IN CATEGORIES... 
Design, Nifty Stuff
Design, Nifty Stuff Entries from August 1, 2007 - September 1, 2007
Friday
31Aug
Friday, August 31 Outsourcing Manufacturing to...Bees
My wife keeps bees so I was particularly intrigued by these new vases from Libertiny, which are made of wax honeycomb, and literally created by 40,000 bees. Each vase takes a week to make. Bees have experienced a sharp population drop in recent years and months, so if this helps keep more of them around, great. They are amazing little buggers and essential to a lot of agriculture. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much detail on how these are created. The Dutch firm refers to the process as “slow prototyping”, in contrast to the typical “rapid prototyping” techniques like SLA and material deposition.
Libertiny’s homepage (literally just one page)
Tip of the hat to Core77
Tuesday
28Aug
Tuesday, August 28 Blog Address Simplification
I finally got around to the various technical hurdles required to combine this blog with my personal domain, so now you don’t have to type in the “squarespace” part of the address. Just go to richardsona.com. Plus it makes it easier to tell all your friends!
I have to say that while Squarespace made it pretty easy to do this, and has an arrangement with a domain registration/web hosting company to do it automatically, it was still a rather complicated process. A large part of that was because I had to first transfer the domain to somebody that would allow me to do the DNS trickery to get it to work (my old domain registrar wouldn’t, so I transferred to Squarespace’s suggested provider). This by itself was a convoluted process requiring several chat and phone sessions with the old providers technical support.
It’s one of those computer things where just because the customer (me in this case) includes a couple of acronyms in their request for help, the tech support people assume you are a fellow geek, and they start spewing jargon-filled requests at you. While I’m pretty tech savvy overall I don’t spend a lot of time reading manuals on DNS settings and such. The fact is I really didn’t know what I was doing, I was just parroting what the Squarespace tutorial told me to say, I didn’t have much clue what was going on under the hood. So when things didn’t work the way I expected I had no idea why and didn’t know who to ask which questions.
The internet still has a long way to go before it becomes consumer-friendly.
IN CATEGORIES... Site Admin
Site Admin Friday
24Aug
Friday, August 24 frog in Harvard Business Review
My colleague in the Strategy Group at frog design, Ravi Chatpar, has written an article that will be appearing in the Forethought section of September’s Harvard Business Review.
From concept through development, designers should function in parallel with corporate decision makers, creating prototypes for a number of variations on a product and then testing them with users and, if appropriate, partners. Tracking how customers’ ways of using a product evolve over time also makes it possible for designers to identify desirable new features and, in some cases, create new functionality in conjunction with users.
This is an exciting step for frog and our rapidly expanding strategy practice.
Friday
24Aug
Friday, August 24 Speaking at Inverge 2007
I’m going to be speaking at the Inverge 2007 conference up in lovely Portland, on September 6. Looks like it’s going to be a really interesting conference about convergence of media. I’ll be speaking about “The System is the Product”
If you’re going to be attending or in the area, drop me a line!
Monday
20Aug
Monday, August 20 Beijing Solves the Pollution Problem for the Olympics
The Olympic authorities getting ready for the Beijing Olympics next year have solved the air pollution prolem which has been causing concern for atheletes and visitors alike.
Turning to an unlikely but logical source, the city has commissioned The Sharper Image to construct a skyscraper that is actually a giant version of one of their patented Ionic Breeze air purifiers. As you can see from the photo, it is close to completion and has already started clearing the surrounding air. The skyscraper actually swivels from side to side as it works, which as you might imagine could cause some motion sickness for the 850 inhabitants. The famed architectural engineering firm Arup was retained to develop a special damping mechanism that minimizes the apparent motion. No word on the warranty offered on the lifespan of the building, or whether The Sharper Image’s arch rival Brookstone would try for similar bragging rights before the Olympics come around in 2008.
IN CATEGORIES... Nifty Stuff, Architecture, Sustainable Design
Nifty Stuff, Architecture, Sustainable Design