sundance

Green tech finds: Got some organic matter lying around?

Dead leaves? Grass clippings? Fruit and vegetable peels? Sure, you could compost them, or you could turn them into robot fuel or solar cells. Plus, a gadget for harvesting the power you generate while walking, and an app for showing off your gas and carbon savings from driving a plug-in vehicle.

Green tech finds: from solar power to the Super Bowl

Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, and while I don’t pay enough attention to say whether it’ll be a good game, it will definitely be a green(er) game. That, plus cooler roofs for more efficient solar power, and a very quick look at over a century of global warming: your green tech finds for the week.

Buy renewable energy for your Volt: While the arguments about the energy sources for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are generally really overblown and oversimplified, many EV drivers do want the cleanest power they can get for their vehicles. So, GM is developing a system for its OnStar platform that would notify Volt drivers when there’s renewable energy available on the grid so they could plug in at the right time. (via Earth 911)

What does global warming look like? If you’re thinking big picture in response to that question, the folks at NASA have released a video that shows 131 years of global temperature fluctuations in 26 seconds. (via Climate Central and @NRDC)

Green tech finds: Earthships and solar get affordable

Think “green tech” automatically means “expensive?” Nope: costs are dropping on everything from Earthships to solar power.

An affordable Earthship: I’ve been in love with the Earthship building concept for years, but no way I’d ever be able to afford one. That may be changing, though: the “Simple Survival” model Earthship is designed to provide the amenities of these self-sufficient structures without the “mortgage bondage.” Check it out above.

Design Dish: Pantone for Visa & the biggest dining table ever

The Liyuan Library: I’m a sucker for unusual library spaces, and this new construction in Huairou, China hits all the sweet spots. Tucked away in a small mountain village, the long, narrow structure blends into its surroundings with a reed-like outer layer that still allows for sunlight to trickle inside.

Collection of Occupy movement posters

If you plan on heading to an Occupy protest in your local hometown and want to wave a message that’s a step up from the crude signs made from pizza boxes and random flattened bits of cardboard (or like the one that Anne Hathaway was spotted carrying recently) then head on over to Occuprint. It’s a well produced online resource that “showcases posters from the worldwide Occupy movement” and “is meant to connect people with this work, and provide a base of support for print-related media within the Occupy movement.”

Design Dish: Moleskine logo winners & Prague’s floating bathtub

Moleskinerie Logo Competition: This week, Moleskine and Designboom unveiled a shortlist of 117 designs that were submitted for the notebook company’s logo competition. The winning design by French artist Sylvain Bouyer offered a poetic definition for a “Moleskinerie,” the name of the company’s new blog: “A small graphic digression illustrating the idea that the greatest dreams often arise from just small things.”

First covers of famous magazines

From The Atlantic Monthly in 1857 to Wired in 1993, here’s a fascinating look at the covers of the first issues of famous magazines, including, I’m sure, at least one of your favorites. It’s kind of amazing to see how these magazines have evolved over the years. Some are radically different in terms of design, focus and content, while others – most notably The New Yorker, whose first issue stars Eustace Tilley, or New York Magazine, with its breathtaking photo of the most beautiful skyline in the world – look as timeless and instantly familiar then as they do today…

Design Dish: Miami gets the rainbow effect & McLaren’s new yin-yang factory

Coming Up Rainbows: After his first installation was removed in 2002 due to tightened 9/11 security measures, multimedia artist Christopher Janney is installing his colorful glass tiles in an overpass at Miami International Airport just in time for Art Basel…

Art Buzz: Buy art on your iPhone & real bullet holes from Iraq

Geert Goiris: For his latest photo series, “Resonance,” Belgium-born photographer Geert Goiris offers up seemingly benign snapshots which, upon closer inspection, reveal uncanny, or off-putting elements. Most peculiar of all is an image of plastic office chairs arranged AA-style around an unremarkable wood table (which, you soon realize, has no legs)…

Best of Kickstarter, 11/21

We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup.

TECH

Desktop 3-D Printer: The 3-D craze continues with the first personal three-dimensional desktop printer. As it turns out, a 3-D printer is not something that makes weird images you can look at with 3-D glasses, but it actually prints out three-dimensional objects.

Capta: I’m a major dropper/smasher of iPhones, so this weird octopus-like contraption, the “Capta,” seems like an excellent solution for clumsy folks like me. Rigged with a magnet at the back, you can mount the suction cups to different surfaces to keep your phone out of the way but still accessible…

The world’s slowest roller coaster in Duisburg, Germany

Not to sound like a pageant contestant or anything, but I really like roller coasters. Big loops, crazy heights, upside down swirls—you name it, I’m into it. This isn’t true, however, of most of the friends and family members I find myself with at amusement parks, many of whom prefer to calmly eat their sugar-dusted funnel cakes and then maybe take a ride on the Ferris wheel, if they’re feeling saucy…

Design Dish: Winemaking at home & chairs that flip

Flip Chairs: Each of Daisuke Motogi’s candy-colored chairs can be flipped upside down or sideways to create new seating options. A high-backed chair becomes a low seat, or a lounger becomes a rocking chair. Come to think of it, it’s about time the rocking chair had a design makeover…

Design Dish: Why every home needs a fuzzy accessory & LA Auto Show’s coolest cars

LA Auto Show: The Batmobile is so passé. Each year, top automotive design teams compete at the LA Auto Show to create “Hollywood’s Next Movie Car,” submitting outlandish designs accompanied by concepts for their feature films. I think somebody should consider pumping funding into the “341 Parkour,” a short, chubby vehicle that would help the star of ANNIE GET THE GRANNIES! solve the mystery of the missing granny robots. Who doesn’t want to see that movie?

Best of Kickstarter, 11/7

We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup.

FILM

SEFF Student Experimental Film Festival: Help rising student filmmakers work out their freaky inner psyches at an Experimental Film Festival in upstate New York. Granted, half the submissions will probably make you want to poke out your eyeballs (or will be about poking out eyeballs), but hey, it’s creative expression, okay?

ABACUS at Sundance: A team of 12 artists collaborating on a large-scale multimedia installation called ABACUS was recently invited to perform at our very own Sundance Film Festival. From what we can tell by their preview video, the presentation involves a lot of lights, loud sounds, flashing screens and possibly someone in a panda suit. What’s not to like?

Design Dish: A city made of bubbles & a toxic underground village

Pritzker Prize to be Given in Beijing: With its explosive recent development, Beijing has become an appealing spot for the world’s most influential architects and designers. It’s no surprise then that the prestigious Pritzker Prize – sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize” of architecture – will be awarded in Beijing next year…

IMDB’s Captcha is less annoying and actually kind of cool

Little Big Details is a slightly esoteric website but one I think would be very interesting and useful for my designer friends and really anyone who lives and breathes in the digital space. It posts user submitted examples of how the tiniest detail in a website, software or user flow can have a disproportionately huge impact on the user experience. A lot of the submissions are from the Apple ecosystem and can be traced back to Steve Jobs, whose obsession over the smallest details resulted in a superior overall user experience…

Design Dish: Performance architecture & design solutions for the 99%

Alex Schweder’s “Performance” Architecture: Architect Alex Schweder is credited with the invention of “performance architecture,” which broadly refers to small, occupied spaces that challenge our preconceived notions of shelter. Many of Schweder’s works are built within existing spaces, appealing to my childhood obsession with forts. Among my favorites are the inflatable plastic creations, including “sac of rooms all day long,” which looks like a big, warped playhouse.

Design with the Other 99%: Cities: Now on view at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, “Design with the Other 99%” showcases the most promising design and technological innovations coming out of the world’s cities and over-crowded slums…

Best of Kickstarter, 10/24

We scoured the pages of Kickstarter to bring you this week’s best projects. Have a great Kickstarter project of your own or see one you think deserves some extra attention? Let us know about it the comments and we may just feature it in our weekly roundup.

DESIGN

Imagined Cities: Architecture collective Hither Yon is calling for images of intimate and inspiring spaces (be it the house where you grew up or the church your parents were married in), which they will then manipulate and re-attach to form a “hybrid” city. From these renderings, the collective plans to create a three-dimensional model of the unusual metropolis for display in a Berlin gallery…

Archive of classic video game title screens

Interactive designer Cameron Askin created this impressive online archive of the title screens of video games from the pixelated 8- and 16-bit era, preserved as .gif images. Looking at the animation back then, which used to blow my mind as a kid, it’s wild to see how far computing power and video games have come over the past couple of decades….

The “Low-Line,” an underground park for NYC

Okay, I’ll admit it. Whenever someone from out of town starts asking me about the Highline and whether or not it’s really as cool as it looks, I feel very proud to live in New York. Because yes, it’s exactly as cool as it looks (actually, it’s cooler, because they sell gourmet popsicles now, and I love me some popsicles), and it’s pretty neat to live in a place that would invest millions of dollars in a beautifully designed piece of urban revitalization. I mean, just look at it: it’s a park suspended over New York City. The future is now!

Design Dish: Moleskine launches a logo competition, Frank Gehry’s latest for Louis Vuitton

Frank Gehry’s LVMH Sail Boat: After a few legal setbacks and delays, Frank Gehry’s design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation (a fancy name for the building that will house CEO Bernard Arnaut’s giant personal art collection) is scheduled for completion next year. At 130,000 square feet, the structure is designed to look like a white sailing ship standing alone in a forest. To create the unique curvature of the massive white panels (or “sails”), Gehry and his team worked with Moulage Sous Vide technology, a new technique that allows the designer to create concrete molds from computer-generated 3D models…

Building the perfect urban beehive

Man-made beehives haven’t really changed much for centuries, mostly because beekeeping was always something that happened in rural areas. But beekeeping, like produce farming and even livestock keeping, is moving into cities – and urban apiculturists are struggling with the best ways to adapt beekeeping to the city…

Design Dish: See-thru airplanes, Archtober and Mexico’s inverted skyscraper

From the coolest new products to dramatic feats of engineering, here’s what has us excited in the design world this week.

The Boeing Dreamliner: Airplanes have looked more or less the same since the 1960s, but this week Airbus revealed plans for a super slick new generation of planes with a transparent “skeleton” structures, allowing for unobstructed views of the surrounding sky. Think of it as the flying version of those glass-bottom submarines at Disneyworld. The planes won’t roll out until 2050, which means I’ll have to stay all excited about this until I’m in a nursing home.

Quirky answers: where do today’s inventors live and what are they inventing?

We wanted to share this brilliant infographic from the Quirky site that maps out where today’s inventors hail from and answers the question: “Does innovation flow from cities?”

“Obviously, most of the ideas seem to be flowing from the big cities around the country: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington, etc. But adding up those figures, over half of Quirky’s submissions come from states with mega-cities (NY, CA, IL, TX, PA, AZ, TX, GA, VA, MA). Doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, about half of America’s 300 million people live in those same states. In other words, the innovations seem to be flowing at a steady per capita rate; cities are not over-represented…

EARonic cases turn your iPhone into an awesome gag

In my opinion, the mobile tech market could really use a few more gag accessories. Forget all that “elegant design” stuff – we use these things all day long, so surely there’s an opportunity for a little humor. Isn’t that, like, the whole premise of “Seinfeld?” Finding comedy in the mundane? Which is why I so appreciate these fairly ridiculous new iPhone cases by Daniela Gilsanz. Printed with images of various ears – some studded with piercings, others sprouting long gray hairs or growing into beards – the “EARonic” cases blend into a user’s face to create the illusion of phone-lessness. According to her website, Gilsanz came up with the concept while working on her art school portfolio. The initial EARonic product mock-up came into being while sketching ears – a prompt specified in one of the applications.