Hasta La Ideas

News: scientists at the Google[x] research facility in California are working on contact lenses containing tiny electronics that could constantly monitor glucose levels in the tears of people with diabetes.

“We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturised glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material,” said Google in a post published on its official blog.

The contact lenses would be able to generate a reading every second, making it possible to instantly identify potentially dangerous changes in the patient’s blood sugar levels.

“We’re also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we’re exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds,” the company explained.

As well as minuscule chips and sensors, the lenses could also incorporate an antenna thinner than a human hair that would communicate with apps so patients or doctors could view the measurements on a smartphone, tablet or computer.

Diabetes patients are currently required to test their blood sugar levels at regular intervals throughout the day by pricking their finger to draw a tiny amount of blood that can be analysed. The process is painful and time-consuming and can discourage people with diabetes from checking their blood glucose as frequently as they should.

“The one thing I’m excited about is that this is a device that people wear daily – the contact lens,” project co-founder Brian Otis told the BBC. “For us to be able to take that platform that exists currently, that people wear, and add intelligence and functionality to it, is really exciting.”

Google stressed that the technology is at a fledgling stage in its development but added that it will be seeking out potential partners who could help it refine the hardware and software required to turn the concept into reality.

“It’s still early days for this technology, but we’ve completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype,” Google claimed. “We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease.”

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diabetics monitor blood sugar levels appeared first on Dezeen.

This movie we filmed at Dezeen’s pop-up shop of the future at London department store Selfridges demonstrates how augmented reality technology could transform retail.

Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs introduces the shop we curated for Selfridges‘ Festival of Imagination, which includes a virtual retail experience for Dezeen Watch Store and a life-size walkaround digital model of Zaha Hadid’s superyacht – both created by technology company Inition.

“The Imagine Shop is an attempt to visualise the kind of products, services and shops we might have in the future,” says Fairs.

The space on the ground floor of the department store contains all wall of 3D-printed products and clothing by Janne Kyttanen of 3D Systems, and even features a giant printed ping-pong table.

“The most exciting thing here is that we’ve worked with Inition, which is a 3D visualisation company, to show how augmented reality could be used in stores of the future,” Fairs says.

Inition lead creative Alex Lambert then talks about the augmented-reality projects that his company and Dezeen worked on for this event.

“Inition and Dezeen collaborated on two pieces of augmented reality,” he says, “one for watches available at the Dezeen Watch Store and another for a £300 million superyacht designed by Zaha Hadid.”

Lambert talks through the technology for the yacht models, which works using a tablet camera that picks up the code from patterned markers then displays the 3D model on screen.

“This type of augmented reality relies on a tablet,” he explains. “You’ll see a live video feed coming through the camera and once you point it at the marker the 3D model will appear.”

Two versions of the yacht are included in the shop: a miniature version and a full-size model that glides across the tablet screen.

“We’ve actually created the yacht in full scale,” says Lambert. “It’s a sunny blue ocean with a full-scale yacht sailing past, just to give people an idea of the scale of the superyacht.”

Using the same technology, shoppers can try on designs from Dezeen Watch Store at a virtual watch shop. Shoppers simply attach a band around their wrist and hold it up to a camera, then the chosen watch manifests over the band.

“We take one of these bespoke trackers… turn to the camera, get the marker in view and boom! The watch appears,” Lambert describes.

Inition added texture and shadows to the virtual watches to make them look as realistic as possible. Different models and colourways appear instantaneously around the wrist on screen as they are selected.

“Dezeen are very forward thinking in employing this technology, especially for watches,” says Lambert. “In the future hopefully people will download the app, use a webcam or tablet and try on the watches at home before they purchase online.”

Elsewhere in the department store, Inition also worked with fashion designer Gareth Pugh to install a virtual reality booth on the first floor and an auditorium designed by Dutch architects OMA has been created in the basement.

The Festival of Imagination continues all this month at Selfridges on Oxford Street, central London.

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Dezeen’s Imagine Shop for Selfridges appeared first on Dezeen.

Cologne 2014: a grid of thin wooden strips supports the surface of this table by German designer Ruben Beckers to make it extremely lightweight (+ slideshow).

Ruben Beckers named his 4.5-kilogram poplar wood table kleinergleich5, which means “less than five”.

“It is safe to assume that at just 4.5 kilograms, it is probably the lightest wooden table in the world,” he said.

Beckers employed a grid of extremely thin strips to create a rigid structure beneath the slender table top, so it could support objects placed on top.

The lengths of wood slot together at five-centimetre intervals to create the lattice, which is 28 millimetres deep.

Removable solid-wood legs are bent into the holes in the grid to connect them with the table top.

The table is half the weight of Benjamin Hubert’s lightweight table, unveiled during the London Design Festival last September.

The table was designed during the Wood*Transformation project at Kassel School of Art and Design, and is currently on display as part of the [D3] Design Talents exhibition at imm cologne.

This year’s [D3] Contest was won by a storage rail based on a traditional Shaker-style peg board. Imm cologne continues until Sunday at the Koelnmesse exhibition centre.

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weighs just 4.5 kilograms appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in his latest column, Sam Jacob argues that architects “might have to learn from communications agencies, advertising and design” in order to regain the social significance they once enjoyed.

It’s a familiar refrain in the whitewashed bars frequented by architects: the despair at the reduced role of architects in contemporary public life, either as public intellectuals or engaged in the formulation of policy and agendas that shape the contemporary built environment.

As architect and theorist Alejandro Zaera Polo argues, the act of architecture has been reduced to a zone comprising the few hundred millimetres of a building’s envelope, the building itself – mass, floor plate, programme and so on – having been defined long before in the formulas of developers’ spreadsheets.

The traditional role of an architect has, over recent time, been eroded. Undermined and usurped by a cocktail of processes and practices, by new kinds of contract, by the rise of other building specialists, and by forms of procurement, which have all taken chunks out of the tweedy old professional body of architecture.

The argument goes that if only we could re-engage in a dialogue with the public and politicians, if only we could get architecture back on the agenda – just like it used to be at some point fast dissolving into the mists of time – then everything would work out again.

I don’t buy this. It’s not that those arguments have simply been forgotten. It’s more fundamental: the terms of architecture’s engagement with the world have entirely changed.

For a period between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s, architecture was a central activity in the construction of civil society. It was both a way of building for society, and a means of conceiving visions of what society could be and how it might work. Architecture was public in many senses: who it was built for and who it was funded by. Architects themselves were likely to be public servants.

Architecture, development and construction are now conceived and implemented as almost wholly private enterprises. There are, for example, very few publicly employed architects now. Architectural services are provided by the multitudes of private firms: good/bad, big/small, young/old, corporate/community. Even at its most social ends, development is now determined by market conditions.

We remain nostalgic for the old days (and why, given the respect once accorded to the architect, wouldn’t we?) but the route to regaining a more central significance can’t come from looking back. The old arguments just don’t make sense because the terms of engagement themselves have drastically altered. Instead we need to figure out new ways for architecture to regain a central social significance. How, in other words, can architecture regain significance beyond the production of envelopes?

In many other disciplines, design has evolved from the production of stuff into a wider, more diffuse set of activities. The focus on the object as the thing that design produces has been pulled so that a whole other range of activities come into view.

In part this is due to the rise of digital products, but it’s also the design of information, systems, forms of innovation and the power of ideas like “design thinking”, which applies a design approach to all manner of things that once were well beyond the scope of design. Almost anything from money to healthcare to the functioning of democracy can be now be framed as a design problem.

The real motivations for design’s contemporary mutations are not rhetorical, but neither are they venal. They come from changes in design’s habitat – the way the world works. Perhaps, as more youthful forms of creative practice, these forms of design have adapted faster to their circumstances; faster at least than architecture and property, two industries with the turning circle of a supertanker.

Society has become increasingly networked, increasingly information- and media-based. As it has, design’s relationship with the world has changed too: the physical stuff of things now exists within contexts of the mediated and the digital.

That’s why we see close relationships between digital, technological, information and communication design. It’s why advertising agencies and design consultancies are increasingly converging. It’s because the distance between thing, service and communication has shrunk – often occurring within the same space, within different components of the same design project. In these worlds, too, the space between investment, innovation, production and distribution has also shrunk, as has the distance between traditional roles of designer, manufacturer and consumer.

In other words, in parts of what we might loosely describe as the design world, the very idea of what design is and what a designer might do is evolving at a rapid pace. This is in marked contrast to architecture, whose declining position within the design team and flatlining fee rates tell a very different story. Architects – and of course creatives in many other areas of design – remain hung up on what they perceive to be their rightful role and their moral purpose.

Rather than despair or rail against architecture’s prevailing conditions, we need to find new positions for the profession; new arguments for a new terrain. We need to recognise that the context within which we produce architecture has changed and from this form persuasive arguments for its place at the centre of society.

A modern product is now much more than a thing. It’s also packaging, the environment in which you encounter it, the media and conversations around it, the service that supports it, the qualities of the brand that produces it, the embodiment of ethics and integrity within all of these disparate elements and, most likely, much more than this. The task of the contemporary designer is to corral all of these aspects, all these diverse forms of media, operations, and systems into something coherent, something appealing, something we want. Design, in other words, becomes a kind of glue between a huge range of scales and services and substances.

A similar argument can be made for architecture. It too may well be a physical thing, but it’s also the place where investment, communications, marketing and media all come together, where these issues congeal into built form.

For example, the distance between a developer, the investment they need, the architecture they commission, the public permissions and partnerships they require, the vision they create, the publicity they generate, the buy-in of a community, and the market they seek are intrinsically linked – one is nested within the the other. Trying to separate “architecture” out of these processes, as a traditional definition of architecture might do, is to defuse architecture’s potential to engage in the very real politics, vision and social possibility embedded in these relationships. It’s in the interweaving of these concerns where value – social as well as economic – is created, where architecture really happens.

Just as design has expanded its role, we need to argue that contemporary architecture is much more than simply the production of buildings. Or, to put it another way, buildings are just one of many outcomes of architectural production, part of an activity that might also include the construction of collective vision that brings together investors, planners, the public and users. As a form of practice embeds ideas and ethics within the built environment, a practice that can develop the services, processes and programmes alongside physical things. It could position itself as the place where design, engineering, planning, sales and marketing come together.

Perhaps architecture should step back from the act of building as its ultimate fulfilment in order to provide a deeper, more significant vision of how we are going to live, work and play and how places can become economically and socially meaningful and sustainable in the long term for the people who live in them.

In other words, we might have found ourselves in an ironic situation where in order to fulfil architecture’s core ambitions it might have to become less architectural. It might have to model itself on more youthful and vigorous forms of creative practice. It might have to (or better, want to) learn from communications agencies, from advertising, from digital and interaction design and from research and innovation experts. Rather than selling out, we need to see this wider definition of architecture as a way of really fulfilling the core disciplinary remit of making the world a better place.

This, I would argue, is one way architecture can regain a centrality within contemporary life and escape from the shrinking limitations of its professional remit. By immersing ourselves in the realities of our contemporary circumstance we might find ways to forcefully argue for the absolute necessity of architecture to clients, to the public and to society at large.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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less architectural” appeared first on Dezeen.

A cabin nestled in a former Hungarian quarry (pictured) and a doughnut-shaped skyscraper feature in this week’s Dezeen Mail newsletter, along with the last news, jobs and reader comments from Dezeen.

Read Dezeen Mail issue 185 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail

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