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Wouldn't a world where we could retrofit everything be amazing? Maybe... maybe not. When it comes to adding a souped up engine to just about any transportation device, contraptions like this come to mind. Likewise, when it comes to added utility there's often the notion that we should just throw it out and upgrade for 'fully integrated' design. The Rubbee however, is a neat little gadget for the casual bike enthusiast looking to add some juice to their ride. At roughly the size of a loaf of bread, the device allows you to give your bike all of the perks of being electric with only about a minute of installation.
The Lithuanian company behind Rubbee set out to fill a gap in the market for an easily installed and flexible electric conversion kit for bikes. As some of you may know, converting your tried and true two-wheeler into a super-charged electric ride requires users to switch out a tire and hook up a battery cable—not an entirely quick fix for the casual cyclist looking to bounce between the traditional and electric. The Rubbee requires only that you clamp the box on the seat post, remove the fixation pin to enable suppression system, connect the throttle and turn the system on. You can also ride with without the drive engaged and pedal normally by replacing the fixation pin. On the whole, it seems like a pretty simple bike hack... though many normal conversion kits only take about four minutes more to install and offer double the speed.
Photographer: Scott Serfas
Athlete: John Jackson
Location: Aniak, AK, USA
The physical design of the GoPro camera changed videography, as its small, wearable form factor gave rise to POV footage previously impossible to capture. It gifted us viewers with an entirely new visual experience of the world. Along those same lines, the software that enables what's known as sequential photography is allowing us to see things that the human eye cannot naturally perceive. And produced by the right shooter, those things are freaking beautiful.
Photographer: Christian Pondella
Athlete: Brandon Semenuk
Location: Virgin, UT, USA
A handful of those shooters around the globe are making fantastic use of sequential photography, as evidenced by the finalists in the Sequence category of the Red Bull Illume Image Quest 2013 photography contest.
Photographer: Zakary Noyle
Athlete: Gabriel Medina
Location: Oahu, HI, USA
The triennially-held competition, which will hold their award ceremony at the end of this month in Hong Kong, has posted a massive gallery of the top 250 entries across ten categories.
Photographer: Blotto Gray
Athlete: Jeremy Jones
Location: Anchorage, AK, USA
And speaking of ten, we had to show you our ten Sequence faves. Hit the jump to see the rest.
This was printed with the Mcor Iris; video after the jump...
Findings from a paper by a handful of intrepid engineers at Michigan Technical University have been making headlines this week, concluding that "the typical family can already save a great deal of money by making things with a 3D printer instead of buying them off the shelf." Per Michigan Tech News:
In the study, [Associate Professor Joshua] Pearce and his team chose 20 common household items listed on Thingiverse. Then they used Google Shopping to determine the maximum and minimum cost of buying those 20 items online, shipping charges not included.
Next, they calculated the cost of making them with 3D printers. The conclusion: it would cost the typical consumer from $312 to $1,944 to buy those 20 things compared to $18 to make them in a weekend.
Open-source 3D printers for home use have price tags ranging from about $350 to $2,000. Making the very conservative assumption a family would only make 20 items a year, Pearce's group calculated that the printers would pay for themselves quickly, in a few months to a few years.
Cory Doctorow notes (H/T to BoingBoing) that "I suspect that the real value of 3D printers isn't simply replacing household objects, but rather, in ushering in new ways of relating to objects—the same way that email and VoIP don't simple substitute for phone calls, but rather enable entirely different kinds of communications." Similarly, commenters also note that the value of 3D printing is in creating custom sculptures, toys and other things that cannot be found on Amazon and the like. (Other critics cite the fact that most household items have rubber or metal components that remain unprintable, at least for your average DIYer.)
Having conducted my own cost-benefit analysis that I could probably glean the takeaway messages of the primary source through a bit of Internet reserch, I opted not to put up the $31.50 for the full text of "Life-cycle economic analysis of distributed manufacturing with open-source 3-D printers."
In other news, the UPS Store is launching a pilot program for on-demand 3D printing at six of their U.S. locations, starting with San Diego. It's the first major news item for Stratasys following its blockbuster acquisition of Makerbot earlier this summer, though it's worth mentioning that the merger has no bearing on the UPS partnership—in keeping with their strategy to keep Stratasys and Makerbot relatively independent. Customers will have access to $15,900 Stratasys uPrint SE Plus machines for their rapid prototyping needs.
Want to get out of your apartment without going far? Why not set up camp right down the block? The designs this week prove that urban camping has never been easier—or stranger.
The Walking Shelter is part Inspector Gadget, part performance piece. Created by the Australia and Amsterdam–based design collective Sibling, the Shelter deploys from a slightly odd-looking pair of sneakers. From the netted back of each shoe, the wearer pulls out a single-person tent stored in two parts. When zipped together, it almost looks like the real thing, save for one key design feature: the covering relies on the wearer for support. So pulling up a tent also means assuming the (seated) position.
It's a familiar scene, at least for those of us NYC residents who work in certain neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn: a gaggle of Europeans or Midwesterners, idling smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, shopping bags akimbo, stalwart leader poring over a tourist map... oblivious to the workaday New Yorkers swarming around them, en route to a meeting or just out to coffee or lunch. We pride ourselves on our ability to navigate the city—most of us are happy to offer directions, power stride notwithstanding—yet there are times when we too are at a loss, chagrined to consult our smartphones for advice on how to get to that appointment above 59th St or that friend's place in the dark heart of Brooklyn or Queens. After all, we know all too well that the City suffers from a serious deficiency of pedestrian-friendly maps and signage.
With all of the fanfare (and backlash) surrounding the launch of New York City's bikesharing program, few noticed that the dozens of Citi Bike stations—which started popping up seemingly overnight—also included brand-spanking-new infrastructural element along with the pylon-like bicycle docks. Indeed, the debut of Citi Bike this past May doubled as a quiet way to introduce an appropriately understated article of new signage that nicely complement the stations yet are not contingent on the bikesharing system by any means.
Of course, the new NYC Wayfinding System received more attention when it officially launched about a month later, starting with a few of the steel-and-glass monoliths popping up in Chinatown. In addition to the minimalist maps at each Citibike station, WalkNYC signage is intended to facilitate navigating the city by foot—hence the name—whether they've just emerged from the subway or if they've pulled up curbside on a human-powered conveyance.
WalkNYC is New York City's standard for pedestrian wayfinding. WalkNYC provides a clear visual language and graphic standards that can be universally understood, encourages walking and transit usage by providing quality multi-modal information, and provides consistent information across a broad range of environments in the city. The first WalkNYC signs are being installed during the Summer of 2013 in four areas of the City.
New York City is well-known as a walking city, but pedestrian-oriented information is difficult to find and inconsistent where available. The City's streets are a mix of named and numbered streets, with a variety of building numbering conventions, with street grids merging at confusing angles. Even Manhattan's simple street grid is difficult to navigate when emerging from a subway station or transit hub. While the City has many signs directing drivers, these provide very little benefit to pedestrians. The goal of WalkNYC is to remedy this information and navigation gap.
In addition to the abutting grids of Chinatown, three other neighborhoods will see the new signage by the end of the summer—the commercial center of Herald Square, and the up-and-coming outer borough locales of Prospect Heights and Long Island City—to bring the total up to about 100 maps, with the goal of citywide coverage next year.
I, for one, also happen to find maps to be aesthetically pleasing, and Pentagram has done a nice job of presenting the information (gathered by cartographers T-Kartor), and their planned ubiquity upped the ante for the NYC-based powerhouse. Project lead Michael Bierut related that "I did the bags for Saks Fifth Avenue and the logo for the anniversary of Grand Central, and I encounter the results every day, often unexpectedly. It would really be painful if I was unhappy with they way they looked. Same thing in this case. Luckily, we're really happy with the way the signs look."
As with most understated designs, the elegant yet information-dense signage was a major project, involving more organizations than you can count on one hand: Besides Pentagram and T-Kartor, the NYC DOT also called on wayfinding specialists City ID, industrial designers Billings Jackson and engineers RBA Group to collaborate on the ambitious undertaking. (Together, they formed the a Volton-like design consortium known as PentaCityGroup—no joke.) Bierut spoke effusively about the team effort:
Mike Rawlinson at CityID is very experienced at this kind of large scale civic project and he put together the perfect team: very collaborative, very open minded. It helps when each team member really understands their discipline and their scope of work, as was the case here. And it also helps when the job is so big that your own scope keeps so busy you have no time to meddle in other people's scope. Our job, figuring out the elements of the system's graphic language, turned out to be a real challenge. Knowing that the planning, industrial design, cartography, and engineering were all under control made it so much easier to keep our own energy focused.
The 3D software market has never been in as much turmoil as it is right now. But this isn't meant to sound like a bad thing—quite the contrary. There was a time when CAD Jockeys stayed only in the program they knew and would snub their noses at anyone else that used another software that wasn't the one they loved. Oh, how times have changed—the past ten years have seen a variety of new developments in speed, functionally and accessibility.
Fast forward to today's market and any designer worth their salt will tell you that they use at least two to four different software packages in the design/engineering process. Any seasoned vet will acknowledge that no one program offers everything that a design/engineer might need on any given day. Data Interoperability has become the new phase for today and is meant in ways that refer much more to maintaining geometry without losing its "topology." (More on that later)
Among the many options in today's 3D software market is a relatively new/old-comer to the scene called solidThinking. I'd best describe this 3D design creative engineering package as jack-of-all-trades for the breadth of its offerings compared to some of its other mid-range competition. If you haven't had the opportunity to take it out for a test drive, here's a quick run down of some of its offerings:
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The saying goes that "You can never have too many clamps." That's why you'll see collections like Lumberjock Canadian Woodtick's, below, decorating a woodworker's shop walls. Never knowing exactly what size clamp you'll need for any given project means you've really got to spend a lot to cover all the bases. Pipe clamps ameliorate the situation somewhat, but you've still got to buy the pipes—and carry them around if you need them for an on-site job.
Stanley Tools has thus introduced their new 2×4 clamp, designed for the tradesman on-the-go. The idea is that rather than needing to load the truck up with bar- and pipe-clamps, you bring only the 2×4 clamps to the jobsite; once there you grab something presumably in abundant supply—a 2×4, if you're putting up a house—and that becomes your "bar." Check it out:
The convenience of the portability cannot be denied, but I wonder how these things measure up during actual operation. I don't have much experience with clamps longer than 24”, but for those of you that do: How do you see these things working out? Do you think they'd be trickier than a pipe clamp to wield into place, requiring two people for the longer spans? What applications would you use or not use these things for?
It's not exactly the Coroflot Design Salary Guide, but it's worth a gander. To promote their Galaxy S4, Samsung teamed up with Mashable to commission a series of unusual illustrations: Annotated drawings listing the costs of living for popular superheroes, comparing their start-up costs (from their origin years) to their current budgetary needs.
As you can see above, out of the five superheroes chosen—Batman, Superman, the Hulk, Wolverine and Spider-Man—it is the Dark Knight that has suffered the most from inflation and the unfortunate male urge to keep buying gadgets. And some of the purchases make you wonder—I can see shelling out 25 large for a hunk of Kryptonite, in case you're getting drinks with Superman and things get out of hand, but does Batman carry it around at all times?
"Brand New IDEO" centers on a 24-hour global Make-a-Thon taking place Monday, March 25th in IDEO's eleven offices around the world, starting in Tokyo and ending in San Francisco.
This was printed with the Mcor Iris; video after the jump...
Walking Shelter photos by 
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