Old-timey cosmetics package designs, weird point-of-purchase displays, streamlined cars, pedestal sinks, antiquated color palettes. For those interested in vintage products, check out the Vintage Ads community on LiveJournal, which is not dedicated to vintage products per se but features them in advertising form.
Christian Schallert’s 250 sq feet apartment designed by Barbara Appolloni
This video is making the blog rounds as the “Christian House,” named for owner Christian Schallert, but the name that should be noted here is Barbara Appolloni. She’s the architect who turned a space not much bigger than an American jail cell—roughly 250 square feet—into a livable apartment in Barcelona:
A couple weeks ago, I tweeted about Patrick Stevenson-Keating’s Quantum Parallelograph, idly wondering what it does. Lo and behold, he’s released a video showing his brainchild in action:
Good stuff, but I’m still not quite sure what’s going on in there. Of course, Stevenson-Keating’s website indicates that it is a “work in progress.” I wonder what the future holds for the Quantum Parallelograph… if only there was some kind of tabletop device that could tell me…
Earlier this year, Barcelona’s blablabLab piloted an attraction called “Be Your Own Souvenir” on Las Ramblas, the main tourist thoroughfare in the city they call home. It’s essentially the ‘Souvenir Penny’ 2.0: lucky tourists posed for three Kinect sensors to generate a full-body scan, which is translated into a 3D-printed figurine of said tourist.
For two weekends in January, “Be Your Own Souvenir” demonstrated the potential for new technology to invert the relationship between artist and audience: “spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.”
The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites him/her to perform as a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of him/herself printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured light scanners (kinect)… The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.
Video after the jump:
I absolutely love how the finish has been worn off on the iPhone and Canon camera posted by Remy Labesque on frogdesign’s Design Mind blog. In his article, titled “Aged to Perfection,” Labesque makes the intelligent point that
…Consumer products are ‘new’ for a very brief moment when they are first removed from the packaging, but spend the great majority of their useful lives as ‘used’ products in the process of decay…. Aging with dignity is a criteria designers should recognize in their efforts. I’m thinking of a future when products are designed not for the brief moment when they are new, but for when they have been aged to perfection.
Hear hear. And until that day comes, the “physically-worn tech objects” thing is begging for a Flickr page.
I’m loving Gregoire de Lafforest’s “Clock Agnan,” which uses illegibly tiny numbers and magnifying glasses to indicate the time.
It’s no secret that Apple’s products have spawned a veritable cottage industry of Kickstarted third-party accessory design, so it was only a matter of time before designers started looking to design accessories for accessories. Hence, “Tembo Trunks,” a set of injected-molded silicone earbud cones.
Industrial designer Scott Norrie shares his inspiration in his Kickstarter video:
Design inspiration is such a fascinating and peculiar thing, and I love seeing how designer Christian Vivanco can draw a straight line between two seemingly very disparate objects. Certain project pages on Vivanco’s website start with photos reminiscent of a National Geographic cover that then lead in to the finished product he was able to envision from the unlikely source—from a favela to a storage unit, from algae to a lamp, from a Mexican street vendor to a table.
For example, Vivanco sees this…
…and comes up with this.
There is an old adage in the firefighting community that the profession is 150 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.
The original fire helmet, then called a fire cap, was designed in 1731 by Jacobus Turk for the Fire Department of New York in order to distinguish the department from competitors. (Scarily enough, firefighting was once privatized—just like in the movie ‘Gangs of New York.’)
An ornamental eagle—with no related significance—was added to the helmet design around 1825. A 1930 New Yorker article points out that the eagle “sticks up in the air, it catches… on telephone wires, it is always getting dented… every so often, some realist points out how much safer and cheaper it would be to do away with the eagle, but the firemen always refuse.” The eagle still exists as an integral part of the helmet today.
The colors of the helmet, however, do have importance. Black generally denotes a private/basic firefighter, yellow or red can denote a lieutenant or captain, and white denotes a chief. Sometimes all of a department’s helmets are black, while only the colors of the helmet badges denote rank. Lastly, Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) fire investigator helmets are bright blue.
BMW Group’s design team has developed a folding bike that fits in the trunk of a Mini, though you need not purchase a Mini to get one; starting in August you’ll be able to order the bike separately from the online Mini Lifestyle website and from a handful of Mini dealers.
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.
