A while ago, we posted about Victimless leather, part of MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” show.
Well, Paola Antonelli had to put the victimless leather coat to death when it started to grow too quickly and outgrew its test tube. While the thought of killing a living product makes us sad, it’s an interesting site for feeling out what reactions might be to futuristic living materials we might imagine around our homes or on our bodies.
Ambidextrous was at Maker Faire this weekend. We’re not sure how many attended, but they ran out of parking and 101 and 92 had tons of traffic, so we take that as a sign of its popularity.
Check out photos of Ambi’s magazine-making and mechanical dissections:
Sorry it’s been quite on the Ambi blog front lately. Between getting issue 9 to the printers and getting issue 10 rolling, it’s been busy at the Ambi-plex.
But we’ll be at Maker Faire in the bay area Saturday and Sunday! Come to the Ambidextrous table for discounted magazines, mechanical frog dissection, and mini-magazine making.
Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things. It’s put on by the publishers of Make and Craft magazines and attracts 45,000+ people over the course of the weekend.
When? Saturday, May 3, 2008 (10am – 10pm) ; Sunday, May 4, 2008 (11am – 6pm)
Admission? Adults: $25; Students (13-21): $15; Youth (4-12): $10; and children under 4 are free
April 16, 2008 @ 9:02 am · Filed under Designed things by Lilly
This is old news, but I thought it was too cool not to share. In January, Team Aqueduct won Google’s “Innovate or Die” competition to design a way to get clean water to rural communities in the “developing” world. The bike treis to solve the problem of storage, transport, and filtering all while getting you to and from the water source.
April 16, 2008 @ 8:51 am · Filed under Games, Design News by Lilly
Does Guitar Hero have too much rock star attitude? Rockband too complicated and pricey? Shawna Hein and Ambidextrous contributor Kevin Lim and editor Lora Oehlberg brings you Jug Hero, featured both in Kotaku and Make.
Make writes:
Two players are assigned one jug instrument each, which they blow puffs of air into to score points. Players also “clink” their instruments together in a social “cheers!” that allots them bonus points. Each jug includes a microphone to sense resonant puffs of air in the mouth of the jug, and a force-sensor to sense social “clinking” of two jugs at the side of the instruments. The interaction is kept both simple and social.
There’s nothing like the smile that a sunny morning ride across the fabled Brooklyn Bridge can paint on your face, or pulling off the West Side Bike Path at 14th Street to discover that you’ve led an impromptu bicycle calvacade halfway up Manhattan. Against all odds, I’m a sometime bike commuter in New York. Since life in this city is so unpredictable, bike parking — especially in-building bike-parking — is what makes it all possible. I’m lucky to work in at a company with an indoor bike room; if I end up meeting friends across town, or leave work as the spring sleet begins to fall, I can always beg off until the next day, knowing that my bike is safe inside.
Not everyone’s so lucky, though. “A study conducted by the Department of City Planning found that lack of access to secure bike parking was the primary reason cyclists did not ride to work. The current standard fixture for bicycle parking consists of variations of a fabricated square steel tube called the “CityRack” that is mounted on sidewalks. These fixtures occupy little space on the sidewalk and do not obstruct the flow of people or goods…. The CityRack design, however…. does not fulfill the potential to be an icon for New York City cycling.” — CityRacks Design Competition website.
Unlike many design competitions, there’s a user testing cycle built in! Up to 10 teams will receive up to $5,000 to fabricate their solution, which will be installed and tested at 2 public locations throughout NYC. Final winners are selected after that period. It sounds like the challenge is to improve on a generally useful and usable status quo, while adding an element of desirability to the new design.
April 6, 2008 @ 9:45 pm · Filed under Designed things by Lilly
In the next Letters to things, designer and researcher Catherine Forsman explains the magic behind her pillbox.
For anyone who has been addicted to cigarettes, there is a ritual to the cigarette pack. One could call it an experience, but in reality it is much deeper than an experience because it is repeated and becomes fetishsized, learned, compared among smokers, and becomes invisible to the ritualist in a way that only ritual can as a person repeats it. This ritual starts as soon as the addiction begins. What becomes ritual to the cigarette smoker, who purchases them over the counter, are things like tapping the top of the pack, box or not, taking the plastic wrapping off of the pack, un-origami folding the foil, then tapping or plucking or simply dispensing each cigarette out. Until I tried to quit smoking, I wasn’t aware of how the ritual was as soothing and as indicative to a sense of self and place as the cigarettes were.
Chantix, the new “wonder” drug that blocks receptors in the human brain that parse out nicotine and give it to the other parts of the brain. When a person decides to take that plunge and quit smoking, the Chantix chemical arrives in its weekly packages. Opening the first pack is very familiar to a smoker because the packaging is an emulation of the ritual of the cigarette pack. The box is thick, nicely designed folded cardboard. As you open the top flap, there is another layer, and the pills cannot be revealed until one pushes a “button” and pulls out the pill dispensary. Once the pill dispensary is revealed one needs to push rather hard in order to dispense the tiny pill inside all the packaging. The package itself, in practical terms, would not need to be designed this way, unless the chemical itself needs to be protected from light, but a dark bottle would do this. Rather than seeming “practical,” is this packaging about creating another ritual of drug dispensation? Has Pfizer hired ethnographic consultants and to study the fetishsization of the cigarette pack and emulated this in their packaging to soothe smokers as they begin to wean themselves off of the nicotine chemical?
“I felt cruel when I turned it off,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The “it” in question is a tiny coat that has been grown in a test tube using cells around a biodegradable polymer structure. The coat had flourished to such an extent that its “life support” system had to be switched off to stop it getting too big.
The people of Symbiotica gave a tissue culture workshop and talk at machine project in Los Angeles last fall. Oron Katz, Symbiotica’s co-founder and an industrial designer by training, described a crisis. He had been exploring concepts to create furniture out of living plants, hoping to engender a care for our consumer objects that people have for living things. Horrified, he came to fear that his concept would only render the plant world a commodity as well. So he began trying to synthesize nature instead, working to get people thinking about their relationship to nature, food, and exploitation through art.
The Economist doesn’t seem to get the critical element of victimless leather or the perfect, in-vitro steak. The actual Symbiotica in-vitro steak, consumed in France some time in the last few years, tasted wretched according to Oron. Especially given his fears of commoditizing life with the plant furniture and his framing Symbiotica as art rather than product development, I think Oron is trying to make us think, not relieve our guilt.
He and his fellow researchers examined brain scans of people who were playing a shopping game. The shoppers looked at pictures of designer chocolates and books and computer gizmos, and their nucleus accumbens lit up on the brain scan. That’s the same part of the brain that lights up when people eat something delicious or shoot up heroin.
The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.
People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.
It uses less material and more intelligence. Take the computer. First it was as big as a house. Now it comes in credit card size. In ten years, our bodies will be bionic. In 50 years, the concept of “computer” will be gone. The designer of the future is the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet counselor. That is all.
He goes on to explain that the role of design in the last century was to democratize good products by making well-designed things cheaply available. Asked about his yacht designs for Russian billionaires, Starck explains that it is his “Robin Hood” strategy — research and develop new concepts on the rich’s dime and use those learnings for designing for others.
“I was a producer of materiality. I’m ashamed of that. In the future, I’ll be a producer of concepts. This will be more useful,” he ends.
Starck’s TED talk says as much, but with a bit more context.
He calls for designers to throw away their sketch books and get political, subversive, and philosophical. Fair enough. But he’s certainly not the first one to call for service design, design thinking in social entrepreneurship, or sustainable design. Nor does he express much regret at the labor markets and globalizations that enabled the “democratic” design he called for. Is this bombast for self-promotion? Is it promoting a concept on a more global stage? I wonder what Phillipe Starck has cooking.
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A while ago, we posted about Victimless leather, part of MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” show. 
But we’ll be at Maker Faire in the bay area Saturday and Sunday! Come to the Ambidextrous table for discounted magazines, mechanical frog dissection, and mini-magazine making. 
There’s nothing like the smile that a sunny morning ride across the fabled Brooklyn Bridge can paint on your face, or pulling off the West Side Bike Path at 14th Street to discover that you’ve led an impromptu bicycle calvacade halfway up Manhattan. Against all odds, I’m a sometime bike commuter in New York. Since life in this city is so unpredictable, bike parking — especially in-building bike-parking — is what makes it all possible. I’m lucky to work in at a company with an indoor bike room; if I end up meeting friends across town, or leave work as the spring sleet begins to fall, I can always beg off until the next day, knowing that my bike is safe inside.
In the next 
