Gems Sty

In the current train system design, the train has to accelerate/decelerate to a complete stop for every station to pick up passengers. The video above shows a very interesting concept for an alternative solution to mass commuter trains - it is a train that doesn’t stop.

Instead of stopping, it’d have a slider carriage on the top of the train. The slider carriage serves as an intermediary ‘pod’ where boarding and alighting passengers transit (before diffusing into the main train carriages). Commuters at the station wishing to board the train would enter the carriage (and presumably at some point before the train actually arrives, the doors are shut). The train seamlessly picks up this carriage, while depositing its own carriage to drop commuters wishing to alight.

Without having to stop for stations, train journeys can be drastically reduced without sacrificing passenger convenience - it is the best of both worlds! I’m definitely not an expert in locomotion engineering, but on the surface it does seem like a possible concept (hey, we’ve sent people onto the Moon!).

A small (social) concern for me might be how effective/efficient can passengers diffuse from the pod into the rest of the carriages. In a system like this, there is even more inertia to venture away from the sliding pod if you’re just hanging on for a few stops, and people are likely to gather in the few carriages nearest the pod. This could however probably be solved by having multiple sliding pods instead of the singular one as visualized in the video.

If you can read Chinese, here’s a more detailed explanation by the inventor Chen Jian Jun. It seems like he’s been working hard trying to pitch his ideas to various agencies (including government, rail etc), but hasn’t been particularly successful.

What are your thoughts on this?

Perhaps I should count myself deprived, or maybe just too young or something - when the NYTimes reported on artist Chris Burden constructing a 65-foot tower using stainless steel modular pieces, I was in awe. I’ve never seen or heard about these metal trusses before - and thought ‘Wow, these are like LEGO for grown-up engineers or something”.

It’s inspiring to see these basic building blocks stretched right to its limits:

“The fact that it is both a model and the height of a real building is bizarre,” she said. “It is simultaneously right and wrong from a traditional building perspective. And so it starts to play tricks on you.”

The pieces he used were stainless steel replicas of a toy commonly known as ‘Erector Set’s, which to my surprise was launched almost a hundred years ago back in 1913, and created history by being the very first toy to be advertised nationally.

Wish we’d see more (resurgence) of toys like these. Open-ended, as-challenging-as-your-imagination, and probably encourages kids (and adults!) to take interest, understand and marvel at engineering and construction ideas.

I need to play more.

[via momeld]

BMW has just unveiled their latest concept called GINA Light Visionary - GINA being an acronym for their design philosophy behind: Geometry and Functions In ‘N’ Adaptations (I suppose GINA sounds cooler than GIFNA?). At my first glance, I thought it was not too radical - the initial impression was a concept that was probably a sportier extension of the Mille Miglia concept unveiled back in 2006.

But after going through the video (in Youtube above), I realized it was a rather radical and refreshing perspective of automotive design - this may yet be a watershed in automotive styling. BMW has always been experts in dealing with expressive surfaces (that are often sharply ‘clipped’), with one of their master strokes being the iconic negative curvature found along the sides of many of its sportier cars. But I think in GINA they re-thought the whole tradition of car body designs.

In typical automotive designs, you have a certain structure on which you add metallic panels on. You can style these panels in as many ways as there are cars on market now - but they are generally all seen as panels. The associated possible actions are linked to traditional metal sheet forming technologies - bending, rolling, cutting, etc., as the automotive designers think of themselves as sculptors, adding or coring away extra ‘clay’.

In GINA, instead of hard panels, the body is conceived more like a soft skin wrapping against a skeleton body. While it may very well be made of metal panels eventually just like any other cars, the important thing is at the design level, the ’skin’ metaphor brings out a whole set of different analogies and thus designs - you’re thinking about creases, pinching, pricking, etc. Design is thus by growing and subtracting the inner skeleton (which then defines the creases). I particularly liked the quote by Chris Bangle in the video: “…let’s let material talk in a different manner; and let the tooling be a different issue, instead of just a way to give us form.“

There are some other interesting features enabled by such a skin too: for example, there can be a continuous line on the sides, with the door creasing and folding away rather than opening/lifting. It could also consume less resources to build and drive, since the fabric would probably be lighter and require less manufacturing energy. Imagine also the possibility of changing the profile of your car exterior at a whim - in a fabric concept, it may be as simple as pressing a knob to rotate or shift the underlying skeleton.

It reminds me of Gehry’s Guggenheim too - which was for architecture another conceptual breakthrough: where technology has grown to such sophistication that we can in fact produce a building not by ‘ground-up’, ‘level-by-level’ structure which is then clad by facade. Instead, the building was defined much by its skin itself, its transformations and its refreshing organic lines.

In a way, I also felt it made the car more organic - it’s almost like a silent…monster. As it lifts it eyelid, the head lamps project its vision menacingly ahead; the unveiling of the bonnet reminds me of open-heart surgery; makes me think about Toyota’s ‘Human Touch’ ad too (haha both are somewhat creepy).

Overall, I must say this is one of the most refreshing and innovative concept cars that I’ve come across these years. There are many concept cars that are wild, interesting, etc. but I thought the GINA managed to tackle car design in a whole new perspective, while inheriting the qualities that make it a BMW.

Bravo to the design team!

(And if you’re the essay type, here’s their philosophy (wall-of-text!))

Nature’s camouflage is at its best - there’s a chameleon within that tree bark. Can you spot it? (Don’t worry, honest-to-goodness, this isn’t one of those scary-jump-at-you-with-full-scream kinda stupid trick).

[Give up!]

Even if the photo itself is probably carefully timed and staged, I couldn’t help but admire the vision of the original graffiti artist who plopped that UFO into that very spot - it certainly shows an eye for seeing and visualizing what isn’t immediately obvious - and with a great sense of humor too!

[Unknown origin, via Wooster]

Erik Nordenankar had an interesting idea - to draw the biggest drawing in the world using nothing but a suitcase of GPS tracking device and the ever reliable DHL:

[On] the 17th of March 2008, I sent away a briefcase containing a GPS device with the express transportation company DHL. I gave them exact travel instructions, where to go and in what order. 55 days later the briefcase returned to Stockholm. The GPS automatically recorded the briefcases’s journey around the world. The  information  was downloaded to my computer and gave me my drawing. Due to the GPS drawing technique and the magnitude of the drawing, the self portrait had to be made in only one stroke. That giant stroke passed through 6 continents and 62 countries, thus becoming 110664km long.

And here’s the device he sent on voyage:

Can’t make it more like a ticking briefcase bomb, can you?

Anyway, for more videos head on to his site here.

Stumbled upon this discovery on Harvard Business Publishing mentioning how Zappos, an internet shoe retailer (on course to exceed $1billion in annual revenues), has a very unique method of retaining committed staff - they pay their newly-hired staff $1000 to quit:

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

Wow. I’ve not dealt with Zappos personally - never bought or returned any shoes from them. But apparently the customer service are legendary. I guess this eccentric strategy (does eccentric have to be opposite of logical? Because if the numbers are balanced, this strategy seems really logical too) was one of the factors that helped them achieve this level of service.

I guess if it’s not already in every business case study textbook, it’d soon be!

We all know how powerful and you can say essential Photoshop is to a designer - It’s virtually the bedrock program for any designers. From touching up photos to creating montages to making posters, Photoshop has embedded itself firmly into the toolbox of virtually any designer.

But what else can Photoshop do besides arts/design related stuff? For instance, can it do math and scientific measurements? Jacks of Science finds that there are some functions in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended that you can take advantage of - in particular the ‘Analysis’ menu - to go about some research problems that could otherwise be much more tedious:

Can you determine the phase of each moon based on this picture?

Turns out you can approximate very accurately - by using the Magic Wand to select a single instance of the moon, and then ‘Record Observations’ under the ‘Analysis’ menu, you get a rich panel of information, including “Circularity” (Circularity measures how circular something is. A value of 1.00 indicates a perfect sphere). By combining the moon’s circularity with the knowledge that there are 30 days between each full moon, you can estimate at which phase your moon is in!

Now, for those of you who like a challenge: how do you know how many green M&Ms are there in this picture?

Answer, and quite a few more of such examples, over at Jacks of Science.

So this is how a space shuttle launched at night looks like. Magnificent!

[via Flickr]

A very cool spot from Discovery Channel - makes you go all mushy inside, be amazed and rekindles the love for the world’s wonders and miracles…