The product development company Nascent has launched a new hardware incubator aimed at helping designers bring gadgets to market in just eight weeks. The typical product development process takes 6 to 12 months.

Nascent is the startup behind Nascent Objects, a Lego-like system of modules that can be combined and recombined to bring new gadgets to market quickly. Nascent has released three products so far: a water tracker by the prominent design firm Ammunition, a security camera, and a Wi-Fi speaker.

From a designer's perspective, the advantage of using Nascent's tools is that the modules are plug-and-play, and include everything from cameras and speakers to accelerometers and LED arrays. So if you have an idea for a product, you don't need to design the hardware from scratch. You just use the Nascent software to tie the components together, and slap them in a 3-D printed housing, called a Shape. As for consumers: Once they buy a few Nascent-powered gadgets, they can actually break out the modules and recombine them into totally new products.

Of course, right now, there aren't many Nascent products on the market. But this incubator could change that. Successful applicants will take part in an eight-week program that will include access to the Nascent manufacturing platform, as well as experts from Ammunition on how to bring products to market. The incubator is open to both individuals and teams, and is also designed to accommodate remote participants.

If you've got an idea for a gadget you're trying to get off the ground, try applying here. We're eager to see what Nascent is capable of when the platform reaches critical mass.

Photos: via Ammunition

Adrian Zumbrunnen was terrified of what conversational interfaces meant for him as a UX designer. "The conversational interface is scary," he says. "Will I still have a place in this industry when pushing pixels around is no longer the thing that designers do?"

So Zumbrunnen decided to confront his fear head on. He redesigned his personal website so that it ran off a Quartz-style chatbot. Instead of navigating menus, the chatbot asks visitors what they want to do, tells jokes, gives users links to personally curated design stories on the web (with optional chatbot commentary!), and even lets them send Zumbrunnen emails, just by typing to it.

Zumbrunnen admits part of him just did it as a joke. "The basic idea of conversational interfaces is to talk to people where they already are, so for a personal website, this seemed like a totally stupid thing to do," he says. But the visitors loved it. Traffic was up 1000%, and in just 48 hours, he got over 250 emails from people chatting with the bot—although Zumbrunnen admits there were a fair few of sexts in there. "People love to try to trick the bot."

Sexts aside, the Zumbrunnen chatbot was a hit. Why did visitors love it so much? "What I discovered building a chatbot was that I could actually convey something that a traditional personal website never could, which is my character and personality," he says. In other words, he created a virtual surrogate of himself. In the context of a personal website, a chatbot is a perfect fit, because the people who visit personal websites want to get to know you. And well-designed chatbots are the best way to do that.

Interfaces With Personality
It's not only indie designers like Zumbrunnen who are turning to chatbots to create surrogates of themselves. Big brands are pursuing the same approach. "Conversational interfaces (like chatbots) solve real UI/UX problems by making brands more human and approachable," says Robert Hegeman, digital creative director at Siegel+Gale.

This is why Microsoft has gone as far as to announce that the operating system of the future isn't Windows, but "conversation as a platform." Meanwhile, Facebook is pushing chatbots so hard that CEO Mark Zuckerberg says they're the key for businesses that want to sell to Messenger's 900 million monthly users.

Microsoft and Facebook aren't crazy. They recognize a real problem that chatbots (and recent advances in artificial intelligence) can solve.

Branded websites tend to feel slick and impersonal, because they're aimed at everyone. Chatbots can be custom-tailored to express different sides of a brand's personality based on who they are talking to. It's the difference between ordering a computer from the Apple online store and going inside one of its brick-and-mortar stores and talking to a salesman: a smile, a wink, or a nod reaffirms the conversation and makes it more personal. "From a brand perspective, this can mean that brands can extend and change their relationship with consumers—they can play a role versus being seen as just a product," says Siegel+Gale's Leesa Wytock.

Far From A Universal Fix
That doesn't mean chatbots are a salve for every UI problem, says Derek Vaz, group experience director at Huge. "I don't need a [conversational interface] to be able to simply understand someone's profile; that just needs good information architecture," he says. The same thing goes for design problems like online catalogs—good organizational design is more important than personality.

At the same time, poorly designed chatbots can pose an even bigger problem than conventional graphical web design, especially when they create confusion for users, or unintentionally obfuscate information, "Conversational interfaces can be powerful and effective when they are deployed in the right context and designed for the right use case," says Heiko Waechter from Huge. "On the flip side, these interfaces can potentially get in the way of a user or be viewed as gimmicky or even frustrating when they are not thoughtfully designed."

Another cautionary voice is from Sandijs Ruluks, founder of Froont, who suggests that the designers who should fear the rise of conversational interfaces most are the ones who are already bad at their jobs. For good designers, it'll just be another tool in their design toolkit. Either way, even if it ends up with some (bad) designers getting fired, "as long as it improves the user experience of the web, that's a good thing," he says.

Zumbrunnen agrees. After relaunching his personal website, he's no longer afraid of what chatbots mean for his design future. That's not to say he doesn't think the role of a web designer won't change.

"I think design in the future will be much more about writing than pushing pixels," he says, but as designers become better writers, the rest of their design work will improve too. Zumbrunnen argues that the best designers have always been good writers, who are able to clearly articulate what they're trying to do. The rise of chatbots will make the standard of graphic web design better, he says, because "writing about your designs gives you a better idea of what problem you're trying to solve." Something you have to do if you're building a chatbot.

Since 1905, the National Audubon Society has dedicated itself to the appreciation of birds in all their fine feathered splendor. The annual Audubon Photography Awards haven't been around for nearly as long—just seven years—but the content is in many ways the purest expression of the Society's mission: to highlight the fragile beauty of our nation's birds.

The 2016 Audubon Photography Awards garnered almost 7,000 entries across 1,700 photographers, competing in five categories for $2,500 each. The winning photograph was Bonnie Block's majestic shot of a bald eagle swooping in on a great blue heron, but not all of the winning photographs featured such iconic birds. Subjects spanned birds small (a green violetear, nodding off on a branch; a baby piping plover, standing in the sand with its mother), medium (two ravens, butting heads in the snow), and large (two great frigatebirds).

Sadly, the National Audubon Society says that half of the birds in the winning and honored photos belong to the 314 species identified as threatened or endangered by climate change. Unless we find better ways to protect them from rising tides, colder winters, and hotter climates, photos might one day be all we have of these birds.

You can read more information about the birds in the winning photographs and see the top 100 running up entries here.

All Photos: courtesy Audubon Photography Awards

After providing a gross arsenal of bitmap art crimes to design-blind office drones for the better part of two decades, Microsoft officially announced that it was ending support for clip art in 2014. But it appears that Microsoft has had a change of heart. The Next Web reports that Microsoft just integrated clip art back into Office and Windows 10, as part of a partnership with the Swedish photo database Pickit.

The good news is that Pickit's 1.2 billion-image library is a hell of a lot bigger than clip art's ever was, and not nearly as grotty. Basically, the images on Pickit are uploaded to the database by stock image libraries and individual photographers. Those people earn 60% of the revenue on the images, and the revenue is generated through bulk licensing deals (like Microsoft's) and individual licensing (for publications and other corporate use).

Why is Microsoft providing clip art again two years after killing it off? We've reached out for comment, and will update this post when Microsoft replies.

Whatever the reasons, one can imagine that it's a smart move in the legal department. In 2014, when Microsoft first discontinued clip art in its Office products, the company directed users to search Bing for images to use instead. Unfortunately, the images pumped out of Bing image search aren't necessarily legal for people to use, which has likely resulted in millions of photos being improperly used in both amateur and professional Office documents alike. Pickit estimates that a whopping 85% of all images used in presentations are stolen wholesale. Getty Images is now filing an antitrust complaint against Google over image search in the EU, claiming it encourages photo piracy. Microsoft has been the target of antitrust allegations before. It would make sense that the company would want to integrate a database of legal images within its products.

That said, I doubt that Pickit can ever fully replace Microsoft's old clip art library. Where's the Y2K computer, the robot diskette, and the guy juggling a whole beige desktop (including keyboard and monitor) over his head?

Any architectural tour of Europe has to include a trip to Budapest's Great Boulevard—or Nagykörút—built in 1896 to celebrate Hungary's 1,000th anniversary as a country. The Great Boulevard's spectacular reputation is owed, at least in part, to the beauty of the 100-plus-year-old apartment buildings that line it on each side.

As impressive as the facades of these buildings are, some of their best details are located in their interior courtyards. These are the subjects of the work of Hungarian photographer Zsolt Hlinka, who shoots the buildings in these courtyards as tunnels leading to the sky, contrasting the "geometric, sealed networks of architectural forms and the unsubstantial, infinite space of the sky."

According to Hlinka, the photos were all taken over the course of a single weekend. He took advantage of a boulevard-wide Open Houses program to go past these buildings' normally inaccessible front doors and take his shots. He says he was attracted to this particular perspective on Budapest's architecture because of its innate geometries and symmetries—and because he wants to encourage people to take better notice of their surroundings.

"I just want to show that Budapest is beautiful," he says. "People doesn't look up in general, just hurry around all day all day. If they spent just a little time to look around, or look up, they might realize all the simple but wonderful beauty that surrounds them."

All Photos: Zsolt Hlinka via Behance

Assistive devices help millions of paralyzed people access the Internet and communicate, but they don't come cheap. When Stephen Hawking speaks, he does so by using a $200,000 eye tracking computer, which was custom designed for him by Intel. Cheaper solutions exist, but they still cost thousands of dollars to purchase, and can take months to master.

Mehmet Nemo Turker, a Turkish electronics designer based in Shenzhen, never thought much about assistive devices, or their cost. Then his best friend, Caner Cem Marti, was paralyzed from the neck down in an accident. Looking to help his friend any way he could, Turker decided to leverage his gadget manufacturing contacts to create a new kind of head-controlled assistive device that was as affordable as a regular computer mouse, and just as easy for the disabled to use.

Now on Indiegogo, the GlassOuse—a portmanteau of "glasses" and "mouse"—sits on the nose like a pair of spectacles, along with a mouthpiece that almost looks like the mic on a gaming headset. When you hook up the GlassOuse to a computer, smartphone, or tablet via Bluetooth, it lets anyone wearing the headset control a mouse cursor just by tilting their head. To click, the user bites, tongues, or nudges the mouthpiece.

It's ridiculously simple—basically just a smartphone accelerometer you wear on your head. Which is why Turker couldn't believe there wasn't anything like the GlassOuse on the market when he set out to help his friend, at least not at an affordable price. "Compared to you or me, disabled people earn less on average but have to spend more money on everything, because the world isn't designed with them in mind," Turker says. "It's not fair," he argues, that people with disabilities have to spend "thousands of dollars just to control their computers," especially considering how important computers are to helping people with disabilities connect to the outside world.

That's why the GlassOuse costs just $149, or just a little more than Apple's Magic TrackPad 2; it's also why he's being extremely transparent about the cost breakdown of the device on the GlassOuse's Indiegogo page. "This is about something more meaningful to me than making money," Turker says. "It's about helping the 30 million disabled people who can't use their hands to control their computers, just like my friend."

You can preorder the GlassOuse here.

Bill Groom jokingly refers to himself as a "method" production designer—a reference to method actors who embody their characters to better portray them. It's not unlike how Groom recreates the places of the past.

Currently responsible for recreating the groovy look of 1973 New York City as part of Vinyl, an HBO drama about the pre-cassette music industry created by Mick Jagger and Martin Scorcese, Groom is no stranger to recreating vintage scenes: he was previously the production designer for Boardwalk Empire, where he helped bring the world of 1920s Atlantic City to life, as well as 2008's Milk, where he resurrected the night life of San Francisco in the late '70s.

The secret to his process? A willingness to lose himself in the past—and extreme attention to detail.

"When I start shooting a new location, I go in alone, without all the actors and crew, and I close my eyes," Groom says. "I try to pretend I lived in that space, and try to exist in that time. I imagine the ideas and even the dreams I would have had there. If you can actually put your head in that place you're trying to create when you work, at some point, you get familiar enough you have an intuitive knowledge about it. You start to feel the period, or the world you're creating."

Groom has always had a feel for production design. As a child growing up in a mobile home in the '50s, Groom lived in a religious, blue-collar world where he wasn't even allowed to go to the movies until he was in college. "I think people can assume that it takes a certain sort of privilege to make your way in show business, but for me, that wasn't the case," Groom says. Even so, Groom says his love for set design was in his blood from an early age. By the age of six, Groom was helping his cousins hang bedspreads in his grandmother's basement to put on plays, recreating shows they'd seen on television.

By 1978, Groom had entered the industry, working as production designer for Dan Ackroyd and John Blushi's last season. He did that until 1984, and spent the next few years working on small projects, like the first Macaulay Culkin film, Rocket Gibraltar. His first "big" project was 1990's Awakenings, but according to Groom, it was a job that he got almost entirely by accident: The man who hired him for the job thought he had been the art director for Woody Allen's movies. But Groom proved himself, eventually landing the production designer role on Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own. It wasn't his first period piece, but it was his first blockbuster.

Although Groom continued to get plenty of work for the next 15 years, it wasn't until 2008's Milk, when he was 58, that he felt his career really started coming together. Having come out himself in 2003, Groom was asked to recreate a period of his life he felt he had missed: What it was like to be gay in the late '70s. Recreating the LGBT world of 1978 San Francisco, Groom was able to bring iconic period locations like the Castro back to life. "Ask any designer, some projects are just more personal to you than others," Groom says. "I was 58 when Milk happened. Before that, I'd just done some nice work on some mediocre projects."

Since Milk, Groom has been in demand—he marvels that the busiest period of his career has been his sixties, when other professionals are usually ramping down. It led to Boardwalk Empire and then Vinyl, where Groom may be on track to win an Emmy for outstanding production design, five years running.

So what's the secret to recreating a period? According to Groom, it's crucial to understand that something like Vinyl's portrayal of the '70s isn't just about a single period in and of itself. It's an encrustation of different periods and styles that lead up to the '70s, but which might also include the '60s, the '50s, and even the 1800s. In other words, the past is just as stylistically messy as the present. And importantly, it has its own past, which designers need to take into account. Groom points to a project he did in 1994, the Nicholas Cage-Bridget Fonda comedy It Could Happen To You, as to what he means.

"For that project, we had to build both exterior and interior sets that felt like a building from 1810 in early Manhattan," Groom recalls. "We were working on stairs to a small diner made of concrete, and we took pains to wear it away, and chip it, so it looked like it had been used for years. Architects who were walking by looked at it, and thought it was so interesting. 'Wow, you're always looking to fuck things up!'"

Method production design, as Groom calls his technique, involves a lot of research into details. When Groom starts a project, the first thing he does is hit the library, trying to answer questions about the era. For example, if a scene in Vinyl takes place in a '70s hotel room, what color are the walls? Are they painted or wallpapered? If so, why? What screws were used to install the wall sockets, and if so, are they different from the screws we use today?

Many of these details might seem extraneous—after all, even 4K HDTVs can't show the detail on a room's individual screwheads—but Groom says that it's all part and parcel with establishing a "feel" for the past, which eventually becomes a form of intuition, making his work feel more authentic. But not necessarily authentically authentic. "You need to think about what's authentic not just to the time, but to the character, or even the space itself," he says. That means that when he's looking for screws to install an electrical socket in Vinyl, Groom isn't necessarily looking for '70s screws, any more than he might be aiming to make sure that an out-of-touch character in Vinyl is wearing contemporary clothes. Knowing what to leave out is just as important as what to include.

"Every project has a point of view," says Groom. "It's just like Spike Lee told an interviewer, when they asked him why Do the Right Thing didn't comment on drugs in the black community. He looked at her, paused, and just said: 'Well, that's not what the movie was about.'"

The London-based studio Dorothy—makers of posters and infographics that also serve as speculative maps of fanciful worlds—has released its latest print, a look inside the original Macintosh computer. In typical Dorothy fashion, though, the inside of a Mac isn't filled with circuit boards and transistors, but a tiny world full of microscopic people.

Although Dorothy's map of the inside of the original 1984 Macintosh probably won't satisfy silicon geeks, it's still a lot of fun. The poster filled with whimsical references to Apple lore: a tiny man running on a hamster wheel indicates OS X's "spinning wheel" cursor, while a Stalin-esque statue of Steve Jobs in the upper level of the Mac make reference to "El Capitan." There's even a NASA-like space center in the bulky Mac mouse to represent OS X's Mission Control. In all, there are 29 labeled references to Macs in the poster, and Dorothy's Ali Johnson tells me there are even more hidden ones to discover.

I think what I like about it most, though, is that this Lilliputian approach to the Mac isn't as fanciful as it might first appear. After all, Steve Jobs himself pushed for a "little man" called Mr. Macintosh to come pre-installed inside every Mac. That plan didn't pan out in the end, but Dorothy's visualization is probably what the silly, surreal world Mr. Macintosh would have looked like had Steve Jobs gotten his way.

You can purchase the three-color litho print for around $44 here.

All Images: Dorothy

Google and Apple have both actively spent the last couple of years trying to solve the biggest problem in mobile: how to treat your finger taps differently depending upon context. Google's solution is to use big data to try to predict what you want; Apple's is to detect the force of a tap, essentially giving multitouch the equivalent of a right-click.

Now, Microsoft's having a go at fixing mobile's "one tap, one action" paradigm. The company has designed a special type of smartphone that blends Google's precognition with Force Touch's pressure sensitivity—a device that can detect how you're gripping your phone and predict when and where your finger is about to touch the screen.

In Microsoft Research's new paper, "Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction," Ken Hinckley (who previously invented a stylus that reads your mind) and his colleagues describe how this new type of smartphone will work. It depends on a special kind of touchscreen that can sense the electrical disruption caused by a finger approaching the glass, as well as pressure sensors around the edge of the device. None of this technology is exotic—this type of smartphone is easily buildable now—but the options it affords UI/UX designers are bigger than the sum of its (literal) parts.

Using what it calls pre-touch sensing, Microsoft shows how a smartphone interface could essentially be turned off until it detects a finger approaching the screen. Microsoft calls this a "nick of time" UI, and it could do things like hide the player controls on a video until the instant they were needed. Not only that, but because this smartphone could detect how it is being held, it could also figure out which hand a finger belongs to. If you were using your phone one-handed, Microsoft's pre-touch sensing might present a very different interface than if you were gripping it with two hands—allowing you to easily scrub through a video with just your thumb, or offering a different keyboard depending on what fingers you have available.

One even more specific way the technology could improve mobile UI? By vastly improving the precision of tapping on small on-screen elements. For example, if you're reading a web page in your mobile browser, the UI could highlight the link you're trying to tap before you even tap it. It would also give mobile users the equivalent of a right-click. You could tap a file or icon with one finger, then hover your thumb over the screen to select between options in a contextual menu.

It's a fantastic demonstration of some innovative uses of existing technologies, but like all of Microsoft Research's projects, there's no telling whether or not this smartphone will ever come out of the prototype phase—especially as Microsoft winds down its Nokia smartphone business.

For most of history, if you wanted to live in a house, you probably designed and built it yourself. These days, though, design has become so thoroughly uncoupled from construction that most architects never have the experience of physically building something they intend to live in themselves until they're well into their careers—if ever.

Spanish architect David Tapias thinks that in this transition, something has been lost. Architects, he says, shouldn't design in a bubble; they should have an intimate understanding of the spaces they design that can only be achieved by constructing them from the ground up themselves.

Tapias's company, Aixopluc, teaches architecture students how to design and construct small, environmentally sustainable shelters. His latest pupils were a group of students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture—where, over the course of 12 weeks, Aixopluc taught these students to design and build their own shelters in Arizona's Sonoran Desert.

The twist? They had to use only local materials and stick to a mere $2,000 budget. The combination of a harsh climate and limited construction materials taxed the ingenuity of the students, as they solved problems like how best to keep a desert shelter cool while using corrugated metal for the roof. (You can read more about the finished designs here.)

This project wasn't a one-off, though. Tapias and Aixopluc do this all the time, going on location with a couple of students, and showing them how to design and build a dwelling from scratch in just a couple days. These small-scale interventions have big ideas behind them.

According to Tapias, there are a few basic principles of good shelter designs. First, good shelters are designed to give pleasure and make people feel at home. Second, they're both sturdy and easy to construct; the best shelters, Tapias says, even forego nails and screws to hold themselves together, but instead fit together geometrically. This also means that good shelters are easy to break down, which brings us to the third criteria: these structures must have a minimal imprint upon a place or ecosystem and use local materials wherever possible. Good shelters can also ideally be built in just a day, by a team of two people working together. "Building and assembling is just a better experience when it can be shared," Tapias says.

Tapias points to a shelter his company helped construct in a forgotten vineyard in Priorat. This rocky, remote Catalan wine region is known for its mountainous terrain and dry, dominant reds. Here, Aixopluc chose the bank of a large, steep hill as its site, then began the design process by researching the surrounding area. "We gather as much data as we can about the site, the weather, the climate, the geology, and so on, even if that data seems meaningless at the time," Tapias explains. "Then we make a plan. How do we make the environment inhabitable for living, for seeing, and for building?"

For the Priorat shelter, the major challenge was finding building materials and transport. The vineyard was remote, and difficult to access by car, so all of the wood needed to be transported up the mountain by hand. Even the wood itself was hard to come by, though: the closest lumber that suited Aixopluc's purpose came from a company in the Pyrenees over 60 miles away—which managed its own forest and did everything from plant the trees to cut the beam, a philosophy that dovetailed with Aixopluc's own. "We always try to find the closest light material resource in an area, but sometimes it's better if the source is further away, if the company producing it is better managed ecologically," he says.

In the end, Aixopluc's Priorat shelter took three days to construct, most of which was spent just dragging materials up the hill. The finished shelter looks almost like a miniature bungalow, with a steepled roof that would look right at home in the Alps and a broad front porch perfect for surveying the beautiful vistas of the Catalan country side.

What Tapias thinks architects get from this exercise is a better understanding of the symbiosis that should come from a well-designed building: a balance between its setting, its materials, and the purpose to which it will be put. And it also gives architects an opportunity to actually live in a building they designed at the beginning of their careers—when that insight counts the most.

"It's weird that architects usually don't build or even live in their own buildings anymore," Tapias says. That's something, in Aixopluc's purposefully small way, that his company is trying to change.

All Photos: courtesy Aixopluc

In 2013, MIT unveiled a shape-shifting interface called Inform. Since then, the Tangible Media Group has continued developing new projects based on the display—including its latest, Materiable.

Originally, the Inform was a low-res display connected to a Microsoft Kinect, in which every "pixel" moved up and down to allow people half a world away to reach out and touch one another. While the Inform's versatile 3-D pixels could already be used to play games and even build objects remotely, it's now gaining some great physics-simulating abilities—allowing the display to be used as a huge block of reactive, shape-shifting clay.

Unveiled over the weekend at the CHI 2016 conference, MIT's Tangible Media Group calls this new functionality the Materiable platform. Materiable gives the Inform the ability to mimic the tactile qualities of real-world materials, like rubber, water, sand, and more. Depending on the settings, flicking the surface of an Inform might make all of its pixels ripple, or quiver like jelly, or even bounce like a rubber ball. It's all accomplished by giving each individual Inform pixel its own ability to detect pressure, and then respond with simulated physics.

The Tangible Media Group researchers give some cool examples of how this technology could be used. For example, artists could use the surface of an Inform display as digital clay to physically mock-up concepts, which are then stored as models on a nearby machine to be 3-D printed later. Likewise, medical students could use the Inform to practice their CPR technique on virtual patients, while seismologists and geologists could use Materiable as a way to simulate the way an earthquake might shift the terrain of a river bed.

Though the project was presented this weekend, Materiable has deep roots: way back in 2002, the Tangible Media Group was experimenting with ways to use projection-mapped sand and clay as an interface for 3-D design, but it was messy and limited.

Thanks to Inform's 3-D pixels, it looks like the lab has finally been able to polish up some of its earliest UI concepts. But if you expect a shape-shifting display of your own to play with, expect to wait a good long while: MIT's Tangible Media Group is in the business of exploring nascent UI/UX concepts, not necessarily delivering retail products. Consumer shape-shifting displays are likely another decade away—at least.

Bertha, as she is affectionately known, is the 57-foot-tall, 325-foot-long tunnel-boring machine that is currently carving out a $3.1 billion subterranean highway underneath Seattle. There's no more awesome example of machinery in all of North America, but the only way to really get a sense of Bertha's sheer scale is by watching this video. Shot by a drone "working" for the Washington State Department of Transportation, the video shows that Bertha is more than just a giant drill. It's a giant drill with a fortress on its back.

Right now, Bertha has dug over 1,500 feet of the SR-99 tunnel, which will eventually be a two-story underground highway. Essentially, the way Bertha works is by using a rotating cutterhead to carve out earth in front of it, then feeding this earth on a long conveyor belt back to the surface. Behind the cutterhead, there are enormous structural rings, which help support the tunnel's weight until they can be reinforced with curved concrete segments. After the structural rings are laid down, Bertha uses hydraulics to lurch her enormous bulk forward a few feet at a time. Rinse and repeat.

If there's a porn magazine dedicated to sexy machines, Bertha's got to be the centerfold. Unfortunately, though, Bertha's had a run of bad luck. She first started digging the 1.7-mile long SR-99 back in December 2013, when the cutterhead was damaged by a steel pipe, requiring a two year delay as workers tunneled down from the surface to lift Bertha's bore out for repairs. She only resumed digging on December 22, 2015, roughly when the tunnel was originally meant to be completed. She has since been delayed a few more times, and is now projected to be finished boring by January, with the tunnel opening to the public in April 2018.

Of course, that all depends on everything going perfectly from now until January. Chances are, Bertha will be delayed again. Still, looking at a machine this beautiful, it's hard to fault her for being slow. She's got a lot of junk in the trunk, after all.

One of the most important weapons in the ping-pong player's arsenal is the smash hit. The equivalent of a spike in volleyball, a smash hit is a devastating attack used to blast opponents who have bounced their serve too high, or too close to the net.

Thomas Mayer was a pretty good table tennis player, except for one thing. "I sucked at placing my smash hits," he laughs. So the 28-year-old interaction designer decided to apply his other skills to bear on the problem, inventing a projection-mapped ping-pong table that could serve as both a virtual trainer and as a real-time data visualization for any game happening on it.

The Table Tennis Trainer uses Playstation webcams and two overhead projectors to turn the black top of a typical ping-pong table into an interactive display. Players log-in by placing an NFC-equipped ping-pong paddle—linked to them and containing statistics on all of the games they've ever played on the Trainer—on the surface of the table.

Once they've logged in, each player's side of the table becomes a dashboard, showing them data visualizations of their play, and allowing them to switch between modes. There are training modes, where a player has to hit the ball into a small ring of light to improve skills like serves and smash shots, as well as multiplayer modes, in which two players have their game visualized in real time: For example, by tracing the path of every ball hit on the surface of the table in streaks of neon light, or highlighting the most- and least-used sections of the table.

Mayer says the original idea for the Table Tennis Trainer was to create a ping-pong interface that was the equivalent of the stats screen in a FIFA video game. After prototyping a build of the Trainer during his internship at Artificial Rome, a Berlin-based interaction studio, Mayer eventually presented the Trainer as his bachelor's thesis.

One of the biggest challenges in designing the trainer's UX was trust. Especially in real-time training modes, players tended to second guess the Trainer, or ignore its advice entirely, because they didn't really believe it could "see" the ball. To counter this, Mayer introduced several visualization modes that were designed to show how well the system could track the ball, play-by-play. Flow mode, for example, uses thousands of magnetic lines to show the "flow" of a game as the ball bounces back and forth.

So did the Table Tennis Trainer actually improve Mayer's game? He thinks so. "I've played 245 games on the table, and I finally learned to bring my smash balls to the sides I wanted them, which I could never do before," he says. Other amateur players found the system useful for doing simple things like learning to control where they hit the ball.

It's no wonder that table tennis manufacturers have been sniffing around Mayer's project since he first presented it, although he says the Table Tennis Trainer isn't ready for retail. "It's still very prototypish," he says. "It's going to take a lot more work to turn it into a magic box you can hang above just any table."

All Images: via Design Made in Germany

The only thing more painful than going to the hospital is the steep bill that comes later, but the Obama administration thinks design can help make a difference. That's why the administration launched an open contest that will pay two $5,000 bounties to the best medical bill redesigns.

The A Bill You Can Understand contest was announced today during the Health Datapalooza contest by Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. It's sponsored by the AARP, and administrered by Mad*Pow, which has had a fair amount of practice trying to leverage design to improve our healthcare system.

The major goal of the contest is to come up with a template that better explains to patients what their health insurance plan will pay, what they owe, and if the bill is complete, or still in processing. There will be two winners, each of whom will win an award of $5,000: one for the easiest medical bill to understand, and one for the medical bill which most effectively relates to patients what, if anything, needs to be done next.

Anyone who has ever received a hospital bill knows these are big problems. The world of medical billing seems almost pointedly designed to confuse, which bloats the administrative costs of the health care industry (think about all the effort expended on hunting down payments from bewildered patients). Considering how much money a more transparent medical bill design could save patients and hospitals alike, a $10,000 bounty seems like chump change.

Designers who want to enter the "A Bill You Can Understand" contest have until August 10 to submit ideas. Winning designs will be featured at the Health 2.0 annual fall conference in September, and may eventually be implemented by industry groups.

In the world of traffic planning, "spaghetti junction" is a nickname given to a traffic interchange that is so complicated, it seems like Jove should hurl meatballs down upon it from above. New York City's Long Island Expressway and the legendary Can Of Worms outside of Rochester are examples of spaghetti junctions, but there are hundreds of examples of others in America alone.

Chicago-based designer Nicholas Rougeux usually sticks to illuminating the patterns in language, or what lies in between it. For his latest experiment in data visualization, though, Rougeux has hit the road—quite literally—with a colorful series of choreographs which aim to make sense of the world's most bewildering intersections.

Rougeux's Interchange Choreographies tries to map out the world's spaghetti junctions by assigning colors to each road coming in and out of the interchange. It's a little like individually dying each piece of spaghetti with food coloring to figure out how they intertwine on your dinner plate. Rougeux was able to do this by using OpenStreetMap data, isolating the roadways, and then tweaking them in Illustrator until the roads had all been manually isolated as different color strands. Major roads are colored red, blue, yellow, and purple, while minor roads are colored green, orange, and pink.

Rougeux says that his interchanges "resemble everything from dancers to otherworldly creatures," but what I see are alt-universe subway systems, stripped of their station names. So far, he's created 60 of these Choreographies, spanning every continent but Antarctica. Is anyone really surprised, though, that all of the most Gordian traffic interchanges seem to be located in New Jersey?

You can order prints of Rougeux's Interchange Choreographies for around $28 a piece here.

Cover Photo: ChameleonsEye via Shutterstock

Thanks to the effects of war, economic instability, and climate change, the world is currently enduring the worst refugee crisis since World War II. According to annual figures released from the United Nations, there are almost 60 million refugees and internally displaced people around the globe right now. To put that in perspective, that's one in every 122 people, or about how many Americans would be displaced if everyone living in California and Texas found themselves suddenly homeless.

Not that you could tell the scope of the problem from the world community's often heartless response to the problem. To shed light on the world's displaced, LA's Annenberg Space for Photography is hosting Refugee, an exhibition that explores the lives of refugees around the world in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Colombia, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Myanmar, Serbia, Slovenia, and the United States.

In all, five photographers took part in the project. Pulitzer Prize-winning human rights photographer Lynsey Addario aimed her lens at the Rohingya Muslims, a disenfranchised group called the "boat people" by the media who are fleeing systemic violence within predominantly Buddhist Myanmar to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Fashion photographer Omar Victor Diop, meanwhile, created colorful portraits of refugee mothers and their babies who escaped from the Central African Republic to Cameroon. Martin Schoeller, a New Yorker staff photographer known for his hyper-detailed close ups, shot the faces of resettled refugees here in the U.S. in his signature style. British photojournalist Tom Stoddart embedded himself in smugglers' boats to shoot the journey of refugees fleeing from Syria to Europe. And finally, Graciela Iturbide turned her lens on the families in Colombia who have been displaced by guerilla warfare and cartel violence.

Although the photographers approached very different groups with their signature styles, the common thread linking all their works is humanity in the face of tragedy. Some politicians (ahem) might think there's a difference between Americans and the dispossessed beyond mere circumstance, but if there is, the objectivity of glass and celluloid doesn't see it.

Refugee will be on exhibition until August 21.

All Photos: courtesy Annenberg Space for Photography. Installation Photos: Imeh Bryant

I'm standing in a ghastly living room of paisley walls, kaleidoscope carpets, and dreary accents. Everything's beige, like some kid barfed a stomach full of Silly Putty and Pudding Pops all over everything. "No no no," I say to myself. "This will ever do." So I tap the walls, strip them of their wallpaper, and paint them white. I tap the floor, digitally wipe away the asbestos wall-to-wall, and replace it with a nice, high-contrast shag. I hang some nice photographs, and put a plant in the corner. Then I survey my work. "Better," I think. "Martha Stewart would approve."

She probably wouldn't, actually—my interior design choices are very basic. But I'm not redecorating this house to get into Better Homes & Gardens. I'm redecorating it to learn about design principles for helping people with dementia through an iPad app, The Dementia-Friendly Home.

Designed by Alzheimer's Australia, a wing of Alzheimer's Disease International, The Dementia-Friendly Home is a simple interactive app that guides users through 10 interior design principles that make life easier for people with dementia or Alzheimer's. It works by providing a relatively life-like virtual house to explore; question marks on the floors, ceilings, walls, and household objects indicate interior design choices that can be made, while navigation through the house is accomplished by tapping on a simple floor plan at the bottom left-hand corner. The app is meant to educate caregivers on relatively simple improvements they can make to a home to make it safer, more comfortable, and more grounding to patients with Alzheimer's. From a non-caregiver perspective, what's interesting about The Dementia-Friendly Home is where the design principles it espouses for those with dementia intersect with regular good design practice.

Some of the ideas it espouses are obvious. For example, upon entering the kitchen, I find myself confronted by a tea kettle boiling over on the top of a gas range. To turn off the kettle, I need to reach over the spitting tea kettle and leaping flames to twist knobs on the back of the range, which is clearly just terrible design. Instead, I opt to replace the oven with knobs on the front, following one of the most important design principles for the demented and health alike: unobtrusively reduce risks whenever possible.

Other dementia-enabling design principles are less subtle, but fall well within the wheelhouse of contemporary design. Unnecessary visual clash is a no-no in the Dementia-Friendly Home, since it makes it harder for people to be seen and creates unhelpful visual stimulation. So a lot of the interior decorating in the app is done to create unobtrusive areas of high-contrast calmness: white rooms with darker rugs and accents that clearly establish the mood and geometry of any space, supporting movement and making any given room more engaging. The app focuses strongly on tidying up, reducing visual clutter, and tastefully placing objects that provide joy and happy memories throughout the space. Marie Kondo would approve.

It sounds like interior design 101, but that's the point. Only on issues of safety and memory does The Dementia-Friendly Home's design principles look completely alien. Few of us, for example, would opt to install handlebars near the toilet, label our cupboards with pictures of what's inside of them, or replace our light switches with flippers that say "ON" and "OFF" in giant, neon green-and-red letters. But for the most part, what The Dementia-Friendly Home proves is that good interior design is the same whether or not you're a twenty-something in a Manhattan micro-apartment or a caregiver for an Alzheimer's patient in a ranch in Nebraska. To a design lover, that's sort of a comfort, in and of itself.

You can download The Dementia Friendly Home here.

Although we've all probably given one to our parents for Christmas, conventional wisdom is that digital photo frames kind of suck. They've got bad interfaces, tiny screens, and need to be plugged in all the time. No wonder, then, that they've never really caught on, especially amongst art lovers.

Acanvas wants to change all that. This skunkworks project within LG turned Silicon Valley startup wants to make digital frames cool, and make it easier for people to bring fine art from their homes. But forget all that for a second, because Acanvas's coolest innovation isn't actually the frame (although that's cool too). It's the crazy autonomous power cord that charges itself like a yo-yo, without having to be plugged into the wall all the time.

Unless you're willing to rip open your wall to hide it, wall-mounted displays always fail what Acanvas co-founder Dan Lee calls "the wife test." In other words, there's always an unsightly power cord snaking out of the bottom of the device, making the accompanying display (no matter how tastefully designed) look more like clunky gadget than elegant decor. Just like TVs, digital frames are, in essence, wall-mounted displays, so the question of what to do about the cord was the first major challenge Lee and his colleagues tackled when designing the Acanvas.

The system they came up with is just awesomely fun and clever. A 23-inch long portrait HD display, the Acanvas can be hung on a wall with a single nail, just like a regular painting. It will run for about six hours at a time without being plugged in, thanks to an enclosed 6,350 mAH battery pack. But where things get interesting is when the juice runs low—and the Acanvas silently drops a charging cable towards the floor. This charger magnetically holsters itself in an unobtrusive cradle near the baseboard, which is tethered to a nearby wall outlet through a nondescript extension cord, and starts juicing. When it's sufficiently charged, the Acanvas retracts the cable automatically, hiding it within its casing until the next time it needs to juice itself up.

In action, the Acanvas's charger is so fun to watch, it's almost like wall art into itself. It's easy to forget, in fact, that the cool charger is attached to a pretty cool product, which is more thoughtfully designed than most digital frames. You can actually install your own frame around the Acanvas—for example, by adding a matte, or stripping it away—just by snapping it on. In addition to being able to display its owners' photos, Acanvas also has access to a million works of photography and fine art, thanks to a partnership with Fine Art America. These images are easy to push to the frame through the Acanvas smartphone app, and have even come as curated collections, so your Acanvas can always cycle through nature photography, or 19th Century Spanish Eclecticism. Three Acanvases can even be linked together in a triptych configuration to display large landscape prints.

At the end of the day, there's a bit of a disconnect between most art lovers (who put value upon the physicality of fine art) and the sort of people who buy digital frames. Acanvas's clever design may be enough to overcome that, even if there's still a big difference between hanging a print of your favorite painting on the wall and just seeing it on a screen. But even if Acanvas fails, that crazy yo-yo charger will be a killer conversation starter for years to come. You can preorder one on Kickstarter today, starting at just $299.

Most camping lanterns seem plenty bright indoors, but outside, at your campground, they get swallowed up by the darkness of the wilderness. This is doubly true with LED lanterns. Although they're lighter and more convenient to pack than propane lanterns, the light they give off tends to be much weaker, which is especially acute when you're stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

But now BioLite, maker of off-grid energy solutions, thinks they've come up with a better LED lantern. The BaseLantern is a svelte 500-lumen lantern that has cool Phillips Hue-style mood lighting abilities, and can be used as a battery pack to recharge your gadgets, thanks to a built-in 7,800mAH battery. But the coolest feature is that it can be used as a generator for a series of supplementary string lights, letting hikers expand the periphery of their campsite.

First, let's talk about what BaseLantern isn't. At 500 lumens, this LED lamp isn't actually more powerful than many others on the market. Some of the better propane lanterns out there run 1600-1700 lumens, and entry-level models usually rate around 800 lumens, about the equivalent of a 60 watt bulb. So the BaseLantern is probably not going to be as bright by default as a propane lantern.

Truthfully, this is an issue with all LED lights. Basically, on their own, LEDs have very low light-emission efficiency, because the light can only escape at very specific angles from the diode. Light that doesn't escape just turns into waste heat. The way around that is by using total internal reflection to bounce any light that doesn't escape the diode the first time around so it can escape at other angles. Not only does it give LED lights a bigger cone of illumination, but it significantly maximizes their light efficiency.

The point is, with any LED lantern, you're making a trade-off between raw illuminating power (an important consideration in the dark) and bulk (which is an even more important consideration during the day when you're hauling all your gear on your back). What makes the BaseLantern's design so clever is that BioLite has figured out a way to balance the slim form-factor of an LED lantern while expanding the sphere of illumination through the use of string lights, which plug into the BaseLantern's built-in battery pack. BioLite calls these small overhead lamps SiteLights, and they can be easily strung from overhead branches as little overhead lamps and accent lights.

The rest of the BaseLantern seems thoughtfully designed, too. It's Bluetooth-enabled, so you can use an accompanying app to adjust the mood of the light the BaseLantern is emitting, or even just shut off automatically when a tethered smartphone is out of range, saving the battery. The built-in 7,800mAH battery is enough to recharge a smartphone five or six times (although keep in mind that comes off the top of how long you can keep the light on).

Serious campers will still probably want to invest in a good propane lantern for anything other than a weekend car camping trip. But compared to other LED lanterns on the market, the BaseLantern easily looks like the best one we've ever seen. You can pre-order one on Kickstarter starting at $99.

Multitasking is a huge headache in mobile. Something as simple as texting the address of a bar to someone you're meeting can require traversing three different screens and half a dozen taps. Google's new iOS keyboard, Gboard, is providing an alternative, by integrating Google's search services right into every app's text entry fields.

Upon installing Gboard, the first thing you'll notice is it doesn't really look or feel all that different from the default iOS keyboard. The biggest difference is that it adds a rainbow-colored Google search button to the left of the iOS autocorrect bar. But that button is absurdly powerful. Hit it while you're typing and you can search your contacts, for web links, for directions, for restaurants and stores, for images, even for animated GIFs—all of which can be pasted in with just a tap. The idea is that instead of constantly having to switch apps to find information you need and paste it in, you can use the Google keyboard as a sort of multi-tasking command center.

Google isn't the first company to figure out that the keyboard is the best place in mobile to inject itself and serve as a connection between a smartphone's apps and services. Microsoft tried something like this on Android earlier this year, and other keyboards like Reboard have also made a play to solve mobile's multitasking problem on iOS. Gboard also isn't perfect. You can't log in to your Google account through the keyboard, so you don't have the ability to add an appointment to your Google Calendar anywhere, for example, or display Google Now's contextual cards.

Even still, Google has devoted more than a decade to becoming the connective tissue of the web. So the brute power of a Google search button on every screen in IOS can't be overstated. It obviates the need to use any other keyboard on the operating system—and a fair few of Apple's own services, like Maps or Siri, depending on the context. Texting—far and away the most popular feature on smartphones—becomes simpler. And after just a couple minutes using Gboard, that rainbow "G" button on every screen seems like the most natural thing in the world.

You can download Gboard for iOS for free here.