a new message or alert, or you can flow over to other applications like the alarm clock or calendar or maps.

Emilie Chalcraft: BlackBerry is best known for its integration of the full QWERTY keyboard into the phone, so why would you want to move towards a pure touchscreen model like the Z10?

Todd Wood: We have 79 million customers that love their BlackBerrys, and they’re primarily keyboard BlackBerrys. These are for people that can type without thinking and love the tactility of the keyboard, and that’s great. But we as designers started to notice this phenomenon of people carrying two devices, an all-touch and a BlackBerry – it’s often the case of having one business device and one personal device.

So that was one problem we wanted to solve, and we solved it with a feature called Balance, where you can easily switch between the environments of business and personal and you can have different apps and different content on both. Then your business is happy and you’re happy, because you have everything you want in one device.

The other problem that we saw that we really wanted to do something about was to do with large displays. They’re fantastic for browsing, fantastic for viewing movies, maps and pictures, but the problem with a large display on these touchscreen devices is it’s very difficult, and sometimes embarrassing, to type on them.

Emilie Chalcraft: What do you mean by embarrassing?

Todd Wood: We noticed that there are websites that post the most hilarious misspelled messages, and sometimes it’s kind of scary when you get your own emails back and you read them. So we realised that’s a problem that people have with the accuracy and the efficiency of typing.

Text input is something that we knew a lot about and we thought, let’s apply all the intelligence, all the technology we have to make writing and composing and communicating much more efficient and more professional.

The [new] keyboard offers a mode where you can actually have the system suggest words and you can flick these words onto the page, so you don’t have to type out frequently used words or names, or long words.

Emilie Chalcraft: But is a full keyboard still more accurate than a touchscreen?

Todd Wood: For some it is, if they’re really hard-wired or they have this muscle memory for the keyboard. I’ve actually been using the Z10 for a number of months and I’ve become really good at it so I’m willing to switch, but I think that a lot of our customers aren’t quite willing to switch, so that’s why we’ve offered the choice.

Emilie Chalcraft: So although it may seem like you’re trying to phase out the keyboard, you’re actually retaining that design element because people like it so much?

Todd Wood: Absolutely, it’s very iconic. As a design we almost own the category – anything with a QWERTY keyboard, you call it a BlackBerry. But also, what we were excited about was that the engineering can really make something different and better in the world of touch and all-touch devices.

Emilie Chalcraft: The BlackBerry is obviously is a very popular phone for business customers, so are you trying to move away from that customer base with this new touchscreen phone?

Todd Wood: It’s really about reframing the problem and realising you can be in an enterprise of one, if you’re a freelance journalist or whatever, and you’re balancing work and personal.

So we’re designing for that person – someone who’s hyperconnected, someone who’s getting stuff done, and we know that often it’s the case of multi-tasking to get things done. And just like we liberated email from the desktop so you’re not chained to your desk anymore, in a way we’re taking multi-tasking away from the desktop and putting it in your hand.

Emilie Chalcraft: Four or five years ago, BlackBerry was at the top of the market, but since then you’ve been rapidly overtaken by Apple and then Samsung. How do you propose to compete with those companies?

Todd Wood: Smartphones have become a very big business for our customers and the carriers, and with that big opportunity comes competition. I think the very positive side of all of that is that we’re all striving to make things better, so it’s really driving innovation in the category.

Through this evolution in the category there are clearly two typologies of devices. There’s the one that’s most familiar, with the QWERTY keyboard, and that’s a category that we own. Then there’s the all-touch, which is almost like a Ford or a sedan – just the new normal.

I think then we start to look at the differences between the sedans. There is the brand – and I think you’ll see clearly with our product design that it’s a BlackBerry – and then it comes down to what makes the user experience better than the other brands, whether it’s the applications, like BlackBerry Messenger, whether it’s the quality of the display, or just the graphic of the device where we have the distinct edge-to-edge glass.

Emilie Chalcraft: You recently named pop star Alicia Keys as the brand’s creative director, but a few weeks ago she was spotted tweeting from her iPhone. Why would a company choose a celebrity as its creative director, especially if they don’t have any design training?

Todd Wood: The interesting part in the collaboration with Alicia Keys has to do with our Keep Moving campaign. She is really an iconic personality. She’s somebody who is getting things done, working with and using Blackberry as a creative tool and as a communication tool through various applications. She’ll be very instrumental further downstream through marketing activities and relationships with the core BlackBerry people in the music industry.

She doesn’t have any industrial design background, so it’s not clear exactly how we’ll work together, but I think that’s something to be inspired by and surprised by.

We’re a very open brand to collaborations. We’ve worked with Porsche Design to do a very premium, or “ultra-premium” BlackBerry in the past. They have their own store network where we could experiment with materials that for mass production would be difficult to do – the real leather back, the fully machined seamless frame, etc. So those collaborations are always important.

It’s a different way of working. We don’t do everything ourselves. We are very open to the developer community, so that could mean being open to brand collaborations, whether it’s Alicia Keys or Porsche Design.

The post BlackBerry aims to end “hilarious
misspelled messages” appeared first on Dezeen.

Designer Richard Clarkson has created a conceptual smartphone with a rotary dial.

The Rotary Mechanical Smartphone combines a digital touch-screen on the front with interchangeable mechanical dials on the back.

The painted surface of the case will wear away in time to reveal the electroplated copper beneath.

More mobile phones on Dezeen »

Here are some more details from Richard Clarkson:

Digital vs. Mechanical – Rotary Mechanical Smartphone is a concept designed by Richard Clarkson that combines and synthesizes digital technologies and physical mechanical systems in order to elicit more value in our everyday objects.

The rotary mechanical smartphone is based on the idea of incorporating more feeling and life into our everyday digital objects. In modern times these objects have come to define us, but who and what defines these objects? Are we happy with generic rectangles of a touchscreen or do we want something with more tangibility, something with more life, something with more aura?

I have looked at where industrial design has come from, and where it might be going to, and by doing so have tried to create an object that is true to both, a harmonious combination of mechanical parts and digital technologies.

Rotary mechanical is a question not only about the ever increasing ‘digital take-over’ of everything in our lives but also what is lost when this happens.

There are two interchangeable brass dials, a true rotary dial and a button dial, the act of changing these is inspired from changing the lenses on a camera.

The body is electroplated copper which is then painted and designed to improve aesthetically as is wears.

The design of the phone references both steampunk and minimalistic genres to combine and contrast the different forms and surface finishes.

See also:

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Cola-powered phone by Daizi Zheng	Body heat-powered phone by Patrick Hyland	Pedal-powered kitchen by Christoph Thetard