Hasta La Ideas

This is absolutely eye-opening. In an earlier post we showed you wheelchairs designed for wheelchair-unfriendly environments, and because most of us have seen wheelchair users in real life or on TV, we have at least a vague idea of what those without the use of their legs have to go through. But here we have a video of a woman with no arms showing you how she dresses herself every morning, a procedure I had zero concept of:

Take a good look at that device Tisha’s using, a metal rod with a hook on the end:

She mentions that she’s had it covered in aquarium tubing acquired at a pet store to make it a bit more “squishy,” i.e. ergonomic. Which got me thinking: The video you just saw was less than five minutes, but after watching it, I bet you can already think of ways to improve upon Tisha’s device. Think of the design questions popping up in your head: Is that hook the optimum shape? Is it too sharp, in case she misses and contacts her skin with the hook, or is the metal unpleasantly cold? Does the rod need to be straight, or would it be better if it had a slight arc to it at the end? Does the rod need to be cylindrical in cross-section to fit between her toes, or would a slightly elliptical cross-section provide better purchase and maneuverability? The upper part that Tisha manipulates between her chin and collarbone, is it optimally shaped? How and where does she store the device, and how does she typically retrieve it and put it back?

I hope that more folks with disabilities make videos like this, not just to share with others what their particular trials are, but to enable us designers to improve upon the objects they use.

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Following yesterday’s post on the spherical drive system, my fellow Pratt ID alumnus Jay G. wrote in with where those omniwheels may have come from. An Australian company called Rotacaster produces the crazy-looking wheels, sometimes called “Ezekiel Wheels,” you see here. The wheels are used in the Rotatruck Stair Climbing Hand Truck:

Why are they called Ezekiel Wheels? Here’s where it gets interesting: The wheels’ designer, Henry Guile, claims their inspiration came from The Bible:

The first chapter of Ezekiel describes a vehicle with four wheels and “their appearance and their work was as if it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” From this simple idea, the Ezekiel Wheel was born.

Guile reportedly worked on the design of the wheels for years but was never able to get it quite right. But his son Graham picked up where he left off and perfected the design. The father and the son, and I guess the Holy Ghost fits in there somewhere too.

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What’s the one thing your smartphone is missing? That’s right, a knife. The Adappt XT iPhone case (currently up for funding on Indiegogo) features a little flip-out tanto-style blade to solve that problem.

At 1.5 inches you won’t be using it to fend off ninjas, but if you can get to your opponent before he breaks that bottle, you at least oughta be able to slow him down. And best of all, when the melee’s done you can grab your knife–that is, your phone!–and do the decent thing by calling an ambulance for your foe. Then you can use the Maps app to locate the nearest precinct, calculate which direction the cops will be coming from, and disappear in the other direction.

(In all seriousness, I should point out that the case is actually designed to be a multitool and contains a screwdriver, a series of hex-head cutouts and a bottle opener. Check it out here.)

“Give it back, Bernardo. Unless you want to get ‘phoned.'”

See also: Iain Sinclair’s “Cardsharp” knife

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I run a photography rental studio on the side, where people shoot everything from fashion look-books to stock photography to images for toy packaging. I’ve spent eight years kitting the studio out with every basic piece of equipment a crew would need to conduct a shoot. But the number one thing that everyone asks for is not a particular type of strobe, or stand, or backdrop: It’s a cell phone charging cable.

After the strobes, the iPhone charger is probably the most popularly-used piece of equipment in there. I have no idea why this is; you’d think everyone would just plug their cell phones in every night, but my observation is that many people don’t and are constantly running out of juice.

An idea recently chosen on Quirky, but yet-to-be-developed, may provide the answer. It is not an exact fit to this problem, but could be: The idea is for a bracelet that is actually a wearable USB syncing cable. If this were modified with prongs so that one end went into your phone and the other into a proper socket, I think it would be huge.

A fair bit of technical trickery would be required to wedge a bulky adapter into a slim bracelet, but imagine the convenience. If your phone ran out of juice and all you had to do was find a socket and whip your bracelet off, I think a lot of people’s lives might be made easier.

Then again, the success of this theoretical object is predicated on people remembering to put it on—and remembering to take it with them. Anyone wanna take a guess on the number one object left behind in my studio? It’s not CF cards, laptop cables, or merchandise: It’s cell phone chargers, left plugged into the wall in a forgotten corner (occasionally with the phone still dangling from it).

What do you think, would a phone-charging bracelet do the trick?

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Micro-technology engineer Maximillian Busser’s No. 3 Frog watch—sorry, “horological device”—was certainly unconventional-looking. His latest, the No. 4 Thunderbolt, definitely keeps pace.

Released under Busser’s MB&F brand, the aircraft-inspired Thunderbolt features a regular face and a “power reserve indicator,” both oriented 90 degrees away from the way a conventional watch face is. In the recent Frank Stephenson video, that designer talks about the importance, in supercar design, of displaying a portion of the engine; Busser clearly has the same philosophy, and has spared no manufacturing difficulty to achieve it.

The striking transparent sapphire section of the case requires over 185 hours of machining and polishing to transform an opaque solid block of crystal into a complex, exquisitely curved panel allowing the light to come in and the beauty of Thunderbolt’s engine to stand out.

Every component and form has a technical purpose; nothing is superfluous and every line and curve is in poetic harmony. Articulated lugs ensure supreme comfort. Highly legible time is a fringe benefit.

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