May bank holiday Monday at Culzean Castle
Augmented reality flooring
From Fast Company website
What happens when display screen technology gets so cheap you can lay it down like carpeting? Researchers at Canada's McGill University have an idea: floor tiles which use precisely calibrated vibrations to simulate snow, grass, sand, and myriad other surfaces--and can even be programmed to become virtual buttons and sliders. As Tech Review reports, the "haptic" floor tiles, which were created by Yon Visell, a PhD student at McGill's Center for Intelligent Machines, are made of a sensors that are sandwiched between the top plate and the supporting platform. The sensors then detect the forces coming from a person's foot, and then calibrate the response in the plate, which gives off subtle vibrations that are able to simulate the feel of different materials. An overhead LCD projector throws the pattern on the floor, along with speakers inside the platform that add to the illusion. Luckily, the sandals in this picture are optional: While simulated organic surfaces obviously hold the most gee-whiz appeal, the plates can also be programmed to simulate the feel of buttons or analog slides. Visell suggests that floors could become gaming interfaces or giant, haptic touchscreens. Imagine walking across a huge map in a building lobby, or a complete virtual-reality cave that (finally) has some physical feedback! Or a super-cool room inside Bill Gate's house that simulates being at the beach, without ever requiring Bill to don SPF 45,000 sunscreen before traipsing across the sandy dunes. For more intriguing haptic designs--that is, interfaces that engage the sense of touch--check out these great speakers, this "emotion shirt" for gamers, and this squishy touchscreen interface.
Furniture mat
This flat pack 'furniture' mat is the most innovative floor system I've seen in ages. Inspiring.
Designed by Shin Yamashita.
Flexible cardboard boxes
Forget the one-size-fits-all, rectangular box-and-lid approach. Imagine: a cheap, flat-pack, pre-creased sheets of corrugated cardboard with perpendicular and diagonal lines along which it you can fold it into any size large or small and any simple or complex shape. Instead of just length, width, and height, you can suddenly create three-dimensionally complex curves. Corrugated cardboard may be the coolest material of modern times: lightweight and flexible but also durable and rigid in just the right proportions to be the perfect way of packing boxes for storage, moving and shipping. This designer concept by Patrick Sung takes those key properties and uses them to take our idea of a boring cubic box to the next level. If you unwrap them right on the other end, you could even refold them into other shapes; otherwise, they are built ready to be compacted and recycled quickly and easily, without the normal cutting and ripping required to pack normal boxes flat. This green package design project is entitled UPS – for Universal Packaging System, not United Parcel Service – and is not available for sale yet, but seems like an obvious buy if manufacturers and suppliers of cardboard can be convinced that cheap and simple is why this classic material is so successful in the first place.
Beyond Boxes: Cardboard Shipping in a New Dimension
Double Decker Bus House
There was a time when designers were also philosophers, artists and visionaries beyond just being professional architects. Aristide Antonasis a Greek professor of architecture whose imagination pushes the envelope on adaptive reuse, recycled materials and portable dwelling beyond merely mobile homes. This two-story used bus is imagined as a potential hotel or a portable commuting community space for professionals on-the-go. It features seven beds, a living room area and a restroom and would fit int typical mobile home parks, though finding dealers with parts for sale might be a bit trickier. It is an intentionally non-radical work of construction, requiring no contractor or elaborate plans to be built – just a group of people who wish to turn an ordinary vehicle into a multi-person housing unit on wheels. The value is in the labor, not the design – and forget about estates or land prices. Professor Antonas contends that architects often over-complicate issues of design, layering form upon concept upon meaning without simply looking at what is in front of them and how few changes could make it work in a new way. Instead of starting with a site and building on examples from a given typology, he proses stripping an existing object bare and filling it in as needed – neither radically new nor conventional as an approach to remodeling a space or structure. “Typical banal elements show us already how to interact with them. The beds, the sofa, the water closet, the shower, the small wardrobes, the bookcases already speak about a particular type of stay in which we know how to behave. They are all elements of a given functionalism, traditional now originated from modernism.”Original post from Dornob.
Bus Home or Mobile Converted Double-Decker Community?
Pixies gigs in London - just announced
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Hello.Thanks for being on the list.We're writing to announce two very special, fan exclusive shows in London on June 3rd and 4th. Tickets are onsale now (yes, now) and available exclusively from us.
Get tickets here: http://www.lalapixiesloveyou.com See you in London...La la love you,
-PIXIES
PS -- We've only sent this show announcement to the mailing list... so you get to decide who to share it with.
-PIXIES
PS -- We've only sent this show announcement to the mailing list... so you get to decide who to share it with.
© Pixies
Saturday in Bella Park
Whilst Celts gubbed in semi final I was on family day out. Much preferable.
