Category Archives: Design
Rosetta Stone 2.0
The Rosetta disk is an archive of 1,500 languages that can comfortably be held in the hand. The underside of the disk has, .. over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. [...]
University Oath
I propose that Aalto University should stand for …..an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life. (via) John Thackara proposes a new kind of oath for the forthcoming Aalto University based on a viewpoint that we are part of the Earths’ biological system not apart from it, and that the whole [...]
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Powerkiss
Powerkiss is a Finnish Startup which integrates power charging of your mobile phones and other gadgets into pieces of furniture with no requirement for cables. The future for this should be huge just put your laptop or mobile down on a table to charge it, you will no longer have to think about charging your [...]
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Minature Concrete Buildings
Cute miniature concrete buildings by push+pull. (via) I love the fake drain planter.
Antikythera Mechanism
Decoding the Heavens is a book about the Antikythera mechanism a 2000 year old device that could conceivably be called the worlds first computer. There is a nice short video of the man responsible for rebuilding it describing what it does.
Archinect T-Shirts
Archinect has a new set of t-shirt designs just out and I just ordered my steel on asphalt. I like the latest designs alot more than the ‘architecture sucks’ design which ‘sucks’ and has been around since forever. Archinect T-shirts.
Amsterdam 360°
Dutch graphic artist Frank Dresmé has made a series of psychogeographic collages of routes through Amsterdam. They are quite stunning images by themselves but also interesting as they present the city as a kind of unified whole, somehow for me capturing the quality of the city in a way that single images or map for [...]
Construction Graph
Beautiful graph of Construction Activity in the U.S.A. by Bill Rankin of Radical Cartography (via). Note the dips during winter.
2nd Cycle
Artek and Tom Dixon have a new range / recycling strategy for their furniture. It’s called 2ndcycle and it is reselling used Artek furniture again. But in addition they add an RFID tag, this tag has information for access to a website which then gives the history of that item, when it was made where [...]
Buildings to Suit your Mood
Yesterday it started snowing here and already in the afternoon the landscape had flipped from earthy autumn colours to white. Everything, the grass, the roads, the buildings look different, especially those white prefab concrete block apartments now so ubiquitous in our fair nordic capitol. And last night I couldn’t help think about how it would [...]
Baltia
A new quarterly magazine is due to come to Finland soon called Baltia covering Architecture, Urbanism and Design. Published in Russian and English it is based in St.Petersberg with a brief to cover Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and NW Russia, around the St.Petersberg area including Kallingrad. Why Poland, Germany and say Sweden are not covered [...]
Designer Labels
An excellent gallery of old Finnish Beer labels. Russia and the Baltic are also covered. Too bad we can’t taste them also!
Citywall
I saw the Citywall installation by students at HIIT yesterday which is one of those multi-touch screens hooked up to tagged images of Helsinki from flickr (film). Played around with the photos, the closest I’ll get to a Jeff Han touchscreen for a while I guess. It’s really nice playful installation for the summer, but [...]
Japan and Finland with a Shared Design Culture
Natural materials and the economy of their use seem to be a common theme see Pinmag for a flavour of the latest news from Japan, where they have featured several Finnish items. Oh and they like to make films over here to! Finland has established a considerable reputation in Japan. This is reflected in the [...]
Architecture of Control
I remember going to a lecture as a student about the strategies used in malls and large shops in attempting to control the behaviour of their clients. This handy A-Z of retail tricks (via) is a nice summary of the main ones. There is also a weblog called Architectures of Control in Design which takes [...]
Ascending and Descending