Hasta La Ideas

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pWhen it comes to showing off unusual materials, you could do worse than transparent concrete and cement. Both are solid and strong, yet allow light to pass through them, causing a cartoon question mark to pop up over people’s heads the first time they see the stuff./p

pAt this year’s World Expo in Shanghai, Italy took the opportunity to build their pavilion out of transparent cement (above), whereas Germany is displaying–if not using–transparent concrete (below) in their structure./p

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pBoth materials are strong and allow light to travel through them, but what are the differences? Italy’s product, called A HREF=”http://www.italcementigroup.com/ENG/Media+and+Communication/News/Corporate+events/20100322.htm” i.light/A and manufactured by Italcementi, has a “higher transparency performance than the optical fibres experimentally used in this field, but also cost much less allowing for their application on a large scale,” says an Italcementi researcher. Meanwhile Germany’s product, called A HREF=”http://www.lucem.de/en/material.html” Lucem/A and manufactured by Robatex GmbH, is 100% recyclable, and is on display in 2cm-thick sheets. /p

pBragging rights have to be awarded to the Italians: They’ve put their money where mouths are and incorporated nearly 4,000 i.light blocks, each 1m x 50cm x 5cm thick, in their structure. /p

pvia A HREF=”http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20100514/182583/” tech on/Abr /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/materials/transparent_concrete_and_cement_at_world_expo_16562.asp”(more…)/a
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pAs someone who does Ia lot/I of walking, I have more than a casual interest in comfortable footwear. And I always assumed that the sneaker, independent of whatever bells and whistles come out each year, has been largely perfected as a product: A hard outsole on the bottom and a soft, cushy midsole against your foot, wrapped around the top with a fabric upper and some laces./p

pSneaker designer and A HREF=”http://www.golite-footwear.com/” Go-Lite Footwear/A owner Doug Clark, who has thirty years of experience in the field, knows better. The central design of sneakers, he points out, is flawed; they’ve got the bottoms on upside-down. For example, let’s say the wearer steps on a small rock or irregularity protruding off of the ground. The rigid outsole will then act like a lever, see-sawing your foot into a skewed angle and, if you’re elderly or have a poor sense of balance, lead to possible injury. /p

pThis is one of those things that takes several sentences to describe but can be understood visually right away. If you’re not a footwear designer, you may not be willing to sit through the following video’s amateurish presentation and god-awful camera shake–did they film this in the back of a helicopter?–but if you want to see the central point, fast-forward to the 2:00 mark. /p

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pIf you want to read more about Clark and his methodologies, there’s an in-depth local-paper article on him A HREF=”http://www.tnhonline.com/unh-history-alum-gains-new-respect-for-shoes-1.1472023″ here/A.br /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/materials/footwear_designers_why_sneaker_soles_should_actually_be_upside_down_16505.asp”(more…)/a
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pIf you think about it, headlights on cars are actually a ridiculous solution. I’m sure they seemed a wondrous idea in the 1920s, but back then so did drinking bathtub gin./p

pDuring my first week of living in Japan some years ago, a local friend was driving us around Tokyo. At each stoplight I noticed the cars behind us would turn their headlights off. I asked my friend why. He explained that there’s no need to have the headlights on when you’re at a stoplight, as all they do is dazzle other drivers (not to mention pedestrians). The drivers there turned their lights off as a courtesy to the driver in front of them, so they’re not getting a mirrorful of brightness./p

pI returned to New York a year later, in the late ’90s, when SUVs were becoming trendy. It seemed like every time I stopped at a light, an SUV would pull up behind me, high-mounted headlamps shining full-bore into my mirror. I could practically feel my retinas cooking./p

pHere’s why I say headlights are a ridiculous solution: Imagine it applied to pedestrians. Imagine we never used ambient artificial lighting, so every time the sun went down, we all just put on miner’s helmets with a bright-ass light on top and used those. /p

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pOn sidewalks, in movie theaters, restaurants and offices we’d all be blinding each other all the time. If someone walking towards you didn’t turn his high beams off you could play that little aggressive-aggressive game and turn yours on to blind him in return./p

pI don’t know what the full solution is, but I think I’ve seen part of it. Scientist Franky So, a researcher at the University of Florida, A HREF=”http://news.discovery.com/tech/night-vision-cell-phone-eyeglasses.html” has developed a paper-thin film/A based on OLEDs that can convert infrared light to visible light. What this means is that you could conceivably cover a windshield with this film and experience something like what you’d see through night-vision goggles. But unlike NVGs, So’s technology uses hardly any electricity at all due to its technological makeup./p

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pSo’s proof of concept is only about a centimeter square, but A HREF=”http://news.discovery.com/tech/night-vision-cell-phone-eyeglasses.html” Discovery News reports/A that “It will take about 18 months to scale up the device for practical applications, such as car windshields, lightweight night vision eyeglasses and cell phone cameras.”/p

pIf we did get rid of headlights, of course we’d still have the problem of alerting cyclists and pedestrians to oncoming traffic…although when you hear about people stepping into traffic in broad daylight because they’re fiddling with their phones, you gotta wonder what you could do. Maybe approaching cars should automatically turn your Mobile Facebook off, that would probably get you to look up.br /
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pThat’s your standard plastic water pitcher used in restaurants worldwide, and as a former waiter I can say its design sucks. Waiters often carry three of them in one hand by putting the handles together, but though this is an established practice, the handles were not designed for such and don’t align neatly; when fully laden, any unexpected starts and stops–such as when moving through a crowded restaurant–may cause one of the pitchers to slip and jostle, splashing its contents on you or worse, a short-tempered diner./p

pMore importantly it’s not good at the very thing it was designed for: Pouring. You can always tell which of your friends has worked in a restaurant by the way they handle one of these pitchers–if loaded up with a beverage containing ice, they will always pour out of the Iside/I of the pitcher, not the poorly-designed spout, because ice gets jammed in the spout like cars going in the Holland Tunnel and eventually causes a spill. And even if you pour ice-free liquid from the spout, if you do it too quickly the liquid will overwhelm the spout and come spilling out around it. I spent eight years working in restaurants and had problems with this pitcher design up until my last month./p

pI’ve found a lot of kitchen implements have not changed much since their very invention. If you dug up an artifact from a thousand years ago that someone used to boil water, it would be recognizable as a pot. The metal may have changed, and the materials of pitchers may have evolved from ceramics to glass to plastic, but the overall shapes and functionality remain much the same./p

pBut now we’re seeing something different in A HREF=”http://www.isinorthamerica.com/basics/basics/en/” iSi’s new Flex-It line/A of mixing, measuring and pouring products. /p

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pWhile the shapes are the same, the key difference is the material: Made from silicone, the Flex-It vessels can change their shape and allow you to make your own spout./p

pThe flexible mixing bowls, measuring cups and random containers come in handy in all sorts of ways, as you’ll want to pour something with the viscosity of pancake batter at a different rate than you’d pour straight liquid, olive oil or dry grains of rice. /p

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pIt’s wonderfully intuitive to squeeze the container to make your exit point, instead of using the flawed one-size-fits-all notion of a fixed spout. I’ve even been using them to dole out dollops of the thick Greek yogurt that I use to supplement my dogs’ diet, and with practice, you get good at squirting out just the right amount of the goopy stuff./p

pLastly, the stuff cleans up easily, and though I’ve not had cause to use them in this way, the silicone material makes it heat-resistant up to 475 degrees. Once you use these things, you’ll never want to go back to using fixed-shape mixing bowls, prep bowls and measuring cups./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/materials/kitchen_goods_evolve_with_isis_silicone_flex-it_line_16452.asp”(more…)/a
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pA HREF=”http://www.srulirecht.com/index.php/projects/” Sruli Recht/A has a strange sense of humor. We journalists were at a party at the Iceland Design Center when one of the partygoers had a bit too much Brennavin, sat on an unstable table laden with bottles of red wine, and sent the whole thing crashing noisily to the ground. Recht walked in right about that time; spied the huge puddles of red liquid all over the ground; pulled a camera out of his pocket, pressed it into someone’s hands, and hit the deck to pose for a crime-scene photo:/p

p[image courtesy Brian Fichtner]/p

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p align=”center”Sruli Wrecked/P

pDuring conversation Recht likes to ride the line between funny and uncomfortable, with a deadpan delivery of transgressive subject matters that sends the jokeometer needle wavering, unable to distinguish sarcasm from earnestness; that sense of humor is also evident in his product designs, some of which are produced in extraordinary circumstances–how many product designers do you know that have smuggled tanned whale penises across the International Date Line? /p

pThe products are better described in Recht’s own words, so we’ll let him do the talking./p

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p align=”center”Minke Dorks boots/P

blockquoteThe Minke Dorks are a series of coincidences combined. Actually the first night I met Heimir [Sverrisson, film director] we began talking about how Iceland had just announced it would begin whaling again in early- to mid-2006. At the same time I was putting together that shoe collection. The conversation naturally took to “What do they do with all the whale that isn’t eaten…and what can I use that will be thrown out?” I tracked down some hunters and spoke with them about this – what is discarded and what is salvageable. It turns out the only part that is tannable is the foreskin. So I took a box of frozen penises to the north of the country to a leather tanner I had heard could tan anything. And he could. These are the guys I still work with to make the other leather I still use.

pI then had to smuggle the tanned skins into Australia with invoices saying they were just fish skins, so as to take them to the producer that was making my samples. /pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/materials/interview_with_designer_sruli_recht_part_2_a_product_rundown_16317.asp”(more…)/a
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