Published on February 11, 2008
I still do it the old fashioned way… my mug and CPU are separate, but Jason Farsai has a better idea. His Yuno concept turns your insulated coffee mug into an internet appliance. Think of it as bringing your Dashboard Widgets with you to the breakfast table.
Now that flexible displays are reaching commercial practicality, and wireless data options have saturated our lives, I expect that we will see a lot of exciting concepts like this becoming a reality. Cool concept Jason, and those are some beautiful renderings/composites.
Via: Yanko Design Blog
Published on January 2, 2008
We could be on the verge of an energy crisis… Oil just hit $100 a barrel (a combination of increased world-wide demand, and the declining value of the US Dollar I believe) so alternative energy sources are becoming more and more important. Solar seems like a no-brainer to me. We have all of this energy bombarding us every day, and it’s a shame that we don’t capture more of it. The SunTable looks like a cool concept for a small patio or deck.
There’s certainly no shortage of solar panels of various shapes and sizes that’ll let you charge and use your various gadgets outdoors, but those looking for a slightly more permanent solution now have a new option to consider courtesy of the folks at Sudia Design Labs, which recently introduced its appropriately-named SunTable. In addition to comfortably sitting six people, it’s able to provide up to 150 watts of power and recharge fully in just three hours of direct sunlight. To make use of all that juice, the table also comes with an inverter to let you plug in a laptop or other device and, naturally, it includes some LEDs to inform you of its status. As you might have guessed, however, that convenience comes at quite a cost ($3,600), and you’ll have to act fast, as there’s only fifty of the tables up for grabs, with ‘em set to start shipping on March 15th.
- Engadget
Price is a bit prohibitive for all but the wealthy right now, but solar panel efficiency and product is getting better all the time, so I hope that some day soon this concept will be only marginally more expensive than a standard table.
To move the discussion a bit broader, I have been wondering about solar power generation a lot lately. The sun sends this energy to the planet constantly, and a solar panel can grab some of it and turn it into power. However, considering the law of conservation of energy, would this affect the environment at all? It seems that less energy would be reflected back into our atmosphere, into space, or into the ground. Are solar panels just at a scale small enough that the environment would never be affected?
Published on December 21, 2007
I saw this over at the Yanko Design Blog. A very clever solution to a problem that I think we all probably experience, but don’t really consider fixable.
Raise Me Up is an electric powerstrip designed to make it easy for one handed operation. Normally you would have to brace a powerstrip with one hand while pull the plug with the other. Raise Me Up uses a simple lever switch to connect and disconnect plugs.
Designer: Yoo-Kyung Shin
Via: Easy Plugs - Yanko Design
Published on November 21, 2007
Wired presents this image tour of Frog Design’s process. It’s a great look into the workings of a big-time design firm. It’s also great to see Industrial Design getting some more main-stream media exposure.
Gadgets aren’t immaculately conceived, in spite of what seems like lightning-speed development. That new gizmo you’ll love (or hate) for a few months before discarding received countless hours of attention and forethought from a sizable team of designers, engineers and researchers. Long before most products hit the retail shelf, a company’s design team or an outside design consultancy spends maybe a year on them, usually in complete secrecy.
Wired News peeks into product design with Frog Design, a Palo Alto, California, consultancy responsible for such hits as Sony’s first Trinitron and the case for the portable Apple IIc. The first six slides take you from the discovery phases to the final working prototype. The final five look at the machines and material used in the process.
Birth of a Gadget: Inside the Industrial Design Process
Published on October 19, 2007
Merlin Mann at 43 Folders sat down with Scott Underwood from IDEO (an amazing Industrial Design studio) for an hour long talk. They discussed a lot of productivity related subjects, like GTD (Getting Things Done). You can catch the video here:
http://www.43folders.com/2007/10/08/merlin-ideo-talk
We talked about Getting Things Done, life hacks, knowledge work, nostalgia for scarcity, and the problem of getting addicted to productivity advice, among many other topics. This one’s a tour de force.
