Criticizing larger, so-called "phablets," Steve Jobs once said that the iPhone was the perfect size, because you could easily use it with one hand. Today, though, the majority of smartphones Apple makes are too big for ergonomic one-handed use, and while iOS has a built-in one-handed mode called Reachability, it's pretty limited, essentially cutting the screen in half. A new patent from Cupertino suggests an intriguing alternative: an iPhone that can dynamically adjust its UI to the way it's being held.
In the newly published patent, which was first filed in late 2014 around the time of the iPhone 6's debut, Apple describes a way for an iPhone to detect how it's being held. The phone dynamically adjusts where buttons and on-screen controls are positioned, accordingly. So if you're holding your iPhone with the right hand, iOS might display a special keyboard for one-handed use on the bottom right of the device, or adjust the buttons in an app so you can hit them with your thumbs.
Functionally, this patent is similar to something Microsoft proposed earlier this year: a specially designed smartphone that that could detect how you are gripping your phone thanks to pressure-sensitive sensors in the sides of the device. Apple's patent mentions pressure sensors as something that would be nice-to-have, but the company also says that the iPhone's existing array of sensors is sufficient to accomplish the same task.
This is where Apple's solution gets clever. Remember Antennagate? It was a widely publicized design flaw in the iPhone 4 that caused the phone to lose its signal when it was held in a certain way. In the patent,Apple describes how antennas can actually be used in lieu of pressure sensors to detect how the smartphone is being held. The reason this happened is because of something called antenna attenuation—say that five times fast—which basically changes the way radio waves interact with an antenna depending on how it is being held. Although the iPhone 4 had worse attenuation issues than most smartphones, leading to dropped calls, all mobile devices experience spikes and dips in wireless performance depending on how they're being held. Apple would just track those, and use them as a way of tracking how the device is being held.
Apple also suggests other ways this mode could be made to work with existing iPhones. For example, an iPhone with a Touch ID fingerprint sensor could determine which hand the user is holding it in simply by which finger he used to unlock the device. Orientation and motion sensors, also existing in the current iPhone, could also be used to make a best guess based upon past data about how someone is holding a device, and in which hand.
It's a compelling idea, although considering the fact that it is two years old, and Cupertino almost never tips its hand through patents, it seems unlikely Apple will bring the feature to market, at least as described here. But coupled with new mutual capacitance touch screens that can detect a finger approaching before it actually hits the glass, this patent is still intriguing. When the iPhone 7 arrives, maybe it will come with an adaptive nick-of-time UI that practically reads your mind.
"Type is your brand," says type legend Bruno Maag, founder of font studio Dalton Maag.
Sure, he's biased. As a font designer with a career spanning over 25 years, Maag has worked for The New Yorker, Monotype, Nokia, and most recently, Amazon, for whom he helped create the Kindle's new Bookerly font. So it's in his best interest to say that.
But Maag has a point. In this video—a partnership between Co.Design and the Brooklyn design studio Hyperakt—Maag argues that the Roman Empire was not geopolitically sustainable, but thanks to great branding, its type has survived 2,000 years. Heck, it's the basis of some of the most iconic typefaces out there.
In America alone, there are more than 2.2 million people who depend upon wheelchairs to get around every day. But most wheelchair users aren't active. They're more sedentary, on average, than those who have full use of their legs—and are consequently at much greater risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes.
Amazon is currently selling more than 1,000 different models of fitness trackers online. But how many support wheelchair users, an enormous demographic in desperate need of sophisticated tools to manage and encourage fitness?
None. Zero. Zilch. Up until now.
Two weeks ago, Apple made a seemingly small announcement at its annual Worldwide Developer's Conference. Starting in September, the Apple Watch will support wheelchair users, allowing them to track their fitness goals the same as anyone else. But this feature is a big deal to the millions of people around the world who live their lives in wheelchairs. It was also an incredible technical challenge to pull off, requiring Apple to mount the most comprehensive study ever on fitness among wheelchair users, as well as a complete overhaul to the design of its fitness tracking algorithms.
We spoke to Apple's Ron Huang, director of software engineering for location and motion technologies, to get an inside look at how Cupertino made the Apple Watch's wheelchair tracking features possible.
Whether you're talking about a Fitbit or something more sophisticated like an Apple Watch, all activity trackers work pretty much the same way. Inside is an accelerometer, a little chip that can detect and record acceleration data. In graphic form, that data looks something like a Joy Division album cover, but in the spikes and troughs of that data stream is a record of every gesture, step, jumping jack, or swimming pool cannonball you've made while wearing your tracker. All the device needs is the proper algorithms to decode it.
In the case of the Apple Watch, its algorithms look for two things to measure a step. Since most people who aren't Molly Shannon on Seinfeld swing their arms when they walk, the Apple Watch tracks arm movement, with the length of the arm swing roughly corresponding to the distance of the stride. But people swing their arms a lot, even when they're not walking, so the Apple Watch also looks for a telltale data spike of a heel striking the ground, punctuating each step.
In this way, it can tell the difference between someone jogging and someone doing a Cabbage Patch. Multiply the number of steps versus the average number of calories burned per step according to medical consensus adjusted for an individual's height or weight, and voila! You've got a fitness tracker that can convert steps into calories burned.
But this algorithm breaks down for wheelchair users. Most obviously, those who get around on wheels don't strike their heels against the ground. Even the way wheelchair users move their arms when pushing themselves is different than the way people swing their arms when they walk. Walking is a regular motion; pushing, comparatively, is irregular. Wheelchair users need to start, stop, and adjust their pushes more than walkers do. To make the Apple Watch's fitness tracking functionality useful to wheelchair users, then, Apple needed to totally reexamine its algorithms.
First, Apple's software engineers examined the available scientific literature on how wheelchair users burn calories. But this literature was lacking. The existing studies tended to only involve a small number of subjects, and their methodology in translating pushes to calories wasn't applicable to the real world. For example, the studies might prevent their subjects from using their own wheelchairs, or only track how many calories a wheelchair user was burning on a treadmill, not on their home turf.
None of this was useful data for a general-audience device meant to track wheelchair users outside of a lab setting. Apple found the existing studies so lacking that it ended up conducting the most comprehensive survey of wheelchair fitness to date. They teamed up with the Lakeshore Foundation and the Challenged Athletes Foundation, two organizations dedicated to promoting fitness among people with disabilities.
Each test subject was allowed to use their own wheelchair, which they fitted with special wheel sensors. In addition, many were outfitted with server-grade geographical information systems, which collected extremely precise data on their movements through the world. The number of calories burned, meanwhile, were determined by fitting test subjects with oxygen masks, and precisely measuring their caloric expenditure as they pushed.
In the end, Apple collected more than 3,500 hours of data from more than 700 wheelchair users across all walks of life, from regular athletes to the chronically sedentary, in their natural environments: whether track or trail, carpet or asphalt. From this data, they learned how to adjust watchOS 3's algorithms to track wheelchair users.
It turns out that wheelchair users tend to push themselves in three different ways, each with its own corresponding accelerometer patterns and calorie expenditures. The first is in a semicircle, pushing from 10 o'clock to 3 o'clock. If you've ever pushed yourself around with a wheelchair in a hospital, this is probably the pattern your arms made. The second is called an arc push, and it's what you do when you have to push yourself up an incline: shorter, more powerful pushes with a quick jerk to the return position to prevent yourself from rolling back. Finally, there's the semi-loop-over: a pushing style that tends only to be done in competitive situations, like wheelchair racing, where you're really leaning into the push.
These patterns were all identifiable in the accelerometer data, but how to reduce false positives? After all, from an accelerometer's point of view, pushing yourself in a wheelchair and, say, turning a crank or rowing a boat can look similar, but they don't burn the same amount of calories. That's true for walkers swinging their arms, too, but in that case, each step is punctuated by a heel strike: If that doesn't exist, the Apple Watch knows not to count it as a step.
Apple had to find another way. Even without a telltale heel strike, the team found it could still tell the difference between a wheelchair push and a Cabbage Patch by looking at which direction their hands are traveling: A wheelchair user pushes down, so if the wrist angle is above the horizon, Apple knows it isn't a push.
To accommodate wheelchair users in watchOS 3, Apple also had to make some UI tweaks. For one, the Apple Watch tracks three fitness metrics through the wearable's Activity Tracking rings: Move, Exercise, and Stand. For wheelchair users, watchOS 3 replaces the Stand ring with a Roll ring.
And since being told to stand every 60 minutes by their Apple Watch—as it does for users in watchOS 2—might be considered a little insensitive, watchOS 3 reminds wheelchair users to roll in place for a minute every hour instead. The Apple Watch Workout app has also been tweaked to include exercises appropriate for wheelchair users.
Those not in a wheelchair might find this intellectually fascinating, but a little abstract. It's incredibly important, though, to the 2-plus million people in the United States alone who depend upon wheelchairs for their day-to-day mobility, and for whom existing fitness trackers simply don't work.
"There's a huge disparity in the amount of exercise people with disability get, compared to those who don't have disabilities," says Jeff Underwood, president of the Lakewood Foundation. Underwood says a company like Apple taking an interest in fitness among wheelchair users sends a strong message to the community: "You should be exercising. Your health is important. Here's an extra tool to motivate you and sustain a healthy lifestyle. Apple's raising the expectations."
Time and time again, seemingly niche accessibility features have laid the groundwork for mainstream technology improvements that benefit everyone. For instance, Siri owes a debt to a lot of earlier work done in natural speech recognition to help those without full use of their hands access computers.
So even if you don't care about building a more inclusive world of technology—which you should, because there's roughly a one-in-five chance you'll have a disability in your lifetime—the work Apple is doing in making the Apple Watch accessible to wheelchair users has a good chance of benefiting you somewhere down the road.
Today, the Apple Watch can accurately count your steps, but who knows? Thanks to work done by Cupertino today to study the way wheelchair users push themselves, the Apple Watch 2 or Apple Watch 3 could get better at tracking everything else you do besides walking, from pull-ups to breast strokes to the number of times you flip people off in traffic. Opening up opportunities for millions of people with disabilities to live healthier lifestyles is a big deal no matter how you look at it. But it's an even bigger deal when you remember that all of technology is accumulative. Even if you never know it, someday, the work Apple did making fitness trackers work for wheelchair users is likely to touch you, too.
Clambering in the back of a van or station wagon and driving with your folks to your nearest national park used to be a summer tradition. Certainly, it was for Matt Holly, who grew up to be a national park's ranger. "I come from a family that loved visiting national parks," he says. "There was just something about driving through that park entrance and having the ranger hand you a map. You made it. You're here now. Let's have some fun."
Holly's obsession with National Park Services (NPS) maps is why he set up NPMaps, a website that serves as a resource for high-resolution downloads of all the national parks maps he can find, as Citylab recently pointed out. The official map for every national park is designed at Harpers Ferry Center according to the agency's Unigrid guidelines, which were created by no lesser designer than the legendary Massimo Vignelli. But those aren't the ones Holly's really fascinated with: It's the regional maps created by the local rangers themselves, with highly specific goals unique to their parks.
We asked Holly to share some of his favorite National Park Services maps, along with his favorite design details. Here's what he said about them.
"One feature I particularly enjoy on some of the newer maps is the use of a mask to highlight the park area compared to the surrounding terrain. Notice how in the Death Valley map, it shows the topography both inside and outside the park, yet the park is still easy to distinguish and really jumps off the page. This is a great example of realistic coloring."
"Note how Hawaii Volcanoes labels historic lava flows with dates; Glacier Bay includes dates showing the past extent of the park's glaciers. These small details add a lot—Hawaii now seems much more alive, with new lava flows occurring all the time, and Glacier Bay helps us learn how climate change is impacting our parks."
"Just as Hawaii Volcanoes does a great job of showing the context around the park and showing how the park fits into the larger island landscape, this Haleakala exhibit map is one of my favorites. Different maps have different purposes; clearly this map is not meant to help visitors navigate around the park, but instead shows visitors the geography and geology of Maui and how the park fits into the landscape. This is much more effective than a simple top-down outline for teaching visitors about Maui."
"It's not just big natural parks that get the love; take a look at the set of maps included in the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park brochure. First, the zoomed-out view shows the entire extent of park lands and the surrounding topography, and the Lower Town map identifies and labels the park's historic structures. Anyone can read and navigate this map even if they've never read a map before."
"A couple other personal favorites include some sand dune parks, Great Sand Dunes and White Sands. What do visitors always want to know when visiting these parks? 'Why is there all this sand here?' Both maps include simplified diagrams drawn onto the landscape to show how wind and water interact to help form the dunes. And in both maps, realistic colors and topography make it much easier for visitors to orient themselves compared to using a flat monochrome map."
"The Kenai Fjords map is one of the best in terms of evoking personal wonder and excitement in me. Most visitors to the park just go to Exit Glacier—the only road-accessible location from Seward. "But look at that map! Look how much more of the park there is to see! Look at all that ice and all those fjords! And are those campsites out there on the water? How do I get there? I want to go to there." Exit Glacier is pretty awe-inspiring from a personal visit, but a look at this map shows how tiny Exit Glacier is compared to the rest of the park."
Ikea's cheap, cheery Malm dressers are a mainstay of college dorm rooms and small apartment bedrooms around the country. But these dressers also have a dark side: they easily tip over, a design flaw which has led to the death of three toddlers in less than two years.
Now, in an unprecedented move, Ikea is recalling the Malm line of dressers, as well as other models of dressers that tip over too easily, going back a decade. Some 29 million dressers are eligible, and while Ikea has yet to announce full details of the program, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that customers will be offered full refunds, while customers who want to keep their products will have repair crews sent to their house.
The recall follows the death of Ted McGee, a 22-month-old boy who in February became the third child to be crushed to death by a Malm dresser in two years. Before McGee's death, Ikea had responded to their dressers' stability issues by offering free wall anchoring kits, but did not offer refunds, or make changes to the design of their dressers.
"We are announcing this recall today given the recent tragic death of a third child. It is clear that there are still unsecured products in customers' homes, and we believe that taking further action is the right thing to do," the company said in a statement on Monday.
We've reached out to Ikea for comment, and will update this story when we hear back, along with official details of the recall when it is announced. But if you have kids in your house, maybe now's a good time to consider shopping somewhere else besides Ikea?
These days, everyone's saying that it's important for kids to learn to code—and, in turn, it feels like every company is coming up with its own proprietary systems to do so.
Now here comes Google, late to the party in some respects. It's not bringing much new to the table, except for the one thing that counts: the clout to establish a truly universal tangible coding platform for kids.
It's called Project Bloks. It follows a Montessori-style approach, in the belief that playful discovery is the best way to teach kids anything. Building blocks have long been used as a great tool for teaching kids everything from animals to the alphabet, and Google is applying the same principle to teach computational logic (Ideo is developing the experience design). In Project Bloks, physical blocks representing different code commands click together with what's called a central "brainboard" to command objects in the Internet of Things, whether a toy robot or something more sophisticated, like an entertainment center.
"At Google, our view is that kids should be creators of technology, not just its consumers," says Project Bloks project lead Jayme Goldstein. "We believe that behind coding is a fundamental skill set—computational thinking—which is just as fundamental for problem solving as reading, arithmetic, and writing." Project Bloks is a way to teach kids computational thinking, regardless of whether they actually grow up to be software engineers.
But while those are products in their own right, Project Bloks wants to be a platform. The distinction is that anyone, or any company, can build their own contributions to Project Bloks, by releasing different kinds of blocks that add new kinds of functionality to the platform, or by making their IoT-compatible gadget capable of being controlled over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth by a Project Bloks "brainboard," or controller.
"When we started thinking about Project Bloks, we really asked ourselves what Google could bring to the party," Goldstein says, acknowledging the sheer number of coding platforms for kids on the market today. What Google realized, he says, is that while many of these platforms were excellent, they all lacked interoperability.
That's why Project Bloks aims to lower the bar to entry for both IoT interoperability and infrastructure. Google will provide the spec, and the design of the controllers; you just make your game, app, or product compatible. That has the potential to vastly simplify the landscape of tangible computing platforms, where kids are taught to code by manipulating physical objects. Google gives a couple examples of what Bloks could be used to create, like a music maker that uses Bloks to mix tracks broadcast over a Bluetooth speaker, or a robot that draws on a piece of paper according to the instructions it gets from Bloks.
Moreover, new efforts to launch tangible computing products are extraordinarily cost-heavy. "Everyone spends all their money and time working on technical infrastructure, as opposed to their product's experience design, which is where their real passion is."
Right now, though, Project Bloks is still in the research phase. Although the platform boasts a human-centric industrial design spec authored by Ideo, which makes coding as easy as snapping together some colorful magnetic blocks, Goldstein says they're not ready for retail. Instead, the team wants to spend the summer talking to potential partners, refining the design, and hearing from the community before Bloks is pushed as a standard.
So maybe Project Blocks won't be the one API that binds together all the wanna-code playkits on the market today. But the idea of a standard, and a platform, feels necessary. And there's no one with Google's clout or Ideo's experience trying anything like this right now.
Ikea USA has just announced the biggest recall in the company's history. The company is offering full refunds or free anchoring repair kits for every single chest, dresser, or bureau the company has sold in America since 1985: a staggering 29 million units. The issue? Ikea dressers, which did not adhere to voluntary stability standards, can tip over and have even killed kids.
Speaking to Co.Design, president Lars Petersson says that after the third child in two years was crushed by a Malm dresser in February, Ikea felt it needed to do more. "A chest of drawers can be an irresistible temptation for children to use as a ladder," he says, and if it's not properly secured, tragedy can result. The company has distributed millions of free Secure It wall anchoring kits in the past year to help with the problem, but that solution wasn't adequate, Ikea says. By recalling all its chests and dressers, Ikea hopes to prevent further deaths, as well as raise awareness of how important it is to secure any furniture in your home that can tip over, Petersson says.
A 29 million-unit recall is an "unprecedented" step in Ikea's history, Petersson says, but insists that "this isn't just an Ikea issue, it's an industry issue." Under the wrong circumstances, any chest of drawers will tip over, especially if a kid is trying to climb on it. Injuries related to furniture tipping over have been responsible for about 38,000 people visiting emergency rooms each year, the New York Times reports.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates consumer goods in the U.S., has guidelines for designing chests that don't tip easily, but they're all voluntary, meaning it's up to manufacturers whether or not to follow them.
Petersson wouldn't comment on whether or not he felt those regulations should be mandatory, but he did say that going forward, all Ikea chests sold in the United States would conform to those regulations. That means design changes down the line, although Petersson wouldn't explain exactly what those changes might be. "We're working right now with the CPSC [the Consumer Product Safety Commission] to explore technical solutions which might be safer," he says.
But even if Ikea does succeed in designing a more stable, bottom-heavy chest of drawers, that's just a half-measure, Petersson argues. "The only truly safe way to have a chest of drawers in your house is to secure it to the wall," Petersson says. "We want to create a safety culture in the United States where everyone attaches a chest of drawers to the wall as a natural action when they buy one." What Petersson left unsaid was that materials and construction make a difference: a solid mahogany dresser built by a 19th-century woodworker probably isn't going to tip over when a kid climbs on it, while a cheap Malm made out of particleboard will topple over if you breathe on it wrong.
The recall only affects products sold in the United States, even though identical chests are sold throughout Europe and other territories. Asked if Ikea should recall those units as well, Petersson said that the company was "following mandatory standards and intensifying communication" in other parts of the world.
If you have an Ikea chest or dresser in your home, you can return it for a full refund, or apply for a free anchoring kit here.
Perhaps even more than other kinds of identities, the logos of video game companies need to do a lot of heavy lifting. There are the usual requirements, of course. It must flexibly adapt to both print and digital, and remain reproducible at extremely small or large sizes. But it must also be playful, thematically fit with the types of games the developer makes, and dynamic enough to be animated . . . all while still remaining neutral enough that it doesn't look discordant sitting alongside the dozen or so other studio logos that pop up on the game's splash screen.
It's a tall order, but the identity for a new studio called Motive manages to tick off all those boxes, and more. Designed by Frontier, the Motive logo (and accompanying typeface) were designed to evoke the symbology and color language of video games—like the runes on an alien computer monitor or hieroglyphics on the walls of a buried temple.
Motive is the new action-adventure gaming studio from EA, one of the world's largest video game publishers. It's headed up by Jade Raymond, a more than 20-year veteran of video game development who, among her many other credits, helped give the world the Assassin's Creed series of games, which has sold more than 100 million copies since launching in 2007. "With Motive, we're looking to create open world games with something meaningful to say below the surface," Raymond tells me. "Our games have to have something enriching that you take away from them."
Raymond pegged Frontier to design Motive's identity based upon a casual connection. She had struck up a conversation with Paddy Harrington about design at a party, back when Harrington was still creative director of Bruce Mau's design studio. When EA green-lit her new studio, Raymond called up Harrington, who had since founded his own design and branding studio. Motive's parent company, EA, actually has a design department that often handles logos—but with Harrington, Raymond thought, "We'd not only get a good logo but get to see a design process firsthand that maybe we could apply to video game development."
When Frontier started work on the Motive identity, the team was only asked to follow two loose guidelines. First, Motive's logo had to reflect what the studio was trying to do, which was create more substantive, meaningful open world games that put an emphasis on player choice, like the Grand Theft Auto games, where you can go anywhere in the game at any point. The second was that while it needed to be flexible enough to work in any gaming context, special attention needed to be paid to whether or not it worked in the context of Motive's first project: the widely anticipated shooter Star Wars: Battlefront 2.
Early in the design process, Frontier settled on the idea of creating a typography-based logo that felt liked it was pieced together from the various arcane symbols prominent in gaming, like the etching on the head of a key you find, or an arcane ideogram discovered on a far-off alien base. "We wanted to come up with something that felt like it could just as easily have a historical context as it could be dropped from another planet," says Paul Kawai, Frontier's design director.
They also decided to adopt a color palette similar to one commonly found in gaming, where light blue is the color of your allies, and red is the color of the bad guys. (It's probably no coincidence that these are also the colors that define the blue and red lightsabers of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, respectively.)
Once Frontier came up with the idea for the Motive logo, it tested it, adapting the mark to all the gaming contexts it could think of to see if it would hold up. "We tried it in neon in the world of Tron, dropped it on ancient parchment paper, put it at the bottom of the ocean, and blasted it into space," Harrington says, not because Motive has plans to do any of those games, but because "it was really important to see how well the design would hold up if they did."
The first time Motive's identity will actually ship with a game will be on the splash screen of Star Wars: Battlefront II, which is due out next year. That means it could soon join the likes of iconic logos like 20th Century Fox or Lucasart's before the John Williams-scored Star Wars crawl, which shows up at the beginning of every Star Wars movie, show, or game.
That's a lot of pressure to put on a logo, but Frontier's identity can probably handle it. After all, it was designed with a galaxy far, far away in mind—among other things.
And some rode while spontaneously evacuating their bladders
Here's a GoPro-eye view of what it's like to ride the Skyslide, which makes it look less scary than it probably is.
Why the blankets? Official word from the U.S. Bank Tower is that it's to keep the bottom of the slide as clear as possible. Presumably because the earliest terrified beta testers were leaving long, brown streaks behind them.
Music boxes can be hypnotic. Open one, and you'll usually see a metal barrel with raised bumps, turning round and round to pick away at the musical teeth of a comb. Captivating as music boxes are, though, there's no way to compose music on a music box: it only plays it back.
The XOXX Composer is a music box for the digital age. Designed by Swedish interactive designer Axel Bluhme, the XOXX Composer uses the basic principle of a music box—a rotating cylinder with bumps that plays notes—and transforms it into an instrument any aspiring DJ can use to mix new tracks.
A traditional music box has one rotating cylinder. The XOXX Composer has eight spinning platters, each one making a full cycle every second. These discs are magnetized, so you can stick ball bearings to them; as the cylinder spins, a sensor detects where the ball bearing is, and triggers a beat as it moves past.
Where things get digital is that "beat" can be assigned to any digital sound: a tick, a chiptune bleep, a sample, or whatever. The more steel bearings you attach to a plate, the more times that sample plays per second. Meanwhile, a separate knob allows DJs to adjust the volume and pitch of each track, allowing the XOXX Composer to function as an analog interface for digital sound.
The XOXX Composer is MIDI compatible, so you can use it for nearly any audio workstation or software suite, like Garage Band or Logic Pro X. Having first won a Bill Moggridge design award, it is now on display until July 3 as part of the Royal College of Art London's graduate exhibition. Musicians who want to send Xs and Os to the XOXX Composer, meanwhile, can sign up for a mailing list, telling them when it's available for sale.
After news leaked that they would be recalling up to 29 million chests and drawers in the wake of the third child death in three years, Ikea USA president Lars Petersson described the recall as "unprecedented" in the company's history. But the massive recall wasn't just unprecedented for Ikea: It marks the largest furniture safety recall in American history, according to data provided to Co.Design by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC).
In fact, looking at the top five furniture recalls in American history, it's not even close. The Ikea recall is three times bigger than the second largest recall in the CSPC's archives—and that recall was spread across an entire industry. Yet a look at the largest furniture recalls in U.S. history reveals that the last two decades have seen plenty of other large-scale recalls, if not quite as huge as Ikea's. Trigger alert: This list is likely to give new parents panic attacks.
No doubt about it: Ikea's recall is the largest in U.S. history. Thanks to lightweight construction and low stability ratings, Ikea's dressers have killed at least six children since 1989, starting with a 20-month year old girl from Mt. Vernon, Virginia, who died after an unanchored Gute 4-drawer chest tipped over and pinned her against the footboard. 2014 was the deadliest year for Ikea-related deaths, when two kids were killed by Malm chests within a span of just four months, prompting Ikea to start distributing free anchoring kits. After the third child in two years was killed by a Malm dresser back in February, though, Ikea agreed to a " full recall, offering either full or partial refunds for every single three-plus drawer dresser or chest they have ever sold in America.
This is the grand poombah of non-IKEA recalls. In 1995, 10 million beanbag chairs sold by nine separate companies dating all the way back to 1971 were recalled by the CSPC. At least five children died after unzipping these beanbag chairs and inhaling or ingesting the small pellets of foam filling, choking them to death. Twenty-seven other children were injured or hospitalized for similar incidents. At least this recall had a permanent market effect, though. These days, beanbag seats are either sold completely sealed, or with locked childproof zippers.
2005 was a bad year for furniture recalls. In May, 2.1 million children's folding chairs distributed by Summit Marketing International were recalled after the CSPC noticed that the safety lock tended to fail, catching children's fingers in the hinges. The chairs—which were sold nationwide between September 2002 and May 2005—ended up amputating the finger tips of four children, as well as a string of lacerations and bruises. By the time the CSPC recalled the chairs, though, Summit Marketing International had disappeared, leading the agency to recommend that anyone unlucky enough to have bought one to "discard or destroy" it.
Another line of folding chairs for children, another series of ghastly finger amputations. In April 2005, the CSPC recalled 1.5 million children's folding chairs distributed by Atico International. A design flaw in the safety locking mechanism had a tendency to catastrophically fail, lopping off or mutilating the fingers of the children unfortunate enough to get them caught when the chair snapped shut. The chairs were sold in hardware, toy, grocery, and department stores before the CSPC finally got wind of the problem, at which point 11 children had been maimed by the chairs. Like Summit Marketing, though, Atico International had gone out of business by that time, leading the CSPC to recommend anyone who had such a chair to destroy it.
Noticing a pattern yet? This line of folding chairs for children, manufactured in China and distributed by Idea Nuova out of New York, were sold at discount department stores nationwide from September 2004 through June 2005, with many colorful designs, including Spider-Man and Disney Princess varieties. Unfortunately, the chair's safety lock was prone to failure, resulting in two kids losing their finger tips, and one child breaking their finger when the chair spontaneously snapped shut on it. In late July 2005, 1.1 million of these chairs were ultimately recalled.
But the Ikea recall might be too big to ignore. Senator Robert P. Casey Jr. (D., Pennsylvania) is calling for dresser manufacturers to meet mandatory stability requirements going forward, instead of the current voluntary standards that Ikea ignored to the peril of both the company and its customers' children.
If GIFs are the lingua franca of the Internet, Giphy is its Webster's. The San Francisco startup has gone from a GIF search engine to a popular GIF-making platform and plug-in valued at an estimated $300 million. But how do you take something animated like a GIF and bring it out into the real world, as part of a brand identity? You rely on '80s Trapper Keeper technology.
Designed by Dark Igloo, the physical elements of Giphy's brand identity— including business cards, posters, iPhone cases, and other kinds of brand swag—all use lenticular holograms to bring GIFs into real life. The GIFs were provided by popular GIF artists like Animated Text, Julian Glander, Kidmograph, and Skip Hursh, among others. They're designed, Dark Igloo says, to "melt your face off."
"When you're a company that deals solely in animation, the big challenge is getting that across in real life," says Dark Igloo cofounder Mark Richard Miller. So considering the fact that GIFs date all the way back to 1987, what better way to bring them into the physical world using the analog printing technology of that era? And they're not even that expensive, all things considered. They cost less than a buck each to print—more than what you'd pay ordering business cards from Moo.com, sure, but less than what you might pay if you went nuts with a letterpress.
Dark Igloo has been working on Giphy's brand identity and design language for three years, and it's a big part of why the GIF search engine has the '80s vibe it has, right down to the logo. "The GIF is an old file format, but it's going through this contemporary resurgence—maybe it never even went away," says Dark Igloo's other cofounder, Dave Franzese. "So that was the idea behind the logo: this low-res, 8-bit file format icon, dressed up in poppy contemporary colors and a blocky computer font."
Dark Igloo—"dark" is a portmanteau of Dave and Mark, while an igloo is supposed to be "the coolest place you can be"—says they're surprised how popular the Giphy identity has become. Even though Giphy itself only has about 70 employees, the Giphy logo pops up in popular media all the time, including in the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer. And given their love of the '80s—just check out the insane web racing game they made for their website's contact page—they're proud to be a part of that.
Earlier this year, The Village Voice's business department got a bright idea: why not put Bluetooth beacons on their red distribution boxes to keep tabs on how they're doing? So they called up Gimbal, a company that specialized in such beacons, to make a deal, only to have Gimbal quickly suggest that it could offer the Voice a better deal on the technology if it sold data collected by the beacons to third-party advertisers—violating NYC ordinances that forbid selling ads on the boxes.
"This deal was starting to smell wrong," Nick Pinto at The Village Voice writes. "A huge discount to surreptitiously use Voice property to push location-specific ads to passing New Yorkers? Maybe there was a story here. The business team walked it down the hall to the editorial staff."
He was right. Gimbal, it turns out, also provides Bluetooth beacons to CityBridge, the consortium —backed by Qualcomm and Intersection, which the Alphabet/Google-owned Sidewalk Labs invests in—behind New York's new "free" public access kiosk network, LinkNYC, which went live earlier this year with the conversion of 500 disused public pay phones. CityBridge's ambition is to blanket the city with over 7,500 of these free Wi-Fi access points, as well as terminals that serve up free national VoIP calls, free USB charging—and, of course, the ads which will pay for it all. Mayor Bill de Blasio has called the project a "historic" undertaking that will finally make the Internet freely accessible to everyone in the City, including underprivileged groups which traditionally have a harder time getting online.
But as the Voice explains in its in-depth exposé of LinkNYC today, the effort seem like a privacy nightmare in the making—and not just because of Gimbal's participation.
The fact that CityBridge is willing to pay $300 million to install the kiosks across NYC should be enough to raise eyebrows, Pinto points out: there's big money to be made here. Even supposedly anonymous data collected from LinkNYC's network can be crunched into surprisingly specific data profiles of individuals. CityBridge and its partners might not be able to collect your name from a kiosk, but they theoretically have everything else: what device you use, how old you are, what you search for, what you buy, and even where you live. "Companies are using our information to know us better than we know ourselves," Linda Holliday, an expert on digital marketing, told The Voice. "They can predict that you're going to get divorced even before you know it. They know that you'll pay for business class even if you're asking for coach. And they're using that knowledge to make decisions about us without our even being aware of it.""
What's truly alarming about LinkNYC, though, is how clearly the initiative intersects with Google's own stated goal of breaking free of the Internet to become, in the words of CEO Sundar Pinchai, ambient. As the Voice explains:
It is an effort to establish a permanent presence across our city, block by block, and to extend its online model to the physical landscape we humans occupy on a daily basis. The company then intends to clone that system and start selling it around the world, government by government, to as many as will buy. And every place that signs on will become another profit center in Google's advertising business, even as it extends its near-monopoly on information about our online behavior to include our behavior in physical space as well.
Supporters of LinkNYC say that critics can ultimately choose not to use the kiosks, but this isn't actually true. Google can easily snoop on people passing by LinkNYC kiosks, just by sniffing for their smartphone or tablet's IP or MAC address through their Wi-Fi signal. (Update: A representative from CityBridge says that the kiosks will not Wi-Fi sniff, and third-parties will never be given access to user data.) Citywide, that's enough to tell advertisers where individuals live, where they work, how they commute, and what shops and restaurants they pass every day. Gimbal's Bluetooth beacons can theoretically do the same thing. (Sidewalk Labs declined to comment in the Voice story, and did not immediately return a request for comment from Co.Design.)
But even if it was possible to opt out, that's a straw man argument for justifying this kind of city-sponsored surveillance of its citizens. "Those are not adequate choices in a 21st-century world: We are designing the net to track you—if you don't like it, don't use it," says Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law professor interviewed in the article. "The human race is shifting to a fully surveilled and monitored superorganism—if you don't like that, stop being human."
The real choice, which should have been made by NYC's elected officials, is not to let privately held companies like Google and Qualcomm bankroll these sort of infrastructure "upgrades" in the first place. "There is a different issue in play here," writes Pinto in the Voice. "The right of the City of New York to surrender that data for us; the right of our elected officials—over the objections of some of the city's own watchdogs and in exchange for what is, viewed in the light of the city's $78 billion annual budget, chump change—to sell citizens' privacy off the back of a truck to a for-profit company."
Update: A spokesman from LinkNYC commented: "LinkNYC does not collect or store any data on users' personal web browsing on their own devices. CityBridge will never sell any user's personal information or share with third parties for their own use. This includes the City, law enforcement, investors, vendors, partners, and advertisers. Alphabet, Sidewalk Labs, and Google are all third parties to CityBridge."
Correction: The LinkNYC kiosks began rolling out in January, not this month, as we previously reported. Also, CityBridge says that their kiosks will not sniff Wi-Fi, and that no third-parties will be given access to user data.
In 2016, surveillance of private citizens is widespread. The government does it. So what's stopping you? "That's what we're after: the democratization of surveillance," says Simon Caspersen of Trailerpark I/O, an annual arts and design conference in Copenhagen by Rebel Agency, the small Danish design agency also behind Ikea's Space10 innovation lab.
To do so, they have partnered with Great Works CPH to develop the I See U: a DIY surveillance gadget that spies on people around you, and translates their conversations into a stream of animated GIFs.
Made up of a parabolic microphone, a Raspberry Pi, and a touch screen, the device works by transcribing the conversations of the people it's pointed at in real-time, then using their words as search terms on Giphy, the popular GIF search engine. These GIFs play in a three-by-three grid on the touch screen, shifting between GIFs as the conversation changes. For example, if someone said, "Hello, how are you?" the device might spit out a GIF like this, or this. If you're lucky, you might be able to discern the actual conversation, but it's really more of an artful interpretation.
Why GIFs? "We're trying to hide the real dystopia," says Caspersen. "Enabling people to spy on everybody was the most horrific idea we can think of, so like everything we do, we tried to make the execution playful." The goal of the kit, though, is deadly serious: to raise awareness and start conversations about the ubiquitous surveillance state, as it exists around the world.
As Caspersen points out, we're living in a world where Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg—himself responsible for the monthly surveillance of roughly 1/6th the world's population—is so afraid of being spied on, he's gone to the ludicrous length of taping over his computer's camera lens and audio jack. That's a man who is afraid of the odds being evened out, Caspersen says.
Comics seem like they would be easy to adapt for visually-impaired readers. Just raise up the comic lines, like braille, and you can "feel" the story, right? Think about it for a few moments, though, and it all falls apart: if you'd never seen a cloud, or a sunset, or a bird, or a dog before, would you be able to tell a drawing of one by tracing it with your fingertips.
Multidisciplinary comics artist Ilan Manouach's project Shapereader aims to give the visually-impaired their own comics—not by adapting Batman into braille, but by creating a tactile graphical medium of shapes and glyphs which can be combined to tell a story.
According to Manouach, he was inspired to create Shapereader after a solitary retreat in Lapland, the extreme Nordic region known for Santa Claus and reindeer. There, he says, "my whole visual landscape consisted of layers of dense snow imprinted by different animal traces, leftovers of a frenetic night activity. I wanted to produce a sensual work, that could bypass verbovocovisual stimuli and address directly the plexus of deep linguistic structures in the brain, solely by the universal use of touch."
Inspired by this experience, the first Shapereader story is called Arctic Circle, a 57-page original graphic novel which tells the story of two climatologists digging in the North Pole. Manouach describes the plot like this: "In the midst of an imbroglio of conflicting interests from traders, human rights activists and impoverished Inuit dwellers, the two protagonists are pursuing research for an ice column that contains records of climate changes of past ages. They hope to decipher those cryptic patterns, pretty much the same way the readers of Arctic Circle engage with the work."
Reading with Shapereader doesn't require a knowledge of braille, but it helps. Each character, object, or concept in the story is represented by a separate tactile glyph, called a "tactigram," which is meant to evoke the feeling of what it represents. A reader knows what each tactigram represents thanks to a braille index, which translates them from feelings into characters and concepts.
arctic-circle-page-54
In all, there are over 200 story-specific tractigrams assigned to Arctic Circle. The tactigrams are grouped on a given frame so that the nouns are surrounded by the verbs and adjectives that influence them. For example, an iceberg is a craggy polygon of interconnected ridges, representing its crystalline nature. Anxiety is a block of sharply oscillating lines, while a hot air balloon comes in a diagonal grid that resembles hot air rising. Spoken text is represented by standard Braille. Ultimately, each tactigram is designed from scratch to be as simple, distinguishable, and easy to memorize as possible.
Why create such a new way to tell a story for the visually-impaired to begin with? Isn't braille a simpler, better way to communicate the plot? Not necessarily, says Manouach, who points out that Braille isn't actually a universal language in the same way comics are: an American trying to read a French person's Braille reader would think he was reading gibberish, while a Japanese person trying to read a French comic would at least be able to follow the basics of the narrative, as long as the tactigrams were identified for him verbally beforehand. Other projects, like this tactile comic created by a design student in 2013, have attempted to solve the same problem.
But the Shapereader was also designed to acknowledge what Manouach calls the "sensuous pleasure of cognizance, and the particular gratification that derives from the awareness of subtleties and nuance." In other words, the alienness of the Shapereader—which is just as much of a puzzle as it is a medium for storytelling—is meant to give pleasure, in and of itself, as a reader gradually learns to decode it.
Arctic Circle is just the first story planned for Shapereader. Over the course of the next year, Manouach says that there will be multiple exhibitions, workshops, and conferences related to building a community of storytelling around his invention. If you want to check it out for yourself, Arctic Circle will be on display at Seattle's Washington University as part of an exhibition starting in September.
From outside, the towers of the Barbican Estate looks positively Ballardian. The Barbican is the best-known example of Brutalism in London, and perhaps the world: a concrete castle-city (whose name literally translates to "fortress" in Latin) that seems to evoke feelings of dread in many. But for people who actually live in the Barbican, it's not dystopian at all.
One of those people is Anton Rodriguez, a photographer who specializes in fashion, architecture, and portrait photography. He's lived in the Barbican for the past four years with his girlfriend, but in his spare time he takes intimate snapshots of the interior lives and interior design of his fellow Barbican residents—a project that began about a year ago, after he won a grant from VSCO's artist initiative.
On his website, Barbican Residents, he profiles 20 different individuals and families who have taken up residence in the Grade II listed landmark—and shoots their spaces as they've decorated them, ranging from clean modernism to cluttered domesticity.
In general, those who live in the Barbican tend to have a lot in common, says Rodriguez. Many of the residents tend to live in the tower for years, even switching units multiple times, because of the building' amenities. For example, Barbican resident Adrian cites"the ambitious features like the hand-textured concrete, the calm podium walkways, and communal underfloor heating, and countless smaller details, like the deliberate small shadow gap where the internal walls meet the ceilings" as the ones that keep him in the building.
Unsurprisingly, Barbican residents also tend to have a lot of designer furniture on display. There's not much Ikea to be found: Eames chairs seem ubiquitous, and at least one Barbican resident has the twee habit of organizing her books by color.
Rodriguez's favorite subjects aren't the young, urban, and rich, though. He likes the Barbican's older residents, like Kate Wood, who has lived in a ground-floor Mews floor on the Barbican since 1976. Her busy, lived-in, grandmother-like apartment is a refreshing change of pace from most of the Barbican resident's ultra-trendy, ascetic decors . . . and, perhaps, the truest representation of what the inside apartments of the Barbican looked like through most of the building's history.
Ultimately, though, even old-time residents like Kate Wood have the same thing in common as their trendier neighbors: a deep appreciation of the estate. "Many people dislike the Barbican because it is Brutalist, but the interiors are far from Brutalist," Rodriguez says. To move into the Barbican is often to begin a life-long love affair. "Many of the people who move to the Barbican tend to stay for a very long time. I myself have had three different apartments in the estate in just four years."
Ikea has just released a surreal little ad for its upcoming collaboration with the Danish design brand Hay. It's what Philip K. Dick would see if he tried to Feng Shui his apartment.
The ad takes place in an immaculately unfurnished apartment, and gets trippy right away. Look at the size of that room, the gleaming unscuffed hardwood, the immaculate moulding and those cathedral-like ceilings! Surely, no one who buys furniture from Ikea could afford such an apartment, so you already know the whole ad takes place in the psychotropics-addled fever dream of an Ikea executive, even before plinths of marble melt like vanilla ice cream, and a bobbin of gray cotton weaves itself into an undulating gray rug in mid-air.
The ad was created by three separate creative agencies (Morten Kühl Christensen from Kühl & Solvstrom with Nikextension and Barkas) and serves as a strong statement that Ikea is trying to move past its sensible flat pack offerings, and experiment more to stay competitive.
Or maybe that's just how you phonetically spell the stream of babble that comes out of your mouth when you take the same hallucinogens that Ikea's team did to create this ad.
With 2.2 billion fans worldwide and $124 billion in revenue, professional sports is big business. But ask Mike Sepso, senior vice president of Activision Blizzard Media Networks, and he says that's nothing compared to the potential of e-sports. By 2017 alone, Sepso says, there will be 2.1 billion gamers on the planet, who between them will generate more than $107 billion in revenue—and just keep climbing from there.
The key word here, though, is "potential." Right now, the e-sports market is worth $463 million—small potatoes compared to what a regular professional sports league generates (like the MLB's $9 billion in annual revenue). There's just not a lot of excitement around e-sports right now. That's something Activision Blizzard is trying to correct with EVE (Event Viewing Experience), an e-sports broadcasting platform that aims to give gamers the equivalent of what ESPN gives to sports nuts.
E-sports, otherwise known as professional gaming, is a purely digital form of athletics in which teams of video game players compete with each other in organized league play. E-sports has been around almost as long as gaming: Atari held a Space Invaders Championship all the way back in 1980. In the late '90s, games like Quake and Starcraft became so popular that e-sports became formalized, eventually leading to the creation of the first e-sports league, Major League Gaming—which Sepso cofounded. These days, there are hundreds of competitions each year, where thousands of e-sports athletes compete in dozens of games for prize jackpots that can sometimes reach the high six figures. These competitions, in turn, are sponsored by gaming publishers and hardware markers, which treat the streaming video footage of these matches as a form of publicity.
Although there are plenty of places to watch e-sports online, like YouTube or Twitch, the problem EVE is trying to solve is a complicated one. Viewers' appreciation of sports is going to ultimately be dictated by their knowledge of the significance of what's happening: Watching a game of baseball isn't very exciting if you don't know why all those fat guys with mullets are running around that diamond. But in the case of traditional sports, like baseball or football or hockey or basketball, a hundred years of cultural osmosis guarantees there's probably someone in the same room with you who can explain what is happening, and why it's important.
That's not the case with e-sports. Even though the top players use a lot of skills that can be transferred across different titles, the popular games change rapidly, depending on what new games are published in a given year, what publishers are sponsoring a tournament. An e-sports player might be playing Counterstrike one day, Modern Warfare the next, and Overwatch the day after that, with each game having its own rules, goals, and levels. Add in different gameplay modes and variants—there's a huge difference between Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Capture the Flag— and e-sports broadcasters have to spend all of their time explaining the rules of the game to the people watching at home.
But broadcasters' time would be better spent on narratives, insists Sepso. "Most people don't really follow sports because of the technical capabilities of the players, or the strategy of the coaches," he says. "They follow drama and storyline, heroes and villains. We love the story of sports." Stuff like: Will Kevin Durant carry the Warriors to next year's NBA championships? Is Kobe Bryant really retired or will he come back? Will Rex Ryan finally throw over the regime of Bill Belichick?
And so on. That story is something sports broadcasters only have the bandwidth to convey because they're not spending all their time explaining the significance of what just happened in the game: The graphic overlays do most of the heavy lifting for them, keeping the viewer informed of data like player scores, team location, and stats. If it's on the screen, it's important.
That's what EVE is. A graphical overlay system, like the one you might see on Fox Sports or ESPN. EVE works by tying right into the code of a game, spitting out real-time stats, facts, scores, and trivia about a given game or player, which are overlaid on a live e-sports broadcast. So if a player is making a run for the flag in Team Fortress 2, EVE might spit out some stats on how likely the player is to capture it, given his career performance; or if a player gets a headshot in Counterstrike, EVE could immediately tell viewers at home what percentage of headshots that player has made in the last 30 days. The overlay gives you the significance of the play immediately.
In practice, the interface looks a lot like what you see in an NFL or NBA broadcast, just layered over a video game screen instead of live footage. It can obscure some of the details of a game, true, but there's a tradeoff: In many cases, EVE can explain more about what's going on in a game than the game itself—especially since, in gaming, user interfaces are usually limited to the perspective of a single player, not all the players of the game.
By automating stat-crunching and putting it on screen, Sepso hopes that e-sports announcers can really delve into the drama of the game. "That's what announcers are good at," he says. "Are the players pissed at each other? Is this player on fire, or is this other player performing badly because his girlfriend dumped him 30 minutes before they match? That's the kind of thing we want to know as fans."
It's also important from a business perspective: Arguably, e-sports hasn't taken off the way physical sports has because the players "feel" anonymous. Compared to the strutting, posturing titans of the field or court, e-athletes are rarely seen on screen and their personalities aren't often discussed. They just don't have good branding. EVE opens this up, not just by making it easier for announcers to tell stories about the personalities involved in any given game, but by constantly putting a player's physical face and reactions on the screen, alongside the game play.
Whether this will actually work is anyone's guess, but Sepso seems confident that e-sports has just as much potential as physical athletics. "We think e-sports is a multibillion dollar industry. We think next year, there will be 300 million global viewers for e-sports in general. We're at a tipping point, where e-sports are ready to be a business in and of itself." The only question, as far as Sepso is concerned, is how much EVE can and will do to tip e-sports into the mainstream once and for all.
Alexander Enoch is a roboticist twice over. Not only does he have a PhD in robotics from University of Edinburgh, where he specialized in designing walking bipedal bots, but he attained a Master of Engineering in robotics before that. So Enoch knows a good robot when he sees one—which is why he knew that what passed for robots in the educational aisle of his local toy store, well, weren't.
"They looked like robots, but they were just motorized toys," explains Enoch. The difference? "A real robot can be programmed to do things by itself, like interact with its environment." A lot of the robots he was seeing could be ordered around, but you couldn't really teach them to be autonomous. The ones that were autonomous weren't bipedal robots, which Enoch thought were coolest. Since he was looking for a gift for his talented, nerdy niece, he didn't want to settle for a robot that wasn't up to snuff.
So Enoch decided to create a toy robot himself. One that walked around on two legs and was as programmable as the robots he worked with in the lab—but could be bought at a toy robot price.
The result is Marty, an adorably blocky robot with Groucho Marx-style waggling eyebrows (fully programmable, natch) which kids can use to learn about robots, from building them to programming them.
If you opt to buy the whole kit, Marty comes shipped disassembled, so the first thing a kid learns when he or she opens the box is how to put a robot together. Marty is easily assembled by fitting his parts together—no soldering or screws required. Inside his robot chassis, he contains some bump sensors, an accelerometer, and a distance sensor, which allows him to do some simple navigation around his environment.
Marty also has a Wi-Fi module, allowing kids to plug him in and program him on any device—and even in any language, ranging from Scratch to Python. He even supports ROS, the robotic operating system that roboticists like Enoch use in academia to program robots. So Marty can be programmed to perform new dances, respond to stimulus in new ways (for example, if he falls over, kids can program Marty to right himself), and more.
But it doesn't end there. Enoch didn't want to design a robot toy that kids would easily outgrow, so Marty is also completely expandable. Slap another pair of legs on him, and he's a centaur. Connect a webcam, and he can see. Put a Raspberry Pi inside Marty, and supercharge his smarts. With the addition of a color detector, Marty could be programmed to play Red Light, Green Light. Enoch designed Marty so that kids could potentially use him as a tool for testing out their robot design concepts for many years as they grow and learn.
Now on Indiegogo, preorders for a Marty kit start at around $125, although if you have a 3D printer at home and don't mind using it to print out the chassis, a simple circuit board kit starts at less than $50. You can order one here.
Open offices are terrible. The acoustics are nerve-racking, they stress out workers, and they destroy any semblance of privacy. The good news, though, is that there are some great aftermarket solutions employers and employees with open office plans can use to make open offices suck less.One of the simplest? A pillowy, illuminated desk partition, new from Dutch brand De Vorm.
The AK2 Workspace Divider was designed for De Vorm by Ivan Kasner and Uli Budde, with the aim of fostering a sense of privacy by partially separating both sides of a work table. Hanging down from the ceiling by wires, the felt divider also contains an LED light bank, which equally illuminates either side of the table.
The material itself is made of old plastic bottles that have been recycled into a soft, durable felt-like material. It looks lovely in gray, but also comes in a gamut of other colors, including green, turquoise, beige, olive, marine, and brown. The sound-dampening foam inside the unit won't be as good as noise-cancelling headphones, but should help keep your office phone calls a little more private.
De Vorm is no stranger to trying to improve the plight of open office workers. In a play to inter-brand synergy, the company recommends combining its hanging divider with an existing desk-based version to create an enclosed, felt-lined nook for each employee. Oh luxury! It's just like a cubicle, only infinitely smaller!
Pricing is only available on a client-by-client basis by request).
