rb.log

Fwis: Readymech Series 002.

Cute "Flatpack Toys" for you to make.

DESEO - Simply clever, the new DESEO!.

But still pretty modern.

BLDGBLOG: Fictional ruins from fictional worlds. 'Zimmerman's Landmarks of Industrial Britain, for instance, is "a photographic series of fictional public buildings derived from small scale architectural maquettes." '

These are beautiful, but entirely virtual, buildings that show a false history of industrial England. Beautiful work.

77 Design Gifts Under $77

Another great live auction from ebay, this time featuring this writing desk by Dieter Rams. See the full auction on the Highlights of German Design.

A Move to Make a Silent Air Terminal Hum Again - New York Times

I've never noticed all the shrapnel damage in the side of the Victoria & Albert Museum before. It must have suffered during the blitz.

AIRSTREAM COMMEMORATES 75th
with a New Limited Edition Anniversary Model. One day. You will be mine. You will...

eBay: 21: Braun AG, Frankfurt am Main. Radio-Phono Combinatio (item 200025511864 end time Sep-18-06 10:00:00 PDT)

Take a look at the rest of the lot if you have time. Some really cool 60s TVs, and modern furniture.

YouTube - Frank Lloyd Wright in Half Life 2

Some lovely graphic design from cerealandmilk over at Flickr.

Curry's, one of the UKs electrical retail chains, has started selling solar panels in its stores. Seems like a great move, that should help make the technology more mainstream.

Toshio Iwai is a huge inspiration for me. He's the creator of Electroplankton, and has a long history of designing beautiful ways of making music. He has started a blog on a new musical instrument he's creating with Yamaha called the TENORI-ON.

Really nice design concept for a speaker bag. It has built in speakers, and the red tag acts as a remote for your iPod. Should keep my daughter, who is obsessed with Taggies, happy.

I've been looking for some home (non-PC) printing options for making things like cards ans T-shirts for some time. Actually, I've been looking for print-making evening classes for a while, but nowhere locally seems to have a class.



Anyway, I've just come across the Print Gocco, which is a Japanese home screen-printing unit for making cards. Hard to come by (they've just stopped shipping them to the US) but available on eBay. Seems like a cool option.

Suzuki's new LC Concept Car goes to the top of my list of cute small cars that I'd love to own. Other contenders include the Nissan Figaro (qhich we haven't owned, but you can buy as imports here in the UK) and of course the Smart ForTwo (which we have owned, but have now jettisoned for practical reasons).

Got to say that I'm hugely excited by what was on display from Nintendo at E3 today. Their press conference constantly emphasized the importance of "feel" over looks for a game. Their new control system is gutsy, energetic, will hopefully feel intuitive and most importantly looks like fun.

Small details like putting a speaker in the controller are brilliant. I love the idea that when you fire an arrow, for example, in the new Zelda game you'll hear the bow being drawn from a speaker in your hand, which makes sense, and then hear the sound of the arrow move from the hand to the screen. Can't wait for its release. Hope I'm not disappointed.

I've just downloaded Google's new purchase, the 3D drawing package Sketchup. It is wonderful, particuarly for knocking out cool recta-linear buildings in glass. See: Flickr: Photos tagged with sketchup.

The great thing about it is the Google Earth integration. Ideally, Sketchup enables you to quickly mock-up existing architecture, or buildings under construction, then see them in place on Google Earth's surface. There's no reason those buildings need to be real, or need to be designed by professionals. What I'd like to see is the start of a virtual architecural world, built on Google Earth, not unlike Second Life, but planned on real geographical space.

I think I'll go get myself some virtual space in the San Juans and start planning my new pad.

Actually, anyone know what this would take? Some server to host all the Google Earth 3D files?

(Building by deevee)

I've visited LA twice. Both times I was hugely unimpressed by downtown, the only highlight being Frank Gehry's design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A really stunning building that made up for the far more crappy EMP building in my former home city of Seattle. I'm glad that LA is now giving Gehry the run of 9 more blocks of downtown.

Social Suicide is a clothing label started by a couple of guys from Brunel University and the Royal College of Art, both of which I attended. Extremely beautifully made suits with a twist.

The perfect chair for Shannon. My version would probably be similar, but with DVDs and magazines replacing all the books.

I've just discovered Platial, which is a great personalized map creation site. Been looking for something this flexible for a while. I've started a map entitled "Buildings I've taken photos of". All it has in it at the moment is a pointer to my photos of Steven Holl's St. Ignatius Building in Seattle. But it's a start.

Thanks to Adam Machado for pointing to my hacked up iPod in a Moleskine on his blog Hackerati. Can't wait to see what he comes up with with his own version!

Cute plastic figures explain the web development process. Why? Because cute sells. That's why.

My two (current) favorite things to have with me are my 60Gb Video iPod (amazing machine) and my Moleskine notebook. Or rather my Moleskines, since I keep one (with graph paper) for work and one (with sketching paper) for personal/diary use.

I thought I'd have a go at combining these two (design classics) by buying a mini-Moleskine, carving out its innards, and fitting the iPod into it. The leather covers and the elastic strap for sealing it provide some decent protection, especially when the iPod itself is wrapped in a soft cloth.

This is definitely V1, but I though it was fun. I really need a slightly thicker Moleskine to seal the iPod in, and the pages flop about a bit too much. And the soft cloth is a bit of a pain. Still, those are things I can work on in a future version.

This article in the Telegraph is pretty shallow and only includes about 3 paragraphs of actual quotes from Ive, but he is a real inspiration. As designer for Apple he’s produced some amazingly focused, gorgeous products. He’s modest and passionate, and clearly cares deeply about every curve, bulge, glow, and motion.

When we lived in Seattle I used to groan when I switched channels and hit Saturday Night Live. They seem to have a “hit” rate (i.e. one that actually makes me laugh) of about 1 in 10, which is about 1/5th of what Seinfeld is capable of on a bad day. Add to that the fact that it’s so advertising heavy that you only seem to get one sketch between breaks. It feels like you get 4 sketches and a band per episode. Talk about stretching your material.

This sketch is the first one I’ve seen for a while which totally nails it, though. Maybe the fact that I’m in the technology industry makes it more appealing. But as a commentary on the pace of change and miniaturization of hi-tech, with some great observations of Steve Jobs’ mannerisms, it’s pretty awesome.

I've had a PSP now for a number of months. It's a great games machine with a dreadful lack of games. I still can't believe that this many months after release in the US the selection is still so awful. I wait in hope.

Its media capabilities have been played up quite a bit, and I bought a much needed 1Gb memory stick to make up for the 32Mb default, stuck a load of songs on it and have been carrying them around with me. But not really playing them. In my mind, the PSP barely qualifies as a decent music player because it lacks the one thing that's become standard in even the most basic MP3 devices - the ability to pick the songs to play based on the properties of the songs themselves. On the PSP you can't pick songs by album, by artist, by genre, or any of the other pieces of metadata you would expect. Instead, the system is based on folder, limited to two levels, with a list of songs that you cannot sort beyond the default, which I think is filename. I really think that's a little pathetic.

I've waited patiently as the firmwares upgrades have been released, expecting a fix, but instead we've got some really thin improvements. I've also waited patiently for the homebrew community to release a decent media manager, but instead they've stayed focused on visualizations and other things that just eat battery life.

To be honest, this is so basic I'm surprised not to have seen any fuss kicked up about it. Imaging the iPod experience if it was based only on a two level folder hierarchy, sorted by filename. It certainly would have hampered their carefully crafted, simple experience.

I've really admired the work of Rachel Whiteread, ever since my friend Matt and I took a late train out to Tower Hamlets to see House, a ghostly cast of the interior of a former terraced house. Reversed out electrical sockets, door and window surrounds and light switches really emphasized the sense of the formally occupied space, and the whole thing was made all the more poignant by the art works destruction a few weeks later.

Now, as part of the amazing set of installations at the Tate Modern that make up the Unilever Series, she’s installed thousands of casts of packing boxes, piled around like snowdrifts. It’s definitely not as intimate a piece of work as House, and it’s disappointing that, even with the thousands of boxes she was still not able to really fill the space, but walking around the maze, and finding new views of people and reflections is compelling.

Just saw this amazing wall construction system called Beco WALLFORM on Grand Designs. You just build the walls with these lightweight polystyrene lego-like "bricks" and fill them with concrete. Then you end up with really strong, highly insulated walls. Amazing.

Another great page full of people's moleskines.

BLU - website that uses the metaphor of a sketchbook.

As a sufferer of vertigo, I'm not sure I could cope with this proposal for a glass walkway over the Grand Canyon.

I was asked if some of my architecture images could be used on Architypes.net. The site is a collaborative wiki that's focused on describing architecture as a set of patterns , each of which correspond to an idea for successful architectural design. A pattern might, for example, descibe a way in which a building uses natural light or fits into it's environment. It's an interesting idea.
My shots are sprinkled around the site in different pattern descriptions, and also listed conveniently on this page.

Some really beautiful, curvy work at MAP, a design and illustration company based in California.

Pleasure cards. I like the concept of these cool, personal business cards with nothing on them but a pointer to your website.

Smart color pickers. "ColorBlender will generate a Photoshop and Illustrator Tables, email recipe to a friend, or suggest a Pantone match."

I think this design for a smoke detector from Snapalarm is total genius. No more screwing a plate to the ceiling. Pretty easy access. And it's more or less hidden away by the shade.

I thought this back to basics umbrella re-design was really interesting.

While I admire the emphasis that James Dyson has put on the difficult process of industrial design as part of the marketing of his vacuum cleaners I can't help but be disappointed with the one that we bought a year ago, just after we moved into our house. I've never had a cleaner that is so complex. Removing the hose from the back of the unit, particularly, takes quite a bit of strength and feels wrong, like it's being broken.

Our professional cleaners put it succinctly. "Should have got a Henry".

I love the dual nature of this idea. It's a kids playground roundabout, installed in a bunch of locations in South Africa, that pumps water from deep underground into storage tanks as the kids play.
Genius.

A beautiful movie, by Michal Levy, that combines the jazz of John Coltrane with the animation of architecture.

I thought that these bracelets by Franz Schnaas were pretty cool. Kind of a medical/bicycle aesthetic.

I thought this elevator re-imagined as a coffe stand was pure genius.

Shannon is taking a photo a day. I'm writing in my journal and doing at least one small sketch in it, also on a daily basis. Both of us find it tough to keep up, and feel guilty if we're late.
I can't even imagine what Micah went through in his [graphic journal], which obviously must have demanded a lot more from his time. Lovely work, though. Like his inspiration page, too.

Something else I'd definitely like to get into. Here's a blow-by-blow tutorial for how to print your own t-shirts.

Nice work this.

The VW van that I wish VW would make.

Google have another great service in Beta release. This time it's a map that you can use to show local services, get directions ets.
Here's all the Starbucks around Redmond town center, for example. Click on the tags that appear and they show the address and links to related websites.

Great article from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the evolution of portable audio. From the Transistor 8 to the Burton iPod Jacket, through boomboxes, the walkman and so on.

I've made the mistake of buying scooters before. I don't really make the time to ride them, and the roads around here don't feel that scooter friendly.
I'd sort of be willing to make the same unfortunate error if my scooter looked like this.
Honda Zoomer

Mike pointed me to the work of Aaron Jasinski. The site itself is really tasteful, designed by SectionSeven, and Aaron's work (both visual and audio) is really compelling.

I liked this visualisation by Paul Nixon of "Apple's Tipping Point" - how the different products map to High End, Hard to Resist and the Hot Spot of affordable (cheap).

Shannon and I have had discussions in the past about getting a tiny studio appartment in London that we could afford the mortgage for and stay in when we worked out of the London office, or wanted to go out late in the evening. Then friends who visited could stay there, too.

Anyway, something like this would be great, of course. Wouldn't mind just gutting a reasonable sized room and fitting it out with this kind of look.

Here are some highlights, though:
- A light that is designed to be mounted in a book shelf.

- Paint-by-numbers wallpaper.
- I'm a sucker for all things cubic, like this furniture.
- Thought this network-like wallpaper was also cool.

- This range of products from the MySpots design team based in Taiwan is cool, especially the USB wristband.
- David Mellor's stuff still looks cool.

- You can't really resist these tupperware-looking ceramic containers.
- This furniture that is also low-key fitness equipment was very cool. Not sure where we'd fit it in our house.

- Some cool wall mounted square plates that do different things like hold pictures or tea lights.

- This pebble supplier just makes me want to lay pebbles around the whole house.

- This is the place to go if you want a big stool shaped like a Delete key.
- Some really nice kitchen design work.