Hasta La Ideas

When we first posted about ZIIIRO’s debut collection of wristwatches at the very end of last year, we commented on how designers can’t quite seem to exhaust the possibilities of the wristwatch.

ZIIIRO has come up with yet another way to represent time in a circle, as in the tried-and-true analog clock design, with their second pair of watches, the “Aurora” and the “Orbit”:

What we are experimenting on Aurora is to reduce both swirls into a single element without taking away any functionality from the watch. Hour indicator which is on the bottom layer uses a 100% to 0% blue gradient and the Minute indicator uses a 100% to 0% yellow gradient. Overlapping both layers create a color mixing result thus producing an ever changing clock face color! It allows the user to learn a new way of interpreting time by understanding mixture of different colors.

The Orbit is inspired by space and solar system. We want to build ZIIIRO as the ‘Solar system of time’ and therefore the hour and minute orbits around the parent star ZIIIRO. Colored orb represents the Hour and white orb shows the minute on Orbit. And most importantly, all these models are interchangeable with each other! All the watches in the rubber bracelet series: Gravity, Aurora and Orbit.

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I recently restored a 1938 Singer sewing machine as a friend’s birthday gift. The gears are all metal, which explains why I was easily able to get the 73-year-old machine running like it was brand-new. Singer’s plastic-geared machines from the 1960s, on the other hand, would not be so easy to restore. The plastic gears can simply rot.

Along these lines, check out artist Ryan Kothe’s “Worn Out,” below. The stop-motion animated short looks at how the objects around us can—and will, given enough time—fall victim to the ravages of long-term wear. (I’m still a fan of metal over plastic, though. Lasts longer.)

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Brooklynite and electrical engineer Steven J. Sasson had an interesting problem posed to him in 1975 by Eastman Kodak: Was it possible to make a film-less camera that could capture images electronically?

Three years of hard work later Sasson, along with his Kodak supervisor Gareth A. Lloyd, was issued a patent. It would be many years yet before companies like Sony and Panasonic would pick up the digital ball and run with it, and companies like Canon and Nikon would stop wishing this bothersome new technology would go away, but Sasson had invented the first digital camera. His contribution to the current state of the world is incalculable; eBay, fashion photography, journalism and a host of other industries would not exist in their current forms if not for Sasson’s work.

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In this age of capitalism, it seems if you build something big enough somebody will put a store in it.

Korean Air has recently announced they’ll be installing duty free shops in their forthcoming Airbus A380 jumbo jets. The shops were apparently designed at least in part by cosmetics company L’Oréal’s design department, and while details are light, it appears from the photo that they’ll incorporate a pivoting countertop/display unit that presumably stows away during take-off and landing. And as you can see in the video below, to prevent breakage during turbulence, all of booze bottles will be kitted out with magnets on the bottom, holding them fast to metal shelves.

via flight global

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Tel Aviv’s DÅG studio is exhibiting a new series of LED lamps at the Salone: the three quirky desk lamps and their wall-mounted cousin are known as the “Fixie” series.

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