スマートフォン用延長フィンガー Extension Thumbstall for... - scrapbook. Hip Gadgets For The Developing World Won't Solve Global Poverty: Stop Making Them. Every time I see a gimmicky product hailed as the "next big thing" to make a dent in world poverty I want to pull my hair out. There are already enough products in the market to change the lives of every single poor consumer on the planet. Poor consumers don’t need another slick product developed in the U.S., they simply need a product that reaches them in their village. Let me explain. Many entrepreneurs (incorrectly) think the biggest challenge is actually making the product. They are so pleased they have invented a widget that is more efficient or lower cost or fancier than the other widgets on the market. Wrong! The focus on products is almost certainly because investors and the public flock to product companies like bees to honey. An extreme example is Playpump (now defunct) which was a $14,000 to $20,000 merry-go-round that pumped water when children played on it.
The problem? [Image: Abstract via Shutterstock] 3 Reasons Why Co-Making Is The Future Of Branding. Eleven of the most notable technology brands in the world--Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Intel, Cisco, HP, Oracle, SAP, Dell, and Adobe--together filed more then 15,000 patents in 2012 alone. Developing and protecting intellectual property is important, but all this patent filing reveals an entrenched posture among technology companies that can be summarized in a word: mine! This is a problem. Because the way we’re currently thinking about technologies is in direct conflict with how we think about brands.
Technologies might belong to companies (because a team of lawyers says they do), but brands belong to people. And the people don’t want more patents. They want products, services, and experiences they can’t get anywhere else. This is harder and harder to do in our crowded marketplaces, so more and more brands are collaborating to create real breakthroughs. Consumer Love = High Margins The Doritos Locos Taco earns a 40% premium compared to Taco Bell’s regular taco. Snowflake Status. This Mason Jar Coffeemaker Is The Most Hipsterrific Thing You'll See Today. It seems to be an immutable law of hydrodynamics that if something tastes good, it usually tastes better coming out of a mason jar. New York's Intelligent Design Company is hoping that holds true, even for coffee.
Its latest design is the Pour Mason, a pour-over coffeemaker aimed specifically at the home canning contingent. Made of 18-gauge aluminum alloy and finished in electroless nickel right in Williamsburg, the Pour Mason is a metal lid that is screwed on top of the mouth of a standard soda-lime glass jar. Once fitted, you can essentially brew coffee straight into it. Admittedly, there is literally nothing stopping you from breaking out a Kerr jar from your cupboard and brewing some coffee in it right now using your existing pour-over. Which is kind of genius, when you think about it. If that sounds like your kind of coffeemaker, the Pour Mason can be ordered from Intelligent Design's website for $35. Kickstarting: A Pinhole Camera Made Of Cardboard.
At a camera shop in Edinburgh, I spotted it: A vintage, bellowing lens camera with crystal clear glass and a pricetag within my reach. I’d been eBay-stalking these old beauties for months. Now, one was mine, complete with the original leather case and a few free rolls of film. For the next week, swapping 12-frame rolls in mud, mist, and high winds beneath nothing more than the tenuous shelter of my raincoat (and the infinite expanse of my wife’s patience), I experienced more fun taking photographs than I’d had in years.
And when I finally got the photos developed, even my mistakes reminded me of the place and time. The Videre is a pinhole camera by Kelly Angood, decorated with an intricate, cardboard twin lens reflex camera body (so it looks like a TLR, but it’s not). "The key moving part is the internal mechanism where the 120 film feeds into the empty spool. "To me it’s really important to get these little features right," Angood explains. Order it here. First Look: Fab Unveils The Winners Of Its Design Open Call. Fab.com may be the web’s fastest growing e-commerce site, but its ambitions don’t stop there. The real aim, its founders have said, is to grow Fab into a global design brand--a stylish alternative to giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart--and the company has already designed over 3000 original products to that end.
In March, Fab announced another initiative for expanding its offerings: a crowdsourced competition, calling for designers around the world to submit their ideas for the company’s next big product. Now, they’ve narrowed the field down to 12 finalists--two of which you can see here for the first time--and announced a second competition, coinciding with this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City.
The first Disrupting Design competition, which was held last month in Milan, drew submissions from over 150 international designers. "The winning designs all embody the Fab ethos," says Shellhammer, Fab’s founder and chief design officer. PET bottle lamps by alvaro catalan de ocon. Apr 29, 2013 PET bottle lamps by alvaro catalan de ocon ‘PET lamps’ by alvaro catalan de ocon in 2011, alvaro catalán de ocón travelled to south america where he took part in a project led by hélène le drogou, psychologist and activist who was concerned with the plastic waste contaminating the colombian amazon. currently large amounts of PET bottles are washed into the earth’s body of waters by tropical rains–the discarded material pulled into the rivers, floating out into the pacific ocean where over time it has accumulated into an immense island, spanning larger than the area of spain, which today is known as the ‘seventh continent‘. the colors, materials and motifs employed in the creation of the lamps speak of the cultural traditions of the artisans who make them his response?
Using the surface of the PET bottle as the warp on which to weave, local craftsmen come into the picture to create the weft, electrical components to the lamp shade itself. image © designboom the making process: Building Awe-Inducing Crystalline Structures. "I wanted to see where sexy ends and grotesque begins" Dezeen and MINI World Tour: recent design graduate Leanie van der Vyver speaks to us about her project Scary Beautiful, a pair of extreme, back-to-front high heels, which she presented at Design Indaba in Cape Town. Van der Vyver, who comes from Cape Town originally, explains the concept behind the shoes, which she developed as part of her graduation project while at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
"In my thesis I wrote about how humans are constantly trying to reach perfection and the different ways that we practice control over our bodies," she says. "I looked at what the high heel is traditionally doing and I pushed it over to see where sexy ends and grotesque begins. " The project drew gasps and laughs from the Design Indaba audience in equal measure when van der Vyver showed video footage of a model walking in the shoes as part of her PechaKucha talk. She explains that the contorting effect they have on the wearer was a key part of the project. The Ultimate Air Purifier Uses NASA Technology. As the space program shifted its focus from putting life into space to sustaining life in space, the plentiful technologies to emerge from its hollowed labs have followed suit. For example, one of the biggest breakthroughs of the '90s was a device that scrubbed the air of ethylene, a gas that builds up on the ISS and causes fruits and veggies to ripen too quickly.
The technology was intended to slow down the process of ripening on long space journeys. A few years later, the experimental device was bought by a company now known as Airocide, which has built an empire around selling the technology to grocers, florists, and even hospitals. This week, Airocide unveiled the first consumer-targeted version of the device, the Air Purifier, designed by NewDealDesign principal Gadi Amit. “The purifier industry has suffered from overselling and under delivering,” Amit tells Co.Design. “The overmarketing of air filters is ingrained in our culture.” Buy it here. Li Edelkoort exhibit at Design Indaba Expo 2013. Design Indaba has invited Li Edelkoort to curate an exhibition of South African design, which will be a feature stand located at the centre of the Expo, held from 1 to 3 March 2013 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Conceptualised by Edelkoort and sponsored by Woolworths, the exhibition is titled Totemism: Memphis Meets Africa and calls for submissions from all South African designers across all disciplines.
In a nutshell, Edelkoort’s concept is based on the trend of stacking and layering colours, patterns and materials to achieve a totemic quality reminiscent of the bold 1980s. Click here to view Edelkoort's concept presentation for Totemism*. For more information on how to submit an entry, please click here. * This PDF and the images contained therein are intended for inspiration only and may not be published on any public platform. $160K Table By Zaha Hadid Looks Like Rippling Water. It’s been an exciting month for Zaha Hadid. On top of news that a Chinese developer is copying her newest building verbatim, and the emergence of straight-up fake photos of her early life fabricated by adoring fans, Hadid has been named a nominee for the 2013 Design of the Year Awards. But it’s not just Hadid’s architecture that’s being celebrated--it’s her furniture.
In addition to nominating her Galaxy Soho complex in Beijing for the architecture award, curators at London’s Design Museum have added her Liquid Glacial Table to the shortlist for furniture. Other objects nominated for the 2013 Awards include Heatherwick Studio’s Olympic Cauldron and Nike’s FlyKnit trainers. Hadid unveiled the four-part dining table at David Gill Gallery--which commissioned the piece--back in March. The acrylic resin tables are formally remarkable: Each crystalline surface is smooth and perfectly clear, deforming to mimic hydromorphologies caused by some unseen force.
Redesign Of The Baby Bottle Reveals A Fascinating Cultural History. When Pentagram partner Daniel Weil first became a father in the 1980s, things were different. “When my first daughter was born, we didn’t have half the tools we do today,” he tells me. “When my third was born in the '90s, there were prams that could transform with the child up until it was old enough to walk. Something happened--a shift.” Weil was hired by Mothercare to redesign its baby feeding collection--bottles, nipples, and sterilization equipment--in 2009. He’s spent the last three years researching parenting culture, developing a remarkably in-depth study of how product design has changed along with childrearing since the 1950s.
“I always want to know as much as my client, or more than my client,” he explains. You might not expect the design history of baby bottles to be particularly riveting--but it is. Weil’s Innosense feeding range makes two major changes to the conventional bottle. Which brings us back to that “shift” Weil mentioned earlier. [H/t Design Week] New Governors Island Pavilion Asks For Your Empty Milk And Water Bottles. Another year, another quirky pavilion on New York City's Governors Island. The FIGMENT art and cultural festival, held every summer on the former-military-base-turned-urban-getaway, has announced the latest installation to join its lineup: Studio Klimoski Chang Architects' "Head in the Clouds," a groovy blue-and-white structure made of donated empty milk and water bottles.
The Head in the Clouds proposal beat out 199 other entries for this year's City of Dreams competition, and is expected to go up during the 2013 summer season. A lush park is the perfect location for daydreaming, especially about the wondrous city life. That's what designers Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang had in mind with Head in the Clouds. Consisting of 120 structural pillows, the installation will need to collect 53,780 milk jugs and water bottles for the construction of synthetic clouds. Add To Collection Save this image to a collection Images: courtesy of Studio KCA. Yoko Ono Tries To Break Up Menswear. Soooooo, this is actually, like, "art" or something, isn’t it? No fucking way Yoko Ono thinks she can break up The Beatles AND ruin menswear. Yeah, yeah, one person can’t ruin something and this probably isn’t even the worst thing to ever come out of a designer’s cranium, but still, this stuff fucking sucks.
Even if it is art, can’t we say it’s bad art? Like, what’s the message? Is highlighting nips and dicks a statement on how women’s fashion do the same to them?