Hasta La Ideas

Yesterday in my photo studio they were filming what I assumed to be an industrial training video. In the morning I saw the crew loading a machine into the studio and I didn’t pay much attention.

Working next door in the office, I heard what sounded like an air rifle being fired in the studio, over and over again. I went back to investigate and saw this:

The second half of the video above is lifted from the company’s website; I’m not sure why it lacks audio, and the subtitles seem oddly truncated. In any case, you load what look like grain pellets into the Delice Magic Pop Machine and it starts spitting out multigrain snack cakes. (I tried a couple and they’re tasty, if you dig rice cakes.)

South-Korea-based manufacturer Delice is marketing the Magic Pop in Israel, Russia, Iran, the Netherlands, and the USA (there are Asian sandwich shops in California that have had Delice machines for years, albeit with a custard-filled variant). We might as well face the fact that we eat food produced by machines, and the Magic Pop wears its industriality on its sleeve, cranking out its healthy treats in plain view of the snacker.

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Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t see the point of Mobee’s new Magic Bar inductive charger for Apple’s Wireless Keyboard.

The whole point of Apple’s keyboard is that it’s minimal and wireless. That was the design feat it managed to pull off, it’s raison d’etre. You slip two AA’s in there and you’ve got juice.

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Mauricio and Sebastián Lara, who design projects as Eos Mexico, present “Sima Pashtun,” a rug design that translates a traditional pattern into a technologically-enabled optical illusion. The visually striking result is the rug equivalent of a mash-up, combining global influences and ancient allusion in a contemporary design.

While the weaving technique originated in Tibet some 3000 years old, the Odabashian Trading Corp. executed the Lara brothers’ design earlier this year for a current exhibition at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City.

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Photo by Kieran Riley & Ben Lieberson for Rapha

London’s Wilson Brothers are a multidisciplinary design team (who isn’t these days?) comprised of brothers Oscar, Ben and Luke. Well, snark aside, these guys actually deliver: renowned cycling clothiers Rapha recently commissioned a “Mobile Cycle Club,” a converted truck has been outfitted with the latest in, um, mobile cycling club technology. The design features a retractable awning and 60″ flatscreen for viewing races via satellite, as well as glass cases to display Rapha’s greatest hits and matching benches for extended coffee breaks.

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The Mitsubishi Pencil Company’s Kuru Toga model is a couple of years old and features a gear inside that rotates the pencil lead every time it’s put to paper, continually keeping a sharp, centered point on it:

An amusing piece of belated overengineering–I could’ve really used one of these back in the days when we actually did hand draftings. This is kind of like making a carbon-fiber T-square.

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