Tag: Design

Here's what we looked at this week:A man was ordered by the city to build a visual screen to conceal his boat. He complied. This incredible mobile bridge, designed and built in Switzerland, diverts traffic overhead during road repairs.This TriqBriq production sys

Canfield Scientific, a manufacturer of imaging systems for science and healthcare applications, wanted to refresh their Vectra H1 handheld system. They contacted industrial design and engineering consultancy HSD, a/k/a/ HS Design. "HSD worked to not only aid in improving lighting and imaging quality, but also to incorporate Canfield Scientific's new brand language into the revitalized design," the firm writes.The VECTRA H2 is a portable imaging solution that allows users to capture high resolution 3D images of both the face and body. With a fully automated solution that maps images of the body captured by a 24 mega-pixel DSLR camera and studio-quality non-

Monocab is a new form of transportation that makes use of existing infrastructure. Conceived of by German design engineer Thorsten Försterling, the idea is that rural areas of Europe, which often lack public transportation options, could have their disused railway lines populated by these autonomous on-demand passenger pods.

Years ago on a trip to Death Valley, I slept in a tiny one-man tent. The host had provided a cot inside to elevate the sleeping bag. Although the space was coffin-like, sleeping on the cot was far more comfortable than on the cold ground.Jake Lah, a veteran South Korean tent designer credited with revolutionizing the industry, has taken this a step further. If one is going to sleep on a cot inside a tent, his thinking goes, why should the tent contact the ground at all? Thus he designed a tent that attaches to, and encloses, a line of cots.

At Johns Hopkins University, a Mechanical Engineering class was given a difficult assignment: To silence an off-the-shelf leaf blower, without reducing its efficacy.Apparently the assignment was given with no expectation that it could actually be accomplished; as the school's Hub publication writes, "Shocking their sponsors, their advisers, and even themselves a little, the students did it." Seniors Leean Alfaoury, Michael Chacon, Madison Morrison and Andrew Palacio have been working on it since last September. The team analyzed the variety of noises that come out of a leaf blower—"it contains a lot of different frequenc

This Wind bench, by Belgian designer Peter Donders, combines digital fabrication with hand craftsmanship.Made of birch plywood, the pieces were produced in slices on a CNC mill. "It is composed of 1265 sections over 85 layers which were combined into 220 numbered pieces before being assembled by hand," Donders writes.

What can you do with tiny offcuts of wood?For Brooklyn-based furniture maker Richard Haining, the scraps of others are the raw materials for his STACKED series of vessels.

I've seen lots of craftspersons who can join wood to wood. But I haven't seen many who can join wood to stone, with this kind of precision:

I started out wanting to make fun of this thing, but realize that's my climate-controlled-workplace privilege. I'm lucky I don't work in torching conditions anymore; years ago I spent a summer working as a line cook, it was 130 degrees where I stood in front of the grill, and I'd have strapped four of these on if I had access. "The Tajima Clip-on Belt Cooling Fan Body 2 is a wearable climate control device. Sl

Years ago The New Yorker had a reader contest, asking you to add one letter to a word, to make a new word that made sense. The amusing entry I remember was "giraffiti," meant to describe graffiti in improbably high locations. The term is now in the Urban Dictionary.Image: Steve Garvie Whereas ground-level graffiti is easy enough to spray over, giraffiti presents a problem for municipalities. "Specialized trucks, called UBITs*, are needed for hard-to-reach graffiti," writes the Washin