Archive for the 'design' Category

Jun 04 2011

Sugar Cube QR Codes

Here’s the rest of the pictures from the rest of our Sugar Cube QR Code experiment at the A2 Mini Maker Faire. I enlisted the help of a number of 3-10 year olds to glue sugar cubes onto an (almost) properly sized template, and managed to end up with a scannable code! Ed Vielmetti and […]

One response so far

Feb 14 2011

Building Museums to Survive Once-In-200-Year Catastrophes

Published by under design,history,sustainability

This news from Cairo is heartbreaking: A full inventory of the Egyptian Museum has found that looters escaped with 18 items during the anti-government unrest, including two gilded wooden statues of famed boy king Tutankhamun, the antiquities chief said Sunday. I can’t help but think of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, where mathic monasteries preserve knowledge for […]

No responses yet

Mar 23 2010

Apollo Lunar Escape System was All Guts

Published by under design,space,technology

Let me take you back to an era before computer control of all aspects of spaceflight was considered necessary. It’s the early 70s, and although additional flights after Apollo 17 were eventually canceled, there were at the time plans afoot for longer duration stays on the lunar surface. However, a longer stay entailed an increased […]

No responses yet

Oct 16 2009

Piano Playing Stairs

Published by under design,transportation

This is awesome: via Machine Thinking

No responses yet

Oct 01 2009

Books and their transforming media

Published by under books,design,media,technology

I came across an entry on Google Books, and realized they have a map with all locations mentioned in the book tagged on the map. This is a neat feature. Check out the map for Around the World in 80 Days. Certainly an interesting way to access data in a book. I was recently reading […]

No responses yet

Jul 01 2009

Running Ignite with Impressive

Published by under design,ignite

Perhaps one of the more stress inducing aspects of throwing together Ignite Ann Arbor, was figuring out how to play all our speaker’s slide decks, with 15 second auto-advance, but also with non-timed slides interspersed between, all while avoiding cross-os font imbroglios and ugly on-screen GUI manipulation. I’ll describe what I used here in nauseating […]

2 responses so far

May 01 2009

Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display

Published by under design

If you’ve ever tried controlling an iPod touch or iPhone in a car dock, you probably are aware of the benefits of tactile feedback provided by mechanical controls – something that’s lacking with touchscreens. Hence this research into dynamic physical controls which double as a multi-touch display looks really interesting. While this programmable tactile control […]

No responses yet

Dec 22 2008

Design Elegance

Published by under books,design

Elegant and crisp interface design is an important whether you’re designing an automotive dash or a command-line tool.  I find good design practices can be harvested from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources.  The underlying thread, is to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.  It’s been said a million times, but it’s so […]

No responses yet

Sep 09 2008

Spore: The game of intelligent design

Published by under design,education,science

Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination.  While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection. It’s a game about intelligent design.  You have godlike powers over your […]

No responses yet

Aug 07 2008

Long Now Video

Published by under design,sustainability,technology

I’ve been following the Long Now Foundation and their quest to build a 10,000 year clock for several years now.  This episode of BoingBoingTV showcases some of the physical artifacts the foundation has machined, including an orrery, and a chime system developed in part by Brian Eno. There are a lot of challenges associate with […]

No responses yet

Older Entries »