Category Archives: installation / sculpture

Stair-Rover

Po Chih Lai‘s 8-wheeled skateboard, the Stair-Rover, allows riders to glide down stairs through the use of independent v-shaped articulated arms mounted to the trucks. For £170 (approximately $258 USD) you can get your own stair-rover through Kickstarter. It looks quite cool going down the stairs, and I like the look of the trucks. They remind me of the articulated wheels of the Mars rovers. I briefly considered buying a stair-rover, but then thought better of it, since I don’t actually skateboard.

Angler Fish

Michigan sculptor Justin LaDoux, is selling his his angler fish sculpture. A collage of knives, shovels, bicycle parts, and other found pieces of metal, the sculpture is four feet wide, five feet long, and five feet tall, and features motion activated lights.

I don’t know really anything about this artist. I do know that this piece was originally part of a set displayed at the 2010 ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In an interview during the ArtPrize, you can see a similar loose jaw fish and a squid.

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Lead Type

I’m a sucker for movable type. (The lead blocks, not the software, I have no opinion on the software.) The idea of assembling little blocks to make words and sentences makes my heart flutter. I don’t know why. I guess it’s sort of like legos. I love the large trays holding the letters, and I particularly like how the bins are different sizes depending on the character distribution of the language. As I read about how movable type was used and evolved over the years, I gained a greater appreciation of typography. Ligatures, kerning, why periods go inside quotation marks, and why it’s as irrelevant today as the creation MLA’s parenthetical citations 30 years ago.

I don’t think I would have the patience to use movable type. Laser printing is just too easy, and hot metal typesetting seems like cheating. Although in the world where movable type was common, U certainly would have used it instead of carving individual presses for every page.

via Dark Roasted Blend: Intricate Japanese Movable Type Sets

LED Streetlight

Keha3‘s Pavel Sidorenko, Tarmo Luisk, Margus Triibmann collborated on this led streetlight concept for LED Street. What I like about the design is how thin it is, while still looking like a modern streetlamp. What would normally be a reflector, is hinged rain cover to allow access to the lighting elements. According the LED Street site, the lighting element is replaceable and comes with different numbers of lighting strips in order to customize illumination and power usage.

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Sea Buoy

Margus Triibmann of the Estonian design studio Keha3, designed this LED lit buoy. Made of translucent polypropylene, the buoy comes a 15 meter waterproof cable. The accompanying documentation helpfully points out that by placing the buoy on land, the buoy can be used as a decorative hanging lamp or as a floor lamp when provided with an appropriate stand.

RIP Carbon Motors

Recently, I read some sad news, Carbon Motors has folded. I can’t say I’m surprised. Starting a car company, especially a niche car company is hard. It is sad because E7 concept seemed really thought out, and that’s what I liked about it. I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t write more about Carbon Motors three years ago when they first showed up on my radar. The E7 was was billed as the only purpose built police car in the world. The front seats had cutouts for utility belts and a sucky to blow cool air on the driver’s neck. The rear seats had suicide doors and seatbelts rigged with the latches records the outside so that officers didn’t have to lean over prisoners when securing them in the back. The car also was supposed to come full of gadgets like nightvision cameras and NBE detectors (no doubt to enable police departments to offset the cost of the vehicles through antiterrorism grants).

Apparently getting enough orders and/or bringing the manufacturing cost down for profitability became a problem for Carbon, because they eventually ditched the patrol car, and started shopping around a rather boring paddy wagon.

Sadly, Carbon Motors’s online presence is completely gone, save for the wayback machine.

A salvaged picture of the paddy wagon is after the jump.

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Space Mobile!

Shortly after Maximilian was born, I decided that he should get a mobile to place over his crib. I knew what theme I wanted. I wanted a space mobile. I looked all over, but couldn’t find any in stores, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend 90 bucks on one from Etsy, so I decided to make one myself. Normally, these things are made out felt, but not having a sewing machine, decided make Maximilian’s out of paper.

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Rat as Jellyfish

Janna Narwoth, advised by Kit Parker at Harvard, created a jellyfish mimic from the cardiac muscle cells of a rat. (Video after the jump.) Copying the structure of Moon Jellies, the cardiac muscle cells were grown so that they were aligned into ring shape on a sheet of polydimethylsiloxane. When electricity is applied, the muscle cells contract, deforming the ring into a bell shape. When the electricity us removed, the cells relax, and the natural elastic properties of the substrate reflatten the disk. Examining the fluid dynamics, the mock jelly not only propels itself, but also creates a counter vortex that drives particles up and into the center of the bell, just like real jellyfish. The researchers hope to apply this technology as a tested for examining the effectiveness of certain cardiac drugs.

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