Design

Australia architects Stutchbury and Pape have created a house out of recycled cardboard, Velcro, nylon wing nuts and tape. It can be built in six hours by two people and can be transportable in a light commercial vehicle

Tokyo is an impressive city above ground, but one of the most incredible things about this city is it’s mind-bogglingly complex underground. The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city. The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometres of tunnel sitting 50 metres beneath the surface.

The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying Edogawa River.

The site is all in Japanese, but if you click around the menus a bit, there are animations and diagrams of how the system works, and other interesting photos of the high-tech control center and turbine facilities. Supposedly the G-Cans project is also meant to be a tourist attraction, and can be visited for free — via Dead Machinery

Interesting article on Wired about the demise of brands.

The world seems to be disappearing beneath a deluge of logos, corporations are branding like there’s no tomorrow and the brand value of companies like Coca-Cola and IBM are routinely calculated at tens of billions of dollars.

Brand were originally created to protect the consumer. So that when you bought a bottle of Coca Cola you were getting exactly what you purchased rather than a knock-off. Laws were based around a company fighting to protect the consumer from being hurt or misled by products falsely claiming to the real thing.

That changed when companies started attacking the consumer. Disney’s one of the worst, of course, going after day cares that paint Mickey on the walls — even though there’s not an instant’s danger that anyone will mistake a nonprofit daycare center for a Disney operation and be misled into patronising it.

This practice has backfired on corporations with consumers no longer having brand loyalty and actively avoiding some companies due to their aggressive behaviour.

When form defines function the experience of a product is better. In this case, Charlotte Van Der Waals’ World Time Clock takes the math and confusion out of time zone hopping. Simply position the clock with the desired city on top and the correct time is displayed.

As gorgeous as it is, it seems it’s a bugger to replace batteries and your nifty clock soon reverts to a paperweight — via Cool Hunting

Designer Luigi Colani has created a space-saving house with a six square metre cylinder inside that contains a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The cylinder rotates left or right bringing the room you want into view of the main living room. There’s a separate toilet and a small hallway, and everything is controlled with a remote. The house was designed for young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career — via boingboing

I’m working on some artwork for our company’s christmas party invite. The theme is winter wonder land, we’ve hired some large fluffy polar bear cut outs (growly bears) for decoration and I though the invite should therefore feature a polar bear.

I opted for a very deceptively classy smooth Arctic background with stars, two scripty fonts, some cartoony penguins (think Japanese character stationery), dangling from and icy curly glacier with a polar bear trying to reach them so he can eat them. The polar bear is also thinking about a roast chicken as he is trying to eat the penguins.

I have received the following criticisms from my party organising colleagues before sending it out to the company.

1. The polar bear is too fierce/aggressive. Can you at least take off his claws?

How many friendly, cuddly polar bears without claws have you met?

2. I don’t get why the polar bear is thinking about chicken.

Have you been watching cartoons over the past 50 years? Man it’s a classic toon cliché!

3. But the fierce polar bear doesn’t go with the style and isn’t what the theme is about.

Obviously very new to the use of contradiction as humour.

Nothing has been said about my Santa’s sweatshop sign depicting a swoosh logo in candy stripes. I guess that one hasn’t hit the radar yet.

Maybe I’m being over protective, or these subtle things are too subtle.

GRRRRRR!!

Before:

After:

My Fishbone watch arrived from TokyoFlash today.

It’s all fishboney and has lovely blue lights to play with.

Mmm… blue LEDs. You can never have too many blue LEDs.

Design for chunks competition, in partnership with Virgin Atlantic.

What a fantastic comp! You design a sick bag, you are one of the lucky 20 winners, Virgin Atlantic print them and passsengers throw up in it! Fan-bloody-tastic!

Needless to say the site is full of double entendres of the vomity kind. I love this sentence in the copyright info:

Isn’t the blatant commercial exploitation of real talent enough to make any true aesthete sick?

Now for something truely sick, the Disney Dream Desk.

Little Tikes Commercial has created a playground structure called the Infinity Climber, which is a climbable double twist strip for kids.

It also recently won a 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Award — via boingboing

I like strange houses and the Silo Home is certainly that.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s when the Cold War was escalating, the US government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos (each for 18 million in 1961, with the rising cost of construction today one could barely fund the excavation.) to prepare the country for an attack that never came. Today, most of these silos lie abandoned and filled with water, monuments to a bygone era of American history and left to waste. But now, thanks to two entrepreneurial cousins, Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons, one of these silos located in beautiful Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid is finding new life as a luxury home safe haven getaway complex assessable by plane or car.

On the surface it features a hangar and spacious open living room with a fireplace and a wrap around porch. Below ground in what was once the launch control centre, now is a two level, three bedroom, 2½ bath with an open living area and kitchen adjoined by a spiral staircase. Star Wars like doors open to a large tunnel that accesses the silo.

How can you not like a house that comes complete with massive blast doors? Mmm… blast doors…

The silohome is a surface mountain home with an underground 1,850 m² vault one can habitat in with luxury. Francisco and Gibbons have restored the 200 m² two level launch control centre. Their complex is climate controlled using the earth temperature to moderate the surface and below ground environments. The same principals can be built into the large and expansive additional 1,850 m² silo area.

It has come to my attention that our office kitchen has a hidden vortex. I first noticed this a couple of months ago with my mug mysteriously disappearing, my coffee and green tea levels diminishing quickly and honey also suffering a similar fate.

I have managed to keep these at bay with some ingenious skull and cross bones stickers, or at least they slowed it down. In fact some people confessed to frequently taking some of my supplies and promised to stop.

Okay, I don’t mind if someone uses my stuff occassionally, but it really fucking shits me when I turn up to work in the morning and all my coffee is gone, or there’s only one tea bag to see me through the day.

Today, however, was the last straw. My ingenious tea strainer has vanished. I spent 20 minutes turning up our small office vortex / kitchen, but to no avail. I have sent ’round and office e-mail, and with the aid of my trusty graphics tablet, quickly composed a sketch of my awol tea strainer to accompany said e-mail.

No one has seen my tea strainer, but everyone finds the sketch amusing.

GRRR!!!

It used to be only Superman who could see through concrete walls, but an exhibit at the National Building Museum shows that mere mortals can do it, too.

Called Liquid Stone, the show features variations of translucent concrete, a newfangled version of the old construction standby that offers a combination of aesthetics and practicality.

A prototype wall of translucent concrete is shown at the National Building Museum. When backlit, a human form can be seen through the wall. The blocks are made by mixing glass fibers into the combination of crushed stone, cement and water — via boingboing