This simply amazing book by book and graphic designer Marion Bataille floored me – it’s really delightful to watch how those 3D alphabets pop up, morph into the next, etc. – it’s like watching a live magic show:
From the lenticular cover that changes with the angle of your hands, all the way to the Z, ABC3D is as much a work of art as it is a pop-up book. Each of the 26 dimensional letters move and change before your eyes. C turns into D with a snap. M stands at attention. X becomes Y with a flick of the wrist. And then there’s U… Boldly conceived and brilliantly executed with a striking black, red, and white palette, this is a book that readers and art lovers of all ages will treasure for years to come.
You can order it on Amazon here – it’s only $19.95! On my wish list it goes!
Stanford has an ‘Entrepreneurship Week’ with a rather interesting ‘Innovation Tournament’. A mundane object (this year’s being the rubber band) is the theme for groups to innovate and create value upon:
The 2008 Innovation Tournament is open to teams of Stanford students, as well as students around the world. Teams can be of any size. Your challenge is to create as much value as possible using rubber bands. You can use as many as you want, of any size, shape, or color. Value can be measured on any scale you choose. Remember, value comes from actually implementing your ideas and delivering results. To be successful, challenge assumptions, seize opportunities, be creative, and Make it Happen!
This, I guess is probably really the equivalent of the common ‘drop-an-egg-from-a-certain-height’ assignment that many design/engineering students get. With the minimal of materials (and usually time), teams have to be really creative, innovate and in this case, get the most amount of value (money?). Here’s the video of the winning team, who effectively leveraged the visuals of an bigger-and-bigger rubberband ball as a focal point in their donation appeal, and subsequently trying to harness the internet viral effect.
Would you’ve been able to pull off something like this (or even better!)? For good measures too, they did it in 24 hours.
PS:
I quite like the prizes in this competition too. In most university efforts, what you’d probably get is maybe a certain budget, with the top prizes invariably some variant of iPod or some other ‘young hip thing‘. An object of desire of some sort – easily dealt with. But for this tournament, all of these are experiences that you can’t buy (in part with the sponsorship from Deloitte) – “A day of sailing on the San Francisco Bay on a 36′ yacht provided and skippered by Club Nautique; Meet Deloitte’s Global leaders, hear Al Gore speak in person, and enjoy cocktails and dinner at Deloitte’s World Meeting at Stanford University; Box seats to Sharks game – Donated by Deloitte, etc”.
I’m sure Deloitte et al could’ve have it much ‘easier’ by signing a cheque for a certain amount to buy prizes – but putting effort into creating experiences and meeting the winners shows some measure of sincerity. Plus it’s a win-win situation for both parties – for the experienced directors to meet with the young upcomings – I’m sure the exchange would be both much more fruitful and remembered.
National Geographic brings us a video on how a Japanese architect managed to make a tiny apartment (Penguin House) in Tokyo appear larger by using various techniques like ceiling heights and external light – the space does look a lot more humane…
The picture on the top may look like some indecipherable Matrix-like message from outer space, but if you look closely enough, they’re actually rather familiar (and harmless!) things – drawings of sheep facing the left side. That big, 10000-sheep artwork is known as ‘The Sheepmarket’.
The Sheepmarket is a really interesting experiment in art and harnessing the power of the masses. Artist Aaron Koblin assembled an army of sheep by asking random strangers to each draw him one for $0.02, through Amazon’s labor distribution mechanism – The Mechanical Turk. Here’s the artist explaining the project:
With the project turning into printed books and exhibitions, I suppose this is proof that leveraged correctly, the sum is indeed more than its parts?
I am always rather intrigued when digital or virtual experiences are brought back into the physical realm of ‘things’ (‘thing‘ being, ‘stuff’, feelable, touchable stuff). From the popularity of ‘steampunk’ computers we see an almost desperate claw at turning our increasingly digital lives back into something more tangible, more crafty.
The D/A Clock is yet another example – converting a whole table-sized display of time in the classic LCD segments. What’s also interesting though is the purposefully slow transition from one digit to another. When I first saw the picture I thought the blocks would simply jerk up and down as it changes; the video however shows a much more subtle transition:
This object plays on the common LED-display digital clock with physical segments that slowly fade in and out of a white surface. The D/A Clock introduces new characteristics to the digital mediation of time: a physical dimension and intermediate states – the time between 0 and 1.
I like that the designer Alvin Aronson noticed and chose to play-up this subtle difference. In the digital world of ’0′ and ’1′s, there are no intermediate states: it’s either one or the other. And when the clock is borne onto this full-sized, physical display, it drops its ‘digital’ properties and re-adopts the analog properties that this world operates in. Interesting thought.
There are many ways to re-examine our history – making films of them are one of the means. But this video scores brownie points for taking a rather different tack: it re-enacts the World War II and other subsequent battles that the US engaged in, with each country represented by popular foods from that country, taking you (via culinary tracts) through the American-centric history of world politics. From World War II, to Korean War, to Vietnam War right up to the current Iraq War – you’ve got it all!
Absolutely weird, but very amazing at the same time too!
The people at Kansas State University seem to be churning out many interesting videos as part of their work in digital ethnography. Here’s yet another one – chronicling the evolution of text -> hypertext -> XML etc. Enjoy!
This is a nicely-directed short clip about the evolution in how we communicate – from the quill-pen letters all the way to the status-updates in Facebook. What are your opinions – do you think the quality of our communication options has improved and become more convenient, or has it become an apathy of insincerity and meaninglessness?
Check this out! Jonny Lee, a PhD candidate in Carnegie-Mellon turned a standard flat-screen television into an immersive 3D environment not unlike those you see in the 3D cinemas or those dorky ‘immersive-reality’ goggles, all by cleverly hacking readily available Wii parts and custom software. This seems to be a proof-of-concept, showing that it is indeed not too difficult to create an immersive environment at home. The advantage of this over the traditional visor-like implementation is of course, not having to encumber the user (and the product package) to have to wear a screen on the head. This could mean it’s much lighter, easier, comfortable and certainly cheaper – all that needs to change is pretty much just the software (the hardware is almost insignificant in terms of part costs).
You can already think of the gaming possibilities (I’d drool at a first-person-shooter game with something like this…). This would definitely be a breakthrough – in breaking the fourth wall. Imagine a Playstation 4 with impeccable graphics and this motion-sensing, immersive, spatial reality.
Of course there are some limitations as well – with this configuration the virtual reality can only work for 1 person. It is also somewhat different from the traditional VR-goggle implementation in terms of experience, I think. With the goggles, you can turn your head around and the virtual world follows through. With this hack, if you turn your head, the TV still remains at where it is (though the screen changes) – so chances are you’d be staring at your TV rack or speakers, and this would jolt you out of your virtual world. In other words, the former can accommodate rotation, while the latter is more apt for translation-in-space motions (with your eyes still constantly oriented towards the screen).
