Hasta La Ideas

News: online retail giant Amazon has presented a prototype for a service that uses flying robots to deliver packages to customers within half an hour of ordering (+ movie).

The service would be called Amazon Prime Air and would be available to customers living within a ten mile radius of one of Amazon’s distribution centres.

The unmanned aerial vehicles are called “octocopters” because they feature eight propellers and Amazon claims they could be implemented as soon as 2015.

A video released by Amazon shows a drone collecting a package inside a plastic container from a conveyor belt at a distribution centre before taking off and delivering it to the customer’s doorstep. The flying robots would be directed by GPS to coordinates specified by the customer.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made the announcement yesterday on American investigative news programme 60 Minutes and explained that the technology is already in place, but that the legal issues surrounding such an operation are likely to delay its implementation.

“The hardest challenge in making this happen is going to be demonstrating to the standards of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) that this is a safe thing to do,” Bezos told 60 Minutes.

“I don’t want anybody to think this is just around the corner. This is years of additional work from this point,” he said, before stating that he hopes it could be made available to customers in four to five years.

“We hope the FAA’s rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015,” said Amazon on a webpage dedicated to the project. “We will be ready at that time. One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today.”

“The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritise public safety,” the company added. “Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.”

During a demonstration, Bezos pointed out that the unmanned vehicle can still fly if one of its rotors suffers a failure. “I know this looks like science fiction; it’s not,” he said.

Sydney startup Flirtey claimed to have launched “the world’s first unmanned aerial vehicle delivery technology” earlier this year, using flying robots to deliver books directly to customers based on the location of their mobile phone.

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packages “in less than 30 minutes” appeared first on Dezeen.

Plants could be genetically engineered to produce textiles at the same time as food, according to this synthetic biology project by designer and researcher Carole Collet.

“Would you eat a vitamin-rich black strawberry from a plant that has also produced your little black dress?” questioned Collet, whose Biolace concept responds to the need to produce enough food and textiles for the world’s rapidly expanding population by proposing that the DNA of plants could be adapted so they produce synthetically-enhanced foods and lace-like fabrics grow from their roots.

“Biolace proposes to use synthetic biology as an engineering technology to reprogram plants into multi-purpose factories,” explained Collet, who is a full-time academic and deputy director of the Textile Futures Research Centre at Central Saint Martins College in London.

“Plants become living machines, simply needing sun and water to be operational. In such a scenario, we would harvest fruits and fabrics at the same time from the same plants.”

Collet believes that by 2050 advances in biological technologies could enable the “hyper-engineered” plants to be grown in huge greenhouses with their roots embedded in a mineral nutrient solution.

The project proposes four genetically-engineered plants including a tomato plant with high levels of a nutrient called lycopene that could help improve the skin’s resistance to sunburn and protein-rich edible lace growing from its roots, and a basil plant that could produce anti-viral medicines as well as perfumed lace for use in decorative fashion applications.

A strawberry bush with black lace growing from its roots would yield black strawberries enriched with enhanced levels of vitamin C and antioxidants, while a spinach plant could produce micro biological sensors for use in electronics at the same time as providing a multi-mineral food supplement.

“The aim of this project is to bring to light the potential of emerging living technologies and to questions the pros and cons of such extreme genetic engineering,” said Collet. “Could biological engineering promote a new kind of sustainable textile manufacturing, less reliant on chemicals and less energy-hungry than our current models of production?”

The project is presented alongside floor tiles made of snail poo plus over 50 other ideas for combining biology with art, architecture and design presented at an exhibition called Biodesign at The New Institute in Rotterdam, which continues until 5 January 2014.

Photography is by the designer and the film is by Immatters.

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grow lace amongst their roots appeared first on Dezeen.

News: double-ended teaspoons commissioned as part of the recent renovation of Tate Britain’s cafe have been so popular with visitors to the London gallery that they’ve been taking them home.

The Manners teaspoons by London artist Nicole Wermers were commissioned for public use in the Tate cafe and restaurant but have been disappearing since the opening two weeks ago.

“Regrettably a number of spoons have been taken from Tate Britain since we started using them,” Tate told Dezeen. “The vast majority of visitors have enjoyed using the spoon without removing them from the areas in which they are being used.”

Wermers made each end of the spoon different to reflect the changing shape of teaspoon bowls at different points in the twentieth century: the smaller end references the 1950s and the larger references the 1980s.

The spoons have been in use alongside otherwise regular cutlery since the reopening of the refurbished Rex Whistler restaurant, and the newly created Djanogly Café and Members Room.

London architecture practice Caruso St John completed the £45 million renovation of the Tate Britain gallery earlier this month.

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stolen from Tate Britain cafe appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Eindhoven, Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma show us their experiments with unusual materials including fish skin, cow bladders, animal blood and even lava.

Italian designers Farresin and Trimarchi, who met at Design Academy Eindhoven and set up Formafantasma in the small Dutch city after graduating, have become well-known for their interesting use of materials.

Past projects include objects made out of food, a range of natural plastic vessels and furniture covered with discarded animal skins.

The duo’s latest project involves melting down volcanic rock from Mount Etna in Sicily.

“We are conducting some really simple experiments by remelting lava,” Farresin tells us when we visited their studio during Dutch Design Week.

“We are working with basalt fibres, which is this really interesting material that we found. It is similar to glass fibre, but is entirely produced by the melting of lava. Because of the chemical components of lava, you can create fibres with it.”

Farresin shows us two applications of the material, a textile made from woven threads of basalt fibre as well as a ceramic-like material, which is made from layers of this textile heated in a kiln.

“We put it in a ceramic oven and control [the temperature] so that the basalt fibre does not melt completely and turns into a more structural material,” Farresin explains.

He then shows us fish skin samples from Formafantasma’s Craftica project for Fendi.

“What we like about these skins, which we got from a company in Iceland, is that they have been discarded by the food industry,” he says. “We are actually continuing the investigation of these materials and are [currently] designing a piece for a company using fish skins.”

The Craftica collection also included water containers made from animal bladders, which Trimarchi shows us next.

“These are from cows and, again, they come from the food industry,” he says. “Usually these are used in Italy to make cases for mortadella [an Italian sausage].”

Farresin adds: “We still find the material fascinating, so we thought to use them in lighting. We made a construction using the valve of a bike so that we can basically dry the piece and inflate it directly on the LED light source.”

Finally, Farresin and Trimarchi show us samples from their Botanica project, a series of vessels made from natural plastics, which was acquired by London’s V&A Museum this year.

The first is bois durci, a nineteenth-century plastic made from sawdust and animal blood. Then he shows us pieces of shellac, a natural polymer secreted by lac bugs, a small parasitic insect native to India and Thailand.

Trimarchi says that, since the Botanica project, they have been looking into better methods of producing the material as well as ways of using it.

“Something we are really trying to investigate is to make the production process of shellac more efficient,” he explains.

Farresin adds: “Nowadays it is just farmed by small communities in India and Thailand. We see a parallel between this and silk production, but the farming is really difficult.”

“We are interested in getting in touch with institutions in India to see if we can participate in improving the bug farming there.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

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is “experimenting with lava” appeared first on Dezeen.

San Francisco studio Fuseproject has created a concept for a wearable device to allow people in the developing world to test themselves for symptoms of chronic illnesses such as malaria without having to visit a doctor (+ slideshow).

Kernel of Life would allow users to test their own blood, saliva, urine or breath and transmit the results to doctors via a mobile phone.

Patients would communicate with doctors remotely via an app on the smartphone. “Kernel is our answer to the complications of treating chronic illnesses in the developing world, malaria in particular,” said Yves Behar of Fuseproject.

“When the nearest doctor is days away, both treatment and diagnosis can be accomplished through the cloud-based and embedded medical test that Kernel offers.”

Fuseproject developed the concept in response to a brief from Microsoft owner Bill Gates’ charity the Gates Foundation and Wired magazine, who invited four leading design firms to create prototypes for products that could help improve the lives of people in the developing world.

To use the device, users rotate the circular cover to reveal a micro-perforated pad, divided into four colour-coded quadrants to match the different types of biosamples that could be gathered.

“The four quadrant bio-sensing absorbent pad can test the blood, saliva, urine and breath,” said Behar. “Test results are transmitted via bluetooth to a mobile app allowing patients to be continuously monitored remotely via the cloud, with reminders such as medicine intake or doctor’s visits.”

A built-in sterilising pad would clean the sampling surface when the cover is closed. The device, which can be worn around the neck, also monitors the user’s temperature.

The sensor technology required to make the Kernel of Life is currently too expensive and not robust enough for its intended application, but Fuseproject predicts it could be perfected in five to ten years.

Other wellbeing products designed by Behar include a range of stylish pill containers and a wristband that tracks your movement and gives advice on how to live more healthily.

He also worked with the One Laptop Per Child Association to create affordable laptops and tablets for use in the developing world.

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“when the nearest doctor is days away” appeared first on Dezeen.