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Larry Tesler, who passed away on Monday, might not be a household name like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but his contributions to making computers and mobile devices easier to use are the highlight of a long career influencing modern computing.
...Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” when it comes to commands for removing, duplicating, or repositioning chunks of text.
— Gizmodo
After graduating with a degree in computer science from Stanford University, Tesler began working with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973 until 1980. PARC is most famously known for developing the graphical user interface we all use in computers today. From 1980 to 1997, Tesler... View full entry
City Roads, an online tool developed by software engineer Andrei Kashcha, allows users to search any city and instantly receive back only the streets by pulling data from OpenStreetMap. Simply search, click, and enjoy the beauty of urban planning. You can print your city of choice on a mug... View full entry
Recent computational tools that model the simulation of traffic, acoustics and heat conservation, among others, are allowing a more quantitative objective evaluation of forms.
The metrics could be expanded to include terrain maps, sun paths, existing trees and other environmental input, allowing the buildings to be highly adaptive to their context. The physics simulation could force certain boundary shape constraints.
— Joel Simon
Evolving Floorplans is an experimental research project created by a New York-based programmer, Joel Simon. When approaching floorplan design solely through the angle of optimization, a genetic algorithm arranges the rooms and the flow of people in a manner that minimizes things like walking time... View full entry
"We have been spending eight months in the neighborhood, getting ideas from the residents, thinking about how do we repurpose these vacant lots...They can't all just be parks" — The Pitch
Natalie Gallagher profiles Kansas City Art Institute alum and community/social practice artist, Sean Starowitz. Some of Starowitz's projects include; Fresh Bread, Bread KC, Lots of Love and the Talk Shop. View full entry
Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces [...]
As with any modular-robot system, the hope is that the modules can be miniaturized: the ultimate aim of most such research is hordes of swarming microbots that can self-assemble, like the “liquid steel” androids in the movie “Terminator II.”
— MIT News
MIT, you've done it again. And again. A team at CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has developed M-Blocks -- robotic cubes that can self-assemble into practically any configuration, through a system of carefully aligned magnets and flywheels. Even at their... View full entry
We present a system called CityEngine which is capable of modeling a complete city using a comparatively small set of statistical and geographical input data and is highly controllable by the user. — oldurbanist.blogspot.com
