Nextek Power Systems... has developed a system for delivering power via DC to lights and motion sensors through a building’s metal frame, instead of through wires.

Paul Savage, chief executive of Nextek... said the current was not enough to electrocute anyone.

“If you licked your fingers you might get a little bubbly feeling, like if you put a nine-volt battery on your tongue, but it is not noticeable if you’re in a non-wet environment,” he said. — NYTimes

Games gurus and architects have much in common: both design the movement of people through space. Assassin's Creed: Revelations, set in 16th-century Constantinople, writes that similarity large.

To furnish the video-game's levels with verisimilitude, art director Raphael Lacoste and mission design director Falko Poiker turned draftsmen. They made a research trip to the city (today's Istanbul) to collect images that could be turned into computer graphics. — wired.co.uk

The appropriately named Alice Taylor, founder of MakieLab, a games and toys company based in London, agrees that 3D printing takes away the risk element of mass production, as you can print a product according to demand. — The Guardian

Mongolia is to launch one of the world's biggest ice-making experiments later this month in an attempt to combat the adverse affects of global warming and the urban heat island effect.

The geoengineering trial, that is being funded by the Ulan Bator government, aims to "store" freezing winter temperatures in a giant block of ice that will help to cool and water the city as it slowly melts during the summer. — guardian.co.uk

One winning project and two runners-up have recently been announced at the 2011 edition of the James Dyson Awards, an international student design award running in 18 countries. The first prize went to the entry 'AirDrop Irrigation' from Australia. Two top awards went to the design concepts 'Blindspot' from Singapore and 'KwickScreen' from the UK. — bustler.net

As his life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. “Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,” Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. — newyorker.com

It’s like a body brace with a backpack and gizmos that resemble shotguns near the knees. A physical therapist operates a remote control that makes the patient step when their body is properly aligned. — nydailynews.com

... the next wave of mobile applications do more than that—they collect massive amounts of data about how people live, where they travel and what they want to see in their neighborhoods. And they connect all of that with the officials in position to make decisions.

Apps, in other words, offer potential solutions for two of the trickiest parts of the urban planner's job: sharing data and engaging citizens. — theatlanticcities.com

Wojcicki said the new campus — three adjacent buildings including Frank Gehry-designed Binoculars Building — would also help Google attract candidates from area colleges and universities... The company's focus on Web search is evoked by the iconic binocular sculpture at the site, created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. — latimes.com

It turns out that Job’s masterful use of modern design could have been incubated by growing up in a home which was built by the father of the California modernist movement, Joseph Eichler. The idea is not too far fetched - in Walter Issicason's biography on the design pioneer, Jobs admits "that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market". —

Permits issued by Catawba County show that the Cupertino, Calif., company has been approved to reshape the slope of some of the 171 acres of vacant land it owns on Startown Road, opposite the data center, in preparation of building a solar farm. — charlotteobserver.com

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.” — nytimes.com

Countless academic studies have argued that studying design at school can be hugely beneficial, even for students who have no intention of becoming professional designers, because it builds their confidence by teaching them communication, planning and visualization skills, which will be useful in any field. Yet relatively few students in America’s cash-strapped public school system are given the chance to study design, or art, especially in deprived areas like Bertie County — New York Times

Cities are very complex, and what the best designers illustrate is how to give form to sometimes very simple ideas. Good design involves bringing not just a fresh eye to problems but, most of all, listening to the people who live in those communities. We’re talking about a billion people living in informal settlements today — New York Times

The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools. — edition.cnn.com