Americans spend a fortune on health care, about $2.5 trillion each year. This covers everything from surgical tools to weight loss plans, But despite all the money spent, the aesthetics of these products are on life support.
Science fiction robots tend to come from one of two production lines: helpful protocol droids like C-3PO or cyborg Terminators hell-bent on destroying humanity. Few sci-fi storytellers imagined a future where robots would be programmed to master the art of interior decorating. Fortunately for the design-challenged, present-day roboticists have.
Last Friday, XOXO, an art and technology conference scheduled to take place in Portland, Oregon, in September, became the highest-funded project of its type in Kickstarter history. Over the course of the campaign, organizers raised a whopping $175,000. XOXO’s 400 available tickets — procured by funding the project at the $400 level — sold out in only 50 hours. With speakers like Makerbot’s Bre Pettis, the web comic creator R. Stevens, Star Wars Uncut co-creator Jamie Wilkinson, and the founders of tech-savvy creative communities like Etsy, Metafilter, and Kickstarter—all that fall in the realm of what the conference founders call “disruptive creativity” — it’s no wonder. The organizers pulled together a host of makers working at that sweet spot where art and technology meet and then invited the public to join in.
Inspired by the first days of summer vacation, and Wes Anderson’s twee tribute to scouting in Moonrise Kingdom, we bring you this roundup of scout gear on Etsy.
Amazing things happen when designers are given a set of constraints. To celebrate makers everywhere, high-octane sponsor Red Bull is running an online contest in which contenders face off against the ultimate constraint: time. The event, called Red Bull Creation, is a 72-hour competition that will run in late July.
The nine nesting cell phones in Kyle Bean’s Mobile Evolution are a new take on an old toy, by a young artist interpreting an evolving industry. From 1984 to about 2010, as mobile phones gradually took over the world, leaps in cellular technology allowed phones to shrink, while processing power exploded. Bean, a British artist, was interested in the phenomenon, and started collecting old phones from a local junk shop. Placing them beside each other, he drew an unusual parallel — to him they looked like the old Russian nesting dolls, or Matryoshka dolls, that have been resurging in new variations.
So, your Kickstarter project went viral and raised a cool six figures. There’s a mob of eager funders already checking their watches, demanding to know when you’ll ship. Pull it off and you’ll be a design star. Fail and you’re in for a highly public facepalm. You were only planning on making a couple dozen units, you say? The closest you’ve gotten to manufacturing in Asia is ordering take out? Whoops….
Think 3-D printing requires specialized software and an MFA? Think again. Tinkercad, the brainchild of former Google engineer Kai Backman, is making 3-D design something anyone can do. Unlike other web-based drawing programs like Sketchup, Tinkercad requires no download. You simply open your WebGL-supported browser, sign up, and start creating. We caught up with Backman, who’s based in Helsinki, to find out more.
Invented in 1912, the small-scale, obsessive sport of slot car racing has seen its ups and downs over the last hundred years. The hobby, in which motorized model cars speed around a slotted track, enjoyed its height of popularity after World War II, then sputtered in the ’70s with the introduction of Pong and other videogames. The public arcades where hobbyists could race have largely been wiped off the map, but an estimated three million slot car enthusiasts still rev their tiny engines in basements and garages.
Now that Apple is ditching Google as the back end for the iOS Maps app, we’re hoping that they’ll give topography the Jony Ive treatment. While we applaud the super-hot flyover mode, we wonder if they’ve gone far enough. As the examples above show, it’s worth remembering that map tiles can look like anything.
forum before function
