Roger Lima is a North-Carolina-based sound designer and composer operating under his WhiteNoise Lab brand. Lima took a mic and a bike and used it to make music:
Lima, if you’re up for doing other vehicular songs: We’d love to hear a NY taxi, a motocross motorcycle and a commercial airliner.
As an uncannily relevant follow-up to Willem Van Lancker’s excellent essay on craftsmanship and its implications—namely the resurgent (albeit often misguided) DIY approach as a means to achieve authenticity—I just noticed that the Kickstarter campaign for Freaker USA is nearly funded just got Kickstarted. [Ed. Note: After stalling at about halfway-funded for the past week or so, it jumped to about $40,000 when I wrote this article in the morning; as of press time, the project is a go.]
The product itself isn’t particularly noteworthy—it’s a knit beer koozie that comes in a handful of funky styles—but I’m highly intrigued by their marketing strategy. Where Will was rather judicious in his characterization of the much-maligned hipster, Freaker founder Zach Crain goes all-in with the aesthetic: his Kickstarter video features every trope from facial hair and thrift store rummaging to a faux-infomerical segment, a quasi-throwback hip-hop reference, emphasis on media (including the social kind), young people, wacky haircuts, etc. ad nauseam.
Whenever I’ve brought visitors to New York to the esplanade at Battery Park, they’re always surprised to see there are outdoor pool tables there. You provide ID at the nearby NYC Department of Parks & Recreation office and they lend you the balls and sticks.
Now a company called Henge is producing concrete ping pong tables that are also seeking uptake by NYC’s DPR. Both Roosevelt Island and Fort Tryon Park have orders in for the tables, and Henge has donated one to Tompkins Square Park.
Manchester’s Neil Conley has recently designed two series of housewares that address what is arguably the most significant environmental issue of our time: dependence on petroleum. With “Snow Global” and “Oil,” Conley has done a remarkable job infusing concrete objects with concepts. (Some of our readers may have had the chance to see his work in person at the ICFF; unfortunately, I didn’t have the good fortune to happen upon them.)
“Snow Global“—”a series of snow globes created in response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, 2010″—takes a familiar novelty item and reimagines it as a microcosmic oil spill. Both color and content are totally inverted, a subversive twist on the physical gesture of inverting the toy in one’s hand.
Designer Jason Phillips runs an eponymous firm out of North Carolina, where he designs and produces furniture. We’re digging his latest project, the Treforma nesting tables, so new that it’s not yet been posted on his site:
Treforma is inspired by objects and the way they reflect and transmit light. The color of objects is determined by the parts of the spectrum of light that are reflected without being absorbed. Secondary attributes like glossy, sheen, and translucency are made clear by the directional distribution of the reflected or transmitted light.
Back in April we showed you a stuntman driving his car through a Hot-Wheels-like loop-de-loop, and last Sunday Top Gear’s Tanner Faust kicked off the Indy 500 by setting a world record for car jumping. The nutty thing is, Faust did it off of a ramp designed to look like a gargantuan version of the Hot Wheels tracks of our youth.
Now we can add, to the retro-cravings stack, the trend of taking childhood toys and remaking them huge. Previously this was limited to giant-sized Lego blocks, but now people are taking it to much more involved levels. If Faust’s stunt didn’t impress you, perhaps Mark Perez’s Life Size Mousetrap will.
I’m digging the Libreria ABC series of bookcases by Eva Alessandrini and Roberto Saporiti, designed to hold books of all heights. While I’d be happy with the abstract configuration pictured above, the main idea behind the series is that they’re produced in letters, letting you store your books filled with words inside actual words. Though produced by Saporiti, these remind me of Tabisso’s legible furniture.
The Carryology post that sucked us into their site, and their mission, was an in-depth look they took at a problem faced by a subset of people who need backpacks for survival. We’re not talking about the Bear Grylls kind of elective, recreational survival; we mean those with conditions that require they transport medical supplies with them at all times, unless they want to spend their lives in confinement.
As Brandon, the subject of the IV Backpack project, writes:
Basically I have a digestive disorder where I require IV nutritional supplements to survive. Every night I’m hooked up for 10 hours and being strapped down to an IV poll kind of puts a damper on things. However, with advancements in technology pumps have gotten smaller. As a result a backpack was specially created to fit this pump and the IV bag, which opened the door for mobility while being hooked up. The problem is this bag is 10+ years old now and is falling a part. The company that makes it is no longer around, and I’m not able to find anyone else who makes something like it.
I’m part of an online community where patients have similar situations and unfortunately those who are hooked up just go out and buy regular backpacks and modify them by cutting them and adding all sorts of contraptions to it to feel a bit more mobile. Personally, I believe that the market is fairly large; however, no one seems to really want to look into it….
To better understand what things we carry and how we carry them, Bellroy formed Carryology, a research arm dedicated to studying the various solutions we all use to move our stuff around.
Like Rushfaster, Bellroy is another Australian company, this one located in Glen’s hometown of Melbourne. Bellroy’s mission is “trying to improve the way we carry,” starting with the wallet, an object whose design “has existed in a deep freeze for the last generation or two.”
One of Bellroy’s five solutions is the Slim Sleeve Wallet, which provides quick-draw access for your two most commonly used cards, then provides a pull-tab to access the less frequently used cards you stuff on the inside. As shown in the video (after the jump) there’s also a slot to hold some kind of funny little play money, I’ll ask Glen what those are when he gets back to the office.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
