David Lidsky's Blog, page 4688

Ikea's Animalistic Robotic Furniture Moves for You, Humps Your Leg

From NYU's ITP spring show this week, we've already told you about 3-D pop-up books with augmented reality and how cell phones could one day replace game controllers. Now Adam Lassy, another engineer and designer featured at the event, shows us that Ikea furniture is good for more than just minimalist Scandinavian design. For his project, called Ikea robotics, Lassy transformed a Lack table and chair into mobile, wireless robots with "animal behaviors," which automatically reconfigure...

Litl Unveils Internet Interface Aimed at Surfers of Both Web and Couch

The new device will attempt to solve the problem of creating a rich, easy web-browsing experience, while sitting on the couch and watching TV.

The last we heard from Litl, the start-up was introducing its first product, a "webbook" meant to change web-browsing into a lean-back, communal experience, much like TV. But now, the company is taking the logical next step: In an exclusive interview with FastCompany.com, Litl's CEO, John Chuang previewed their next product, a device which will...

Cooper-Hewitt Asks: Can Designers Save the World?

The world's drowning in dark news of political unrest, climate change, environmental disaster, and poverty. But we can still take heart that right now, designers have fixed themselves on the day's problems with a vigor that the world has never seen before. Can design save the world?

How to Motivate People: Skip the Bonus and Give Them a Real Project

Social experiments have upended almost everything that modern management takes as a given.

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Science has managed to reveal some crazy things that fly in the face of almost every commonly accepted management practice. Here's the latest: Rewards for top performers lead them to worse performance. And if you want to foster innovation, bonuses won't work either. Rather, it's all about letting people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about.

Dan Pink...

Robotic Night Writers Are Coming to London

Outrace is a sextet of robotic arms, the kind you normally find in car plants the world over, that will be controlled by members of the public to draw light sculptures in the air around Trafalgar

Square, using specially-developed software. The installation by Kram/Weisshaar is coming to the London Design Festival in September, reports Dezeen.

Last year, the square, in the heart of London, played host to an amazing project by sculptor Antony Gormley. An empty plinth beneath Nelson's Column...

From Oil to Asphalt: How a Powder Could Turn the Gulf Slick Into Future Highways

Brian Merchant of Treehugger is reporting on location about the efforts to contain the Gulf oil spill (seen here in a photo taken this morning by astronaut Soichi Noguchi from the International Space Station). The latest idea to prevent the slick caused by the explosion on the BP rig last month from reaching land is certainly ingenious. It consists of using a chemical formula called C.I. Agent that, when added to oil, turns it into a gelatinous compound that can then be used to make asphalt...

Twitter: A Human Seismograph Measuring the World

Twitter is quickly becoming the lens into all that moves us as individuals and also as a global society. Twitter has become a human seismograph, measuring and broadcasting the pulse of not just the Web, but also world and local events. News no longer breaks, it tweets. In many ways, Twitter's openness creates a new genre of digital anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers. Twitter users reveal the state of all things captivating attention and inspiring action, all in real-time. As...

Lockheed Martin's Maple-Leaf UAV Helicopter Is Too Much Fun for Spying

Proof positive that working for a scary-ass defense company can be fun: the Samari mini monocopter. It's a research project to develop an innovative unmanned spy drone, sure. But it also looks like the fun hybrid of a boomerang and an RC copter.

From what the folks at BotJunkie can work out, this device is the latest development in a Lockheed Martin defense project, also dubbed Samari, that dates back several years but was apparently canceled back in 2009. That aircraft was much larger, so...

Google Experiment Gets Creative Job Seeker an Agency Post

There are many stories about how young creatives get themselves the job of their dreams, but Alec Brownstein's pitch has to rate as one of the best. He spent $6 on Google adwords to reach five creative directors at major advertising and marketing firms: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger, and David Droga. Four of them gave him interviews, leading to two job offers, and he's now working at Young & Rubicam.

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The concept is, of course, dependent on the...

Kolelinio: Public Transit That Flies

Kolelinio sends commuters flying over traffic in the heart of the city.

Why take a bus when you can fly? Kolelinio is a sort of urban ski lift
in which commuters dangle from aerial wires and soar over city traffic. This is public transit as designed by a clever 8-year-old.

Kolelinio is in fact the totally lunatic idea of designer Martin Angelov. It's not to be confused with Kolelinia, Angelov's earlier totally lunatic
idea for running bike lanes along taut steel wires in the sky. (Check
out...