For designers who love to draw by hand on real paper but want to store those sketches in the cloud, there is now a kind of a refined, tech-savvy etch-o-sketch in the form of the Rocketbook Wave Smart Notebook from self-described "notebook innovators" Joe Lemay and Jake Epstein. Using a special... View full entry
Apple Park is unlike any other product Ive has worked on. There will be only one campus—in contrast to the ubiquity of Apple’s phones and computers—and it doesn’t fit in a pocket or a hand. Yet Ive applied the same design process he brings to technological devices: prototyping to minimize any issues with the end result and to narrow what he calls the delta between the vision and the reality of a project. — WSJ. Magazine
“A lot of the buildings that are being built at the moment are products of software-only cultures,” says Ive. “Because we understand making, we’ll build [a prototype] and try it and use it, and see what works and what doesn’t.” View full entry
Those biophysical forces are like universal zoning rules for the biofilm cities: they govern how the inhabitants obtain food and building materials, how they can move and how they interact with one another. Just as urban planners use their knowledge of civil engineering principles and regulations to build better cities for people, microbiologists and bioengineers can use these rules to make objects more or less hospitable to the billions of cells that live in and around us. — Quanta Magazine
Biofilms are, essentially, omnipresent clusters of bacteria that foul everything from sewer lines to our teeth—99.9 percent of the simple cells called prokaryotes default to living in those close quarters among millions of their compatriots. Extracelluar matrix, a sticky combination of... View full entry
Xiang Guan, a recent graduate of Central Saint Martin's Industrial Design program, made a collection of furniture that can only function in the presence of its users—featuring a desk and chair that can't stand without support, and a lamp that only turns on when worn as a hat, his work... View full entry
It’s also striking that for all its fame Silicon Valley makes little impression on the visual consciousness of the world – there’s not a strong sense of what it actually looks like. Until now it has lacked landmarks. But that much power and that much money will not always be happy to be unobtrusive. We are only just beginning to see the ways in which it can change the landscape of cities. — The Guardian
Architecture critic Rowan Moore analyzes how tech giants Apple, Google, and Facebook are appointing world-famous architecture firms to design their increasingly extravagant office campuses, as symbols of their global power. “For the tech giants are now in the same position as great powers in the... View full entry
The Roomba robotic vacuum has been whizzing across floors for years, but its future may lie more in collecting data than dirt.
That data is of the spatial variety: the dimensions of a room as well as distances between sofas, tables, lamps and other home furnishings. To a tech industry eager to push “smart” homes controlled by a variety of Internet-enabled devices, that space is the next frontier.
— Venture Beat
Most of the available on the market 'smart home' devices, including lighting, thermostats and security cameras are still quite primitive when it comes to understanding their physical environment. All robovacs use short-range infrared or laser sensors to detect and avoid obstacles, but iRobot in... View full entry
Labeled with nice-sounding terms like “reproduction,”replica,” or “homage,” many designer chairs in offices, hotel lobbies, airports, restaurants and even big furniture stores are actually unauthorized copies. And while a knock-off Eames or Barcelona chair might seem like a harmless, budget-friendly addition to your living room, these illegal knockoffs threaten the economy and the environment, and erode the very meaning of design. — Quartz Media
For furniture designers, protecting intellectual property is challenging—IP laws for furniture in the US don’t protect function, so designers have to prove a unique element in their design to qualify for a patent. And even when a patent is obtained, its protections often do not apply in... View full entry
Peckham’s famous multi-storey car park has a new addition; a new viewing gallery created by Cooke Fawcett. The young practice, based in London’s creative Clerkenwell, was formed just two years ago, by directors Oliver Cooke and Francis Fawcett, after working on the Tate’s Switch House at... View full entry
Over thousands of years, the building science of timber framing developed independently in both Northern Europe and China. But one big difference between the regions is that China, by virtue of its size and geological traits, is prone to devastating earthquakes. Ancient Chinese builders thus needed a way to create wooden structures that could not be shaken apart, and that were not so stiff that its support members would shatter. — Core 77
Known as dougong, these earthquake-resistant series of brackets were designed and engineered roughly 500 B.C. When interlocked together, the joints transfer weight to supporting columns, containing so many redundancies they can not be shaken apart. By spreading their tolerances over multiple... View full entry
Studio Gang's 2017 Summer Block Party installation called the “Hive," opened to the public in the beginning of July. Since then, many have flocked to the National Building Museum in Washington D.C to experience the structure made of 2,700 wounded paper tubes. For those not near the D.C... View full entry
In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles. (Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)... View full entry
Due to the large influx of refugees, sheet walls of many temporary houses have begun to wear out. And there are other major constraints. There’s low water supply, deforestation, and extremely hot temperatures, and a rainy season which often results in heavy flooding. Plus Kalobeyei remote location creates many obstacles. There are no commercial flights to the area, and it can take up to 3 days to get there by road for the capital, Nairobi, where some materials may have to be sourced from. — UN-Habitat
Shigeru Ban has signed an agreement with UN-Habitat to design up to 12,000 new homes in the Kalobeiyei refugee settlement site in Northern Kenya. Commissioned in response to the settlement’s rapid growth, which is expected to outnumber its original capacity of 45,000 within a year, the new... View full entry
“One time I had a group of furious housewives on my doorstep, telling me I was doing them out of a job and that if they didn’t have to clean their houses, their husbands wouldn’t need them anymore, and I said, ‘Well, if you had more time to spend with your husbands, don’t you think they would like that better?’ ” — NYT
"For decades, Frances Gabe did not clean her house, nor did anyone clean it for her. Yet for all that time, it was spotless. Ms. Gabe, a once-celebrated inventor who died in obscurity late last year, was the creator, and long the sole inhabitant, of the world’s only self-cleaning house. In... View full entry
Shaped from survey responses from over 4,500 Memphians at multiple public events, The Memphis Riverfront Concept proposes to transform six miles and five distinct zones of the historic and culturally significant part of the city. Many of the Concept’s proposed uses, from an iconic adventure... View full entry
The average price of building a garage parking space (as much as $34,000 in 2012) is passed on to people whether they own a car or not, and distort the true demand for urban parking. — Quartz
According to the 2011 National American Housing Survey data of the US census, about 16% of a housing unit’s monthly rental cost is attributable to the expense of building an urban parking spot. For the average renter that amounts to to $1,700 per year, or $142 per month. Parking mandates... View full entry