Yves Behar of Fuseproject at TED2008. I love his quote about advertising. “Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original”.

Call it what you want, but I think this is a great idea by student Nick Demarco! Buy this plastic bag/mesh shaped chair, stuff it with dry items you’d be throwing away anyways or what you have too much of, and you have a comfy chair. Take those old shirts, magazines, bottles, stuffed bears, newspapers, etc.

This is a great “Reuse” project. I’ve got a huge pile of old shirts and magazines that would work great for making a snazzy couch! Reminds me a bit of the very expensive yet cool Campana teddy chairs!

via treehugger!
video interview

Wow! I love it when the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In this instance Tast.es creates “Disposable elements for catering”! I’m not sure the cost on these jewels but every time I pass by cheap ugly paper/plastic plates in the grocery store, I’m going to venture my eyes around for a set of these, especially the sweet soup cups! Plastic at it’s best! Damn this is hot!

More images after the jump mirrored via NotCot

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Yet another way to navigate Flickr Photos through Tag Galaxy! Type in a word  “tag”, surf the luminous galaxies, select another planet, then watch a matrix of tagged photos latch onto a planet to spin, flip, and zoom your fingers away. I’m not sure how practical this is, but none the less cool for a bit.

Rhode Island School of Design’s
Annual Graduate Thesis Exhibition
Rhode Island Convention Center: May 21-June 1, 2008.
opening reception May 20, 6-8pm

“More than 120 RISD artists and designers across 14 disciplines featured in graduate student showcase of art and design at its very best.

For the second consecutive year, the extraordinary work of more than 120 students receiving master’s degrees from Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] will be on view at the Rhode Island Convention Center in RISD’s Annual Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The work of graduate students in painting, industrial design, sculpture, textiles, photography and nine other art and design disciplines will be on exhibit from May 21-June 1, 2008.

An online gallery has also been created to allow “virtual visitors” to view examples of work from the exhibition.”

I’ll be there from 6pm onwards…this should be awesome!

RISD Graduate Exhibition Webpage
Webgallery

update: lots of pics after jump when I went to the show.

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I’ll be blogging the “Art Center: Serious Play” Conference with bloggers Katy and Doug throughout the week on their official conference blog here. We’ve also setup a Flickr account for a selection of photos we’ve taken here. Otherwise, the space here in the Wind Tunnel space is amazing, the creative vibe is flaring with a very diverse crowd, and the subject matter of Serious Play will be in question throughout the week!

Some pics and brief descriptions after the jump! (more…)

PicLens creates a 3 dimensional experience in browsing images and videos. Install the plug-in and PicLens gives you an option to view image+video searches via their zippity fun matrix gallery. It’s a bit slow but visually cool, especially after a few hundred images upload. The visual browsing experience gets more appealing everyday…hopefully bandwidth isn’t an issue =) (thanks dfresh)

Reminds me a bit of TiltViewer or Searchme.com

It’s been an incredibly busy week of travel and work and I apologize for not posting as much.

First came the wonderful GEL (Good Experience Live) conference in nyc, which made me ask “why” every time I experienced something bad in this world, rather than just letting it happen. Why do voice mail avatars talk for sooo long before I can leave a message, why do the same avatars talk for so long when I want to hear my voice mails, Why does technology direct 2 people calling each other at the same time to each others voice mail rather than connecting them, why is the nyc train system so confusing for a newbie… this world is full of bad experiences, and as a designer, discovering, revealing, and disrupting the norm is needed…especially when it comes to sustainability and health care experiences. I’ll post about GEL later on, but here is a great recap collection.

Anyhow, this week I venture off to the “Art Center: Serious Play” Conference in LA. It’ll touch base on user experience, design, and bits of everything. I’ll bring my laptop, but no promises on live blogging.

After that, I’ll be experiencing the incredible Pangea Day on May 10th at the Sony Pictures Studio in LA. If you didn’t catch my last post, this is MUST do…invite a bunch of friends, family, or even strangers over…gather around, watch this global event for 4+ hours, get inspired, and make change! There will be 24 films, live music, and several fantastic speakers very much like TED.

I’ll be twittering most of my journey on the sidebar..feel free to follow me on twitter, or just on this blog… I’ll post when I can, but for now, a few late weekend links below:

Use Whatever Clock: Pretty cool, sell the function, let customer create looks.
Wearable Chair: I had this idea sometime ago, but executed a bit differently.
Twistori: Following Twitter by emotions.
Scrapile: Using wasted wood to make cool wood composites! Very sustainable!
Sunlight Poem Projector: Public Poem based on sun location. Pretty neat!
Soba Machine: Make you own soba at home. I’m in soba mode after going to Soba Koh nyc.
A billion Pennies: What does 1 billion pennies stack up to be.
Momofuku Ko restaurant: reservations only online! Brings the experience beyond the restaurant.

Cozy Seats: Diagonal seats allowing individuals to finally rest their bobbing sleepy heads somewhere on airplanes!It’s about time an airline tried these out, though a sliding wall would have done the trick. I’m not too sold on this idea for spacial reasons, but it’ll be interesting to see even though meeting cool strangers sitting next to you will be tricky. Laptop peepers, yeah..I’ll be asking for aisles seats. Delta planes to install theses in some economy class seats by 2010.

Some pics after the jump via newlaunches.
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In a period where bikes are just as congesting as cars comes the invention field in storage. Watch the above video for an automated bicycle parking facility in Japan which is pretty cool! It reminds me of the VW car storage system.

Either way, very cool, though for the biking system, I’d prefer it to be a tower like the VW rather than a big tunnel underground. I’m also not sure what would prevent someone from sitting on their bike while the robo machine jolted ya down to the lower levels…love the camera work in the video!

via gizmodo

“Sony Foam City Ad”. Makes ya smile and want to go on an adventure!
One other making of clip at Gizmodo.

Chenhui Su made these awesome chair pads transforming your generic seating environment into a very modern blast from the past, with prints from antique chairs to classic Eames chairs! I love it! Every office needs this! If ya can’t afford an Eames, just make it like you have one

I think this is just a concept project, but hopefully these make it out to market! If not, contact me Chenhui …I can intro you to some people!

Chenhui Su’s project page.

More pics after the jump!
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