Hasta La Ideas

I want you to put this in your living room

If I were a famous sculptor, I’d sell you a block of raw granite that you’d put in your house in California, surrounded by a bunch of internet-connected industrial robot arms with sculpting attachments. In my apartment in New York I’d have an identical-sized chunk of granite. Whenever I felt like sculpting for a few hours, I’d put on some internet-connected gloves that tracked my hand motions and I’d begin taking chunks out of the block. Over in California, the robot arms would simultaneously whir to life and carve exactly what I was carving. So over a period of a few weeks, this sculpture would begin to take shape at random times of the day and you’d see the process happening.

Although all of the technology to make that happen currently exists, I’ve yet to see anyone do it. The closest thing I’ve seen to this pipe dream of mine is Antwerp-based Unfold Studio’s L’Artisan Electronique, a “virtual pottery wheel” that tracks your hand motions while you shape a laser-projected rotating shape. A printer that looks rather like a pastry tube then extrudes your creation in clay. It all happens in the same room and it’s not as cool (or messy) as my remote sculpting idea, but mark my words, it’s just a matter of time:

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The first three months of 2011 were extremely hectic, and in response I decided to declare April as a Super Simple Month. This was the right choice for me, and I embraced the austerity that came from this decision. I re-read a few of my favorite books, I spent as much time with my family as I could, I refrained from making any non-essential purchases, I was in bed before 10:00 most nights, and I declined many invitations that would have added stress to my schedule.

As much as I would love to keep a Super Simple Year, I know it isn’t the right choice for me. I like to travel, I enjoy having a more robust social life than I did in April, and there are new book titles calling to me from my Kindle. I’m not planning to jump back into a hectic lifestyle in May, however. There are many wonderful lessons learned from April’s Super Simple Month that I will continue to carry forward with me. Instead of simple, I’m aiming for calm for the remainder of the year.

For May, my public resolution is to be more mindful and deliberate about my media intake. I’m not against television, magazines, newspapers, or the internet (obviously), I think they are wonderful forms of entertainment, education, and information distribution. I’ve simply realized that it is more difficult for me to disconnect from media now than it once was, and this doesn’t sit well with me. I have a constant desire to continually be “plugged in,” and I want to be more conscientious about how and when I am.

I haven’t fully figured out my plan for cutting back on my media intake, but there are a few steps I know I will follow or continue to follow:

1. Except for major breaking news, do not watch television programs when they are initially broadcast.
2. Record programs of interest on the DVR and view no more than an hour of television each week day, two hours of television on Saturdays, and no television on Sundays.
3. Set a timer for 10 minutes whenever I am at the computer or using applications on my smart phone for reasons other than work. This includes personal email, checking social media sites, and general roaming around the web. (This does not include phone calls.)
4. Do not sit at the computer or use applications on my smart phone for reasons other than work for more than 30 minutes total in a day.
5. Unsubscribe from all magazines I’m not reading cover-to-cover during the month printed on their covers.

Do you limit your media intake? What guidelines do you have set for these activities? I’m interested in learning what you do and why you have made your decisions. Share your strategies in the comments.

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Erin’s 2011 monthly resolutions: January, February, March, and April.

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This fun infographic visualizes the full scope of the social media phenomenon. Enjoy.

“One size fits all” is the challenge of a furniture designer, up to a point. You design a chair or sofa that a 95th-percentile anthropomorphic shape will fit into, and then everyone that encounters that piece, from leg-dangling five-year-olds to 300 pound hulks, tries to make their body fit into it comfortably.

Fashion designers have a more daunting task, as they have to produce the same garment in a variety of sizes. But even after they pull that off, a new problem emerges, one that any female clothing shopper can tell you about: There’s no standardization of female sizes in the clothing industry. According to this article in the Times, “Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0.” Even the Gap and Banana Republic, both part of the same company, have different sizes between them. Then there is the problem of “vanity sizing,” whereby companies arbitrarily reduce the number sizes so women don’t feel fat.

One emerging solution to this problem is the MyBestFit body scanner, a piece of technological overkill that nevertheless seems necessary because of the ridiculous lack of standardization.

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I have trouble believing it “took an hour” for a bunch of MIT PhD students at dinner to split the check, and that they got it wrong the first time, but that’s the alleged event that inspired Rajat Suri to launch E La Carte, a tablet-based restaurant menu app. After working on it for two years—which included doing research by actually getting jobs waiting tables to observe how people order—Suri and some guys from MIT are ready to launch it.

The app goes way beyond splitting the bill; what they’ve developed is a full restaurant menu that shows you the food and is apparently so compelling that in early testing it’s increased overall sales by 10%. Check it out, and be sure to peep the competing laser-projection/motion-sensor technology shown at 1:18:

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