Using bone conduction, a technology developed for hearing devices, the “touched echo” installation in Dresdon transmits sounds of the cities devastating 1945 carpet bombing through the visitors arms when they rest their elbows on the balustrade and hold their ears. Several custom made sound conductors mounted to the railing send sounds of the airplanes and bombs exploding through vibrations, it’s completely silent unless you touch the rail.
Yasmin Sethi has designed a super sexy chess set inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece.
I’ve just begun using Blackle, a Google search engine with the colors removed, and white type on a black background. And since your computer uses more power to create colors on your screen, or even to create the white background of your traditional Google search screen. What’s smart about this is that very little behavior change on the part of the user is necessary, and people still get the satisfaction of feeling like they’re at least doing something to help. You could call this armchair activism if you want to, but I think that everyone doing small achievable things has more power than a few people endlessly pushing giant activist initiatives up a hill.
Lucy and Bart like to get conceptual about body stuff. Their work gives me feelings of vague uneasiness. Check this link if you want to feel uneasy too.
this is the sky bridge in langkawi, malaysia, a stunning cable-stayed bridge which actually curves around the single support column from which it’s suspended, 687 metres above sea level. completed in october 2004, the structure relies on an 87 metre high support column to hold the weight of the deck, this weight distributed through 8 load balancing cables attached to its head.
And I can’t help but take this idea even further: what if we combined location-aware technology like RFID or GPS with a networked database of images so that the figures in red were drawn to look like the driver’s loved ones? Yikes!
Troika was asked to create a piece to mark the entrance to British Airway’s new luxury lounges at Heathrow. Beautiful.
In response, we created ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. We were fascinated by their materiality, by the way they physically flip from one side to the other. The sound they generate is also instantly reminiscent of travel, and we therefore decided to explore their aesthetic potential in ‘Cloud’.
“…the ‘Temples of Damanhur’ are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.
The first time the police came it was over alleged tax evasion and still the temples lay undiscovered. But a year later the police swooped on the community demanding: “Show us these temples or we will dynamite the entire hillside.”
Stunned by what they had found, the authorities decided to seize the temples on behalf of the government.”
The Free Rice project is so fucking smart that I can’t help but want to copy it, or build on it, or evolve it, or something. I’m jealous. And also very grateful.
HumanKindMedia describes it nicely:
Head straight to Free Rice, play a vocab game, and for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. Don’t click if you don’t have a few minutes though — it’ll snare you! While you play this insanely addictive game, the advertisers at the bottom are sending bits of that excess American capital known as advertising revenue to countries that need food. If you can pull yourself away from the game for a second, take a look at their stats. They’ve gone from hundreds of grains of rice a day donated to millions a day in only a month. Isn’t it amazing what you can do to end poverty … in just a few clicks?
A fellow out in Chicago just emailed us to share his concept for using newspaper dispensers as a place to replate your leftovers. It’s a great idea, especially in cities that don’t have ledges or hoods on their trash cans. Check it out here.
I just bought an item (an apparatus, actually, and also probably a tool) designed for cutting bottles. I’ve only used it a couple of times, but so far I like it a lot. It’s easy to use, and there’s something very satisfying about watching glass split. Right now I’m making a set of glasses from those curvy Kombucha Wonder Drink bottles. You can buy your own bottle cutter here.
In 1975, two artists—Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt—collaborated to create a deck of cards designed to help break creative deadblocks. Here’s what Brian Eno has to say about them:
“These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we are doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack (a set of posibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from a shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if it appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.”
There are now 5 editions, and they are filled with super interesting, super cryptic advice that feels (to me at least) very powerful for provoking a new way of thinking when you’re stuck.
Want to draw a card from the deck? Do it online here or here or here.
Wikipedia for Brian Eno here, Peter Schmidt here, and Oblique Strategies here.
Business Week has an interesting article about Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s latest so-crazy-it-just-might-work endeavor. And while the audacity of the project itself is quite amazing, what inspired me was London design firm Seymourpowell’s conceptual thinking about the interior of the world’s first commercial spaceship.
The firm was charged with designing conceptual interiors for the spaceship, and wasn’t at all fazed by the prospect of designing something for which there was no precedent. As principal Dick Powell explains, they simply saw it as a human problem…
It’s a rare and beautiful thing for an organization to make this claim and actually mean it. Beautiful.
Is Not Magazine is an Australian publication that takes the form of a big poster that goes up in what would normally be advertising space. What’s more, it has no advertising in it, but it does have a crossword that passersby can fill in.
When we're not dorking around on the web, we make stuff. Enjoy: Replate is an open-source food activism project in which you may already be participating.
Dirty words & dick jokes will show you that "shit," "fuck," and "piss" aren't the dirtiest words in the creative industry. (pdf)
How to clean out your desk will kick your ass into being creative at work again. (pdf)
How to be a better lover is the definitive sex manual for good business. (pdf)
Written on the City celebrates the conversations happening on the walls and sidewalks of the places we live.
Dear Bosses, get your creative staff to stop quitting. Here's what they wish they could tell you. (pdf)
10 Writing Tips to Make Your Mother Proud is the writing help Mom would give, if she were still speaking to you. (pdf)
Inventions
This is fuckin smart.
