At CES 2012, Samsung introduced an amazing 46″ LCD transparent television with touch controls.
My office of the future will definitely have one of these.
Check out Core77′s post about it.
06
Jan
12
bocci
Bocci is a design firm in Vancouver, Canada with a couple lines of decorative pendants. Very nice photography…clearly, they love depth of field…or lack thereof.
Lalvani Studio explores morphogenomics as used in sculputure and architecture. Check out Haresh Lalvani’s TEDx Talk. The pieces in the pictures here are made in collaboration with the metal shop Milgo Bufkin.
Via the site The Inspiration Grid:
“Ephemera” Photo Series by Mark Laita, a photographer based in Culver City, California.
“Color, form and movement captured in a vessel of water after drops of colored dyes are introduced.”
22
Dec
11
aston martin’s OLED room
No wonder James Bond likes Aston Martin cars: It must be the lighting when you pick up the car. Wired has a great post about how Aston Martin builds their $1.7m One-77 supercar in a laboratory-clean facility. But the part I love is the dedicated space for when a customer receives their car:
“When customers make the pilgrimage to Aston Martin headquarters to take delivery of their One-77s, each is treated to an unveiling experience that’s nothing short of theatrical. Seated in a satin black room, a uniquely composed musical sequence fills the space from a Bang & Olufsen sound system. Five hundred organic LED lights hanging like tiny chandeliers start pulsing over the vehicle with a heartbeat, creating wave-like movements across the roofline and evolving into a choreographed shimmer that grows in intensity, finally shedding full light on the sheet metal below. The tease culminates with a musical crescendo, a sea of photons and the reveal of an impossibly sexy supercar.”
Turns out the lighting is Philips’ Lumiblades and the design was by Jason Bruges Studio.
I also love the shot of the surface defect review room: At first, I though this was the customer reception room!
15
Dec
11
atmospheric optics
Atmospheric Optics is a cool site showcasing all of Mother Nature’s delightful anomolys in the sky. The site has terrific simulations and detailed explanations about how the optical effects work, such as the classic crepuscular rays above. Although it is obvious in hindsight, it was sort of my personal equivalent of finding out that Santa Clause may not be real: Those glorious rays of light “radiating outward” from the sun are actually all parallel (just like any other time of the day); they just appear in perspective to us from the ground.
There are some truly amazing visual effects that make Hollywood’s usual assortment of alien invasion stuff look like child’s play, including several effects that show the impact of human activity on our sky.
Here are “light pillars” of artificial light reflecting off of water droplets:
The upper atmosphere vapor trail of a missile launch:
I’ll finish this post with the classic aurora (this picture from over Norway):
via Gizmodo.
13
Dec
11
lighting inspiration: bokeh
According to Wikipedia, “bokeh” is the photography term meaning “the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.”
The website Digital Photography School has some interesting examples of “bokeh”. Many of these are interesting conceptual inspirations for lighting designs.
Cool Hunting has a post about a new project Leo Villareal is trying to raise funds for: Adding dynamic lighting to the vertical cables of the San Francisco Bay Bridge.
The Bay Lights from Words Pictures Ideas on Vimeo.
Department stores’ holiday windows are often amazing little worlds in and of themselves, filled with color, sparkle, animation and humor. I was particularly caught by some of the windows at the French department store Printemps, designed by Karl Lagerfeld. via CoolHunting and Materialist.
Happy Holidays!
Philips Design has an interesting demonstration project called the “Microbial Home” that explores the use of methane gas and other natural end-to-end processes throughout the home. As one part of the project, Philips proposes a lighting fixture that uses methane gas to feed bioluminescent bacteria.
If you can imagine a future where certain buildings are plumbed with a methane feed, which is quite reasonable in certain areas, this is actually a viable concept, at least for decorative lighting installations.
28
Nov
11
chrysalis project
SolidSmack has an interesting article about the “Chrysalis Project” on Kickstarter, an effort by architect/programming experimenter Chris Chalmers. To summarize the article, Chris is developing an export function from Rhino’s Grasshopper add-on, to allow designers to export parametric models – and their controls — to a Processing language-based website. Above is a mockup of what his web storefront “Fabripod” might look like for creating a customized light fixture.
Chalmers made an excellent introductory video explaining how these technologies work: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1419987702/chrysalis-grasshopper-processing-for-online-making/widget/video.html
Below are some of the many parametric variations permissable from just this one model:
27
Nov
11
windscreen
Windscreen was a temporary installation at MIT by Howeler+Yoon Architects from Boston.
Straight from their site: “Windscreen creates an exterior screeen composed of an array of small-scale, vertical axis wind turbines. The spinning of these turbines self-powers their integral lighting, providing an active, moving, flickering screen that visibly indexes wind”.
The small turbines are mounted to a tensioned-cable structural net.
Very nice project…especially for windy Boston & Cambridge. It will be nice to see it scaled up to a permanent installation.
21
Nov
11
student concept: urban tiles
Via Inhabitat, here is an interesting design thesis concept from Meidad Marzan, who proposes a solar shading system consisting of servo-controlled rotating panels with photovoltaic panels on one side and OLED panels on the other. They charge during the day, and flip around at night to emit light. Marzan also proposes some alternative uses for the mechanical aspect of the system.
I always love to see new thinking and exploration of intergrated media + green systems into architecture. And part of me really likes the aesthetic of this student’s proposal. But the other part of me would love to see the system redesigned to eliminate the actual mechanical movement. Servos simply wear out, and maintaining them are cost prohibitive. No amount of engineering and wishes-for-cool-future-tech will change this fact.
11
Nov
11
sephora’s laser blasters
I love this street-front entrance to the below-grade Sephora store at the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. The pendants are made out of translucent red plastic with a frosted texture. Coupled with the cool white luminous walls, it totally looks like something straight out of Star Wars.
Can I hear a “pew-pew”?
At the Quai Branly Museum in Paris (itself in a very cool building by Jean Nouvel), I saw this awesome luminous wall in the temporary Maori exhibit. It is a simple design, a stick-framed box faced with 1/4″ MDF panels that were CNC cut and painted out all white. A couple fluorescent strips at the bottom of the box are all it takes to create a gorgeous wall that relates to the graphic arts of the New Zealand tribal group, the Maori.
Even though Microsoft goes and kills off the one product that actually looked like something from the future, at least they keep releasing awesome concept videos from their “Future Vision” series, offering a peak at what “technology may look like in 5-10 years.”
Like the previous video series from 2009, Microsoft gives us a glimpse at how media displays could be more tightly and cleanly integrated into architectural spaces via the use of new display technologies. The displays in Microsoft’s video are gorgeous and varied, including luminous, reflective, translucent, 3D, and projected.
Of course, if Microsoft actually wants to survive, they should be launching products like the Courier and some of the killer designs in these videos next year, not next decade. If they don’t, someone else will.
- RIP – Microsoft’s Courier – This should have been my Christmas present this year!
05
Nov
11
ango
Via Cool Hunter, I stumbled across Ango, a small company in Thailand that uses unique materials to great effect, including raw silk cocoons, rattan, hand soldered wire cages, and hand built-up polymer substrates. Sounds labor intensive, but the end results are organic…both literally and aesthetically.
04
Nov
11
glowing bubble chair
Check out this stylish glowing acrylic chair.
Sexy design…LEDs concealed in the outer bezel firing back into etched acrylic. From the UK design company Rosseau.
via TrendHunter
04
Nov
11
lighting inspiration: hypnosky
I found these very cool ’80s retro style graphics with lots of luminosity from a Russian artist called Hypnosky:
Math and I don’t get along all that well, even on simple formulas. So that is why I love this “rule of thumb” from Wikipedia:
“Doubling the distance reduces illumination to one quarter”
