Light by Fire Extinguisher & the Anti-Incendiary Grenades of Yore

RedCometFireGrenadeSalesmanKit-viaCollectorsWeekly.jpgRed Comet salesman kit, via Collectors Weekly—looks cool, but what does it actually do?

You know how words like ‘ingenious’ and ‘inflammable’ actually mean the same thing as ‘genius’ and ‘flammable,’ respectively? It so happens that the object known as a “fire grenade” has a similarly paradoxical name: it’s a glass vessel containing an extinguishing agent, intended to be thrown at the flames—in the same manner as the projectile weapon—in order to put it out.

ValentinoLlegada.jpgLamps by Valentino Llegada

But before we get into the “more-than-you-ever-cared-to-know” segment of this post, it’s worth mentioning that a couple of strikingly similar blog submissions inspired (or sparked my interest, if you will) my inquest into fire extinguisher history. Southern Florida-based artist Valentino Llegada has taken to upcycling the aluminum canisters into household objects, namely vases and pendant lamps. Seeing as manufacturers and fire departments alike typically recommend replacing them annually, the raw material is essentially an alternative to recycling non-refillable varieties of extinguisher (actual shelf life may be over a decade for dry chemical extinguishers; compressed gas extinguishers may develop slow leaks within a year).

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Samuel Bernier‘s project, on the other hand, is a bit more robust: the DIYer extraordinaire recently posted a detailed Instructable for a fire extinguisher floor lamp, which he created with the help of ENSCI students Sarah Khoubbaz and Rim Besbes during a workshop called “Lounge Share.” We’ve seen homages to Achille Castiglioni (namesake of Bernier’s project) before, but this upcycled tribute neatly conflates the iconic forms of an oft-overlooked safety item and an objet d’art.

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How to Get the Chinese Government to Condemn Piracy: Release Giant, Knockoff Rubber Duckies

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Earlier this week the Chinese government clamped down on the Internet, as they do every June 4th, to quell any traffic glorifying the Tiananmen Square protests. Someone promptly released the Photoshopped image you see above, where the tanks are replaced by ducks. But while gigantic rubber duckies may be getting the Communist Party’s goat, it’s not the gigantic rubber duckies from the image above.

This is a little convoluted, but bear with us: In 2007, Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman created an enormous, floating, inflatable rubber duck, some 26 meters long, 20 meters wide and a whopping 32 meters tall.

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Rainy Day Design Flaw: Why Aren’t Umbrellas Better Integrated with Cars?

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I’m currently in rainy North Carolina, where Tropical Storm Andrea has me scurrying about my rental car with an umbrella—and getting soaked every time I get in or out of the car. It’s not just the rain hitting me when I open/close the umbrella and get my body in/out of the car; it’s that often-overlooked design problem of getting the umbrella in/out of the car. With a four-door, you can either open the rear passenger door, throw the umbrella in the back, then hustle into the front seat, exposing yourself to the elements. Or you can climb into the driver’s seat, keeping the umbrella open until the very last minute, then collapse it and pull the sopping mess across your lap to throw it into the front passenger seat. We’ve had umbrellas for thousands of years, and cars for a hundred, and no one has resolved this problem?

Some have tried. Rolls-Royce’s Phantom and Ghost models have a fancy, full-size pop-out umbrella that stores in a compartment in the door:

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Underwater Archaeologist Franck Goddio Finds 1,600-Year-Old City that Vanished 1,200 Years Ago

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In the early 1980s, Frenchman Franck Goddio was working in finance. But rather than searching for treasure in spreadsheets, he began looking elsewhere: underwater. With a passion for underwater archaeology, Goddio quit his finance gig, founded the Institut European d’Archeologies Sous-Marine, and started searching for shipwrecks.

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His results were impressive. Goddio excavated Spanish galleons, trading ships from the British East India Company, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s flagship, among others. But it was an expedition he undertook in 2000 that really put him on the map, so to speak: He managed to locate Thonis-Heracleion, an ancient port city (built circa 800 B.C.!) that’s now completely submerged off the coast of Egypt. The hyphenated name hints at its cosmopolitan nature: The Egyptians called it Thonis, the Greeks, Heracleion after a massive temple to Heracles that once stood at the site.

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Core77 TV: Video Review of Moneual’s Rydis MR6550 Robot Vacuum

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Robot vacuums are amazing, particularly if you’ve spent years pushing a manual vacuum around your apartment. To have this little disc thoroughly clean the floor when you’re not even there is an experience that will spoil you. But that doesn’t mean it’s a completely hands-off experience; in their current iteration, robot vacuums still require some supervision and maintenance—things that they never show you in the commercials.

Here we’ll take a look at what the actual user experience is with our review of Moneual’s Rydis MR6550. After the shine of using a new product wears off, what tasks will you find yourself repeating to keep the thing running smoothly? And what will you wish the product’s designers had done differently? Watch and find out.

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Faux Package Design: Have a Coke and Two Smiles

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While ad agency Ogilvy Mather addressed Diet Coke marketing with an ultra-thin (concept) vending machine, they’re addressing the package design itself to push the flagship Coke product. Ogilvy Paris, with the input of the Singapore office, has commissioned a Coke can that can be split into two halves.

Half-sized soda cans already exist; I spotted some overseas, though I’ve never seen any in the ‘States (which makes sense given American appetites) so it was just a matter of creating a top-half can for a perfect fit:

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The Sunglass Parts Library: Drag and Drop Catalog Parts into CAD

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Earlier this month, we took a look at Sunglass, a product design collaboration site where users can download plug-ins to connect their local CAD environments to the cloud. Their partnership with Cadenas Part Solutions, a company that creates digital catalogs for major parts manufacturers, is starting to reveal the promise of such a system.

The two companies’ newly-announced joint venture, the Sunglass Parts Library, provides users the ability to instantly access parts files—gears, motors, hinges, etc.—and integrate those parts directly into their CAD files. “It’s the first interactive application with the ability to integrate an enterprise-grade manufacturing library directly into the 3D design environment,” they write. The analogy isn’t perfect, but the team-up is sort of an industrial design version of the iPod-and-iTunes ecosystem: Its success is dependent not only on the interface’s ease-of-use, but also on the ability to sign up multiple bodies—in Apple’s case, the music labels; in Cadena’s case, the parts suppliers.

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When It Rains, It Pours: The Musguard Is Yet Another Minimal Bike Fender

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At this rate, bicycle mudguards are the new iPhone cases: it seems like every other bike-obsessed industrial designer is looking to develop an ultraminimal solution to the problem of protecting one’s back from the grit and grime of the streets. The now-on-Kickstarter Musguard splits the difference between Windsor detachable fenders and the recently-seen Plume. It’s a blade-like strip of polypropylene that is affixed to one’s seat tube with a velcro strap, fixed in place at the seatstay bridge such that it sits almost directly above the rear wheel.

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The slick (pun intended) video showcases the product on what I conjecture to be the mean streets of Ljubljana, as well as shots of designer Jurij Lozic’s studio and glamour shots of fixed-gear riders (in fact, one of the bikes is available as a KS reward). The Musguard itself is produced locally in Slovenia, and is not only removable and rollable but also recyclable as well:

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Sound Design: Facebook, Electric Cars, and Learning to Pronounce Ikea Products

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At a previous design gig, I had a co-worker who’d derisively refer to our boss—behind his back, naturally—as “The Millimeter.” Because whenever we’d submit renderings to him for approval, he’d invariably say “Looks good, but can you move this line just a millimeter to the [left/right]?” He couldn’t help himself; he’d have said it to a child drawing a rectangle or to Michelangelo carving David.

Just as industrial designers pore over millimeters, radii and materials, sound designers obsess about details laypeople will probably never notice. Take, for example, the sound that you hear when getting an incoming video call on Facebook:

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Who Knew? NASA Uses Flowbee Technology!

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If you think shaving on Earth is a pain, try shaving in space. With no running water, your shorn whiskers will scatter and float around the cabin—which is bad news for the sensitive electronic devices inside. It’s also kind of disgusting as you can accidentally breathe the hairs in. Here astronaut Chris Hadfield shows you how it’s done:

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