Robot Monkeys

Design students at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, have leveraged the ubiquity of electrical cover plates, to create some very elegant ideas. Called Keep It Cartesian, they replace the normally plastic covers with steel covers with little hooks on them. Some are designed to allow electrical wires to be wrapped around and kept off the floor. Another for light switches, has a hook for keys, and another has a bin for mail.

While I really like the idea of easy place to keep wires off the floor, and perhaps even the mail bin, I have some concerns about the design. While I’m a big fan of elegant, and even the industrial look of metal, I can’t imagine that this would meet code. It’s an electrocution waiting to happen. Back it with plastic, then we’ll talk. The other problem is that they’re a bit too industrial looking. They’re essentially prototypes, so they could change a bit to match the decor of the room (assuming of course that these are actually produced instead of just used as an art project).

Definitely something to make.

Update: Wed Jul 30 22:36:01 PDT 2008
Nils writes:

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for featuring the Keep it Cartesian designs on your website… it’s nice to see people noticing our stuff - people’s responses have helped us think of ways to improve the next versions. We are actually looking into fabricators who might be able to reproduce our designs in bent plywood as well as metal to give it a warmer aesthetic. As for the risk of electrocution they are just as safe as any other stainless steel or aluminum faceplate currently on the market (which aren’t backed with plastic). When we were brainstorming for this project we were worried about that and then realized that several of us had metal faceplates in our homes already.

So I saw this article on /. about burning up a some VIA chip, and for some reason I read it. I think because I thought there actually was an answer about how long it took for the chip to die without a heatsink. Apparently this is all some marketing stunt by VIA to promote their new ARTiGo Pico-ITX builder kit. Normally I don’t really care too much about this stuff, but I’ll admit that sometimes those modded cases are kind of cool, albeit in that incredibly lame way. The thing that caught my eye about the the Pico-ITX was that it’s smaller than a baseball, and is designed to fit (with a 2.5 inch IDE drive) into a 5.25 inch drive bay.

Wow. I can have multiple complete machines within my main machine. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! ;)