Posts filed in ‘ENVIRONMENT’
MAGIC FLUTE
This is the cutest video - it shows the first time the magic flute was played by Glenn, a young boy with limited arm movement. The breath controller changes pitch as it is tilted, quite intuitively it would seem, as Glenn lifts his head the pitch increases.
BREATH POWERED USB CHARGER
Are you breathing? Do you have a gadget that can be charged via a USB port? Well if you answered yes to both, then you are in luck. This instructable shows how to make a device that will charge your USB-capable devices while you do what you do best. Breathe.
VISUAL MELODIES
Last night I met a great bunch of women at the first gathering of the UTS Community of Scholars for 2010. The group gets together monthly to present where they are up to in their doctoral research projects.
Natalya Godbold’s project about sense making in online discussion forums for those affected by renal failure was really fascinating particularly as it is introducing an innovative methodology to the area of health communication.
Amy Chen’s Visual Melodies is a DCA project which produces an interactive art installation in hospitals to help relieve the stress of patients. I was super eager to learn about how the interactivity is enabled - phidget sensors and active script Flash programming make the ferns grow in the forest scene. Amy has had to hand code the active script herself - she reckons she’s the first to use it with motion sensors in this way. She gave up on using Max/msp+jitter because the colours lost saturation when she brought her video files across.
OPEN_SAILING
Open_Sailing is an international community trying to develop the International_Ocean_Station as an open-source project, developing hardware and software to enable intelligent human activities at sea. The project started as an apocalyptic design response unit, but has evolved into a voluntary exploration community of passionate amateurs, inventors and scientists.
Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept from Cesar Harada on Vimeo.
The oceans covers more than 74% of the surface of the earth. The annual budget for space exploration is more than a thousand times the ocean exploration budget, yet there is so much to learn from the oceans and to do there. Life started in water, the majority of humans live at less than 150 km from the coast. We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much more.
Campaign for Obama’s to line dry their washing
I adore this site. It has all the elements that make a successful campaign; beautiful design, wry humour and a clever concept linking a simple action to a global problem. Brought to us by the most fabulous design agency I shot him because I loved him damn him.
Room in a Box
Recycled Urban Furniture Designs
Your Call On Coal
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Cardboard Advertising Agency
Clever Images of Human Consumption
This image depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed every month in the US in 2006.
In 2005, 291,000 American women had bags implanted in their breasts, 324,000 Americans had fat vacuumed out of their bodies, and 231,000 had fat, skin and muscle cut from around their eyes.
If you include less common operations such as buttock lifts, pectoral implants and vaginal rejuvenations, as well as "minimally invasive" procedures such as Botox injections, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that Americans underwent at least 10.2 million cosmetic surgery procedures in 2006.
Findings from epidemiological studies indicate a link between cosmetic surgery and suicide. Five studies, including a US study of over 13,000 women who received breast implants and another of 24,000 from Canada (American Journal of Epidemiology, vol 164, p 334), set out to investigate the alleged link between silicone breast implants and cancers, autoimmune diseases and other disorders. Though they failed to confirm any such connection, another striking link did emerge: women who have received breast implants are two to three times as likely to kill themselves as those who have not.