In about a month, Walt Disney World (that’s the one in Florida) will open a new design-related attraction produced in conjunction with Chevrolet. Called Test Track, the large-scale, interactive exhibit aims to provide “an authentic, inside-the-studio look at the actual automotive design process, while empowering guests themselves to create their own designs, possibly inspiring the next generation of automotive designers.”
While the concept cars on display provide the physical eye candy, the hook is meant to be the four-part interactive element: kids get to design, virtually test-drive, and virtually race their own cars, and afterwards get to film a mock commercial of them and their vehicle.
Hurricane Sandy was unimaginable in almost every way, beyond the scope of half a weekend’s worth of preparedness, and New York City is still dusting itself off from the storm even as another system dusts the city with a fresh coat of miserable weather. As the major media duly noted during the days following the storm, the hurricane made an emphatic case for alternative transportation, but I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that New York City was supposed to get a shiny new fleet of public bikes by this past summer, only to see the scheduled launch pushed back to fall and now March 2013. An August press release cites technical issues as the culprit (Streetsblog posted additional clarification from Mayor Bloomberg):
NYCBS continues work to conclude manufacture and testing of the high-performance software necessary to operate the new system, which is being tailored for New York City. The system uses new solar power arrays and circuit boards, and engineers will continue to thoroughly test data communications, power management and payment systems to ensure overall system performance. Following the March launch, work will continue to expand the system to 10,000 bikes, covering parts of Manhattan and from Long Island City to parts of Brooklyn.
Those initial 7,000 bikes would certainly have been put to good use last week—assuming, of course, that the technology would make it through the storm (or better yet, the system could release all the bikes in case of catastrophe). I’d bet good money that any bikeshare availability at all would have been an unmatched opportunity for goodwill and good press, and its a shame that we may never know the hypothetical social impact of public bicycles in a time of crisis (knock on wood).
Indeed, the semi-anticipated lack of public transit sparked a new (or perhaps inevitable) interest cycling like a candle in a blackout: the extended service interruption left a void that was physically flooded with water and metaphorically filled with cyclists. In fact, on my commute home yesterday, another diehard struck up a conversation as we passed newbies in a broad bike lane, wondering aloud if there seemed to be more cyclists out lately. We agreed that the perceived uptick—bike lanes below 14th St seemed to be almost continuously in use over the past week—was a sure sign that many unsung New Yorkers preferred pedal-power to other less reliable (and only nominally more comfortable) modes of transportation.
As for the crisis itself, web-vid whiz Casey Neistat saw fit to venture into the dark heart of the storm on two wheels (he’s a known advocate of the impractical daredevil activity known as riding a bike). Fastco Create has provided more background information on the much-circulated video (following the original Gizmodo post), as well as an update on Neistat’s efforts since then:
Neistat is a competitive endurance athlete and his younger brother, Dan, is a U.S. Air Force C-17 pilot, [so] the two had inclement weather gear and other equipment ready to go.
“We were donning the most appropriate safety gear we could possibly pull together, and we both have training,” Neistat says of the dangerous excursion he took with his brother, who helped film the video. “But at the same time, we were kind of like, ‘Fuck it, we’re here: Let’s make sure we capture things that otherwise might go unseen.'”
You’ve probably noticed that the number and availability of commercial airline flights has decreased from say, ten years ago. When we travel by airplane, we are essentially freight (in case the flight attendants’ attitudes didn’t tip you off); and us being freight, it makes sense that airlines can increase profits by having fewer flights and using bigger planes packed with more people.
Well, the same holds true for actual cargo freight. So Walmart Canada came up with something they hope will drop their shipping costs and even reduce traffic, at least in theory: Make a bigger truck. Working with an Ontario-based company called Innovative Trailer Design, they commissioned what they’re calling the Walmart Supercube, which holds 30% more cargo in the same footprint.
Most freight trucks lug a standard 53-foot long trailer. The Supercube’s is 60 feet long, yet the overal vehicle length is the same because they use a squashed cab that puts the driver right up at the front. The interior floor of the Supercube’s trailer is lower, and there’s a built-in scissor lift inside to help loaders stuff cargo into the far reaches.
Furthermore, see that box behind the cab?
That’s not the driver’s bedroom—it’s a “drome box,” or dromedary box, which holds an additional 10% of cargo and can be independently unloaded. “We’ve taken that air gap between truck and trailer and put more freight in there,” ITD president Benny Di Franco told supply-chain magazine Canadian Manufacturing. You might wonder why they’d bother designing a secondary box, and here’s the answer: In a situation where you have priority cargo, or where you need to get the tractor back into action immediately with a new load, you can detach the tractor and quickly unload the dromedary box without having to go through the entire trailer. (“Dromedary” is a type of camel, by the way, and the box is presumably meant to reference the camel’s hump.)
The folks at multidisciplinary office AND-RÉ and the city of Vilamoura worked to create the project you’re seeing here – a lovely public bicycle project! This project is just the newest of a set of collaborations the city has done with the design group known as AND-RÉ and aims to continue their forward-thinking philosophy of “humanization of urban space” – this “returning the city to [the] people.”
The aim of this project was to develop a bike system that encapsulated “truly democratic equipment … requiring a great accuracy in ergonomic study and in the visual/formal language in order to achieve a unisex non-discriminatory product.” The bike itself represents a “debugged” design, as they call it, bringing light and purity to the overall system. Vintage at the same time as it is modern, made to serve the function alone – transportation for the city.
As the authorities struggled to get the power back on in Sandy-stricken areas of the northeastern United States last week, I couldn’t help but think: Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the infrastructure itself had its own power? Studio Roosegaarde, the Netherlands-based “international design laboratory,” has a neat idea along these lines. Their Smart Highway project was awarded Best Future Concept at the Dutch Design Awards earlier this week.
The Smart Highway’s brilliant central idea is that the road surface would have glow-in-the-dark elements embedded within it that would soak up sunlight during the day, allowing them to store up 10 hours’ worth of illumination at night. There would also be graphic elements, like giant painted snowflakes that would appear in response to low temperatures, to indicate freezing conditions and warn drivers of slipperiness.
While the project won Best Future Concept, this isn’t pie-in-the-sky; Studio founder Daan Roosegaarde has partnered up with a paint manufacturer that can actually produce the stuff, and with the help of Dutch infrastructure management group Heijmans, they’ll begin applying it to a several-hundred-meter stretch of roadway in Brabant, Holland, sometime next year. “Heijmans and Roosegaarde,” Daan told Wired UK, “are not going to wait any longer for innovations to find their way through the political system, but will start building this highway now.”
You may remember that earlier this year, Philippe Starck claimed to be working on a “revolutionary” project for Apple. That was later clarified, and it turned out Starck wasn’t working for Apple, exactly: He was the designer tapped by Steve Jobs, before his death, to design Jobs’ personal yacht (or at least, the interior).
Well, said yacht—tragically completed one year after Jobs’ death—was finally completed and launched on Sunday in Allsmeer, a Dutch city eight miles south of Amsterdam. Pictures of the interior are pretty scarce, but here’s one that surprised me:
You think those are just for show, or do you reckon they pilot the thing by iMac?
In any case, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs seems to contain more details about the boat than we can see in the sparse photos:
[Jobs] showed me all of the models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support. By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship, but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”
Cambodia has one railway line, laid down by the French during their colonial occupation. The antiquated tracks are no longer safe for trains to run on, and as a result, there aren’t any.
The locals, however, aren’t about to let a potentially useful piece of infrastructure go to waste. In the area near the western Cambodian towns of Battambang and Poipet, the locals produce what are known as norry: Lightweight, powered railcars built from a wooden frame, bamboo slats, and steel wheels from decommissioned tanks. Two men can get the thing on or off the tracks in less than a minute.
Norry were initially powered by poles, like earthbound gondolas, but eventually some locals got their hands on a two-stroke engine and figured out how to drive the axle via belt.
By using a stick to increase or decrease tension on the belt, the “engineer” can induce belt slippage as a rudimentary form of throttle control. Braking is provided via a foot pedal that contacts one of the wheels through the platform, using raw friction. The motors caught on and the pole-drive has gone by the wayside.
Here’s a look at a norry being assembled and going into action:
The Le Mans organizing body was likely very curious to see what Ben Bowlby’s DeltaWing could do, as the design is a car of “halves”: It has half of the drag, half of the weight and half of the power of a conventional design—which Bowlby projected would consume half the fuel, half the brakes and half the amount of tires. This was good enough to get Nissan interested, and they committed to providing the engine.
“As motor racing rulebooks have become tighter over time, racing cars look more and more similar and the technology used has had less and less relevance to road car development,” said Andy Palmer, Nissan Motor Co.’s Executive Vice President, after sealing the partnership. “Nissan DeltaWing aims to change that and we were an obvious choice to become part of the project.”
They subsequently released a sexy video discussing the collaboration. I dig Bowlby’s line about “Guilt-free high-performance motoring:”
On race day, the DeltaWing ran well for the first six hours—before tragedy struck, literally. On lap 75, Toyota driver Kazuki Nakajima knocked the DeltaWing into a wall:
To the untrained eye the knock-out appeared pretty blatant, but as you heard in the video, the announcers attribute it to an unintended consequence of Bowlby’s wing-less design: The DeltaWing, the announcers claim, is difficult for other drivers to see. Other media outlets, however, called the contact “reckless” and Nakajima later apologized.
As light as the contact appeared, it was disastrous for the DeltaWing team. As reported by Automobile,
Damage was so extensive that DeltaWing driver Satoshi Motoyama was unable to make it back to pit road (crew members can’t work on the car outside the pits). Before the incident, the car was running strongly enough to have finished well against the most technically sophisticated prototypes of this era.
The DeltaWing team was out of the race. Bowlby looked on the bright side: “The car did what we had all hoped it would do,” he said, post-race. “It ran at the pace the [Le Mans organizing body] had asked us to run. And believe me, there’s a little bit of headroom: we can go quite a bit faster.”
Undeterred, they returned to the U.S. and rebuilt the car. They subsequently gained approval to run it again, this time in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta, where the DeltaWing made its American debut last weekend.
I know what you’re thinking – is this a cruiser or sportsbike? Well, the answer is yes to both. The TT New Generation Chopper has the characteristic elongated frame, stretched fork and low-rider look of other choppers, but stands out with a simpler, cleaner and more modern aesthetic that’s closer to a super sport. Subtle and elgant, but just as mean!
Here’s what IndyCars have in common with smartphones: both have moved towards a sameness in form factor, with any design differentiation between models limited to fine details. In both categories this is a shame, but perhaps more so in racing, which is supposed to be about innovation, experimentation and risk-taking. “Breakthrough designs seemingly have gone the way of the dinosaur in modern motorsports,” is how an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune put it.
But racecar designer Ben Bowlby, having been prompted by IndyCar driver/owner Chip Ganassi, is shaking that category up with his radical-looking DeltaWing design.
To be clear, the British-born, Indianapolis-based Bowlby didn’t set out to create a car that merely looked different; it was form-follows-function, as he endeavored to solve a specific problem involving racecars and downforce. Every IndyCar/F1 car has a low-lying wing forward of the front tires. This creates downforce, or “aero grip,” as the car whips along and the airflow presses the wing downward, sticking the front wheels firmly to the track surface. But when one IndyCar gets behind another, the turbulent “wash” coming off of the car in front disrupts the downforce on the front wing of the car behind, compromising that car’s steering capacity. In broad strokes, it means that as you begin catching up to another car, your ability to overtake it is paradoxically reduced.
Bowlby’s solution was to get rid of the front—and rear—wing altogether:
Why? Because his radical design does not require the wings to generate downforce. Instead he designed two tunnels running underneath the car that use the airflow to press the car downwards. This “twin-vortex underbody downforce system” is unsusceptible to wash coming off of a car in front of it, and thus it is stable enough to pass in situations where other IndyCars could not.
Ben Bowlby (left) and blogger James Gurney holding a resin model used for aerodynamic testing. [Image via Gurney Journey]
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