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design

New iPhone App Knows How You Feel By Checking Your Pulse

David Smothers April 25, 2014

The Morpholio Project’s latest development uses an iPhone’s camera and flash as an impromptu pulse monitor, measuring your visceral reaction to the things you’re seeing. It’s like a lie detector for your aesthetic taste, and Morpholio’s Toru Hasegawa let me play with it. The Morpholio Project is a collaboration of architects and academics focused on… Continue Reading »

TEXTILE DESIGN

This Awesome Machine Knits a Fully Formed Sweater, Sleeves And All

David Smothers February 20, 2014

This awesome OpenKnit machine can weave a sweater from a digital pattern in about an hour—that’s cool. I mean, look at it go! Even cooler is that you can actually construct this awesome OpenKnit machine yourself. Welcome to a brave new world of textile design. GitHub’s got the plans to put the whole thing together,… Continue Reading »

MOBILE

Could an Ignition-Activated “Car Mode” Keep Drivers From Texting?

David Smothers October 17, 2013

Texting while driving now kills more people than drinking while driving, but there’s no clear solution in sight (unless you think these new SMS rest stops will work). New York designer Joey Cofone is proposing another idea: An iOS “Car Mode,” akin to airplane mode, that would prevent you from texting while your car is… Continue Reading »

Uncategorized

GE Is Freeing Up ‘Thousands’ of Patents to Fuel Your Imagination

David Smothers October 1, 2013

Today, at an event in New York, GE announced that it will open up “thousands” of patents from its library of some 20,000 to inventors using Quirky’s crowdsourced product development platform. That means that if you’re bright enough, you can use a GE patent to invent something. GE will still collect royalties on your brain… Continue Reading »

ENTERTAINMENT

Inside the design interface genius of Oblivion

David Smothers August 26, 2013

For decades, popular film and television science fiction properties have informed the real world of technology and product design. From the rocket ship inspired car tail fins of the ’50s, to the Star Trek-influenced smartphone and tablets of today, the creative minds of sci-fi are always silently guiding the hands of our design culture as… Continue Reading »

NASA

Watch Today’s ISS Spacewalk Right Here, Right Now, Live!

David Smothers August 16, 2013

While you’re just settling in at your desk, Russian cosmonauts Alexander Mizurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin on the International Space Station have been awake for hours preparing for today’s 10:40AM EST spacewalk to install cables (including ethernet) on the outside of the station. And you can watch the whole thing live, right here. The spacewalk should… Continue Reading »

DESIGN

Check Out How Much Better Twitter Could Look (and Work)

David Smothers July 30, 2013

In the early days, Twitter was famous for its dead simple design: a box, some text, a button. But over the years, it’s gotten busier with the hashtags and the @ mentions and the retweets. Some might say say too busy. So why not just start over and rebuild this thing from the ground up?… Continue Reading »

BUSINESS

How To Decide What Ideas To Prototype

David Smothers June 29, 2013

Instead of defaulting to groupthink, writes Google ventures’ Jake Knapp, make sure you have the buy-in of the higher-ups–or you might regret it later. At the Google Ventures Design Studio, we have a five-day process for taking a product or feature from design through prototyping and testing. We call it a product design sprint. This… Continue Reading »

WATCHES

A Watch Inspired By–And Made From–The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

David Smothers June 19, 2013

Romain Jerome has become known as the watchmaker that incorporates exotic materials into its timepieces, from moon dust, to metal from the Statue of Liberty, to volcanic ash. And while it’s still embracing that role with the new Moon Orbiter, the watch actually puts more focus on the highly engineered flying tourbillon exposed at the… Continue Reading »