brent comber: alder rounds

canadian designer brent comber creates furniture using wood in unusual ways. his ‘alder’ series features branches which have been clumped together and cut into geometric forms. the result of this process keeps the form of the tree intact while create a contemporary form. the ‘shattered’ collection has a similar process but instead of branches, it uses cut sections from logs. this creates an effect that resembles shattered glass or ice, hence the name. comber’s most innovative use of wood can be found in his series of lampshades made from cedar trunks. the shades have small perforation drilled in the side to let light through. comber’s work is all made with sustainably harvested wood, often using scraps from wood mills.”

(via Monoscope.)

Temporary Cardboard Shelter.

Flat-pack emergency shelter. This is a great bit of construction from a designer currently studying Product Design at Central St Martins. Cemal Okten’s flat packing temporary shelter is constructed from waterproofed cardboard, and allows space for eight people. Possibly a cheap, recyclable option for emergencies? Or, at the very least, a seriously hip home for the homeless.

See more work by Cemal Okten.

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(via Things of Random Coolness..)

Xmas Card

Absolutely amazing! Abstract Christmas card from AKQA.

(via Swiss Miss)

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(via J:V.)

Urban honey

Certainly one of the most intriguing urban project I’ve encountered lately: miel béton (which means “concrete honey” in french): the production of honey on urban roofs in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint Denis. According to new paris bohemian:

“A graphic designer and visual artist by trade, Olivier Darné began his investigation of bees in 2000, when he first placed a single beehive on his house in Saint Denis. Following that experiment with the installation of a dozen hives on the roof of city hall, Olivier was fascinated by the idea of sending bees out into the city as “prospectors” of the urban environment. What, exactly, could bees tell us about our city, about the relationships between wild and urban, between humans and their surroundings, between space and time? What Olivier found was more than gratifying: bees reproduce, in liquid form, the density, changes, and social organization of our city. If you consider that 3000 hectares (or 5000 acres) of city are concentrated into a single pot of honey, the resulting flavors are a gauge of how we urbanites live.
(…)
By consuming honey produced in and from their own city, urbanites connect themselves intimately to their land, even if it happens to be one that’s filled with concrete, high-rise housing blocks, and if they’re lucky, bees.“

Why do I blog this? definitely not related to technology, I found this project amazingly curious as it shows how cities can be curious places for new forms of design. The intersection between nature and the urban environment is surely a relevant topic for design.

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(via Pasta&Vinegar.)

The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web

There’s always been jabs at Twitter for not having a viable business model and the chatter has increased in the current economic climate. In a recent interview Evan Williams, Twitter CEO, said “We had planned to focus on revenue in 2010 but that’s no longer the case, so we changed the plan quite a bit… We’ve moved revenue higher on our list of priorities…”.

I believe Twitter, potentially, has an incredible business model.

In The New York Times R&D Labs, where I work, we’ve been talking a lot about ‘smart content’, both in relation to advertising, search and news delivery. For the past 157 years (that’s how old the newspaper is) we’ve essentially delivered ‘dumb content’ to people’s doorsteps. You and I, irrespective of interests, location etc. have received the same newspaper on our doorsteps every morning. We’re beginning to explore ways to make content smarter, to understand what you’ve read, which device you’ve read it on and your micro level interests—making the most important news find you, instead of you having to find it.

This also changes the advertising model where ads become even smarter. Sure, ads are at about a 1st grade reading level now; with adsense and cookies, the ad networks have half an idea of what I’m interested in, but they aren’t exactly smart about it. Just because a friend sends me an email about a baseball game doesn’t mean I want to see ESPN ads in my Gmail.

So what does this have to do with a Twitter business model? Twitter, potentially, has the ability to deliver unbelievably smart advertising; advertising that I actually want to see, and they have the ability to deliver search results far superior and more accurate to Google, putting Twitter in the running to beat Google in the latent quest to the semantic web. With some really intelligent data mining and cross pollination, they could give me ads that makes sense not for something I looked at 3 weeks ago, or a link my wife clicked on when she borrowed my laptop, but ads that are extremely relevant to ‘what I’m doing right now’.

A quick perusal of my Tweets shows that I live in Brooklyn, NY, I work for The New York Times, teach at NYU/ITP, I travel somewhere once a month for work, I love gardening, cappuccinos, my Vespa , U.I./Design and hardware hacking, I’m a political news junkie, I read Gizmodo & NYTimes.com and I was looking for a new car for a while, but now have a MINI and I’m also friends with these people. That’s a treasure trove of data about me, and it’s semantic on a granular level about only my interests.

If I send a tweet saying “I’m looking for a new car does anyone have any recommendations”, I would be more than happy to see ‘smart’ user generated advertising recommendations based on my past tweets, mine the data of other people living Brooklyn who have tweeted about their car and deliver a tweet/ad based on those result leaving spammers lost in the noise. I’d also expect when I send a tweet saying ‘I got a new car and love it!’ that those car ads stop appearing and something else, relevant to only me, takes its place.

And it doesn’t have to be advertising delivered on their site alone. One of the great successes of Twitter has been their APIs and the wonderful applications and sites that users have built with them. Why not build out an advertising or search API that delivers the latest micro level tags or ad links of users interests? There’s a plethora of opportunities with this data, and if it’s done right it becomes enticing and engaging, not annoying, irrelevant and outdated.

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(via O’Reilly Radar – Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.)

Freesouls

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The book >Freesouls – captured and released by Joi Ito is finally available in a limited edition release, featuring really nice shots of some of the etoy.AGENTS. Well shot and beautiful portraits, but moreover an interesting process; A  >flickr-set containing portraits tagged with ` >freesouls‘ that unfolded into a concept of creating authentic portraits released under a >creative commons license that can be freely used e.g. for Wikipedia pages.

I think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not just random ones.

(Joi Ito, from the Essay ` >Just another free soul`)

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(via etoy.CORPORATION.)

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Christophe Lemaitre — Sans titre

via R-Echos referers

This morning batch of republished articles on R-Echos seemed
so perfectly tight I decided to make a collection out of it.
I searched a few more articles and assembled all of them
in this issue: SCANNERS. This selection reflects a couple of
thoughts we exchanged with Philippe around the Republishing
event discussion project we are setting up with Tlktlk.

R-Echos issue 2: Scanners (download the pdf)

pan-dan: Jordi Ferreiro