Tag: DESIGN

This gorgeous commercial -- conceived by Morihiro Harano, the award-winning creative director of Drill, Inc. -- features a sort of sloping marimba, down which a wooden ball rolls, producing an unadorned rendition of Bach's Cantata 147. "We did not add any artificial music at all," Harano tells the New York Times. The things people do to sell a wood-encased phone! Are we philistines for kinda ...

Drummer and engineer Aseem Mishra got tired of lugging his drum kit to gigs. Naturally, he fashioned a pair of musical jeans to take its place. The pants -- sorry, trousers -- have eight sensors woven into the fabric, and are hooked up to a backpack with circuitry and speakers. Each sensor corresponds to a different drum, and hitting them duplicates the sound of their real-world equivalents. ...

Although perhaps less prone to absurd extravagance than the neighboring United Arab Emirates, Qatar always seems to have some project up its sleeve that would bankrupt most countries of its size. It landed the 2022 World Cup by promising to air condition the open-air stadiums it built for the games. To accomplish this difficult (and incredibly wasteful) feat, Qatar is constructing a fleet of ...

The Video Turntable is a unique installation that debuted at the Encounters Film Festival in the U.K. this week. The display uses QR codes to lead participants to a website on their smartphones, where they pick the trailer of one of the films being shown at the festival. Once selected, the trailer is projected onto a round bar table that viewers can gather around and watch together, allowing ...

Moritz Waldemeyer, the designer who created a 'Home Disco' out of lasers and a smoke machine, has unveiled his latest installation: a laser harp. Consisting of a black obelisk surrounded by a cage of laser beams, Waldemeyer's harp uses light sensors and an Open Frameworks app to create sounds whenever a person interacts with the laser field. Waldemeyer's "weird and wonderful" soundscape is ...

Rapid prototyping and 3-D printing continue to find new uses, the latest neat-o product being these tiny ornithopters (machines that fly by flapping wings). Cornell roboticists printed themselves a minuscule 3.89-gram ornithopter -- a creation that would normally take days to design and build, but took mere minutes with the 3-D printing equipment. Check out the video above of the ...

Sorry, Apple fanatics -- it's just a prototype. But if Andrew Kim is as clever as this all-in-one iPad/iPhone/iPod stand suggests, you should be able to get your iLoving hands on it soon enough. The plastic on plywood PolyPly lets you snap your devices into place, and even leaves room to connect their cords. It's beautiful in its simplicity and matches Apple's minimal designs without just ...

The LunchCommunicator, developed by Japanese researchers, packs a camera and touchscreen PC that automatically records the person making lunch and plays it back while the other party is eating it, and vice-versa. Maybe it'll make school kids more appreciative of their mothers' efforts, but it just kind of makes us uncomfortable. We figured the one place we didn't have to check for a spycam ...

Do you wonder if the urbane baritone who narrates those DigInfo News spots ever has to record multiple takes because he's laughing his (possibly) Australian ass off at those consistently wacky Japanese inventions? I do. Because I'm not sure I'd be able to say "chicken skin can generate vibrato effects" without breaking into some kind of fit of giggling burp-ups. Anyway, these are forks ...

Yesterday, we sat in on the excellent 'Made it So (Interface Makers in Movies)' panel at SXSW with Chris Noessel, Mike Fink, Mark Coleran and David Lewandowski, some of the designers behind the on-screen interfaces in movies ranging from '80s classics 'Blade Runner' and 'WarGames' to modern day blockbusters 'Avatar' and 'Tron: Legacy.' The panel followed a simple question and answer format, ...

Yes, it's a $10,000 phone. Why? Why not! Do we question man's desire to set forth and conquer new lands? Do we question our strive to push our bodies to heretofore unknown limits? We are human! This is what we do! A €7,250 cellphone that is sort of ugly as sin, lacks a touch screen, and has a memory on par with your first PC? You guys, that is basically like walking on the moon. ...

Occasionally function should take a backseat to form. Take this three-wheeler, resembling, ever-so-slightly, a medieval torture device. Built by German designer Nils Ferber, the vehicle hits (a likely dangerous) 18.5 mph. It's powered solely by a pair of 18-volt-screwdrivers. The driver, doubtless possessing balls of steel, sprawls across the length of the vehicle and steers by leaning to ...

One of the more impressive lighting design projects we've seen lately is this installation by Jason Bruge Studio, which appears on the facade of London's W Hotel and manages to be that rare mix of high concept, high tech, and lovely execution. Cameras mounted on the hotel's roof record the surrounding landscape. A software program then converts the images into panoramas, compresses the ...

The landscapes of Google Earth have never looked quite as hypnotic (or ominous) as they do in this music video from the band Lux Repeat. Created by designer Bartholomäus Traubeck, the clip takes viewers on an aerial voyage across Google Earth's pixelated landscape, in all its geographic desolation and graphic vibrance. Equal parts nature documentary and flight-simulator video game, it's ...

For those who design for the Web, securing a placeholder image -- a temporary picture that'll save a spot while the website is under construction -- is often a headache. On top of needing to resize hundreds of images that'll just be tossed anyway, merely locating a group of suitable pictures is a tedious task to which no self-respecting Web guru looks forward. Enter Placekitten, a simple ...