Design WOO

The notion of time slipping through our fingers is well represented by the sand timer, but how about light slipping through? This effect is captured by the Lime Light – Solar Fled Lamp and is well depicted by the tiny glass bulbs that refract light as they cascade down the hourglass and illuminate the room. The clock is ticking….glass balls fall through to the bottom half, and when they run out…the lamp switches off. Elegant and with a strong message to conserve. Time (light) is running out….

Designer: Seichi Tomari

So you’re snowboarding. You’ve got your Burton board, your Burton nopattern jacket, your Burton snowpants, Burton long underwear. But what’s missing! Your gloves! Oh just slap on a pair of Burton gloves, right? WRONG! You need some music, just use an iPod right? NO WAY! Put the music and the gloves (and the cellphone for that matter) all together. It’s the HR Burton music and voice communication gloves!

Oh joy! How I’ve always wanted to talk on a two-way radio through my gloves! Yes! Everyone whose ever snowboarded, skied, sled dogged, etc, knows how bundled up you really need to be to avoid the cold. We live in the future now, so people not only wish to board down a hill all nice and toasty, they want to talk to their friends and listen to their music on the way down too!

We’ll here’s that all. All of it in the gloves. Whip em out.

Designer: William Mazuel

Tonight I saw a very nice presentation on the work of rAndom international, a London-based art and design collective, hosted by designtransfer of the UDK Berlin. One of the project that Hannes Koch presented was “Study For A Mirror” which is actually the next generation of their other piece called “A Study Of Three Mirrors“.

‘Study For A Mirror’ is a ‘temporary light painting’. Face recognition technology detects when the viewer is standing in front of the work and then directly paints the onlookers image in light. The Image then gradually fades. Evectively a mirror this work offers the ultimate immediate, yet ephemeral, contemporary portrait.

Chris O’Shea wrote the software with openFrameworks & openCV.

The Phone Fingers($9.9) are designed to prevent your iPhone from finger prints and smudges. Phone Fingers, a stupid idea??

It’s a wooden log and a radio. That ain’t all folks. It’s also solar powered and if Mr. Sunshine isn’t happy that day, there’s a dynamo powered by your finger. I love the giant wooden rotary dials to change stations and volume. The old school retractable antenna nostalgically tugs at my heart too. Sure I have no idea what station I’m changing to but it looks like an ewok crafted it so I totally approve.

BTW, 80% of the radio is oak. The rest are radio components. Treehuggers might like it… or will they hate it since it’s made from a tree? Hmmm

Designers: Solène Le Goff & Christophe Gouache