David Lidsky's Blog, page 4753

Fingers Tired? Try the iPed

Anyone who thinks that the iPad is a little on the small side might like this project from students at Potsdam's Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany. Multitoe is a touchscreen interface for floors that can tell different users apart merely by the soles of their shoes and the way they walk--ergo, we at FastCompany dub it the iPed. And it's more than merely a surface for playing Interactive Twister.

The technology is known as frustrated total internal reflection, or FTIR, and is already used by...

Traveling Pants, Indeed: The Closet-Exchange Program thredUP Adds Kids Clothes

In the average American closet, 25% of the clothing goes unworn. Meaning even as we venture out daily to malls, replenishing our stock with of-the-minute additions, a quarter of all our clothing nationwide is sitting idle and unused--sometimes with the tags still on. It was such a closet that confronted James Reinhart one November morning in 2008. Reinhart, a Harvard Business School graduate, suddenly saw his rows of clothes as a vast trove of opportunity. "There was tremendous waste...

Google Unveils a 3-D New York City in Google Earth

Why bother visiting New York, if you can do it in Google Earth without the smell of rotting fish?

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If you're considering a visit to New York City but you'd really rather be playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Google Earth has a sensible compromise: They've just released ultra-high quality images of New York stretched over a 3D map so you can swoop through the city like Superman. It's all a bit hallucinatory, as this video shows: 

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Obviously, you have to download the...

Infographic of the Day: An Atlas of the World's Ecosystems

A mammoth encyclopedia of where the earth's biodiversity dwells--and why it's under threat.

On April 22nd, the Nature Conservancy will release it's first Atlas of Global Conservation--a book of maps summarizing everything we know about nature on earth. No one's ever done that before. Three years of work went into producing it.

Just to create a single map of where the world's 828 freshwater bird species are found, the Washington Post reports, scientist Timothy Boucher spent two months reading...

Bridging the Modern and Middle East With Furniture Inspired by Bedouins

Swedish/German designer Katrin Greiling plumbs Arab traditions in her furniture designs.

Unlike most of her peers on the hotshot contemporary design scene, Katrin Greiling doesn't live in Sweden or Denmark or the Netherlands. Sure, her works are sometimes bought by rich Middle Easterners. But she's not exporting Scandinavian style abroad. Rather, she lives in Dubai, and she's a pioneer in bridging modernism and the Middle East--part of a new generation hoping to entice contemporary Arabs...

Oxo Good Grips Designers Take on Tablet Magazines

My last post about Smart Design's take on the "iPad" of 20 years ago mused about how people
would use powerful tablet computers in the future. Lucky for us, that
future is now. With the introduction of the iPad and the inevitable
array of fast follower devices, we now have the opportunity to imagine
and develop the applications that will bring these products to life. So
what will we do with them? They're big for a phone handset (although
that might be funny...hello!?) and pretty...

Would You Watch Ads for Free Phone Time? Alcatel-Lucent's Optism Is for You

When the subject of mobile advertising comes up, it's usually something to do with the ongoing smackdown between Apple and Google. And now, here comes another player to the arena that's doing it a completely different way--by bartering mobile phone time for your attention.

Franco-American firm Alcatel-Lucent announced today the arrival of Optism, a mobile advertising solution that is expected to bring mobile operators, phone users, and advertisers together. Sounds impenetrably techy. It's...

Filter or Be Flooded: Do You Need a Content Strategist?

The first time I noticed the word "Content" had changed, I was being ushered into the inner sanctum of Zappos by a woman answering phones in an Elvis costume. Why is there a content department at Zappos? Don't they sell shoes and other nifty stuff? Well, it turns out, at Zappos the folks who make images, text, and product information for the Web site are working with Zappos "Content." Makes sense, in a Zappos kind of way, I thought at the time.

But in the eight months since that visit, the...

Bridging the Modern and Middle-East with Furniture Inspired by Bedouins

Swedish/German designer Katrin Greiling plumbs Arab traditions in her furniture designs.

Unlike most of her peers on the hotshot contemporary design scene, Katrin Greiling doesn't live in Sweden or Denmark or the Netherlands. Sure, her works are sometimes bought by rich Middle Easterners. But she's not exporting Scandinavian style abroad. Rather, she lives in Dubai, and she's a pioneer in bridging modernism and the Middle East--part of a new generation hoping to entice contemporary Arabs...

Reboot: Puma and Yves Béhar Spend Three Years Designing Super-Green Shoebox

The "Clever Little Bag" will completely overhaul the shoe brand's supply chain--saving millions in electricity, fuel, and water.

It's hard to imagine something as simple as the shoebox being completely overhauled and rethought. But Puma and Fuseproject, the design firm led by Yves Béhar, have done just that, in a design that was almost three years in the making. (The project is actually just the beginning of a brand overhaul, to be revealed soon.)

"Rethinking the shoebox is an incredibly...