Design posts

I’m one of the slim minority who dislikes Terminator. Don’t get me wrong, Schwarzenegger is nothing if not a vastly-talented thespian, I just don’t sit well with armed robots coming after me in the night. That said, this is pretty cool. MAGIC 2010 (that’s Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge) is a joint venture between Australia’s Defense Science & Technology Organisation and the Research Development & Engineering Command in the States, to help develop the next gen in sweet-ass robotic killing machines….

Getting off the grid may have just become that much easier. Oorja Protonics in California have developed a methanol fuel cell that could keep your wallet fat – assuming of course you have a fat wallet to begin with. The little box isn’t much to look at, but what it lacks in curves it makes up for in heart. The thing generates 5kw of energy – simply put, enough to provide heat and power for a large building. Say, a small store, or better yet, your house. …

Unicycles have a history of looking silly. That’s probably because they’re fundamentally so. But this… this… I… I almost have to excuse myself to go weep. This no-nonsense exercise in TOTALLY AWESOME THINGS THAT RULE is the brainchild of designer Liam Ferguson. And by Thor’s hammer, what a brainchild. …

Surely sometimes even the most digitally-addicted of us wants to ditch the cold machination of musical convenience that is iTunes and put in a little elbow grease – y’know, work for our music. Audio engineering company GGRP Sound’s latest advertising mailer harkens back to an older time, a simpler time. A time when sound reproduction was powered by a crank….

When the iPad was initially announced, you could sum up a lot of the reaction with that common internet expression ‘meh’. Though the Apple hype train was in full effect, many people didn’t see what all the fuss was about, and it literally was only a few minutes after the keynote that the phrase ‘it’s just a big iPod Touch’ to be bandied about. But that started to change when people started to demo what magazines might look like on the iPad. Most prominent was the demo from tech taste-makers WIRED, whose vision of what an iPad magazine might look like was slick and promising. It featured an easy ‘swipe to…

When you think baby monitors, you think clunky, crackling technology from the 80s, right? Well, in this new concept Sikker, there is none of that. Quite to the contrary, this  concept of two high-tech wristbands is state of the art tech for keeping tabs on your wee one. Rather than just transmitting sound, the small device wraps around the wrists of baby and mom or dad, and sends biometric information like temperature or pulse. On top of that, it is also an alarm clock and watch, and can even play music to soothe baby to sleep. The device uses a very cool-looking base to transfer all that information,…

You gotta’ hand it to the Swedish team behind this World of Light concept video. While other people think about cool new designs for suitcases, these folks are thinking about light travel, man. Okay fine, no-one really knows that means, but the vision of the future presented in the video sure looks cool. But beyond the far-out visions of what travel might be like in the future, the video puts forward some really interesting ideas. Rather than heading to the airport, you just go to a ‘hotel’ that happens to have a state-of-the-art tech that will launch you into space….

For as long as humankind has existed, we have wanted to become invisible – mainly so we can inappropriately spy on people. Well, the creepier among us are one step closer to realizing that goal, as some certified scienticians say they’re one step closer to creating an invisibility cloak.. The German team working on the project claim that a new material made up of microscopic polymer rods actually change the speed and direction of light that hits it, making the thing behind the material less visible to the human eye. …

While some design companies tackle complex problems of sustainability or efficiency, Aguila Design are taking on something way more important: the future of watersports. Their ‘breaking’ watercraft – yes, that’s the actual name – features a out-there spaceship like design that allows the vehicle to stop easily and turn on a dime, while never rolling or capsizing. Snark aside, however, there’s actually some pretty cool technology in this thing. The fin at the bottom of the craft creates a ‘hydrodynamic’ effect, which not only means the craft slips through the water with the greatest of ease,…

This image is not a painting of a scene from the world’s worst vineyard – it’s a molecule of chlorophyll as seen through the eyes of New York artist Alexander Kobulnicky, whose body of work deals with capturing the essence and unique character of the building blocks that make up us and the world around us. “Underneath the colorful spheres of molecular diagrams is a deep symbolism,” explains Kobulnicky on his website. As a fellow artist, I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this first. Below are some more examples of Kobulnicky’s explorations: Glucose, Heme, Alcohol, THC, and my personal favourite,…