Last year I helped organized TEDxCambridge and starting this week we’ll be releasing a few of the amazing talks held during that event.
“Neuroscientist Don Katz uses experiments with rats to shed light on where taste preferences come from and, when it comes to food, why we like what we like.”
via YouTube
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!
This is how it should feel like when you recycle and do good!!!(watch video on youtube) Reminds me in Charlie Todd from Improv Everywheres Welcome Back project.
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
Photographer Stephan Tillmans project “Luminant Point Arrays” captures the flicker of CRT monitor screens right when you turn it off. The results are rather beautiful or perhaps nostalgic. Great series.
LUMINANT POINT ARRAYS
“The Luminant Point Arrays show tube televisions in the moment they are swithed off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture discribes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.”
See the images after the jump.
“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.
“James White made this poster, which you can buy at the Signalnoise store. All profits go to the relief effort.”
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.
“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.”
Up-Inspired Floating House! Awesome. Check out the other 14 photos here.
“Yesterday morning, March 5 at dawn, National Geographic Channel and a team of scientists, engineers, and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16′ X 16′ house 18′ tall with 300 8′ colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted. The entire experimental aircraft was more than 10 stories high, reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet, and flew for approximately one hour.
The filming of the event, from a private airstrip, will be part of a new National Geographic Channel series called How Hard Can it Be?, which will premiere in fall 2011.”
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.
Great article from Fast Company about Innovative designs not being consumer-led. I’ve always believed in this. Consumers know what they love and hate now, but they never know what they want tomorrow. Users often don’t know what they actually want even though they might say otherwise. Focus groups are sometimes useful, but in most cases they an excuse to do when creativity is lacking or something to ease the mind in management. To innovate is to lead, not to follow, or as the article concludes with ” It’s time for brands to step up and trust themselves again”
Anyhow, read the article mirrored below after the jump.