Hasta La Ideas

A revolutionary space heater from the U.K.’s leading appliance producer

James Dyson has been turning appliances into art since launching his bright pink G-Force vacuum cleaner in 1983. Never ceasing to innovate, the eponymous line has grown to include several styles of vacuums, hand dryers, fans and now, a heater. The Dyson Hot draws on the technology used in the bladeless Air Multiplyer Fan, passing a stream of air over an airfoil-shaped ramp. Surrounding air is drawn in, amplified six times through induction and heated with 20 ceramic stones, never exceeding 392 degrees and alleviating the burning smell many heaters emit.

Taking over two years (and hundreds of prototypes) to develop, the Dyson Hot also uses as little energy as possible. Once the room has reached the desired temperature, the heater turns off and only turns back on once it detects the temperature has dropped.

Claiming to heat the whole room faster than any other heater, the oscillating Dyson Hot not only looks good, but is a valuable commodity for any chilly home or office. The Hot comes in white or blue with silver colorways and will sell online and in stores for £270.

Until I can find a decent set of bluetooth headphones, tangled cords remain the bane of my existence. At least once a week my arm catches on one and unexpectedly yanks it out, creating a violently disturbing inner-ear sensation as the earbud’s vacuum seal breaks free.

So I was very interested to see ECKOUNLTD’s preview of their forthcoming line of headphones (slated for official unveiling at CES 2012) that included the Zip earbuds pictured above. As you can guess, it transmits audio through the zipper itself, eliminating a portion of the cord. I’m not sold on how the “last mile” of cable remains a metal zipper, and I realize it’s not entirely practical, but for those who jog in zippered sweatshirts this might be just the thing.

The Zips—which include an in-line microphone and pause/play control—are expected to retail for $30.

via Engadget

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On September 10, The Economist published the article “Great digital expectations” discussing the consumer shift from print to digital books:

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books.

As someone who reads an average of three books a week, I have embraced digital books and advocate their use for numerous uncluttered reasons. First, my library allows me to check out digital books for free using their Overdrive service. (Yours probably does, too.) Not all digital books are available this way, but I still use this service a great deal for research and books I wouldn’t usually buy. And, I can download the books at home and skip the drive to the library. Second, digital books are usually less expensive than print books because you’re only paying for the content not the paper and binding and ink. This keeps more money in my wallet, which I like, and saves a few trees (although the components in my digital book reader probably aren’t super environmentally friendly). Third, digital books keep physical books from cluttering up and overwhelming my bookshelf. I love having books in the house, especially children’s books for my son to read, but my house is a home, not a library. I don’t need all books on display. Fourth, and this is my favorite benefit, my digital reader weighs the same if I choose to carry one book or three dozen books with me at a time. I can read whatever book fits my mood, without having to lug around multiple physical books in a bag.

That being said, I still acquire a lot of books in print. Any book that isn’t available in digital form that I want to read, travel books, children’s books, and cookbooks still end up in my house. These come in on a one-in-one-out basis, however, as I am out of bookshelf space.

Speaking of bookshelves, not only are publishers responding to consumers desiring digital books, but so are bookshelf manufacturers:

Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

As a way to curb book clutter, have you made the switch (or a partial switch) to digital books? Could a digital book reader help you to get an out-of-control book collection down to a more meaningful size? As someone who consumes a ridiculous number of books a year, digital books have certainly saved space in my home and office, as well as kept some money in my pocketbook. (FYI: I primarily use a Kindle, but for library downloads I use my laptop since they’re usually research related.) Are you surprised to learn that Amazon sells more digital books than print books? What might be keeping you from making the switch to a digital reader?

Check out the full article.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

The U.S. Open of art: Rauschenberg’s 1966 performance pairing tennis and technology

Think branded interdisciplinary content is a recent phenomenon? In 1966 a unique project was hatched when conceptual artists and Bell Labs engineers collaborated on a series of live installations inside a National Guard Armory in New York City. One of those, “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg, pitted artists—including minimalist painter Frank Stella—against each other in a live game of tennis with rackets wired to switch the stage lights on and off and produce an aural musical score. Their movements were projected on large screens by infrared camera, giving the performers and the assembled crowd of 300 a ghoulish glow inside the cavernous armory

By all accounts electrifying, now 45 years later an exhibit at Seventeen gallery in London will showcase Swedish documentary maker Barbro Schultz Lundestam’s reexamination of the seminal moment in conceptual art history. She takes the audience back to those evenings in NYC with the principles involved explaining how they pulled it off and the effect they had on the actors and spectators. Check out a trailer for the 34-minute film here.

The 1997 documentary is also available for sale on DVD, but for those near London, the installation runs through 8 October 2011.

Perception shifts as art and nature intersect at the Nevada Museum of Art

Promising “unexpected access to the invisible,” what exactly the Nevada Museum of Art’s current show Landscape Futures proposes isn’t immediately clear. On first blush, the work looks like the usual collection of forward-thinking designs. But here there’s a catch.

The exhibit’s range of large-scale installations, experiments and devices all concern themselves less with the design itself than with the viewer’s reaction to it. Two years in the making, Bldgblog editor Geoff Manaugh worked with the NMA to develop an exhibition that would reflect the intersection of art and landscape architecture contextualized by the ever-evolving scope of design communication. The resulting project surveys methods for architecturally inventing and exploring the human perception of and interaction with their environments.

This flip-flopped point of view comes from Manaugh’s desire “to look at the devices, mechanisms, instruments, and pieces of equipment—the technology—through which humans can learn to see the landscape around them differently.” Revising the concept of “landscape futures” he posits that maybe we don’t need to devise new landscapes, “but simply little devices through which to see the world in new and unexpected ways.”

Artists Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada’s interactive installation “Animal Superpowers” anthropomorphizes human sensory capabilities. Furthering the theme of human impact on environment, design firm Smout Allen’s Rube-Goldberg-inspired system visualizes a technological landscape that can adapt to our water needs.

An architectural commentary on the Arctic landscape, “The Active Layer” by experimental design group The Lateral Office consists of thousands of wooden dowels arranged to point out the tenuous geography in the North. “Embracing speculative scenarios in order to provoke new ways of thinking about the future” is at the heart of the exhibition, explains Manaugh.

Furthering the cause is the recently-launched Landscape Futures Night School, a series of event-styled lectures sponsored by Studio X in conjunction with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture under Manaugh’s current direction (along with Nicola Twilley). On hand at the debut installment was lecturer Liam Young, founder of the futuristic think-tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and fellow featured exhibition artist. Creating “living maps of moss,” Young’s “Specimens of Unnatural History” ecologically replicate the Galapagos islands as populated with robotic and taxidermy entities that simultaneously reflect a “cautionary tale” of the future and a throwback to the naturalistic height of the Victorian era.

Supporting the contemplative narrative of his work, Young presented a metaphysical tour-de-force of his expeditions, ranging from Chernobyl dreamscapes to invasive species in the Galapagos conducted under the nomadic studio group, Unknown Fields Division—a group devoted to “unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies.”

Landscape Futures runs until 12 February 2012 at the Nevada Museum of Art.

“Specimens of Unnatural History” images by Liam Young. All other images by Jamie Kingman.