Emoticon Rings from Chao & Eero Jewel! This made me smile. Simple, fun, and makes ya looks twice!

via designyoutrust (more pics here in other designs)

One of my favorite talks and demonstrations from this years TED2011 conference came Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, of Handspring Puppet Company

“Puppets always have to try to be alive,” says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena’s subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.

These are beautiful, sustainable, optimizes entirety of wood, and very unique. I love how some of the curves follow the eyes of the wood and grain direction. Who knew you could get flooring like this!

“Bolefloor is the world’s first industrial-scale manufactured hardwood flooring with naturally curved lengths that follow a tree’s natural growth. Bolefloor takes its name from bole, the trunk of a tree.

Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.

Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.

Our process manages and tracks each board from its raw-lumber stage through final installation. And every board is cut using the finest in Homag woodworking machinery.

Several pictures from their gallery after the jump!

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This is very smart. I want some. High end materials, a shelf built from the boxes you transport then in, and you can customize them in a bunch of formats… this just might beat out my desire for the typical IKEA bookshelf though cost a bit more… It would be nice in different colors, or at least just the white portion… I dig the end grains showing.. black, green, and some vibrant colors would be nice!

“BrickBox is a modular bookcase composed of stackable boxes used to transport and store. Brilliant? I would say so!”
via swissmiss

“makedo is a connector system that enables materials including cardboard, plastic and fabric to easily join together to form new objects or structures.”
Fun, I wish I had a set to build a big monster from all those cardboard boxes I have.

“JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out. Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.”

I’m off to the TED2011 conference, which will be my 10th TED conference. I’ll be stopping by LA this weekend to meet up with some TEDsters, then in Palm Springs all of Sunday to meet with TEDx organizers, then Long Beach for a backstage peek, then back to Palm Springs the rest of the week. Let me know if your going, in LA, or follow me on twitter for updates. And yes, that is me on the back of a shared bike last year cruising around the resort during one of the session breaks with my friend Ash from Australia. Also follow the Facebook Fanpage for occasional quick updates.

Pete Oyler (RISD ’09) has a great project called Rip+Tatter which hammers down large corrugated honeycomb cardboard pieces to make for some great little chairs. I’m not sure how long they will last, but for $55 it’s pretty awesome. I wonder if there is an adult version?

Some pics from Petes site after the jump.

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Pretty slick looking are these Inner City Bikes, which seem to essentially take 2 unicycles and stick them together for a fast looking 1:1 ratio bike. I’m not sure how they feel, but they do look pretty futuristic and the build quality looks nice. I’m questioning structure a bit but hey, it looks good. No pricing has been set. Watch the youtube video of this bike in action after the jump or here.

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What appears at first to be a flock of smart starling birds doing their thing around an invisible box between the US and Canadian border near Vancouver is actually a billboard sculpture by Lead Pencil Studio built from thousands of metal rods swarming a shape as if a billboard to draw attention to the living landscape behind.

“Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape… this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.”

This project reminds me a bit of the CityScape project though using several wooden 2×4′s with a mix of the ad free billboard law in Sao Paulo.

Multiple images by Ian Gill courtesy of Lead Pencil Studio, via fastcodesign, after the jump.

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Wow. It’s mind boggling think about cultures and groups of people that have been uncontacted in our world, living incredibly different lives, away from technology, the industrial revolution, print,  the internet, science, air transportation, and everyday things we take for granted. Watch the video above, and read tons more about these uncontacted tribes at UncontactedTribes.org. I’ll mirror a few of the astonishing pictures after the jump.

“ Video of an uncontacted tribe spotted in the Brazilian jungle has been released, bringing them to life in ways that photographs alone cannot.

The tribe, believed to be Panoa Indians, have been monitored from a distance by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, a government agency charged with handling the nation’s indigenous communities. Many of the world’s 100 or so uncontacted tribes live in the Amazon.

Until 1987, it was government policy to contact such people. But contact is fraught with problems, especially disease; people who have stayed isolated from the mainstream world have stayed isolated from its pathogens, and have little immunity to our diseases. Brazilian government policy is now to watch from afar, and — at least in principle — to protect uncontacted tribes from intrusion.

Unfortunately, uncontacted tribes usually live in resource-rich areas threatened by logging, mining and other development. There’s often pressure on governments to turn a blind eye. Videos like this, released by tribal advocacy group Survival International and produced by the BBC’s Human Planet program, are legal proof that uncontacted tribes still exist, and deserve protection.”

video via wired science
Wired story and pictures mirrored after the jump

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Wow, these are beautiful! love it! I wonder what I would do with 2000 pounds of salt.

“Motoi Yamamoto uses the ubiquitous white mineral to design unfathomably intricate — and deeply personal — floor sculptures.
Motoi Yamamoto has to be the most patient man in the world. A Japanese artist, Yamamoto uses salt to create monumental floor paintings, each so absurdly detailed, it makes A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte look like child’s play. He calls them, fittingly, his Labyrinths. ”

via fastcodesign (pictures mirrored after the jump.)

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