To promote TNT’s latest mystery show, Preception, Brooklyn-based design agency Breakfast took the classic electromagnet dot technology of the mechanical sign — think train station — and souped it up as interactive street art.
We love making stuff here at Wired Design, and the projects we geek-out on most tend to include some electronic element. Marrying gadgetry with off-the-shelf materials can be tricky, but is also highly satisfying to pull off. Contributor Jan Halvarson, co-founder and editor of maker blog Poppytalk, put together this roundup of 10 rad DIY projects with a techie twist.
Summer camp used to be about sailing, learning first aid, and hanging out with other kids your age. And about suffering. If the bug bites, soggy weather, and foul latrine didn’t make you appreciate coming home to Mom and Dad, you were at the wrong summer camp.
Most of us think of the future of eco-friendly cars in miles per gallon (or miles per kilowatt-hour). But a design team from Britain’s Aston University looked at the carbon consequences of the shipping required to move tons of steel and batteries from the factory to the garage. Their unnamed but fully functional concept is made of plywood, cardboard, and a little bit of metal. The whole thing can fold into a flat, light, and stackable package.
When Amanita Design released Botanicula earlier this year, fans knew the game was going to be good. The indie game maker had a track record; in 2009 they released a point and click puzzle game called Machinarium that won them heaps of awards and a dedicated fan base. Botanicula’s early art was promising — a cross between a avant guarde kids book and indie band cover art — but what ultimately pushed it over the edge were its noises, created by the Czech band DVA.
What if you could turn Instagram filters into lenses for your DSLR? Lensbaby, a Portland, Oregon, startup that’s bent on getting customers more engaged in the art of photography, has done exactly that.
Autodes, the company that sells professional enterprise design software to architects, just paid $60 million to acquire Socialcam, a social video-sharing app that has quickly amassed more than 50 million users on Facebook by making it easy to watch shaky videos shared by athletes. Wait, what? This unlikely union has confounded the design and tech communities.
There was a time when concertgoers were perfectly happy just listening to the band play. Not anymore. Today fans expect to see pyrotechnic spectacles with elaborate lighting and special effects for the price of admission. When the time came to create the visuals for Floating — a new album by Danish electronic artist Rumpistol / Red Baron — design studio Futura Epsis 1 made something that was a bit of both.
On July 4, onlookers in Atlantic City watched with awe as Boardwalk Hall cracked, shuddered, then crumbled to the ground. Then, somehow, the hall erupted in rainbow-colored bricks that appeared to move. It was all an illusion! The historic building remained intact.
Somewhere in the vicinity of Hawaii, a huge mass of plastic debris floats in the Pacific. And that’s just a fraction of the waste that’s bobbing around out there. Compared to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” one plastic soap bottle may not seem like much. But if that one bottle is mass produced by soap-maker Method, it could turn out to make a big difference.
In a little over a year, Fab has pivoted from being a social network for gay men to the online destination for 4.5 million design fanatics. In just 11 months, they’ve sold over 1 million products — that’s 2.6 per minute. Bradford Shellhammer, Fab’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, attributes the success to having great products. But stocking great products doesn’t always ensure escape velocity, so we asked Shellhammer to tell us exactly what makes a product “Fabworthy”?
In some ways, Russell Quinn has spent his life running from technology, in search of connection. The son of a punch card-era computer scientist who died three months before he was born, Quinn grew up an only child in Cheltenham, a small town in Southwest England, with very little to do. So in 1984, when he was 5, his mother bought him a BBC Microcomputer — one of the United Kingdom’s earliest PCs — and Quinn taught himself how to program. “The BBC computer found its way into every school,” he says, “so I ended up staying after class and teaching my teachers how to use them. It was second nature to me.”
Ten dollars doesn’t get you a lot of parts. Then again, $35 for a computer seemed pretty outrageous not too long ago. The success of that Raspberry Pi Micro-Computer prompted professors Ken Goldberg and Ayorkor Korsah to stage a contest: Design a $10 robot. Conceived as a teaching tool for use in African classrooms, such a low-cost machine could prove to be revolutionary for education in poorer countries around the world.
Starting today, Swedish home furnishing giant Ikea is offering travelers at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle International Airport a little break. Open until August 5, Ikea’s 200-square-meter VIP lounge, open to everybody (because even cheapskate consumers are important) offers nine rooms with sofas and even beds on which to rest your weary hide.
Digital printers are supposed to create perfect copies. Print something numerous times and it should look exactly the same, down to the last period. But that’s never quite how it turns out. Inkjet prints, in particular, can end up looking more like off-register screenprints
It seems we can’t get enough of the ’80s. Neon, remakes of classic movies, skinny jeans, leg-warmers … okay, can we please skip the leg-warmers? Just when we thought we were done with revisiting the decade, we spot a product that reminds us the ’80s are back in force.
The nerd fest has begun. Over a hundred thousand fanboys and fangirls, some in elaborate getups, are descending on Comic-Con in San Diego to worship at the altars of character designers, digital animators, writers, and celebrities who get to wear kick-ass armor and save the world.
Lighting designer Lindsey Adelman’s work ranges from the practical to the fantastical, from her sprays of brass armature that look like giant molecular models, to a tangle of rope and bubble glass that evokes a Japanese fishing haul, to a series of spiky, spiny candelabras that would make great centerpieces at a goth wedding. Each of these otherworldly creations take shape in the hands of her 12 employees in a bright, well-lit studio on the Bowery in New York City.
Frustrated by your iPhone’s itsy speaker? (We are.) Jonesing for the sense of accomplishment that comes with building something? (Always.) It’ll take you 30 seconds at most to fold up and stick together eco-made’s eco-amp, a fully recycled paper horn that passively amplifies the sound coming from that underpowered speaker.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is a study in superlatives: the world’s largest particle accelerator, housing some of the coldest places in the universe, causes incredibly powerful beams to collide, giving us a glimpse into the nature of the smallest particles. It takes a special kind of designer to see it and think, “I wonder if I could make a home version?”
DIY 3-D printing started out as a humble open source project, but in less than five years has become a big business with a plethora kits, packaged systems, and amazingly low prices.
Early desktop printers were horrible. For the price of thousands of dollars one got lo-res dot matrix printouts on paper that had tractor-feed holes punched in the margins. It wasn’t pretty, but those early models paved the way for high-resolution, low cost laser printing.
You may think of Android as an OS for phones and tablets, but Google’s ambitions run deeper. They’re pitching it as a platform that could run on all kinds of devices. To get developers on board with that plan, the company announced an update to the Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) 2012 at Google I/O.
Holy handicraft, Batman! As summer’s blockbusters pass through megaplexes faster than speeding bullets, we’ve noticed a trend: superheroes are the greatest designers, inventors, and scrappy do-it-yourselfers we know. Many of our pop-culture icons and sci-fi madcaps achieved greatness not by magic or mutant powers, but with brains and bandsaws. Here’s our top 10 list of the most badass makers in film, who’ve inspired mere mortals everywhere to follow in their footsteps.
You know Craigslist’s Missed Connections, right? The personals page where you log a brief interaction with a stranger who you hope to see again? The posts are a candid, wistful, often hilarious look at interactions — or the lack thereof — between people in the digital age, and beg the question, “Have we become so used to interacting online that we can’t say ‘hi’ in person?”
So you’ve built an amazing new robot or crafted a pop culture homage with Perler beads. Awesome work, but what good is building cool stuff if you can’t get Reddit riled up or make an Etsy sale?
We’re sure this designer, who uses the handle “Vanadium,” isn’t the first to notice how much the Houses in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series — the books and the show — resemble teams. There are age-old rivalries, free agents, even trades. And of course, each house has their color and mascot, from the Lannisters’ red lions to the grey wolves of Winterfell’s Stark house.
So let’s say you’re big into Star Wars — like, really big into Star Wars — and you’ve amassed a vast collection of toys and figures. You could leave all that stuff in a box in the hope of maintaining its resale value. Or, you could make art with it. Teacher David Eger chose art.
Ever wonder what Steve Jobs would have done if he’d gotten into experimental physics? When CERN scientists announced that they’d probably found the Higgs boson, they got more than their fair share of smack talk from the design community for presenting their discovery in Comic Sans. Even the font’s creator, Vincent Connare, wasn’t impressed.
The hugely popular tabletop game Warhammer 40K is set in the far future and played with 28mm miniature figures. In preparation for Comic-Con, a few fanboys decided to supersize these little Space Marines and built 7-foot-tall, wearable replicas of their armor. Want to make your own? Go for it! It only takes 352 “terribly complicated” steps.
I can’t believe this thing still exists. It’s a tracing of my childhood teddy bear, Jingle—so named for a defunct bell in his right ear. It’s the earliest independently made piece of artwork that I have any record of, and I actually remember creating it. I was 5, and I was doing something I’d do again and again in my life as a maker: breaking rules.
