Some clever structural geometry lets 3D printers manufacture simple mechanisms, no assembly required.
Although the word "metamaterial" sounds fancy—and they do often have sci-fi properties like giving the world real-life transformers and invisibility cloaks—all it really means is a material designed or engineered to exhibit a property not seen in nature.
Usually, this is achieved by creating materials with a grid of precisely repeating cells too complicated to happen by chance. Such materials can be used to effect sound, electromagnetic radiation, and more, which is why they're of interest to industries like semiconductors and aerospace. But a metamaterial can also just be a dense network of origami-like folds that allows the material to move in interesting ways. Metamaterials don't have to be straight out of Asimov to be useful, as researchers at the Hasso-Plattner Institut have shown with a new technique that lets them 3D print simple machines out of a single block of material.
That's the principle Professor Patrick Paudisch of Hasso-Plattner's Human Computer Interaction Division is exploring, by way of 3D printing. His new "Metamaterial Mechanisms" are 3D printed blocks made up of standard filament that have moving parts, thanks to the way their composite cells have been organized. More specifically, his design uses something called "shear cells"—weaker, less densely-packed cells designed to deform when force is applied—to control directional movement and create simple 3D printed machines.
For example, the handle of Paudisch's metamaterial latch can be twisted to open a door, thanks to the way the dense placement of cells keeps the latch and handle rigid, while moving everything else. Nor does it end at door latches. Using the principles of cell shearing, Paudisch has 3D printed other metamaterial mechanisms, including a pair of pliers, a pantograph, and even a miniature version of one of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests, all with no or minimal post-printing assembly.
The holy grail of additive manufacturing is a way to 3D print machines without having to assemble them. Paudisch's Metamaterial Mechanisms take a clever step towards that goal, and better yet, one that can be put into practice by anyone with geometry skills strong enough to understand cell shearing. Read more about the research here.
It really should have been called Bjarkenoid, though.
Before he was a world famous starchitect, Bjarke Ingels was an 1980s teenager, pumping kroner into Space Invaders and other classic coin-op video games at disreputable Copenhagen arcades with his fellow grody video game nerds. Ingels has been something of a self-proclaimed gamer ever since, which must be why his firm has launched a fun alternate version of its already amusing website as a tribute to a classic arcade game.
Created with the help of web developers Ruby Studios, Arkinoid replaces BIG's architectural portfolio with an interactive HTML5 web game. With each BIG project represented by a small brick, visitors are encouraged to break them by bouncing a ball back and forth with a paddle they control with their mouse or keyboard. The layouts of the bricks change each level, even morphing into classic 8-bit designs, like that of the original Space Invaders. Like the classic '80s games it's referencing, you can even rack up high-scores in Arkinoid—although good luck beating the current high score: 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. You'd have to be some sort of Billy Mitchell-sized gaming legend to beat that.
According to BIG, the name Arkinoid is a portmantaeu of the Danish word arkitektur and the '80s game Arkanoid by Taito, although surely not calling it Bjarkenoid is a missed opportunity. Also, as a classic gaming purist, I'm not sure you can really call any game an Arkanoid tribute if it doesn't feature power-ups that turn your paddle into a laser-firing tank. Still, in the grand annals of notoriously bad architecture websites, Arkinoid might be the most fun—even if it's more impenetrable from an information standpoint.
Because why spend hours practicing when you can just scan yourself and have an app do the rest?
Some of us dance like no one's watching, and some of us dance like we have inner ear infections. But if you're one of the latter? No problem. The Döppeldancer is here to digitally clone you and convince everyone that you have some truly sick disco moves.
Created by Chaotic Moon Studios for this year's SXSW, the Döppeldancer first requires that you create a high-definition 3D model of yourself. This is accomplished by stepping into a 3D scanner, which rotates around you, capturing depth information through infrared (like a Microsoft Kinect) while also scanning your appearance. This data is then converted into a model, which can then be made to perform any dance move thanks to motion capture data, pre-recorded from some actual dancers.
The entire process only takes about five minutes, but the result? Even if you can't moonwalk in real life, the Döppeldancer can make it look like you can on Instagram.
For the purposes of SXSW, the tech behind Döppeldancer was only being deployed for a little bit of fun. Still, there's plenty of legitimately innovative use scenarios for this technology: the possibilities for filmmakers are pretty self-evident, but Chaotic Moon also points out that retailers could use this technology to allow customers to see how clothes fit—without ever having to step into a fitting room.
H.R. Giger's xenomorph design articulates primal fears each of us has at the intersection of sex, death, and monstrosity.
After nearly four decades of exposure, the ichor-dripping design of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror classic Alien is the the rare monster concept that hasn't had its effectiveness blunted by time. Now, a new video essay by YouTube critic Kristian Williams goes into detail about what makes it such an iconic design.
Some of what the video goes over is well-honed territory for horror and science-fiction fans. The titular alien was provided by H.R. Giger, a surrealist Swiss painter whose biomechanical design was adapted wholesale from a 1976 painting, Necronom. He created Alien's adaptation out of animal bones, condoms, and a real human skull.
Giger had two things working in his favor when it came to realizing his design. The first was his outsider status. Since Giger had never worked in Hollywood before, he had no preconceptions about what a horror movie monster was "supposed" to look like. The second was his background. A trained industrial designer, Giger had the actual know-how to create physical props based upon his artwork that could hold up to the rigors of film production. The result was that Giger was able to realize his vision entirely without compromise: the final Alien design literally looks it just stepped out of one of Giger's paintings.
But what specifically makes this design so compelling to viewers? One aspect is undoubtably the design's fetishistic nature. Nearly every aspect of the Alien's lifecycle is highly sexualized: the eggs the Nostromo crew find look profane and vaginal; the Facehuggers they hatch are flesh-colored throat rapers; the Chestbursters are a clear analogy of childbirth; and the Xenomorph itself has a head that resembles a profane, dentate-tipped phallus. All of this contributed to a design that Alien line producer Ivor Powell once said looked like "it could just as easily fuck you before it killed you," something about as far from the conventions of Hollywood sci-fi monster design as you could find in 1979.
Yet in his video, Kristian points out an overlooked reason why Giger's design works so well. Namely, it's understandable.
At no point in Alien does a character explain the xenomorph's lifecycle, but viewers are still able to piece it together, because there's a clear progression in each stage. From alien egg to full xenomorph, Giger's designs articulate a deeply Freudian series of nightmares, understandable to all of us, on the intersection of sex, death, and monstrosity.
It actually shouldn't work—a lesser film would need a talking head to explain the progression from facehugger to xenomorph—but Alien nails it. And as Ridley Scott's execrable follow-up effort, Prometheus, well proves, just so much of that success is due to Giger.
Half static, half solar, this textile could make plugging your wearables in a thing of the past.
Google and Levi's Project Jacquard is already imagining a future of wearables built right into our clothing. But when all our clothes are smart, how will they be powered? And just as importantly, how will they go through the wash?
Right now, the answer is removable battery packs. But a new textile created by engineers at Georgia Tech could allow tomorrow's smart clothes to harvest energy on their own. The new fabric boasts soft interwoven pastel fibers (very much in vogue right now) that collect energy from two sources: the sun, and movement.
Just rustling this fabric around is enough to generate minute amounts of power, thanks to the fact that it is partially made up of fiber-based triboelectric nanogenerators. You know the feeling of shuffling your wool socks against the carpet and hitting the next person you touch with a static charge? That's the triboelectric effect in action, and triboelectric nanogenerators use it to generate small amounts of power every time they move. The power it generates isn't necessarily much—think of how much electricity a static shock produces—but it's electricity that is being generated constantly. It adds up.
But that's not the only place this fabric draws power from. Georgia Tech's textile can also harvest power from the sun, thanks to solar cells that are woven together with the nanogenerators, augmenting its power generating abilities even more. The result is a textile that could keep a low-power wearable juiced up indefinitely without recharging. And it's thin, too. The resulting strands are just 320 micrometers thick, and can be woven together with other fabrics, such as wool. Tests also suggest that the fabric can stand up to abuse, will continue to work if ripped, and could even be waterproof with proper encapsulation to protect the electrical components from moisture.
"This hybrid power textile presents a novel solution to charging devices in the field from something as simple as the wind blowing on a sunny day," writes Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang, who co-authored the paper on the new textile. Better yet, the textile seems cheap enough for mass production. ""The backbone of the textile is made of commonly-used polymer materials that are inexpensive to make and environmentally friendly," Wang added. "The electrodes are also made through a low cost process, which makes it possible to use large-scale manufacturing."
Since the fabric is still in the academic research phase, it's going to be a few years before we see real-world applications. Still, such a fabric certainly opens up a number of interesting possibilities. You could charge your smartwatch just by using a textile watchband, or your smartphone by attaching it to a little triboelectric sail. Tomorrow's sneakers could track your steps, or your pants could have a multitouch patch that pairs with your iPhone, all without external power sources.
You can tell a lot about a city from the Kickstarter projects it supports.
Kickstarter has revolutionized the way designers bring their products to market, allowing them to pitch concepts without first taking on a huge financial risk. It's all thanks to the millions of backers who make Kickstarter what it is. Now, the guys at Polygraph have taken a deep look at those numbers, showing at a glance which American cities are the biggest Kickstarter hubs.
In Polygraph's excellent series of interactive charts, they've taken over 100,000 Kickstarter projects, sorted them by location and type—from music, to film, to design—and then shown what makes each city unique as far as crowdfunding is concerned. For example, New York is the biggest design hub, with 578 projects, 402 of which fell into the product design category. Meanwhile, Los Angeles (320 projects) and San Francisco (247 projects) were the next two largest Kickstarter design hubs, along with Chicago, Seattle, and Portland. You can even see the three most-backed design projects in each city: New York's include the Pressy Android alert button, the Norlan whisky glass, and the NASA graphics standards manual.
See the full series of graphics here. [Image: via Polygraph]
In addition to being able to see just how many design projects each city Kickstarted, the Polygraph visualization gives a useful color map of the distribution of other kinds of Kickstarters backed by city. Each project is represented as a circle, color-coded according to categories like design, music, film, publishing, tech, and so on. The bigger the circle, the more backers. Not only does this allow you to see the types of projects different cities tend to back—New York, for example, tends to support as many design Kickstarters as tech and games projects—but it allows you to get a great overview of how different cities compare to each other. Nashville, for example, has pretty much nothing but music Kickstarters—while Los Angeles, of course, is mostly film.
Dinara Kasko uses 3D printing and 3DSMax. But she's making cake, not buildings.
Dinara Kasko spent her entire adult life studying to be an architect. But when it came time for her to actually start designing buildings, something about it left her cold. So she improvised. Now, the 27-year-old Ukrainian applies the skills she learned at architecture school to patisserie, creating deliciously designed assemblages of pastry, frosting, and fondant.
Kasko says she's not entirely sure what inspired the career change. After graduating Kharkov University Architecture School, she bounced between design jobs, working as an architectural designer and then as a 3D visualizer for many years. But it didn't feel like a true passion. It was only when she started dabbling in pastry in her own small kitchen that Kasko realized she was lending her design talents to the wrong place.
"I liked what I was doing as an architect well enough, but I'm just much more interested in patisserie," she explains. "It just feels more like me." And just like in architecture, pastry making allows Kasko to explore a wide range of influences. "I get to use ideas from modern architecture, art, nature, and more."
Like Nendo, another design studio that has delved into sweets with its geometrically intricate boxes of chocolates, Kasko believes that the shape of a dessert actually influences its taste. "The appearance is as important as the taste," she says. So to create her pastries, Kasko starts on a computer, sketching her idea out three-dimensionally in Autodesk 3DSMax.
Drawing upon her experience with parametric design tools, Kasko's "recipes" often start with a mathematical algorithm, like a Voronoi diagram, to develop a visually interesting object or surface. From there, she 3D prints the silicone molds used for baking her cakes, then decorates them.
Right now, Kasko's sole audience for her desserts is a selection of friends, and her Instagram followers. She says her next step, though, is to open her own pastry shop. She also wants to imbue her work with even more architectural inspiration: Her short term goal, she says, is to make a cake that looks like the Sunwell Muse, the Tokyo building recently completed by architects Takato Tamagami and Tsutomu Hasegaw.
Another goal? Kasko says she might eventually like to open a pastry school, teaching some of her patisserie techniques. But that's not to say she thinks every pastry chef needs a background in architecture. "It's enough that we can all use and add something new to what we do from other arts," she says.
There's a lot we take for granted in the way the objects that surround us work.
Through years of experience, we have an intuitive understanding of the objects that surround us. When we tap some numbers into a calculator, a chip inside adds them together. When we plug in a power strip, it sucks electricity from the wall socket. Put a coin into a vending machine and it returns a treat.
In their dull predictability, these processes seem necessary, immutable even. But as German designer Steffen Hartwig points out, there's a lot we take for granted in the way the objects that surround us work. In his project, The Secret Life of Things, Hartwig has programmed five different common household objects—each named after a mythological figure from ancient Greece and Rome—to behave in unexpected ways when used.
The Pythia calculator, for example, doesn't calculate anything itself: instead, it's connected to the internet, and simply sends all of your input numbers to an external server for processing. Pluto, a power strip, only provides power to its outlets if the German stock index is doing well. Pyramus and Thisbe are a pair of telephones that can only call each other, and only work when used directly side by side. Kairos is a vending machine that says "I prefer not to" when you insert a coin.
"As more of our everyday objects become complex technical devices, what actually happens inside them becomes invisible, because the technology is hidden," Hartwig says. "We don't really think too hard about how our telephones or our televisions work. We just accept that they do." Hartwig thinks this is in interesting contrast to the way primitive man explained natural processes with myths and religion.
By naming his redesigned gadgets after Greco-Roman legends, he hopes to draw attention to the fact that modern man is, in many ways, even more passive in attempting to understand how the seemingly inexplicable things around us work. We're too lazy to even anthropomorphize them; we just "magic" them away with the blanket term "tech." That's why each of Hartwig's Secret Life gadgets is anthropomorphized after an ancient Greek and Roman myth.
The final object, the Lar, is the most Greek of them all. A modern-day lararium, or household shrine to the gods, the Lar simply displays the IP addresses from which your home is connected to the internet, reframing them as modern-day deities to be worshipped. This is Hertwig's personal favorite. "I like the passiveness and simplicity of it," he tells me. "It tells the story about the complex and ubiquitous interconnectedness of the world in a calm and unobtrusive way."
Hartwig's objects and their secret lives are admittedly not the kind of products most people would choose to place in their homes, but that's not really the point. "Really, I just want to point out some details of new things that are usually never noticed," says Hartwig. "I think we can gain a better understanding of our technology-driven world by talking about the behavior and social impact of things and not just their technical implementation."
The technology opens the door for devices that recognize your emotions, even when you can't.
The next generation of conversational UIs will do more than just understand our words. They'll listen our tone, getting to the heart of what emotions we express as we speak to them. Yet that's nothing compared to what a team at MIT is working on: computers that use radio waves to detect what you're feeling instantaneously.
So imagine this. You come home after a hard day of work at the office, disheartened. No one's home, but as soon as you walk inside, your internet of things-controlled stereo cranks your favorite music, and the lights readjust themselves, turning your living room into a warm, relaxing space. Or maybe you're watching a horror movie, and it's a bit too scary for you: the lights around you might get a bit brighter, while the television lowers the volume and bass of the film itself. Heck, imagine playing a video game on your console that gets more challenging or exciting when it begins to bore you.
Those are just a few of the user experiences that an experimental technology called EQ-Radio could enable. Developed by a team of researchers led by Dina Katabi, a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the EQ-Radio uses standard wireless signals—like the ones used by RFID transmitters—to detect how hard a person's heart is beating.
It works something like a cross between an electrocardiogram and a dolphin's echolocation skill, allowing devices elsewhere in the room to measure the intensity of your pulse, then predict what emotions you're feeling based on what pattern the results take: the waveform for arousal, for example, looks very different than the waveform of depression.
How well does this work? According to Katabi, the technology is surprisingly accurate. The EQ-Radio measures heartbeats just as accurately as an ECG monitor, and can correctly predict a person's emotional state 87% of the time, given repeated exposure, or up to 70% if the EQ-Radio has never "heard" their heartbeat before. And yes, the EQ-Radio can even distinguish between multiple people at once, thanks to their unique heart patterns.
That's good enough that Katabi envisions the EQ-Radio being a great supplemental sensor in many smart homes, helping control ambient settings like music and lighting. "By looking at your mood over a longer length of time, it could even make suggestions for things it thinks you might enjoy," she says. Imagine an EQ-Radio hooked up to Amazon Echo. That could be dangerous on the wallet—mass orders of chocolate that arrive like clockwork every time you're blue—but Katabi has some more benign ideas in mind. For example, if you've been depressed for a few days, your EQ-Radio might just encourage you to go out for a walk.
That also touches on some of the EQ-Radio's medical applications. It could be used to help manage everything from heart arrhythmia to depression. An EQ-Radio could detect when you have a heart attack, and alert the hospital. Caregivers could use an EQ-Radio to make sure their charges were in good spirits. And forget wearables—because it can detect how fast your heart is beating, the EQ-Radio could also help you track your fitness. Imagine an aerobics app that automatically adjusts your workout according to how hard your heart is beating.
Sounds like the kind of sensor that should come standard with all smart gadgets, doesn't it? Unfortunately, EQ-Radio isn't a consumer-facing product yet, and as a researcher, Katabi doesn't know when it might come to market. But from a technology perspective, computers that can read our hearts and make intelligent guesses as to what we're feeling are a solved problem.
But should we be so quick to invite these mind-reading devices into our lives? Such technology also raises significant privacy concerns, as Fast Company's Steven Melendez points out today. Although EQ-Radio currently requires users to opt-in by making specific gestures to indicate their consent to be tracked, there's nothing stopping others from deploying this same technology in a more invasive way, he writes. For example, employers could use something like the EQ-Radio to call your bluff during salary negotiations.
Balancing such concerns with the benefits of truly intuitive computers will be a challenge to anyone bringing such a product to market. So depending on where you're sitting, EQ-Radio is either the next evolution in user experience, or a dystopian privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Which is it for you?
It may not hold the title for long. The plyscraper race has just begun.
Although they may at first seem like kindling for a modern-day Towering Inferno, timber skyscrapers—also known by the delightful portmanteau "plyscrapers"—are in vogue right now. Thanks to smart new materials like cross-laminated timber (CLT), which is stronger than steel by weight and resistant to fire for up to three hours, wooden buildings are getting taller in the 21st century.
Now, Canada's University of British Columbia has reached a milestone for the new building type. The school recently finished the structure of the world's tallest wooden building: Brock Commons, an 18-story student housing facility designed by Vancouver-based architecture firm Acton Ostry and made almost entirely from lumber harvested in the forests of British Columbia. The structure, as the school pointed out this week, was completed a full four months early—a huge margin in the construction industry.
Like other plyscrapers, Brock Commons is largely made up of CLT, a material invented in 1990s that plasters together alternating layers of imperfect wood to create thick, strong beams. In the case of Brock Commons, the floors are made from CLT panels supported on glue-laminated timber columns—another material that adds strength to traditional timber—in a grid. This actually results in a structure that forms a two-way slab diaphragm, eliminating the need for load-bearing beams.
Brock Commons uses some traditional construction materials, like steel and concrete, but they're minimal. The building is kept stable thanks to two massive concrete cores, which prevent the structure from swaying. Elevator shafts and staircases are lined with steel, as is the roof, which is made of prefabricated sections of steel beams and metal decking. Then, of course, there's glass: while the cladding of Brock Commons is 70% wood fiber, the remaining 30% is made up of windows, which should bring light into the world's tallest plyscraper. Building Brock Commons out of wood keeps it green friendly, too: compared to similar-sized buildings made out of typical materials, Brock Commons saves the environment 2,432 metric tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking 500 cars off the road for a year.
All told, the finished Brock Commons structure stands 173 feet tall. That's nothing for a traditional skyscraper, but it's a world record when it comes to wooden structures, the previous record holder—the Wood Innovation and Design Center, also in British Columbia—standing just eight stories tall.
Even so, Brock Commons isn't likely to be the world's tallest wooden building for long, with architects like Sweden's. C.F Moller and others proposing timber skyscrapers that will ultimately stand over 30 stories tall. The plyscraper race has just begun.
Most of us wake up to the blare of a smartphone ringtone. Is there a better way?
Alarm clocks that simulate police SWAT teams busting down your door. Alarm clocks that roll off your side table and around the floor, hysterically caterwauling until you get up. Alarm clocks that have helicopter propellors, so they can literally fly around the room, cacophonously blaring until you awaken. Alarm clocks that literally fire off laser-guided rocket launchers when you oversleep.
And so on. In an age when most alarm clocks have been replaced by smartphone apps, the remainder seem intent on differentiating themselves by being as irritating as possible. Into this crowded market space of mendicancy and mediocrity comes Kello, a new physical alarm clock that does something very different: it's designed to help you sleep more and better, not just wake you up with a heart or panic attack.
From an industrial design perspective, the Kello looks soft, friendly, and warm, if a bit bland. A rolly-polly speaker softly glowing with a bank of LED lights and a pastel-colored snooze button, the Kello neither calls attention to itself, nor distinguishes itself. In other words, it looks fine, and it will probably look okay on your night stand.
Where Kello shines, though, is in its smarts. The alarm clock has all sorts of advanced functionality aimed at making sleep a better experience, accessed through its app. When you're going to bed, you can tell Kello to emit a gently pulsing light for you to breathe along with, slowing you down to your natural sleeping rhythm. Have a hard time waking up in the mornings? You can set yourself a certain allowance of weekly of "snooze" button presses; go over, and Kello won't let you cheat anymore.
Want to become a morning person, or adjust your body clock before you travel so you don't experience jet lag? Kello will adjust the alarm every day, bit by bit, until you get there. It can even use your favorite streaming media playlist as an alarm, and integrate with smart home products like the Philips Hue and Samsung's SmartThings Hub through IFTTT, so you can use it to control things like your lights when it's time for bed.
After launching on Kickstarter, you can now pre-order a Kello in blue, gray, or green starting at just $89. Or, you can pay $199 for a Kello in any Pantone color you choose. Here's a hint: you don't want Masala.
40 years ago, NASA launched a record of Earth into space. Now, it's being released as a vinyl record for the first time ever.
The rarest records in the universe are made of gold-plated copper. They are the farthest human-made objects in the universe, at 11.7 billion and 9 billion miles from Earth respectively, along with the two Voyager spacecraft that carry them deeper into space every day. Filled with an audio sampling of Earth's distinctive sounds, as well as 115 images of life on our planet, these records—launched in 1977 and known as the Voyager Golden Records—were never meant for human ears. They were made to be heard by interstellar aliens, billions of years from now.
But thanks to a new Kickstarter, you can finally own a copy for yourself. Produced by the new record label Ozma Records, this version isn't made of quite so rare a material. Instead of actual gold, this "Golden Record" is more of a shiny yellow. But otherwise, it contains all of the material of the original, and better yet, you don't need to catch up to Voyager 1 on your Jefferson Starship to own it.
The contents of the original Voyager Golden Record were selected for NASA with the help of turtlenecked astronomer Carl Sagan of Cosmos fame. He spent over a year leading a committee with the goal of "bottling" the Earthling experience, then casting it out into the cosmos on the back of NASA's then-new spacecrafts. The completed record is no mere mixtape. It contains spoken greetings in 55 different languages, an eclectic selections of ambient sounds from Earth (like the sound of crickets, or a mother kissing her child), compositions from Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry (but not the Beatles, whose then-label, EMI, turned down the honor of being included on the Golden Record). Other content included a selection of digital images of day-to-day Earth scenes, and, in the ultimate romantic gesture, an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Carl Sagan's future wife, Ann Druyan.
Given the eclectic array of content, clearing the legal rights to mass-produce the original record has long been a difficult challenge. Even in its heyday of the late '70s, it has never been released on vinyl before. If you wanted to listen to the Golden Record, you needed to either break out a copy of the 1992 CD-ROM, or listen to it courtesy of NASA's SoundCloud. But nostalgia-fueled reissues of vintage materials are huge right now, from the MTA Standards Manual to NASA's own design guide; the time was ripe for Ozma, a label from Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, to bring the Golden Record back into print.
They're doing it right, too. In honor of the Golden Record's 40th anniversary, the reissue is being produced by the original producer who gave the Golden Record its sound, Timothy Ferris, guaranteeing it sounds better than ever. Gold-plated copper is out in favor of traditional vinyl, and it looks like the digital images—which were contained as files on the original record itself—will be printed out and published in a companion book. This book will also trace the history of the Voyager space program, how the record was put together, and an overview of the images that the two spacecraft have sent back to Earth on their multi-billion dollar space trek so far.
Not bad, although expect this to be more expensive than your traditional vinyl: pre-orders for the Golden Record reprint start at $98, and they'll only ship if Ozma Records can crowdsource $200,000 in the next month. But hey, look at it this way: that's practically a steal compared to the $865 million the Voyager mission cost NASA!
Are we ready for displays and video screens that react to our presence? The "nearables" start-up Estimote thinks so.
We're surrounded by screens of every shape and size, from shopping malls to airports. But over a century after the first cathode ray tube fired up, our displays are as dumb as they've ever been. They broadcast, but do not perceive.
Steve Cheney, senior vice president and co-founder of Estimote, thinks its time for screens to get a upgrade. Estimote has been selling Bluetooth beacons and stickers—aka "nearables"—to retailers for a couple years now, but the company's new product, the Estimote Mirror, is a colorful, tessellated dongle (designed in-house to resemble a Voronoi Diagram) that plugs into the HDMI port of any display, kind of like a Chromecast. The Mirror isn't for streaming video, though. It gives any display smarts and self-awareness.
For example, let's say you've checked in at a flight at the airport. Right now, to get on board, you'd check a departures board, scan a list of flights, then follow randomly placed signage to the proper gate number. An airport equipped with Estimote Mirrors, though, could automatically show your your flight number and show you the way to your gate when you walk up to any airport display.
The way all of this works is thanks to beacons, those little low-energy Bluetooth transmitters that companies like Apple, for example, use to push deals and alerts to your smartphone when you walk into a retail store. The Estimote Mirror is essentially a beacon with a powerful smartphone chip inside. Get within Bluetooth range of one, and if you've got the relevant app installed on your smartphone, the Mirror can pump out custom video programming, tailored to you, according to what information the app in your smartphone has access to. While Cheney admits it's a conceptual leap to expect users to adjust their smartphone settings to ambient tracking technology in the world around them, it's another example of how reality itself will soon be augmented by our devices.
Technology like this always raises privacy concerns, so Cheney is quick to point out that all of this behavior is opt-in. Screens around you will only have access to information about you if you have the appropriate app installed on your smartphone—and give it the requisite permissions. So if Nike, for example, wants to use an Estimote Mirror to let you know that it has the new FlyKnits in stock in your size, it will only do so if you have the Nike app installed and have opted-in. The customers most likely to be tracked by an Estimote Mirror, then, are probably already loyalists who have their favorite stores' apps already installed.
Still, even without an app installed, the Mirror can do some cool stuff in combination with Estimote's other products. For instance, walk into a Nike store without the Nike app on your smartphone, and the Mirror won't know who you are. But thanks to Estimote Stickers—little adhesive beacons that can be affixed to products to track their movement—a display with a Mirror attached could give you information on a product you're holding. Pick up a new pair of shoes on display, and the Mirror might automatically start extolling its features; flip them over, and the Mirror might start listing the sole's design innovations.
Estimote has been in business for a couple years now, and its beacon technology already suffuses the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it helps visitors with the Guggenheim app enjoy guided tours, and easily find out more information about what they're looking at. The company also supplies beacons to help passengers on Qatar Airways navigate the airline's home Hamad International Airport. The Mirrors are not in the wild just yet, but dev kits are available for pre-order for $99. So the next time you walk into a store, only to see a nearby screen to talk to you like you're in Minority Report, peek behind the display—you might just see a U-shaped Voronoi tessellation sticking out of the back.
User experience is the most intangible part of designing a killer product. Here are 18 designs that nail it.
What's the recipe for a great product? That's the billion dollar question that designers may spend their whole lives chasing. And the most nebulous ingredient, user experience, is also the most important.
UX extends to a remarkably diverse range of products. It might involve a prosthetic arm for kids that also lets them tinker and learn, all while turning themselves into superheroes. Or an augmented reality changing mirror that makes a typically awful experience a little more fun. Or even a smart Gatorade bottle that tracks how athletes respond to exertion, adapting their hydration based on biometric data.
After combing through hundreds of submissions for this year's 2016 Innovation by Design Awards, this is the work that nailed that elusive, ever-changing ingredient. Check out this year's one winner and 17 finalists below.
The IKO Creative Prosthetic System, which won this year's UX category, combines robotics, programming, and prototyping into a prosthetic arm that's half prosthesis, half Lego set. It allows kids who are navigating the world with a disability to create any kind of arm they want for themselves—and develop new science and engineering skills while they're at it.
Adobe has given digital creatives the tools they need to realize their work for decades. But as our relationship with technology has changed, and mobile devices have become more prevalent, the company has moved to adapt. With Creative Cloud 2015, Adobe united its mobile and desktop products into a single, intuitive, subscription-based package that makes managing your workflows easier than ever, no matter what platform you're on.
Flying economy sucks, but great UX design can help. Leading the way is AirCom Pacific, whose new in-flight experience overhauled the entire passenger experience, starting with the seats, which feature an integrated footrest, headrest that makes napping easier, a reclining function that isn't an orthopedic nightmare—or a nightmare for your neighbors—and a tray table that folds up to reveal an in-flight screen for ordering food and movies.
BioDesign Studio Firm: Local Projects Client: The Tech Museum of Innovation
Synthetic biology, bioengineering, and biological design are fields that scientists ultimately hope will allow humans to hack our genes, use synthetic DNA as super-efficient hard drives, and even create new types of life-forms. But how do you explain it to someone who isn't a scientist? At the BioDesign Studio, a new permanent exhibition at San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation, you learn by doing. In the studio's hands-on labs, you can try everything from creating your own life-forms to hacking live bacteria colonies.
Mobile ads aren't much more than an annoyance to most users. But the company Button thinks they can make them a lot more useful. Button's software development kit allows developers to integrate actionable software buttons into other developers' apps; for example, a music app could contain a Button that sends you to the Ticketmaster app. Once the Button is tapped, the referring app gets a small cut of the transaction. It's an ad—but a useful ad.
Smart homes represent new opportunities for hackers. DOJO is a home security system that protects your little corner of the internet of things from cyber attacks, with a smooth, pebble-like device that connects to your router to monitor network activity. If something suspicious is going on, it will change colors and start buzzing. Find out more here.
It's not always easy to figure out what your houseplants need to stay alive. For those of us born with brown thumbs, the Edyn Garden Sensor takes the guesswork out of growing. You stick the sensor into your plant's soil, where it monitors moisture, temperature, humidity, and sunlight. And maybe most importantly, it tells you what you're doing wrong.
Every athlete's hydration needs are different. The GX Platform is Gatorade's digital platform for keeping pro athletes hydrated. A smart patch calculates how much they sweat, and its composition, then creates a formula for a personalized blend of Gatorade that is tracked through an internet-connected Smart Cap, which coaches can monitor to make sure their players are getting all the electrolytes their bodies crave.
Matching makeup to every customer's skin tone is a challenge for any cosmetic brand. To solve this problem, L'Oreal created Le Teint Particulier, a process that uses a colorimeter to scan a customer's skin, then uses an algorithm to blend 20,000 pigments into the perfect tone, designed just for them.
The dangers of sun exposure aren't always easy to communicate to consumers. A stretchable heart-shaped sensor, the My UV Patch from L'Oreal and La Roche-Posay is designed to help you keep track of how long you've been in the sun. Thanks to its photosensitive dyes, the patch subtly changes color as it remains under sunlight. Taking a picture of the pixelated patch with the accompanying app will analyze it for exposure, giving users a concrete way to know when they've gotten enough rays.
Osmo is an education company that combines Montessori learning principles and computer vision to help kids learn. Its app, Numbers, uses the iPad's FaceTime camera to track kids and interact with them as they manipulate physical tokens in front of the tablet to solve math puzzles and challenges.
The Facebook-owned VR headset, Oculus Rift, finally saw its widespread retail release in 2016. The streamlined software and hardware—which includes headset, sensor, remote, and Xbox controller—is VR that anyone can use, thanks to deft UX. It finally bring virtual reality into people's living rooms, after nearly 20 years of false promises.
What does a Lego set for the internet of things look like? It looks a lot like Sam, designed by Sam Labs: a series of blocks containing wireless sensors, which can be linked together and programmed with an intuitive smartphone app, allowing customers to give their smart home any mods they can dream up.
Just a few years ago, only a handful of gadgets might be regularly connected to your home Wi-Fi router. Now, it's a cosmos. Starry Station is a new kind of router, designed specifically for the internet of things, that makes it easy to manage the constellations of computers, gadgets, and appliances that are connected to the web, thanks to an intuitive touchscreen UI that is simplicity itself to understand.
Target's Open House is a transparent mock-up home that's designed to explain and demonstrate new internet of things products. It serves not only as a space for customers to check out the most cutting-edge home tech, but also as a funnel for the mega-retailer to see which up-and-coming products have the most potential for a broader market.
How do you teach kids how to hack and build? The goal of Technology Will Save Us is to demystify the maker movement for kids. The company offers a collection of DIY sets that use an intuitive digital guide to inspire kids to create everything from automated plant waterers to synth kits.
The changing room mirror is finally getting smarter. The Oak Mirror is a hybrid changing mirror and touchscreen that allows shoppers to change the lighting, request additional colors and sizes in a particular garment, or "Complete the Look" with a variety of accessories and additional articles of clothing—all without leaving the changing booth.
The average American spends 101 minutes driving every day. Volvo's Concept 26 is a car interior designed for a more comfortable autonomous or semi-autonomous commute. It allows drivers to switch between three ergonomic modes: "Drive" gives them complete control; "Create" puts more space between the retractable steering wheel and the seat, which glides back, while a monitor reveals itself on the dash; and "Relax" provides a more reclined position that still gives a clear view of the road.
Many thanks to our judges: Artefact's Rob Girling, Big Tomorrow's Nick de la Mere, and Pinterest's August de los Reyes. And make sure to check out all of this year's Innovation by Design honorees right here.
From IBM to I ❤ NY, designers at Pentagram, Moving Brands, Under Consideration, and more pick their favorites.
A logo is meant to be a brand's most enduring symbol, a graphic totem that distills a company's essence down into a single graphical mark that is beautiful, flexible, and memorable. Crafting such a deceptively simple symbol is a massive undertaking, so it's no surprise that the majority of the world's logos are so disposable. But when a logo achieves those lofty goals? It's the design equivalent of what Robert Frost once wrote about great poetry: You never get over it.
Of course, what's immortal for one person might be boring to another, and that goes double for designers, who tend to be opinionated on the subject. With that in mind, we set out to discover what some of the most talented graphic designers working today believe is the best logo ever made. Their responses range from surprising to provocative, spanning the world's oldest trademark to a famously accidental logo. These are the logos that speak to them, again and again.
The ones that, as Frost might say, they just can't get over.
Designed by Milton Glaser for the New York State Department of Commerce, this classic mark has fronted T-shirts and bumper stickers since 1977. In execution, it's simplicity itself: a slab serif font designed to look like it's fresh copy right off a typewriter, mixed with a red, bubbly proto-emoji for love. But that simplicity is what makes it so inclusive and adaptable: Everyone can understand and love I ❤ NY.
That's why Min Lew and Thierry Brunfant, partners at Base, give it their vote for the greatest of all time. "It's not only a logo, it's a sentence," they write. "It's inclusive. It can be appropriated by everyone. And it was! It's a noncommercial icon that became commercial because of its emotional strength, which is why it has become the graphic icon of N.Y.C. In fact, along with the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, I ❤ NY has become an N.Y.C. landmark in and of itself. Can you name another logo that achieved this status for a city?"
When we asked Pentagram partner Eddie Opara to name his favorite logo, he picked one that's almost 150 years old—and was designed by a person whose name has long been lost to history. His choice, the Bass Ale logo, is an utterly simple and iconic red triangle created in 1875; it has the distinction of being the world's first registered trademark.
"I'm not going to say Coca-Cola, IBM, or McDonald's, which have used their monetary power in product marketing to elevate their brands," Opara writes. "What I'm interested in is that you don't have to be a ubiquitous corporation to have the greatest mark." Bass Ale isn't as big as those massive brands, but in Opara's eyes, its logo easily beats those larger corporations. "I see the Bass logo as standing out through its reductive, iconic nature," he says. "Through simplicity, it relays its character. It's a classic, the first, and hard to beat."
Not every graphic designer we asked ignored the big boys, though. Armin Vit, the prolific logo critic and cofounder of graphic design firm Under Consideration, gave Paul Rand's iconic IBM logo the nod for world's greatest.
Designed in 1972, Rand's eight-bar logo has been synonymous with Big Blue for almost 45 years now. That's an eternity, in an era when tech companies seem to rebrand every year, but Vit credits Rand with creating something timeless. "In terms of longevity, this is one of the few logos that can go on for as long as civilization exists," he writes. "Saying that a logo is timeless is a cliché, but this one literally is timeless in that it manages to convey technology without being dated to a specific advancement or moment in time."
"The lines can be continually interpreted in any way whatsoever, and they take on the meaning of whatever IBM decides to push at any given time, whether that's Watson or cloud services. It's an amazing bit of typography that can be made into a huge sign for a building or a tiny bug on a screen, without sacrificing recognizability. And this doesn't even begin to cover the amazing alternate version of Eye Bee M."
Not content with naming just one logo as the world's greatest, Vit cast a second vote: the logo designed for Mexico's 1968 Olympic Games by American graphic designer Lance Wyman. In a way, this mark is similar to the IBM logo, using repetitive geometry to create typography. "[This logo] was the perfect visual manifestation of a specific time and place in history, capturing the exuberance of the 1960s, the culture of Mexico, and the fledgling rise of corporate identity programs," Vit explains. It also almost perfectly integrates the Olympics rings "into a very distinct visual language that created a powerful, unified graphic between the place (Mexico), the time ('68), and the event (the Olympics)."
The logo is polarizing among designers. For example, Milton Glaser has said that it has a tendency toward illegibility, and Vit admits that the slightly convoluted nature of the design would have it be inappropriate for longer-term use. Still, he argues that Wyman's design is easily an all-time great. "On its own, it was a great logo, but the fact that it exploded into some of the most amazing identity applications in the history of graphic design is a testament to how strong this logo was a seed for everything that grew out of it," he adds.
London's Victoria & Albert Museum, often abbreviated as the V&A, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, with a collection that includes a staggering 4.5 million objects. With credibility like that, you'd expect the V&A to have a good logo. According to Jonny Naismith—design director at Moving Brands—it's more than just good.
"It's just a perfect balance of elegance and intrigue," Naismith writes of the the ingenious design by Wolff Ollins's Alan Fletcher, which blends the "A" and ampersand into a striking optical illusion. "It has a lovely reductive purity, even with the visual trick. I find myself drawn to the serifs, something that particularly today seems a harder and harder sell."
Everyone knows the Disney logo: Uncle Walt's iconic signature traced across the turreted silhouette of Sleeping Beauty's castle. It would be an understandable pick for world's greatest logo.
But it's not the Disney logo John Paolini, partner and executive director at Sullivan, chose. Instead, he picked "the world's greatest logo that was never meant to be a logo:" the triple-orbed profile of Mickey Mouse, as seen on millions of T-shirts and hats around the world.
"The intersection of three circles has become a launching pad for decades for designers within the Disney creative sphere," Paolini explains. "It has created the 'Hidden Mickey Syndrome': Intentional or not, when you see that combination of three circles anywhere in the world regardless of expression or medium, you're reminded of Disney, and immediately you've entered into a cross-gender, cross-generational, cross-anything community."
Atlanta is the latest city to propose covering one of its urban roadways with public parkland.
For decades, our sunny city parks were blotted out by the massive concrete overpasses that were constructed to bring traffic through town. Now, in the wake of the High Line's success, the trend's gone the other way: parks that are built above the cars. While Seattle built the first raised park over a freeway in the 1970s, other cities have taken up the solution in the past few years, including Dallas, which covered one of its freeways with a five-acre park in 2012.
The best and latest example of that trend? The Buckhead Park Over GA400, a proposal to construct a 2,400-foot long overpass of greenery above a highway that runs through Buckhead, a business and residential district in Atlanta. Proposed by architects and planners at the New York-based Roger Partners, which also enlisted the help of landscape architects at Nelson Byrd Woltz, the overpass park is meant to be a panacea for the pedestrian problems of car-choked Atlanta, connecting areas of Buckhead which have been disconnected since the Georgia State Route 400 freeway bisected the neighborhood in the '90s.
Featuring ample connecting pedestrian paths that allow it to be used as a neighborhood thoroughfare, the park will be made up of three distinct sections. On the north end, there's the Commons, containing an amphitheater for gatherings and performances. The Plaza, located in the middle of the park, would be a more retail-oriented public space, where park goers could easily gain access to surrounding shops and restaurants. Finally there's the Gardens, a fragrant oasis of greenery where visitors can simply bliss out.
In fact, the Buckhead Park Over GA400 isn't the only elevated park proposed for Atlanta. Another planned project, from a group called Central Atlanta Progress, recently proposed the Stitch: a $300 million plan to build over a half-mile stretch of interstate highway in downtown Atlanta, essentially turning the roadway into a tunnel capped with parks. As debates continue to rage about the price tag of that project, the Buckhead park's comparatively frugal $150 billion budget could make it a more attractive taxpayer option.
Both projects point to a national trend, with cities thinking about how parkland and landscape can mitigate a range of problems, including climate change. For example, the last section of the Buckhead park, the Garden, was specifically designed to help mitigate Atlanta's urban heat island effect—which makes the city significantly warmer than the greener regions outside of it.
What are variable fonts, and why are some of the biggest tech companies on the planet throwing their weight behind them?
As competitors, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe are normally hard-pressed to agree with each other, and it's especially rare when design is involved. But two weeks ago, these four frenemies signed off on a major new standard—one that could revolutionize digital typography. It's called a variable font.
The new standard is part of an update to OpenType, the most advanced cross-platform standard for scalable computer fonts, which was created by Adobe and Microsoft back in 1996 and which is still used for the vast majority of modern digital fonts. And these so-called variable fonts are designed to be flexible and adaptive within OpenType, aiming to do for digital type design what responsive design did across the web. But what exactly is a variable font? And why are Apple, Google, Adobe, and Microsoft so eager to see them in the wild?
For most people, the words font and typeface are interchangeable, and that's mostly okay. But to understand variable fonts, we need to get into the weeds a little bit. We tend to think of a "font," let's say Helvetica, as being a single design that comes in different weights (bold, italic, thin, compressed, etc.). In actuality, though, Helvetica is a typeface family, which contains numerous different fonts: a totally separate design for Helvetica Bold, another for Helvetica Compressed, and so on.
On computers, each of these different fonts is essentially a totally different file, which means that if a designer wants to use multiple weights of a single typeface in their app or website, they need to have their users download each one. That increases app file sizes and web load times—so right now, most designers don't include multiple fonts from a single typeface in their designs. Instead, they rely upon rendering engines to fake it, shrinking, slanting, or blowing up a font according to what's needed.
For instance, properly bolding letters in a typeface requires a separate bold font to do correctly, but almost all rendering engines are happy to fudge it by smearing a font to be wider, in a process called faux bold. Italics can be faked the same way through slanting. The problem with this approach is twofold. First, they often look hideous. A properly designed bold and italic font is more than just a smeared or slanted copy of a baseline font, with letterforms that are specifically tweaked to be more readable in that format. But besides that, faking different font weights and styles isn't handled consistently across rendering engines, producing results that look different in, say, Chrome than they do in Firefox.
To sum it all up? Right now, using multiple weights and sizes of a single typeface properly requires a bevy of different, individually loaded fonts, bloating the file sizes of apps and the load times of websites. Computers can fake it, but the results are often gross, and they're not consistent across platforms and browsers.
So how will variable fonts help fix this problem? Basically, by giving type designers their own version of responsive design: a single font file that can dynamically morph between different weights and sizes as its designer intended while remaining consistent across platforms.
"A variable font is a single font that works like multiple fonts," explains Tim Brown, head of typography for Adobe Type, who helped solidify the variable font standard. "They'll lead to faster, better websites; smaller app sizes; more flexible typography; and richer typographical palettes."
Existing OpenType fonts are what are called outline fonts. Inside the file, each letterform is defined as a mathematical series of lines and curves, which your computer draws on screen in real time. Compare this to bitmap fonts, which are essentially graphic files limited in resolution; outline fonts have the advantage that they can be infinitely scaled without resulting in pixelation. They're a collection of instructions, not a collection of letters.
Variable fonts add weights and other design tweaks to OpenType by adding a new set of instructions to the format, allowing a font's baseline design to be tweaked across 64,000 different axes. In other words, a variable font can properly bold, say, the letter "B" not by smearing it, or by downloading a separate font file, but by sending the computer precise mathematical instructions on how to turn a "B" into a B. ("Widen the main stroke by 10%, increase the apertures by 5%, and thicken the shoulders by 7%.")
Nor is a variable font useful only for bolding. For example, the OpenType format previously allowed fonts to be scaled to any size. But a font that is readable at 12 points on a desktop might be much harder to read on your Apple Watch, or as small print on the bottom of a magazine page. This is why many typeface designers, like Tobias Frere-Jones, create variations of their fonts specifically designed for smaller screens and print sizes. A variable font could contain such instructions, without being a separate file.
Heck, variable fonts are so powerful, there's technically no reason they can't contain multiple typefaces. A single variable font could potentially morph between Zapfino, Futura, and Wingdings, without requiring three different font downloads. Brown tells me, though, that variable fonts are really designed to interpolate between different variations of a single design, and not be typeface transformers. "Having multiple typefaces in a single variable font is theoretically possible, but off the top of my head its benefits are unclear and the likelihood of its success is minimal," he says. "Given how variable font axes are designed, and how a few implementation ideas are already taking hold, it would be extremely uncommon."
Given the potential of variable fonts, it's no wonder that Google, Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft are pushing hard to make them a reality. Variable fonts will save significant space in apps and operating systems, cutting down on download speeds, load times, and server costs. They'll make the web typographically richer, and give designers new tools to create beautiful designs. Variable fonts will also help create single fonts that work as well on large screens, like desktops, as they do on modern devices with small screens, like wearables.
"We all want this format to succeed," Brown says. "All of our technologies benefit from fonts that are smaller, faster, more flexible, and look good everywhere, always giving readers what they expect to see."
For variable fonts to take off, though, it will require more than just Google, Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft's pledge to agree on the standard, though. Those companies will need to implement variable font support into all of their products. Meanwhile, there are no real variable fonts yet, so type designers will need to create them, with tools that have yet to be developed. All of this will take time.
Brown says that while he can't say when variable fonts will be commonplace, he thinks it'll be sooner rather than later. "Type designers are already used to thinking about how the different fonts in a typeface relate to each other, and font design tools already have a variable font-like interface," he says. "It's not a big jump from there."
From pizzas that order themselves and AI assistants to design tools that were once only usable on our desktops.
In the mobile-first 21st century, apps have become one of the most important elements of any product or brand. But as the users of millions of crappy apps can attest, designing a good one is tricky. So what separates a great app from shovelware?
After receiving hundreds of submissions for this year's 2016 Innovation by Design Awards, our jury selected the apps that landed on that magic formula. Check out this year's 33 finalists, and two winners, below.
Designers have used Photoshop to mock up their prototypes for ages, but it's hardly a tool that was built for the job. Now, they finally have their own app—thanks to the launch of Adobe Experience Design CC (XD). An all-in-one digital platform built atop Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Design CC was built from the ground up to give designers the tools they need to design, prototype, and test their websites and apps.
How will virtual reality change the way creatives work, and the tools they use to bring their designs to life? Look no further than Google's Tilt Brush for the answer. The app allows users to paint in 3D virtual space with a near-infinite palette of brushes and colors, including simulated materials such as fire and snow. As Co.Design's Mark Wilson put it, "It's like Microsoft Paint for the year 2020."
Airbnb's app serves a similar function to a hotel's front desk staff, so it's got to set just the right tone. As part of its new app experience, Airbnb simplified its interface, introduced new filters, and created a whole new search algorithm that better matches users with places to stay, according to their preferences. And like a good hotel concierge, Airbnb can now tell you about the best sights and experiences in the neighborhood, thanks to newly introduced in-app Guidebooks.
Created for the environmental wellness startup Bitfinder, Awair is a smart indoor air quality monitor that keeps track of the air you breathe where you live. Think you smell gas? Awair can tell you if you're just imagining it or not—as well as keep track of your home's temperature, humidity, dust levels, and other contaminants.
Can video games teach urban designers how to build better cities? Designed by an architect-turned-game developer and inspired by The Whole Earth Catalog, Block'hood is a construction game, somewhere between Minecraft and SimCity in feel, where the goal is to build sustainable communities. By doing so, the creators of Block'hood hope to inspire a whole new generation of urban planners, as well as give them the skills they need to design the cities of the 21st century.
Mobile ads aren't much more than an annoyance to most users. But the company Button thinks they can make them a lot more useful. Button's software development kit allows developers to integrate actionable software buttons into other developers' apps; for example, a music app could contain a Button that sends you to the Ticketmaster app. Once the Button is tapped, the referring app gets a small cut of the transaction. It's an ad—but a useful ad.
Banking websites are notoriously poorly designed, so for its new app, Capital One wanted to create a streamlined experience that allowed customers to manage their finances as easily as they might order a Lyft or book a reservation on OpenTable. The redesigned app united all of Capital One's products, including credit cards, auto and home loans, and banking, into a single experience, driven by Apple's TouchID. It even includes smart geolocation features, allowing users to easily find their local ATMs or branch locations, without entering any information.
Never endure a mass email chain from the PTA again! A social network for classrooms, Class Dojo gives parents an easy way of keeping tabs on their kids throughout the school day. Moderated by teachers, the app lets the educators share photos, videos, upcoming school events, and important announcements with the parents of the children in their class. The app can do the same for the entire school, alerting all parents about snow days, special nights, and more.
When a designer creates an app mock-up, they typically need plenty of filler—from lorum ipsum text to fake addresses to sample images. Craft is a suite of five free plug-ins that work in Sketch or Adobe Photoshop CC to take the pain out of finding and placing filler design elements, as well as sync design assets across every user on a particular project.
Design is still a desktop-first process, but Create hopes to change that. Billing itself as the most powerful and easy-to-use graphic design tool, Create is a mobile-first design app that makes it painless to develop sophisticated mock-ups, all in one interface that makes it feel as easy as drawing.
Most commuting apps aim to get you to where you're going as quickly as possible, but Detour wants you to meander. This walking tour app provides an experimental guide to San Francisco, encouraging users to go off the beaten path and follow unexpected detours that explore the city's hidden stories.
Smart homes represent new opportunities for hackers. DOJO is a home security system that protects your little corner of the internet of things from cyber attacks, thanks to a smooth, pebble-like device that connects to your router to monitor network activity. If something suspicious is going on, the pebble will change colors and start buzzing.
Giphy is the Google of animated GIFs. But the company's first app isn't about searching for the perfect GIF. It's about making them. Giphy Cam makes it easy to create your own meme-worthy looping animations, with a range of quirky, Snapchat-like filters designed to help each GIF uploaded to the service go viral.
Busy calendars are where life aspirations go to die. To help combat this, Google Calendar launched Goals, an always-on digital assistant that manages your schedule in real time, and tries to find appropriate time windows where you can squeeze in a run, some yoga, or even some time to work on your novel. Something more important come up? No problem. Goals will automatically shift things around.
What radio serials were to the Greatest Generation, Hooked wants to be to millennials. This service doles out mobile-first micro-fiction in bite-sized exchanges, told in a text message-styled pastiche.
Looking for a flight on your smartphone stinks. Hopper aims to take the pain out, analyzing "billions" of prices daily to alert would-be travelers when the trip they want to take is cheapest—and giving them forewarning when they're about to rise. Want to buy? A ticket's just a few taps away.
With a whole generation being raised on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets today, how are kids going to learn to code? Hopscotch is a visual programming language for iPhones and iPads that makes it easy to learn by dragging and dropping blocks of code. When your app's done, it can be easily uploaded for the rest of the Hopscotch community to enjoy.
The world's largest social network envisions a future in which you're just as likely to text an AI as you are your family and friends. M for Facebook Messenger is the first step toward that future: a virtual assistant that lives within Facebook's messaging app, combining human and machine intelligence to do things like shop, find reservations, or even plan events.
In the era of thousands of channels and à la carte streaming video services, figuring out what to watch next is harder than ever. MightyTV's Video Discover app aims to make this easier, offering custom suggestions for what to watch based upon a viewer's preferences and the services they subscribe to.
Kids love to dance. Monster Moves is an app by Ideo that leverages kids' natural booty-shaking skills to choreograph a virtual monster's dance routine. In doing so, kids not only learn some new steps, they get a fun lesson in rhythm.
Practicing mindfulness can help relieve stress, depression, and anxiety, but it can be hard to learn. Moodnotes is a new app by Ustwo that hopes to instill healthy emotional habits by training users to be more mindful during their day. The app prompts users throughout the day to record how they're feeling on a seven-point, emojified scale, then prompts them to spend some time on further introspection.
Through Pinterest, 100 million users bookmark the stuff they love. To make sure that experience is great for everyone, the social network has established a new set of product design standards, guaranteeing that the Pinterest experience is the same on iOS and Android as it is on the web.
In the Slack age, what does an office productivity suite look like? It looks like Quip, a workspace collaboration plug-in for Slack that combines a team's documents, spreadsheets, and checklists into a single living document that can be edited and commented upon in real time.
Named after the emerald knave who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, Robinhood is a mobile-first investment app that aims to make buying and selling stocks simple. In this user-friendly, intuitive app, trades are done with a swipe, Tinder-style, making public markets more accessible than ever.
Solitaire is one of the most popular computer games ever, yet until Sage Solitaire, there wasn't a version of the famous one-player card game designed specifically for smartphones. Sage Solitaire is a fast, beautiful game that bulldozes through the inherent design problems of poker-based solitaire games—the pace, the predictability—while perfecting the genre for the mobile age.
If a player in a Women's Tennis Association match is losing, her coach only has 90 seconds to provide on-court counsel to turn the game around. SAP Tennis Analytics gives those coaches the data they need in the moment by processing real-time game info from 10 on-court cameras, then visualizing it in real time in a way that's easy for players and coaches alike to understand.
Most emails don't require much of an answer, but ignoring them can send the wrong message. With Inbox, Google's eventual Gmail successor, Smart Replies make it easier to quickly respond to an email by leveraging machine learning to automatically compose a grammatically correct response. Just click on one of the three options, hit send, and you're done!
Fancy yourself a CMYK super-taster? Specimen is a mobile color-matching game that invites you to match an increasingly subtle palette of hues with colors in a slow-moving petri dish of chromatic blobs.
Adapting a game as slow-paced as golf for the faster mobile age is tricky, but that's just what IBM set out to do with the Ultimate View of the Masters. It's a digital golfing experience that provides analysis, overlays, leaderboards, and 4K live stream of every player on every hole of the Master's Tournament.
Aimed at kids between the ages of five and nine, Toca Blocks is like a digital Lego set that lets kids create their own digital worlds by pushing blocks together, which then transform into different objects like chairs and diamonds. When they're done, three virtual characters can explore these new worlds by flying, climbing, and running over kids' creations.
Tribe is a messaging app for iOS and Android that's the best of both text and video messaging. It has all the immediacy of FaceTime, but also the asynchronous, take-it-when-you-want-it quality of text messaging. And because it works like a face cam walkie-talkie for your smartphone, it's easier to use than both.
Spreadsheets are notoriously hard to read. Vizable, a new app from Seattle-based software house Tableau, converts spreadsheets into easily manipulatable charts and graphs, making it dead simple for small businesses or individual users to parse and understand large amounts of data.
If you thought ordering a pizza was already too easy, don't set up Domino's Zero Click ordering, which makes calling in your regular pie as easy as opening the Domino's app and watching its 10-second countdown. Talk about dangerous.
Who says a football pitch has to be a perfect rectangle?
Soccer ignoramuses like me might not be able to tell you why the yellow cards are flying or why the announcer is so excited. We can tell you one thing: the field's supposed to be a rectangle.
But in dense urban neighborhoods, perfectly rectangular lots can be in short supply. One solution? Convert the weirdly-shaped lots, which blight the space between buildings, into beautiful—albeit unusual—Tetris-like soccer fields. That's what AP Thailand, a real estate developer located in Bangkok, is doing in collaboration with digital design agency CJ Worx, as recently pointed out by Designboom.
To create community play spaces for people living in the central Bangkok Khlong Toei district, the two firms are buying up irregularly shaped open lots, cleaning them up, and converting them into football pitches. You can see some of their work in the video below.
The results aren't exactly regulation, but that seemingly only makes them more fun, adding new dimensions to the game, like 90-degree bends to maneuver around from one side of the field to the other, or even billiards-like obstructions—made up of old shipping containers and odd walls—to try to bank goals off of. If you think that football greats can't come out of such improvised conditions, think again. Legendary soccer great Pelé grew up in such abject poverty that he learned to play football with a sock stuffed with newspaper.
"The moment we realized it had to go was when we realized that our logo actually represented the worst part of meeting up with new people."
With 27 million members and 250,000 separate groups, Meetup.com is probably the most popular social network that no one ever talks about. Among the Twitters, Facebooks, LinkedIns, and Pinterests of the world, it's practically invisible.
Part of that is by design. If Meetup does its job right, you're not spending that much time on it at all. The site exists to facilitate offline friendships and experiences, through groups dedicated to particular hobbies and interests. But even so, Meetup's existing design didn't help. It was functional, but not sexy, a platform that looked appropriate for grandmas looking for knitting circles than, say, twenty-somethings searching out ultimate frisbee leagues.
Today, that has changed. Thanks to a collaboration with fun-loving, nudist-friendly design house Sagmeister & Walsh, Meetup has a new logo, a new identity system, and a new app (which the design agency collaborated with Meetup on to make a reality). The best way to explain it, oddly, might be in musical terms: if the old Meetup app felt like Pandora—a functional app with a design from a decade past—the new Meetup feels like Apple Music, filled with lots of movement and bright, poppy bursts of color.
Let's start with the new logo. The old one had some problems, the first being that the handwritten name tag, while having clear brand recognition, was a nightmare to work with on mobile. Look at Meetup's old iOS icon, in which the nametag is inelegantly crammed, off-center no less, into the rounded rectangle. It looks even wonkier when adapted to the round Apple Watch icon. "That name tag logo had a lot of tactical problems," admits Jen Gergen, design director of branding identity at Meetup. "There's a lot of love for the nametag, and it's built a lot of equity in the last 14 years, but it was increasingly frustrating to work with."
But for Gergen, the "clincher" that put the old logo to rest wasn't its adaptive problems. It's what it stood for. "The moment we realized it had to go was when we realized that our logo actually represented the worst part of meeting up with new people," she points out: that awkward introductory phrase, when you've scrawled your name on a sticker, slapped it on the lapel, and are milling about in a room full of strangers, feeling like a doofus. In other words, it didn't represent camaraderie and friendship, which is the best part of a good Meetup. It represented social anxiety.
The new logo, designed by Sagmeister and Walsh, fixes the problem in some clever ways. Not everything has been thrown out: the distinctive Meetup red, as well as the handwritten look, are retained. But the nametag is gone, and the penmanship has changed, replaced with a thick, quirky, and hip signature that almost looks like it was drawn with a Crayola marker by someone adept at writing with their non-dominant hand. It has a blobby quality which becomes even more apparent when animated, turning the logo into a petri dish of points, swarming together like Twizzler-colored ferrofluid—a visual representation of many people meeting up. For round icons, like the Apple Watch, the "M" stands by itself, immediately recognizable thanks to its idiosyncratic slant. App icons, meanwhile, feature the monogram surrounded by incoming blobs, making it look almost like a paint gun splatter.
But the new identity needed to succeed outside of digital. It needed to be a proper branding system. "This needed to be easy to work in the real world," Gergen says, because the whole point of Meetup is to get people talking face-to-face. Previously, Meetup had 27 million members, spread across 250,000 groups, but no branding system that allowed these group members to easily find each other in the real world. With the new identity, though, that changes. "It's flaggable," Gergen says, referring to the way the distinct "swarming" cursive can be used to write out the name of individual Meetup groups thanks to a dedicated web app, then printed out to serve as a flag in the real world for members. Nor do individual groups' branding options end there: they can also choose duo-tone image headers for their group, giving individual groups a similar look to Apple Music's category pages.
Is Meetup trying to court a younger audience with the redesign? Only partly, says Farah Assir, product design lead at Meetup: "We're still targeting everyone, but it's more about not being neutral anymore. About being bold, and having more of a personality. The colors and system we're using are fresh, so it might attract a younger audience, but we think it's actually more accessible to a lot of people, regardless of age."
Gergen agrees, saying Meetup was inspired by other brands like Apple, Target, and the Gap. "They all have this bold, striking flavor, while still being acceptable to everyone," she says. "We wanted something like that." At first blush, it looks like Meetup might have gotten what it wants . . . and at the very least, it's a clear improvement on the old design in every way. You can check out the new Meetup here.
