BMW recently unveiled their new GINA concept car. They’ve taken the body panels of the car, typically sheet metal, plastic, or fiberglass, and replaced them with a stretchable cloth. Beneath the cloth there are a series of structural supports that can be moved around, changing the form of the car. These days, the rigidness, safety, and ride quality of a car is mostly affected by the structure of the vehicle, while the skin is mostly aesthetic. In this video, Chris Bangle (Director of Design at BMW) talks through some of the philosophies behind the study, and explains the implications it may have for BMW as a company moving forward. We won’t see it on the road any time soon, but GINA may represent a shift in focus at BMW toward non-traditional solutions to very traditional problems.
BVD Collective, a design team out of Appalachian State University’s Industrial Design department, has some great work on exhibit at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair 2008. They have created several luxury items from 100% post-consumer material. I saw the plastic knife lamp on display at the 2008 SouthEastern IDSA conference, and I’m excited to see it and other pieces get much more national attention. Be sure to check out the BVD Collective website for more information on the project, its origins, and the team behind it, as well as many more photos.
Designer David Andrew Bottom has built a very clever convertible seating/storage system, Rox Bench. The unit is a 3 seat bench with two end tables. The unit collapses, and the end tables turn into caps, making a storage box. There are also lights inside the bench that are charged through solar panels, so at night you have some nice underlit effects. The build quality looks great with a lot of attention to the details. (I love the hardware used) David, I’m a fan. Check out the Yanko Design post for more photos. I can’t find a website for David.
This table came up on The Apartment Therapy New York blog. Quite beautiful and, I think, very functional for anyone who uses their living room as a dining room as well. I’d love to see it in action.
TUAW had a post on a new city guide type website targeted to iPhone and iPod Touch users, Schmap. Schmap does a lot of the basic city guy type stuff, quite well I made add, but the thing that got my attention was the interface.
When you view information about a location holding the device upright, you get the typical information such as phone number, address, etc. However, when you turn the device 90º into a landscape orientation, the website switches into a split-screen display, with a map of the location on the left and information on the right. Mobile Safari can feed data on device orientation to the website you’re viewing, and this is the first developer I’ve seen really use this information in a big way.
This got me thinking about the future of device interfaces. We’re no longer just looking at button presses for application interaction. We’ve got so many more forms of input at our disposal now. Device orientation, touch, multi-touch, sound, ambient light, geographic location, acceleration… and these aren’t limited to the iPhone/Touch. Macbook Pros have all of these senses too, even though they’re not all natively reported by the operating system, yet.
I think, in the very near future, we will be flooded with devices that have new and natural forms of input. I’m still amused by the fact that when I’m trying a new application on my phone, and I’m trying to figure out how to do something, shaking the device is actually a logical thing to try.
