The anticipation of what you'll see at the top of a tower can be exciting. Going down, though? Comparatively, that's a drag. Why go down the stairs or the elevator like a sucker when you can slide on down?

That seems to have been the thought process that went through the mind of London architecture firm Bblur, who have engineers a 584-foot slide that wraps around the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a sculptural observation tower that stands in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

The tower itself is 375-feet tall, making it the tallest sculpture in the U.K. Up until the possibility of whooshing down on your greased butt becomes a reality, the main reason to ascend the tower has been an installation of giant mirrors designed by international artist Anish Kapoor. Supplemented by gigapixel viewers that let you zoom in on London's skyline in real time, the exhibit allows you to interactively explore the architecture and design history of the English capital from the Orbital summit.

Let's face it, though. Now that the AccelorMittal Orbital will also be host to the country's largest slide, that's likely to be the tower's big attraction. The descent will take about 40 seconds, meaning you'll travel at a speed of about 14 feet per second, or 15 miles per hour: about half the speed you'd attain in your first second of free-fall. Here's a pro tip from my halcyon playground days: sneak in a piece of wax paper for your butt to boost those speeds.

The slide won't be free: when it opens in spring 2016, it'll cost about $8 a ride, compared to a $15 entry feet to the tower itself. As you descend, transparent panes in the slide will allow you to snatch a glimpse of over 20 miles of London skyline. Or you could walk the tower's 455 steps to the ground—like a sucker. Every tower and skyscraper should have a slide, don't you think?

There's a reason lamps were the first electrical gadgets: they're simple. A simple switch opens or closes the connection between an electric current and a light bulb. The filament in the light bulb heats up from the electricity, and voila. Let there be light.

Like I said, simple. Elegant. But it's a simplicity and elegance that is hidden away inside a lamp, where you can't really appreciate it. As part of their Node series of lamps, The Odd Matter Design Studio has taken the elegance of a lamp's mechanism and externalized it as a sculptural part of the body itself.

Made out of copper and jesmonite (gypsum suspending in acrylic, like a sort of sculptable drywall) the Node series of lamps transform their shapes by opening and closing, like barettes or safety pins. When they do so, they physically close the electrical circuit, which in turn lights up their LED bulbs.

About the Node series, Odd Matter writes:

A lamp has a particularly interesting transformation as it changes to deliver something which is not initially there. It exists to deliver light but light does not take part of the physicality of the object. This suggest that a lamp is a sculptural object when light isn't present and its function begins with its transformation towards delivering light. A lamp therefor is a medium between us and light and the act of turning it on and off is essential as well as symbolic in relation to the object... Node aims at being a very direct and simple way of describing this.

There's five different versions of the Node Lamp, all of which look in part like elegant, quasi-scientific lab objects. There's a feeling about them almost that they could be used in a science museum to teach curious children about how lamps work... or, at least, how lamps worked before dimmers.

[via Design Milk]

For designer Ken Carbone, an apple a day keeps the designer doldrums away. An occasional Co.Design contributor, as well as the co-founder and chief creative director of New York's Carbone Smolan agency, Carbone has committed to designing a different apple every day for all of 2015. The only rule is no two apples can be designed the same way.

Using everything from clay to watercolors to pencils to iPhone apps, Carbone has designed over 180 apples to date. But Carbone didn't set out to design a different apple every day: the original apple was drawn on a whim. When he was done with it, Carbone posted the image to his Instagram account, and for no particular reason, captioned it: An Apple a day, No. 1."Once I did that, I figured I was committed," Carbone laughs.

It's a very different type of design work than the intensive campaigns Carbone Smolan has created for W Hotels, Morgan Stanley, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Musee du Louvre, and more. Yet as a designer, Carbone says that he finds the exercise extremely fulfilling... so much so that he recommends it, or something like it, to other designers.

"It's kind of design yoga for me," Carbone says. "As designers, we're so bombarded all the time, and the velocity of life becomes merciless. For me, this has become a great tonic to that. As a designer, I just feel there's a lot of value in doing a simple exercise every day that taps into your artistic side while removing you from the frantic pace of modern life."

Carbone also feels that his Apple A Day project has allowed him to address his client work more nimbly. While the project might not be the kind of heavy design lifting Carbone has to regularly do for his firm's clients, it's still a deep design problem. It requires him to regularly try new approaches and new tools, reappraise his design methodology each and every day, and be tenacious.

"When you do design on our scale, you have to stick with it until the end, not be afraid of a blank page, and constantly reasses what you're doing" Carbone tells me. "In a small way, this project reflects all of that."

Carbone says he will continue to design his apples until the end of the year. You can follow him on Instagram to keep up with the project.

Typewriters are beautiful objects. They are charming and ingenious in a way that only something analog can be. They make sounds that strike a chord even in those born long after the thwack-thwack of a type hammer smacking against the page, or the brrring of the carriage being slapped to the next line, were replaced with the mundane silence of the word processor. No wonder we're nostalgic for them.

But functionally? Typewriters suck. Even if you do nothing but type words in the simplest text editor, computers are just infinitely better than typewriters. (One word: "backspace.") Don't believe me? Ignore twee typewriter emulators: here's an online typewriter emulator that will make you want to take a sledgehammer to each and every one of Tom Hanks' vintage typewriters.

It's called OverType, and it was designed by Ben Wheeler after a conversation with his son about what using a typewriter was really like. He writes:

It started because I was trying to tell my kids about how typewriters worked (because of course they've never seen one), and all the existing typewriter simulators that I could find on the web get one very basic thing wrong—when you press backspace, they erase the character you just typed, like a computer. On a real typewriter, backspace simply moves the carriage back one space, allowing you to overtype a previously typed character. Erasing requires Tipp-Ex or suchlike.

One day my youngest son suggested I should write one that works the right way and allows overtyping. This seemed like it would be an interesting challenge ... and indeed it was.

Using OverType is like vividly remembering what it was like to get around with a broken arm. Everything you take for granted about modern keyboards is explicitly painful to do in Overtype.

Do you type over 30 words per minute? OverType will skip letters, simulating jamming. Do you have a long letter to write? OverType's simulated ribbon will run out of ink halfway through. Are you interested in simulating the experience of typing on an older typewriter? Keys will completely break at random. Forget line-wrapping: on a typewriter, the only way to get to the next line was a hard carriage return, meaning that in OverType, you're constantly on edge that your words will run off the page. And don't expect clean typesetting: even the best typewriter is going to make your lines jagged.

The star, though, is the delete key. Using Overtype for more than a few minutes will make you want to dip the delete key on your laptop in 24-karat gold, because, as Wheeler says, there was no deleting back in the typewriter days: you just had to type over your mistake, resulting in sloppy, illegible manuscripts that needed to be laboriously retyped to be presentable.

Maddening though it is, I really like OverType. Unlike other typewriter emulators, Overtype isn't trying to fool you into believing that typewriters were somehow a more efficient, more writerly way of writing. Nostalgia aside, typewriters were ill-tempered beasts with which writers constantly had to wrestle to do simple things we all take for granted today. It's ironic that in today's obsession with minimalist writing apps, the typewriter has somehow become symbolic of a cleaner, distraction-free era of writing, because the reality is that the actual act of using a typewriter was as messy a distraction as any writer has ever had to deal with. Overtype is a love letter to modern computers, written on the shitty (but beautiful and charismatic) gadget that our Macs and PCs replaced. Good riddance.

We've seen before how much potential depth-sensing cameras have when it comes to the future of special effects. But a new algorithm from Disney Research could make it possible to do sophisticated video special effects without accurate depth information. Which doesn't sound that exciting, but make no mistake: this is revolutionary stuff that could soon literally make every video you shoot with any ol' camera phone look like it came from Hollywood film equipment with Hollywood special effects.

Depth sensors like the one in the Microsoft Kinect are great for special effects because they allow cameras to clearly distinguish one object in a frame from another. They do this by essentially scanning a room with invisible beams, creating a 3-D model of the scene directly before the camera, called the 'scene space'. Using this data, depth sensing cameras can be used to do things like remove objects from a shot, augment reality with digital models, post-process videos after the fact

That means depth-sensing cameras only make special effects easier in very controlled circumstances. But a new paper published by a team led by Felix Klose at Disney Research Zurich has come up with an algorithm that can extrapolate a highly-accurate scene space from inaccurate—or even totally missing—3-D depth data.

In a demo reel, Klose and his team show off some of the possibilities. By running it through their algorithm, which essentially simulates a 3-D 'scene space' by tracking pixels frame-by-frame from video file, Disney was able to create sophisticated action cam shots from a video of a skateboarder doing some tricks, copying the skateboarder and freezing him in mid-air. Likewise, they demonstrate how they can easily remove objects from a scene, make them transparent, refocus a video after-the-fact, deblur an object in a video, denoise a video so it appears crystal clear in dark lighting, and more. Magic stuff.

In short, what we're talking about here is an algorithm that can make any video you shoot on a smartphone look like it was shot with something closer to a Red. It's efficient enough to run on any desktop or laptop, but can add sophisticated post-processing effects to any old video: the kind of stuff a pro would usually need to spend hours in Adobe After Effects to accomplish. An algorithm that, in their paper, Disney Research seems to indicate could conceivably come to smartphones eventually.

Your dog's Snapchat may never be the same.

Via: PSFK

There are lots of great apps out there for couples trying to get pregnant, or avoid it. Now, there's a wearable that promises to help women track their fertility more accurately.

Your body's basal temperature is an important thing for any woman trying to get pregnant, but tracking it can also be a bit of a pain. Used in conjunction with a chart or tracking app, a basal thermometer will register the minutest temperature variations, but it needs to be used regularly at the same time every day (usually right after you wake up) for you to actually spot the tiny 0.4 to 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in your basal temperature that happens after ovulation.

Yono Labs thought tracking a woman's fertility should be a lot easier, so they've created a new in-ear wearable that women can wear to make keeping track of their basal temperature a lot more seamless.

The Yono in-ear device slots into a woman's ear when she goes to sleep. Unlike a normal basal thermometer, the Yono in-ear device automatically measures its owners temperature up to 70 times per night, then beams it over Bluetooth to the Yono app, which analyzes the data and recommends an optimal fertility window based on the data.

What makes the Yono solution such a good one is it takes the possibility of human error out of the equation. Basal temperature readings are notoriously finicky: not only do you need to do it consistently for 30 to 60 days to build up a reliable dataset, but a single restless night's sleep or bout of insomnia can wreak havoc with your data. Yono sidesteps all of this by doing all of the work for you, getting a much better picture of your basal temperature by reading it all night long: all you need to remember is to put it in your ear when you go to bed.

Yono hasn't announced an official price for their wearable yet. They are currently sending out working samples to a select focus group, and will be following it up with a pre-order campaign in the coming months. You can register to hear from Yono when they go live here.

The Model 3107 Chair—known more often by its official nickname, the Series 7—might very well be the most popular designer chair in the world. Inspired by Charles & Ray Eames' work with moulded plywood, over 55 million units have been produced since Arne Jacobsen designed the first Series 7 was produced in 1955. It's also believed by many to be the most widely copied chair design in the world.

It seems appropriate, then, that to celebrate the 60th anniversary of their iconic chair, Danish furniture brand Fritz Hansen commissioned seven architects to make copies of the Series 7 in the likeness of their own signature styles. The project is called 7 Cool Architects, and the "cool architects" in question are Bjarke Ingels, Carlos Ott and Carlos Ponce de León, Jean Nouvel Design, Jun Igarashi, Neri & Hu, Snøhetta and Zaha Hadid Design.

Although all of the designs in question stay true to the graceful, sinuously curving form of the Series 7, they all reimagine it in various ways.

Zaha Hadid's bright green interpretation replaces the legs of the chair with a tripod of steel loops, which "sweep down to the ground and reach up to embrace the undulating shape of the iconic plywood seat."

Bjarke Ingels, on the other hand, turned the Series 7 into a sculpture by taking a dozen odd Series 7 shells and stacking them with springs in between, creating a kind of Series 7 slinky.

Snøhetta, meanwhile, took the shell of a Series 7 and made it the centerpiece of a small garden. "Since we set the chair free, we felt that the chair could be used for a large number of our projects," they said. "We try to maintain a good link to the outdoors throughout all our work and that's why an outdoor chair is perfect for our projects."

Jean Nouvel Design joined two Series 7 chairs together, facing in opposite directions, and reinterpreted them as the Chinese yin-yang.

Similarly, Chinese studio Neri & Hu's Series 7 concept joins two chairs together in opposite directions, but elegantly joins them with an S-shaped brass arm, joined in the middle by a small coffee table. (This is probably my favorite design.)

From Uruguay, Carlos Ott and Carlos Ponce de León covered the Series 7 chair in upholstery inspired by a vertical garden by Spanish landscape designer Ignacio Solano Cabello, making it look like an immaculately groomed lawn from above.

Finally, Japanese designer Jun Igarashi replaced the moulded plywood of the original Series 7 with chipboard, created from scraps of wood reclaimed from Earthquake rubble.

The 7 Cool Architects chairs will be on display as part of September's London Design Festival 2015, if you want to see them in person. Sadly, though, none are available for sale.

From the sun breaking over a black alien monolith to the trippy, transcendent space baby, there are few films which have imprinted themselves upon imaginations as strongly as Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, book giant Taschen is releasing a sumptuously designed and exhaustively researched tome dedicated to the sci-fi masterpiece.

Designed by M/M Paris—who previously designed Taschen's book Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made—after the same scaled-down proportions as 2001's monolith, The Making Of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey aims to be the most authoritative reference on the subject ever written. First published last year in a limited-edition run of only a couple thousand, it's now available for everyone.

We asked author Piers Bizony some questions about the experience of writing the book, as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey's lasting contributions to cinematic design. Here's what he told us.

Could you tell me a little bit about yourself, and how this book got off the ground?

When I saw 2001 as a kid, there was nothing to compare it with. It was utterly new and unexpected. I am just one among countless thousands of people whose imaginations were fired up by seeing it. Even today, after nearly half a century, so much of this film looks more convincing than modern science fiction CGI extravaganzas. The sheer physicality of the sets and special effects is extraordinary. The film got me interested in science and cosmology, and also introduced me to photography and the visual arts. Kubrick was, and still is, a fantastic creative mentor.

What was researching and writing this book like?

Frustrating and exciting in equal measure. I spent countless long days at the Kubrick Archive in London, looking at images and trawling through documents. It was several weeks before I got a handle on the film's early scripting process, or the sequence of events during 2001's four year-long production phase. But then there would be days when an anonymous stack of brown envelopes would turn out to contain pristine large format negatives, or a document wallet would have this fabulous handwritten note from co-screenwriter Arthur Clarke to Stanley, and so on. Amid the hard slog of research, there were frequent rewards of stunning treasures. Writing the book came from an urge to share these discoveries. Enthusiasm for your subject helps nudge you toward a well-crafted paragraph.

What were the challenges you faced in writing this book? Were there any specific layout challenges that need to be addressed?

The M/M design company in Paris suggested making the book the same shape as the black alien monolith that appears in the film. In conventional book design terms, this was crazy, because the monolith's proportions are too tall and narrow to accommodate anything like a normal shape of page. Sometimes, when you are faced with something that the world tells you shouldn't be done, that's a great reason for doing it. The layout problems were a real headache, but the result is a book whose pages you often have to unfold in complicated ways in order to get at the larger images and visual layouts. It's like unpacking the mysteries of the monolith itself. The entire physical structure of the book is insane, and that's why it's wonderful.

What do you think the most important contributions that 2001 made to cinematic design?

One of the qualities that sets this film apart is its insistence on visual and auditory storytelling at the expense of dialogue. 2001 was resolutely cinematic. There are no warm, cuddly heroes to root for. The astronaut characters in 2001 are pretty bland as people. For this reason, the film is often thought of as cold and clinical, but the grandeur of its images, and the thrilling power of its philosophical questions, often leaves audiences breathless with emotional excitement. 2001 is like Marmite. You either love it or you hate it.

If there was one thing you think everything should know about 2001 that isn't common knowledge, what would it be?

For many months, Kubrick and his team tried to figure out some way of showing alien creatures at the end of the film. They build costumes that looked like giant insects. They dressed actors in glowing polka dots, and created alien cityscapes that looked like nighttime Las Vegas filtered through an acid trip. The boldest decision any visual artist can make is deliberately to not show something, and this is where Kubrick eventually ended up. By not showing the aliens, he gave them an immense presence in 2001.

What is the enduring legacy of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Every modern SF film that we see, from Star Wars to The Martian, draws inspiration about what the future should look like from 2001. Yet this incredible, important film went into pre-production nearly half a century ago. What a strange thought. It's as if the real world is still trying to catch up with what Kubrick showed us.

You can order Piers Bizony's The Making Of Stanley Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey at Amazon here.

Most bars require you to actually order a drink to get drunk. Sam Bombas of Bombas & Parr thinks that's just wasting time. The U.K. architecture firm has just unveiled a new bar in London's Borough Market which gets you drunk without drinking. It's called Alcoholic Architecture, and its a bar defined by its signature cocktail: an aerosolized cloud of alcohol that patrons start breathing as soon as they walk through the door.

From cooking with lava to multi-sensory fireworks you can taste, Bombas & Parr is known for its whimsical and unconventional design approach. "One of the frustrations of doing things like flooding buildings with booze that people have to boat across before drinking it is that they are so short lived," Bombas tells me. "We always wanted to open a bar and Alcoholic Architecture is the bar from our wildest fantasies, made into reality."

Located next to the U.K.'s earliest Gothic cathedral, and on the site of an ancient monastery, Alcoholic Architecture's conventional cocktail list sticks to a monastic theme: Benedictine, Chartreuse, Trappist beer, mead, and Buckfast, which Bombas describes as "a fortified wine so savage that Scotland's Parliament is reportedly drafting legislation to stop the caffeinated intoxicant from entering their country."

But the star of the show is actually invisible: the alcoholic miasma that permeates every breathable inch of the bar. A 1:3 ratio combination of spirits and mixers that has been aerosolized, the breathable brew is so potent that imbibers need to actually don special protective suits, to limit how much skin (and, more specifically, mucus membranes) are exposed to it. It's apparently pretty heady stuff, which will get you drunk 40% quicker than drinking the same mixture in liquid form like some kind of pleb or something. And for boozy dieters, great news: that 40% reduction also applies to the calories you're ingesting.

Of course, Bombas & Parr are incorrigible hedonists, so ultimately, they want you to supplement breathing in alcohol with more traditional drinks from their cocktail list. Which means that at Alcoholic Architecture, things are designed to get out of control very quickly.

"Picasso once said that good taste is the enemy of creativity," says Bombas. "We love bad taste. It is very playful and polarizing. So with this we are really plumbing the depths. In many ways we are creating a modern version of a tiki bar. Through creating this faux fantasy land we give adults license to play in ways which they might not otherwise have."

You can book tickets to attend Alcoholic Architecture for yourself here.

French artist Baptiste Demombourg does outsider sculptures that repurpose old or broken objects, like making an indoor tidal wave out of smashed old windscreens. His latest piece is just as weird, but feels a tad less post-apocalyptic: it's like a time-lapse photo of a crazy upside-down roller coaster, made out of standard European café chairs.

Standing in the public square of the Place du Boufay in Nantes, France, Stellar is an aerial sculpture that takes its inspiration from Robert DuLaunay's 'Palais de L'Air,'a design from the 1937 Paris World Fair that shares the same colorful loop-de-loop pattern. But there's nothing aerial about Demombourg's medium here: he's using 1,200 different chairs in red, green, yellow, and blue, attached to rails.

Stellar has been set up in the Place du Bouffay as a sort of dramatic acrobatic tribute to the kind of people watching and café socializing that is a standard part of French life. According to Demombourg, each chair is meant to be representative of a person; by swooping up in two arc de tired rumps, the sculpture is meant to contradict the gravity of the regular café-goers rooted to the ground.

You can see Stellar in person until August 30. I love it. Outside of a roller coaster, Stellar reminds me of one of those crazy Japanese bike garages. It's like someone took the same Rube Goldberg-style approach to storing empty café seats when they're not being used.

PixelSorter is a new Twitter bot by developer Way Spur-Chenn that automatically glitches out any image you tweet its way.

After mentioning PixelSorter in a tweet with an uploaded image, it will then download the image, and begin segmenting an image into rows or columns according to their hue, brightness, luminance, etc. A few moments later, PixelSorter will @reply you with its own glitched-out version of the image you just uploaded.

If you want to get technical, there are many more parameters you can use to get PixelSorter spitting out specific kinds of glitchy images. For example, if you want your image to be filtered using PixelSorter's "Drip" glitch, you can specify "preset[drip]" in your tweet. And there are a lot of other presets and custom parameters you can try for yourself if you're feeling adventurous.

It's a fun little diversion, considering Twitter bots and glitch art are two of our favorite things here at Co.Design. Mash up the two, and look—the post writes itself.

Now if someone would just come up with a Twitter bot that writes a Co.Design post every time another Twitter bot makes some glitch art, we can automate this whole process.

On a sunny day, even an air-conditioned building can be too warm. A predominate factor is simply your windows, which let in heat in the form of invisible ultra-violet light even if they're insulated and well-sealed. But a new advance in glass-making technology might change that, allowing your windows to block out light and heat-raising ultraviolet light, interchangeably.

A new type of glass has been invented by a group led by Delia Milliron, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. It's basically a new type of smart glass, a glass that clouds over and blocks out light when it is exposed to an energy source like heat or electricity. Think transition lensed eyeglasses, but for buildings.

Some types of smart glass can already help keep air-conditioning costs down by blocking out wavelengths of light, but historically, they haven't been able to block out ultraviolet. This new type by Milliron and her team can.

Here's how it works. Milliron's approach uses a framework of nanocrystals made of an electrically conductive material, embedded in glass. The nanocrystals can either block ultraviolet light or allowthem to pass through, while the glass can transition from transparent to opaque, darkening or lighting in response to energy. In the end, the nanocrystals can block up to 90% of UV light and 80% of visible light. Windows made of such glass can transition between three modes: the standard bright and dark modes of traditional smart windows, which block or let in visible light, and a cool mode, which saves on electricity bills by blocking out invisible ultraviolet light wavelengths that can penetrate even a smart glass window gone dark.

Milliron says that the technology is sufficiently advanced for her to go ahead with a new start-up, Heliotrope Technologies, which will bring it to market. And she says that her glass is actually easier to manufacture than many other types of smart glass, which generally suffer from slow yields and requires a lot more energy to work. Although smart glass has been around for decades, it's still relatively rare to see installed in the wild. Maybe this new leap will finally change all that.

[via MIT Technology Review]

From the beer we drink to the polio vaccine, humankind has a symbiotic relationship with all sorts of micro-organisms—but we we tend to not think of them as our roommates. Living Things is a new exhibition by Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier of the Mattress Factory that imagines the home of the near future, in which human beings have integrated bubbling tanks of edible luminescent algae into their mid-century-inspired furniture.

Currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh until March 27, the Living Things exhibit isn't quite as gross or outré as it sounds. It's made up of three rooms—a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room—which prominently contain glass vessels of algae, connected to one another by a half-mile of plumbing and wiring. Douenias and Frier call this photosynthetic furniture. The vessels are wired to both heat and light the room; in doing so, they also cause the algae within the tanks to grow, pumping oxygen into the room. Eventually, the algae grows so thick it can be harvested, and even eaten.

A recent graduate from Carnegie Mellon's School of Architecture, Douenias originally set out to explore the possibility of a hypothetical building that could produce its own biofuel. Although that project didn't pan out, it did inspire Douenias to pursue Living Things. "I began exploring the idea that photosynthetic algae alongside a variety of other impressive microorganisms represent a massive, relatively untapped resource, capable of being harnessed to improve the wellbeing of people," he tells me.

Although each of the nine vessels in the Living Things exhibition do roughly the same thing by serving as aesthetically pleasing bioreactors cum lamps and heaters, they've been slightly tweaked according to where they are meant to be positioned in the home. "In the kitchen area we built out a control station which allows the maintenance of each of the vessels," says Douenias. "It also allows for the [algae] to be harvested and later to be stored or consumed. In the living room larger vessels are used, which provide a glow to read by and which radiate heat from their internal lights and back-up heaters to people sitting nearby. And in the dining area the vessels are smaller and for accent, perhaps small enough to provide a snack."

Living Things is hardly the first design project we've seen recently that harnesses algae in different ways; we have also recently covered a facehugging helmet and a belt by MIT's Neri Oxman that feed their wearers. According to Douenias, we should expect to keep seeing these sorts of projects, because algae is an amazing medium for designers.

"Micro algae present a unique opportunity to designers," he says. The absence of a superstructure to organize their anatomy allows the liquid suspension in which they live to be treated more like a material than a plant. In the hands of an architect, industrial designer, engineer, or systems designer this liquid plant becomes a living material which can be integrated symbiotically into the architectural environment."

Who knows? Maybe the house that runs its own biofuel isn't that far off.

Is there anything sadder than a blind kitten? Yet Wanderment, a new indie game by developer Andrew Wang, makes the journey of a blind kitten across town into one of the joyous, magical interactive experiences you can have on a computer. It feels like the sort of game Hayao Miyazaki would have made if he'd been born in the computer age.

The premise of Wanderment is very simple. You play a blind kitten who is trying to get to a friend across town. You can't see, but you can sense the world around you by jumping, running, brushing up against things, and feeling. And this is where Wanderment becomes more than just a black browser window of a game, because every time your kitten senses his surroundings, the world explodes in a rainbow-hued burst of particles, outlining the geometry of the invisible world around you.

Wanderment was made in 72 hours for Clonejam, a regular event in which indie game developers are asked to design a game over a weekend inspired by a featured developer's work. In Wanderment's case, this developer was Jord Farrell, who designed similar particle-based games like Leap Before You Look and Goodnight.

The whole game only takes around 10 minutes to play, but it's a powerful 10 minutes. Most games are so overt, but what makes Wanderment so good is how it toys with the possibility of suggestion. The world your kitten explores is only revealed in tantalizing glimpses that explode like fireworks all around you. Playing the game, you are both part of this world, and not part of it; a nyan cat ghost, streaking through a firefly world.

When you reach the end of the game, and meet up with your black feline friend (who streaks beside you if you decide to further explore) the title's pun becomes clear: This is a game less about wandering than wonderment. Play it here.

In India, rape is a depressingly common occurrence. According to official statistics, rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India; nearly 25,000 women reported being raped in 2012 alone, and the actual number of rapes that occurred that year are believed to be far higher.

To help Indian women protect themselves against rape, Vodafone tasked Oglivy Mumbai with designing an umbrella that also, when open, coaches women on how to use it like a weapon. And while that seems like an approach to rape prevention worthy of Oswald Cobblebot), it's actually smarter than you think.

First, some context. In India, millions of men from remote areas have been forced to leave their families to work in bigger cities or abroad. Vodafone runs a money transfer service called M-Pesa which allows these men to send money home to their wives, who can pick up their money locally. But being attacked when actually collecting the money remains a major issue for those women.

Vodafone distributed 200 umbrellas to woman in villages in the Uttar Pradesh province and plans to roll out the project to other provinces including Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Punjab. The umbrellas don't become swords, tasers, or machine guns, but when combined with the right techniques—jabbing, opening it up in an attackers face, etc.—its creators believe it can be an effective self-defense tool.

That's a great approach to this problem. First, India has the world's highest population of illiterate adults, with a full 63% of the population unable to read or write. The Self-Defense Umbrella's diagrams teach women self-defense principles without assuming literacy, many of which can be practiced even if they don't have their umbrella on them.

Even just from a promotional point of view, this is a clever product. Umbrellas are a common promotional give-away, because they're relatively cheap to make and people tend to keep them around. What's a better way to engender brand loyalty than to use a cheap promotional give-away to help your customers defend themselves from a violent, violating, and distressingly commonplace crime?

[via Boing Boing]

The spork is sort of the ultimate kludge of a design. Take a spoon, put some tines at the end, and voila: you have an eating utensil that isn't quite as good as either half of its portmanteau. Things get even messier when you throw in a knife, resulting in the so-called splayd, or sporf. ("Sporf?" Horf.) Depending on how the blade is positioned, you either get half a knife shoved in your mouth, or you get a knife in the palm. Brilliant.

Whether you call it a spork, a splayed, or a sporf, Map—the London-based design consultancy (previously)—thinks they may have finally perfected it. They teamed up with Fortnum & Mason, the 300-year-old U.K. department store, to create a tritensil that combines the best parts of a fork, knife, and spoon, substantially less clumsily than previous attempts.

"It's inherently a compromise to combine three different utensils into one design," says Scott Barwick, a designer and associate at Map. "If you have a spoon with tines, you can't eat soup with it; likewise, a round, concave fork isn't as good at spearing food as a regular one." Going in, then, Map knew there would be compromises in designing a new three-in-one utensil for Fortnum & Mason. The only question was how well those compromises could be balanced.

For the tritensil, Map has favored an ergonomic, asymmetric design that combines a fork's tines, a spoon's curve, and a knife's serrated edge in such a way that each feature's effectiveness is maximized. Holding the tritensil in your hand, the tines of the fork slant downwards, allowing you to pierce food with the edge. The serrated knife edge, meanwhile, faces in the opposite direction, and is part of the soup's bowl, unlike splayds where one of the tines is essentially a large knife. "People don't really like shoving a knife in their mouth, so we wanted to minimize how much people needed to do that," says Barwick. The serrations on the tritensil are also softer than a normal knife, making it nearly impossible to cut yourself on that edge.

The tritensil isn't designed to eat everything with. It's been design to cater to the kinds of foods included in Fortnum & Mason's Hamperling, a picnicking snack pack that crams a traditional English tea into a box, as well as other items the department store sells in its café. Cutting a steak, spooning up a vichyssoise, or eating a plate of spaghetti would probably be challenging, but for cutting a scone, eating some yogurt, or eating a salad, the tritensil is ideal.

According to Map, they were originally approached to design the tritensil after previously having worked on the plastic cutlery that came in the Hamperling. The tritensil was born out of a desire to reduce the costs of cutlery, and the idea of doing so by embracing the spork made a sort of cultural sense for Fortnum & Mason. "They have this memory as part of the company's heritage that they invented the first spork in the War," says Barwick. Technically, this probably isn't true: spork patents go back to 1874, and in their research, Map couldn't actually find any direct evidence of a Fortnum & Mason spork. But it did indicate to Map that their client would be proud to embrace such a utensil, if one were custom designed for them.

And they have. Fortnum & Mason have started giving away plastic tritensils in their café as of last week, and are also selling a stainless steel version for die-hards. Due to its asymmetric design, the tritensil is available in versions suitable for both lefties and righties. A left-handed spork? It's like something Ned Flanders would sell at The Leftorium. But it was the best way to avoid many of the spork's other inherent compromises.

"No, it's not the best fork, it's not the best knife, and it's not the best spoon. We don't think it ever will be," says Barwick. "But the spork is a very difficult design problem, and we've tackled it as best we can. The result, we think, is a really strong design." And until programmable materials get cheap enough that you can make sporks out of them? The tritensil will be probably continue to be the best spork, or splayd, or sporf design on the planet.

Designers collect color palettes the way gamers collect Pokémon. So why not let designers collect palettes while capturing Pokémon? Boom. It's called Pokémon Palettes. So now you can.

The idea of generating color palettes from Pokémon is easy to dismiss, but man, does it work. The execution. You just type in the name of a Pokémon—Pikachu, Psyduck, Geodude, or any of the other 720 Pokémon—and Pokémon Palletes generates a hexadecimal palette of all the colors from the sprite, ordered according to prevalence. It was created by Gus Clover, a recent graduate of the University of Washington.

How useful Pokémon Palettes is as a design tool, of course, is up for debate. Perhaps you're brainstorming colors for a new bank website, and the client says he wants a nice shade of green. Pressing him to be more specific, the client tells you: "You know, like one of those grass Pokémons." Loading up Pokepalettes quickly on your laptop, you respond: "Which one? Treecko, Ivysaur, or Chikorita?" Your client is impressed with your Pokéskills: handing you a $10,000 bonus on the spot, he encourages you to head to Snowbelle City, to challenge the great Pokédesigner Wulfric for his Iceberg Badge. But watch out for that design firm upstart, Team Rocket!

Even if it's not a useful design tool, though, Pokémon Palettes is still a lot of fun to pursue. Any excuse to browse through the amazing sprite design of the world of Pokémon is an excuse worth taking.

Laid on top of a beautiful 3-D visualization of the world seen at night, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has launched WeatherView, a stunning new real-time wind model that shows the world as it invisibly is: a glowing, swirling orb of eddies, vortexes, and atmospheric whirlpools.

Although the visualization can take a little time to load, it's worth it. WeatherView not only allows you to change the time to see current and future weather conditions around the world (try setting it to sundown halfway across America for a particularly lovely effect), but it also has a number of filters that you can apply to see how the wind and other temperature and atmospheric conditions relate.

Click on the temperature filter, for example, and the entire planet becomes as molten as the sun. The moisture filter fills the planet with quicksilver fog. Everywhere else, blue lines eddy and swirl, representing the unseen currents of the planet's winds.

You can check out NOAA's WeatherView wind model here.

[via CityLab]

For most of us, there's a slight disconnect between the trees that surround us and the wood that makes up our furniture. A couple hundred years ago, you might chop down a tree, plane it, and sand it to make a bench, staying in touch with every step of its metamorphosis from a living thing to a functional object. These days, however, we buy our benches from Ikea. Wood, for us, is only intellectually related to a tree, in much the same way that a McNugget is only intellectually related to a chicken.

This is what gives French designer Benjamin Graindorge's Fallen Tree Bench a sort of relevant appeal. From one end to the other, the piece effortlessly segues from a sleek, modern bench to a raw branch of wood. Where one side is propped up with a leg made out of glass, the other stays upright by spreading its branches across the ground.

Created in 2011, the Living Tree Branch is a poetic concept, executed with breathtaking skill and clarity. It invites us to reconnect with the medium of wood, not just as a material but as a living thing. It's a one-off sculpture, so you can't buy it, but again, that's the point: a subtle comment about how mass production can disconnect us from the natural world that surrounds us.

[via Design You Trust]

Conveying that you find something humorous in real life can be challenging enough. ("Is a smile enough here, or do I need to laugh?" or "Wait, they look hurt. Did I actually laugh, or just laugh in my head?") But on the Internet, laughing can be serious business. Is that "LOL" coming across as sarcastic? Does "heh" mean a joke fell flat? And does a crying emoji indicate more laughter than an emoji sticking its tongue out?

As it turns out, you probably don't need to give it that much thought. Facebook has more raw data on Internet laughing than probably anyone, and as part of a new study on how people laugh online, the social network's data researchers find that the way people laugh online actually has more to do with region and age than anything else.

In regard to region, Facebook suggests that the traditional red state/blue state divide could potentially be conveyed as a "haha" versus "emoji" divide instead:

The maps broadly show that haha and hehe are more popular on the west coast, emoji are the weapon of choice in the midwest, and southern states are fond of lol. Presidential campaigns, take note: the battleground states of Ohio and Virginia are haha states, while the candidates' emoji games will surely be key in determining who emerges victorious in Florida.

That said, universally, Facebook found that "haha" accounts for 51.4% of all social network laughs, followed by 33.7% of laughs conveyed in emoji. 13.1% of Facebookers "hehe" and those who type "LOL," surprisingly, account for just 1.9% of all laughs. Age also contributes to what type of Internet laugh you favor: emoji laughs skew towards a younger millennial demographic; meanwhile "haha,""hehe," and "lol" tend to be favored by respectively older groups of users.

And then there's old fogeys like me, who remember the halcyon days of the proto-net, when everyone indicated laughs with HTML tags. Someday, all those moments will be lost, in time, like tears streaking down an emoji face.