Love this great video of Andrew Byrom, faculty at Cal State Long Beach, who mingles typography with product design. From TedX LA. Andrew takes us through his obsessive inner workflow, where anything can become letters. Starting with words written on streets, to the way that blinds hang, anything has the potential to be turned into […]
Aaron Amatnieks, aka Flickr user akama1_lego, built a Lego dragon that breathes real fire! A tricky proposition when your medium is a polystyrene copolymer that melts at a temperature below the boiling point of water. A butane lighter has been fully incorporated into the structure, including a mechanical start-lever disguised as a rocky crag on the back side of the mountain.
I love this work by artist Jesse Houlding: The Magnet Drawing Machines are kinetic sculptures in which a series of magnets draws a circle on a sheet of paper with iron filings. The iron filings make different marks based on the strength of the magnetic field that holds them in place. As the magnets revolve, […]
To celebrate the publication of my new book, The Practical Pyromaniac, the Chicago Review Press (my publisher), is sponsoring a contest to see who can write the most creative Clerihew about fire, scientists, and similarly geeky subjects. For the budding poet, writer, or wise acre with a scientific bent, it’s a great opportunity for creativity!
Clever idea from Japanese firm SoftEther, whose press release is available in English onlyvia machine translation as of this writing. The video pretty much conveys the idea, however. QUMA is rather like an artist’s figure-drawing mannequin with sensors in the joints that report all the articulations through a USB cable. Appropriate software can then position a character’s rigging to match, which seems like it would be both faster and more intuitive than dragging bones around a screen with a mouse.
Karina Smigla-Bobinski‘s project will be displayed at FILE in São Paolo. ADA is a huge helium-filled ball trapped inside a room. Its surface is spiked with charcoals that leave marks on the white surface of the walls, ceilings and floors as it bounced from one side of the room to the other. Visitors might want […]
This amazing, illuminated life-size bear was constructed from 20,000 zip ties. It was created by the New York design firm Design Office Takebayashi Scroggin (aka d.o.t.s.).
