Hasta La Ideas

While I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I have yet to go for a run this year (in my defense, I’ve been biking a lot) despite the pleasant weather lately, Adrien Guenette’s “Beat” might just get me back into the groove.

The gesture-controlled music player is the graduating senior’s final project towards his degree from Emily Carr University of Art & Design. That’s right, “Beat” is part iPod Nano with Nike+ and part Wiimote, bundled in a wristwatch and ring. Guenette explains:

Current devices on the market are difficult to use while on the go—finding the right button to press without stopping or struggling to use a touchscreen with sweaty hands. Using an innovative gesture interface, Beat seamlessly integrates into the running experience and puts you back in control.

I wish the video was more a demo than a teaser, but it does the job:

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It was no surprise to us that Janine Benyus’s introduction to biomimicry was one of the most popular videos in our Sustainability in 7 series last month: the notion of “solving design challenges by asking nature’s advice” has an immediate appeal.

While Benyus uses a peacock feather as an example, architecture and design studio Kawamura Ganjavian has found inspiration in another, equally unique (Ganj?-)avian: the ostrich.

OSTRICH offers a micro environment in which to take a warm and comfortable power nap at ease. It is neither a pillow nor a cushion, nor a bed, nor a garment, but a bit of each at the same time. Its soothing cave-like interior shelters and isolates our head and hands (mind, senses and body) for a few minutes, without needing to leave our desk.

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Relatively speaking, not that much stuff.

A popular thought on human psychology, of the cocktail-party-chatter variety, is that “People don’t regret the things they do; they regret the things they didn’t do.” It’s probably true for the ailing bed-rider who passed on an 18th-birthday bungie-jumping trip, but not so true in the world of industrial design.

“It’s extraordinary,” writes communications coach Carmine Gallo in Forbes, “to think that the world’s top brand has a product portfolio that could fit on a small table.” Gallo is referring to Apple, whose product line-up seems to be inversely proportional to the size to its profits, and serves as a good example of the things they didn’t do.

Gallo is the author of The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success and reveals a Jobs quote that explains Apple’s relatively tiny number of products. (In another Forbes article on Apple’s retail stores, Gallo points out that when the stores were first conceived, pre-iPod, Apple had just four major products to fill it with—two laptops and two desktops.)

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Peter Mullin is a financial services entrepreneur and philanthropist. Last year he quietly opened the Mullin Automotive Museum in his native California, putting on display his collection of over 100 automobiles, mostly French in origin, from the Machine Age and Art Deco era.

Despite the “Automotive” in the title, the museum is not all about cars. Mullin also examines that era’s design influence on furniture, as seen in the museum’s Carlo Bugatti collection of furnishings and decorative art:

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We’ve been fans of Didier Faustino’s work for awhile; his “Hermaphrodite” stool, fashioned out of a single piece of aluminum, confronts gendered anatomy through its form and function. Faustino’s more recent “Instrument for Blank Architecture” similarly challenges our assumptions about an object, in this case a surveying tripod. Traditionally used to survey physical landscapes, Faustino has inverted its usage to survey mental landscapes through sound.

“Instrument for Blank Architecture” is a mobile listening device, adaptable to the space which it occupies. A tripod that is equipped with a balancing device and is generally used by a land surveyor to document landscapes and topographies, here, becomes an instrument dedicated to the exploration of mental landscapes.

Check out the instrument and other new works including “Balance of Emptiness,” a bamboo structure suspended in mid-air and inspired by wormholes.

THE WILD THINGS
Galerie Michel Rein
42 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
Through May 28th

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