Hasta La Ideas

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have unveiled a prototype electric car that folds in half.

The Armadillo-T was conceived by a research team led by In-Soo Suh, associate professor of the Graduate School for Green Transportation at KAIST, to enable drivers to park in tight spots within dense urban environments.

When folded, the micro-car shrinks from 2.8 metres down to 1.65 metres. “Once folded, the small and lightweight electric vehicle takes up only one-third of a five metre parking space, the standard parking size in Korea,” said Suh.

Suh and his team based the car’s design on the behaviour of an armadillo, which rolls into a ball when faced with threats from predators. “Just as armadillos hide themselves inside the shell, Armadillo-T tucks its rear body away,” Suh said.

Watch the Armadillo-T in action:

Using a remote control, drivers can roll up the back of the car, spin it 360 degrees into the correct position and reverse it snugly into a parking space.

The prototype car features two seats and it has a motor in each of the four wheels. The vehicle’s battery and motors stay in the same place when the car folds.

It weighs 450 kilograms, has a maximum speed of 60 kilometres per hour and can travel 100 kilometres on a 10 minute charge of the battery.

Other cars we’ve featured recently include the BMW’s first fully electric production car called the BMW i3 and a preview of MINI’s new car that includes Union Jack door pockets and a disco floor.

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Here’s more information from KAIST:

KAIST unveils foldable micro electric car, Armadillo-T

The small and light electric car completely folds in half when parking, making it a perfect fit for public or private transportation in an urban environment.

Looking for a parking space for hours at a busy shopping mall or being stuck on roads jammed with cars releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide are all-too-familiar scenes for city dwellers.

A group of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently developed a possible solution to such problems: a foldable, compact electric vehicle that can be utilised either as a personal car or part of the public transit system to connect major transportation routes within a city.

In-Soo Suh, associate professor of the Graduate School for Green Transportation at KAIST, and his research team introduced a prototype micro electric car called Armadillo-T, whose design is based on a native animal of South America, the armadillo, a placental mammal with a leathery shell.

The research team imitated the animal’s distinctive protection characteristic of rolling up into a ball when facing with threat from predators. Just as armadillos hide themselves inside the shell, Armadillo-T tucks its rear body away, shrinking its original size of 2.8 meters (110 inches) down to almost half, 1.65 meters (65 inches), when folding.

Armadillo-T is a four-wheel-drive, all-electric car with two seats and four in-wheel motors. Since the motors are installed inside the wheels, and the 13.6 kWh capacity of lithium-ion battery pack is housed on the front side, the battery and motors do not have to change their positions when the car folds. This not only optimises the energy efficiency but also provides stability and ample room to drivers and passengers.

Once folded, the small and light (weighs 450 kg) electric vehicle takes up only one-third of a 5-meter parking space, the standard parking size in Korea, allowing three of its kind to be parked. With a smartphone-interfaced remote control on the wheels, the vehicle can turn 360 degrees, enhancing drivers’ convenience to park the car, even in an odd space in a parking lot, the corner of a building, for example.

Professor In-Soo Suh said, “I expect that people living in cities will eventually shift their preferences from bulky, petro-engine cars to smaller and lighter electric cars. Armadillo-T can be one of the alternatives city drivers can opt for. Particularly, this car is ideal for urban travels, including car-sharing and transit transfer, to offer major transportation links in a city. In addition to the urban application, local near-distance travels such as tourist zones or large buildings can be another example of application.”

The concept car has loads of smart features on board, too: the cameras installed inside the car eliminate the need for side mirrors and increase the driver’s ability to see the car’s right and left side, thereby reducing blind spots. With a smartphone, the driver can control Armadillo-T and enable remote folding control. The car has a maximum speed of 60 km/h, and with a ten-minute fast charge, it can run up to 100 km.

Professor Suh explained that the concept of Armadillo-T was originally initiated in 2011 as he focused his research interest on the sub-A segment of personal mobility vehicles (PMVs), which are smaller and lighter than the current compact cars, as a new personalised transport mode.

“In coming years, we will see more mega-size cities established and face more serious environmental problems. Throughout the world, the ageing population is rapidly growing as well. To cope with climate, energy, and limited petroleum resources, we really need to think outside the box, once again, to find more convenient and eco-friendly transportation, just as the Ford Model T did in the early 1920s.

A further level of R&D, technical standards, and regulatory reviews are required to have these types of micro vehicles or PMVs on the market through test-bed evaluations, but we believe that Armadillo-T is an icon toward the future transport system with technology innovation.”

The research project has been supported by the Korean government, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement, since December 2012.

The post Armadillo-T foldable electric
micro-car by KAIST appeared first on Dezeen.

Inspiré de techniques venant de l’origami ou du patchwork, l’Omni bag de Kumeko est un sac qui change de contenance au gré des besoins de son utilisateur. Utilisable aussi bien comme un sac à main que comme un cabas, l’assemblage de polygones en bâche permet une grande souplesse de l’objet. A découvrir en images.

Royal College of Art graduate Benedikt Groß has digitally “printed” a field with a pattern of oats and wild flowers (+ movie).

He began by investigating how digital technology is transforming farming. “You could say in the last 50 years everything was about mechanisation to increase scale and efficiency, but the next thing in farming is digitalisation and precision farming, where everything is going to be mapped right down to the single plant,” Benedikt Groß told Dezeen.

He explained that precision farming is already being used to apply exactly the right amounts of fertiliser or pesticides to specific parts of a field rather than simply coating large areas.

“Farming becomes more like a digital process or a printing process with these kinds of technologies on board,” he added. “Maybe a farmer in a few years is a person in front of a dashboard and is literally programming the landscape.”

To investigate how precision farming technologies might affect the look of that landscape, the designer decided to tackle problems associated with modern monoculture farming by controlling the mix of plants in a field and sowing them in the most efficient pattern. “If you have more diversity then you have to use less pesticides and have less problems with vermin,” he explained.

To test the process on a field in Germany, the outline of the area was first mapped using a tractor and GPS tracking. Groß then used custom software to determine the most effective layout, dividing the field into patches so 85% of the area would be covered by crops for biomass and 15% of the field would be reserved for a mix of five different flowers.

“The algorithm divides the field into the right ratio of plants and then tries to create small partitions,” he said. “The size and shape of that smaller partition tries to mimic traditional fields, when you had less of the problems associated with monoculture.”

The seeds were then sown according to this pattern using specially-adapted farming equipment, mounted to a tractor and pulled back and forth across the field like the head of a printer. Groß assembled the machinery by repurposing equipment from farming research and development companies, adding his own software to control where the seed was dropped.

“About 95 per cent of the equipment is R&D or right from the shelf of two agricultural companies, so the equipment is not that far in the future,” the designer said. “More or less everything was there and I just had to experiment in terms of joining the technologies together by writing some software.”

For the test run shown in the movie, the tractor had to pass over the field twice – once for the oats and once for the flowers – but Groß says the process could easily be completed with one pass if a hopper were mounted at either end of the tractor.

“It’s definitely possible [to do it in one pass] because with modern tractors, normally you have one machine in front and one at the rear so you are able to do two things in one step,” he said. “But the machine was 50,000 euros so it was not too easy to persuade them to get a second one for the trial.”

Although the technology is expensive at present – meaning only farmers with a lot of land can implement it – Groß is confident that the cost of equipment will come down as precision farming become more widespread. “In five or ten years the equipment I was adapting will be used every day.”

His system also ties into a shift in arable farming from food production to energy production. “With plants grown for biomass you can have more diversity more easily,” he said. “If you have a field for wheat it’s really important that the wheat is really pure because in the end it’s going to be bread, but with energy production it doesn’t matter because everything goes in the same bin in a biomass factory.”

In addition, European Union subsidies promoting diversity in planting to combat monoculture issues could enable farmers to earn extra money by implementing his design. “With the flower mix I’m using, you can get subsidies – a few hundred euros per hectare I think,” he said. “It’s really plausible that a farmer could get subsidies on top of an energy production deal.”

The first crop was made into biomass last month, and he’s now looking to work with scientists to quantify the impact that his planting system has on the environment and farming practice.

He started the project while studying on the Design Interactions course at London’s Royal College of Art. Other projects displayed the Show RCA graduation show this summer included electrical products made from crab shells and food that wriggles around on the plate.

Other farming ideas on Dezeen include communities powered by faeces, electric eels and fruit and an urban farming project on a New York rooftop.

See more stories about farming and design »
See all our stories about Show RCA 2013 »

The post Avena+ Test Bed – Agricultural Printing
and Altered Landscapes by Benedikt Groß appeared first on Dezeen.

News: furniture designer Charles Pollock has died in a house fire in New York, aged 83.

A fire ripped through the house on Tuesday morning and Pollock died at the scene, according to reports from NY Daily News. ABC News visited the house and spoke to friends of the designer about his life and work.

Pollock’s Executive Chair, which he designed for Knoll in 1963, has become an iconic symbol of mid-20th century workplaces. The swivel chair, set on a five-star base with rolling wheels, features buttoned upholstery and “rim technology” – the use of a single aluminium band around the edge of the seat.

Fifty years after its original design, Pollock’s chair is still in production and has been exhibited around the world, including at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris.

Pollock, who studied design at New York’s Pratt Institute, went on to work with designers such as George Nelson at Herman Miller.

Charles Pollock was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1930. He moved to Toledo, Ohio, before settling in Detroit, Michigan. Pratt Institute in New York, where the designer studied, awarded Pollock with its 1991 Excellence by Design Award.

In 2012, Bernhardt Design commissioned Pollock to design a new collection of lounge chairs, which he sits on in the main image.

Photographs from Knoll and Bernhardt design.

The post Charles Pollock
1930-2013 appeared first on Dezeen.

Comme projet de fin d’études, le designer japonais Mugi Yamamoto a créé une imprimante compacte se plaçant au dessus d’une pile de papier et avalant progressivement les feuilles les unes après les autres. Moins massive et plus pratique qu’une imprimante traditionnelle, sa Stack est définitivement une réussite.