Calamityware

This I love.

 

Nice box!

http://designtaxi.com/news/363038/New-Improved-Innovative-Students-Have-Designed-The-Perfect-Cardboard-Box/

A box that, really, opens too easily... but that should be easily remedied. I expect Amazon to snap this one up in the near future.

Lfexible solar panel manufacturers Crystalsol

Just bookmarking this as I've rather lost track of the flexible solar panel market...

http://www.crystalsol.com/engl/index.html

 

3D printed plaster casts

This is definitely an 'oooh pretty' one - certain details of it (the lack of any evidence of analysis, the use of suspiciously feeble-looking snap-fit joints) lead me to suspect it is not entirely practical as it stands.


Still a brilliant idea, though, and no reason why it couldn't work. I give you:

Jake Evill's 'Cortex' 3D printed fracture support

 

AIGA: futurescoping

This may be an interesting insight into how to gather and develop ideas for the future of a professional organization:

http://www.core77.com/blog/case_study/the_aiga_research_project_by_ziba_part_6_the_final_winnowing_-_evaluate_evaluate_evaluate_25808.asp

It may also be a very expensive design consultancy trying to justify their price with a ream of bullshit. Genuinely unsure.

25 Questions to reveal your life purpose

Whether you believe in something like a 'life purpose' or not, I reckon you could do worse than contemplate your life in the view of these 25 questions. Not that I've quite got round to it yet.

This is the point where I should go off into a rant about how 'finding/discovering yourself' is an evil lie, and actually what we are doing, all the time, is constructing ourselves, mostly through our choices of which problems to attack... but I'm going to stop there.

(Lifted from http://www.prolificliving.com/blog/2012/07/24/how-to-find-your-life-purpose/ via shirley's twitter account)

1. What fulfills me?
2. What drives me?
3. What inspires me?

4. What do 1-2-3 have in common?
5. What problem can I solve for others with the common thread in 4?

6. What frustrates me?
7. What pains me?
8. What saddens me?

9. What do 6-7-8 have in common?
10. What problem can I solve for others with the common thread in 9?

11. What terrifies me?
12. What worries me?
13. What can I do to change 11-12?
14. What can I do with this change to help others?

15. What do I love doing?
16. How do I feel when I am doing 15?
17. What happens if I stop doing 15?
18. What happens if I kept doing 15 forever?
19. What do I resent doing?
20. How do I feel when I am doing 19?
21. What happens if I stop doing 19?
22. What happens if I kept doing 19 forever?

23. Why am I here?
24. What am I here to do?
25. What would the world miss if I weren’t here and if I didn’t do it?

Lego faces getting angrier

While clicking around the aforementioned Universal Construction Kit I also came across this article: apparently Lego faces have been getting angrier of the last fifty years. I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise, since when I was a kid none of the spaceships had guns (which simply meant that that was the first thing everyone changed on them) and now it seems like they are all meant for battle of some sort. What really impressed me was they way that the academic in this case seems to have made a respectable career out of playing with Lego - his website is more interesting than this particular story, I think.

How to connect Lego to K'Nex to Duplo to etc., etc.

With the Free Universal Construction Kit!


Basically, some enterprising artist collective with a fondness for dubious acronyms has created a set of 3D designs of components to connect a variety of kid's toys (most of which I haven't heard of, but which includes Lego, and that's the main thing). The aim is to allow people to print these out at home - you have to really go through the small print to find the admission that, unless you've got access to the really high end machines, the current crop of 3D printers can't print at a fine enough resolution to successfully connect your creation to, for example, Lego.
However, it is a brilliant idea.
I also particularly like the following rant from their website - particularly the idea of the commercial system enacted as an infinite series of micro-punishments for us, the humans:
"Consider the frustrating experience of purchasing a new computer (a Mac, say) and discovering that it will not play your aunt’s Windows Media video of your little cousins. Likewise, imagine your aunt’s corresponding annoyance when she finds that her PC will not play the Apple Quicktime video you sent her of your cats. This humiliating little episode isn’t an accident; it’s just a skirmish in a never-ending battle between giant commercial entities, played out, thousands of times every day, in exactly such micro-punishments to customers like you. If you’re well-informed, you may happen to know about VLC — a free, open-source video player, developed by independent hackers as a grassroots remedy for exactly this problem. Until the advent of ubiquitous 3D printing, software remedies like VLC weren’t readily available forhardware products, like toys. That’s changing."

Vibrato on a piano, anyone?

Coming soon on Kickstarter... a multi-touch piano. Although all pianos are multi-touch by definition. Sort of what you iPad piano app would like to be when it grows up.