The Lego house is Finished
September 20th, 2009 link to (permalink)
5 months ago
Barnaby Gunning has posted the finished pictures of the Lego House
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Category: 'featured'
Oobject interviews Barnaby Gunning, the architect for Top Gear presenter, James May’s Lego House (with Pics)
August 24th, 2009 link to (permalink)
6 months ago
View Slideshow of Construction Progress
Barnaby Gunning has an unusual architectural background that makes him one of the few people who could design a real house from toy bricks. In addition to having worked for the world famous architects Renzo Piano and Norman Foster he has also worked with the UK’s rock star engineer Neil Thomas, at Atelier One.
Perhaps Gunning’s work with the Maverick furniture designer, Ron Arad, whose work is currently the subject of a major exhibition at MoMA, is what qualified him most. When Top Gear presenter, James May approached Arad with an unusual request, Ron Arad knew just the man. He called up Barnaby saying, “there’s a TV production team here and they want an architect to help them design a house entirely out of Lego”.
The Lego house is not an illusion, explains Barnaby, “its made of real bricks, and put together with no glue”.
Oobject: No glue?
BG: Yes, amazingly we did tests with glue and it didn’t make much difference?
Oobject: Who the blazes do you get to test Lego structural engineering?
BG: Well you need someone used to testing weird structures. Atelier One and City University ran structural tests on individual blocks, then looked at breaking loads for diffent types of Lego beams. It turned out Lego beams, the size required for a house are structurally feasible.
Oobject: What was the end solution, structurally?
BG: The structure could have been fully lego, but there is a timber ’safety frame’ inside the walls which replaces the lego joists. We designed the bottom edge of the lego beams to use three layers of thin lego plates which perform very well in tension. Three layers of these are the size of one regular course.
Oobject: So what exactly is made of Lego?
BG: Pretty much everything except the joists, the electrics and the lighting. In fact we probably could have done some of that in Lego too. Even the toilet will be in Lego.
Oobject: The toilet - right, this the thing we want to know most, how does a Lego toilet work - I mean how much of it is actually Lego?
BG: Pretty much all of it. The exact design is being specified by the interior designer and will have a Lego cistern connected to a Lego bowl via a Lego pipe. It will even have a Lego flusher.
Oobject: But can you poop in it?
BG: That’s the least of your problems. Have you ever tried sitting on pixelated plastic?
Oobject: What have been the biggest challenges so far?
BG: Making sure we don’t run out of bricks. We have 3M on site, but they are a finite supply and I have to negotiate with the interior designer, who’ll be doing furniture and art work, for bricks for the walls.
Oobject: Do you have miniature brick layer people to build the walls?
BG: Actually we have 3000 volunteers.
Oobject: Tiny little volunteers?
BG: No, ordinary members of the public. It helps when you are recruiting people for a construction project if you have the TV presenter of Top Gear to ask around.
Oobject: I guess, unless it was that miserable one.
BG: Yes, fortunately we had James May not Jeremy Clarkson.
Oobject: One of the problems with giant Lego structures we’ve seen before is that they look nasty because the designs are literal and figurative, like something from a model village. How did you manage to get the Lego house to actually look interesting architecturally?
BG: Largely that was a result of James May being on the same page as us. James realized the kitsch potential from the get go and specifically asked that we didn’t just build an overgrown standard model.
Oobject: Thanks Barnaby, one quick question, can you build us a house out of pasta?
BG: Sure, Penne or Spaghetti?
Snow blowers from hell
August 13th, 2009 link to (permalink)
7 months ago
A great collection of jet engines mounted on trucks from Darkroastedblend.
AT&T and Best Buy phone launch details leak: nuvifone, Omnia 2, Chocolate Touch, more
August 10th, 2009 link to (permalink)
7 months ago
Phone launch leaks a-plenty this weekend, as the Boy Genius Report scoops up a couple of interesting screenshots from Best Buy and AT&T.
The Apollo 12 Quarantine Airstream - which ended up on a fish farm
July 15th, 2009 link to (permalink)
8 months ago
Vintage Airstreams are cool enough, but imagine owning a NASA moon astronaut quarantine version.
The Apollo 11 Quarantine trailer is in a museum and the never used Apollo 13 one is on board the USS Hornet, but the Apollo 12 one was sold off as surplus and ended up at a fish farm, as seen here.
An amazing find.
Apple is closed source. What do you think of the iPhone 3GS?
June 9th, 2009 link to (permalink)
9 months ago
The announcement of the iPhone guaranteed one thing - that every Apple keynote after it would be a disappointment.
Yesterday, was no exception. Apple announced a go-faster version of the iPhone, with a moniker reminiscent of a 1970s Citroen car, the 3GS and a minor software upgrade.
The new hardware featured a camera that was almost as good as standard issue for other phones in Europe and Japan.
The new software added a few do-dads, such as a remote bleeper and software erase that only works if you sign up to the Apple software service that gives you things like an inferior version of Gmail.
New apps were showcased, such as the very promising looking Tom Tom application and unpromising looking Tom Tom kit that hinted it would cost almost as much as a standalone GPS device, thus defeating the point.
But the big deal was the addition of tethering, allowing you to use the iPone as a 3G modem. Something that many 3G phones already do.
No matter that 3G tethering presumably costs money via the providers Apple listed, the problem was that it wouldn't work at all in the US, via the sole carrier, ATT.
Although Apple could be playing passive aggressive, deliberately directing flack at ATT, this is not just an ATT problem.
Apple is no longer the little guy offering a better alternative to Microsoft. Increasingly Apple's closed platform is becoming an irritating hassle, rather than a price that is worth paying for well designed and integrated products from hardware to software.
Here are some of the unnecessary irritations and bad design that Apple's closed approach creates:
1. You cannot easily store your music on an external device without needless messing around with iTunes restrictions.
2. You cannot go abroad with your iPhone and slip a new SIM card in without a huge pain in the ass.
3. You cannot take advantage of many new iPhone or OS features without subscribing to a service that offers inferior versions of free online services like Gmail, that will always be better because of the resources allocated to them.
4. You cannot replace the battery in an iPod, iPhone or (now) MacBook without a screwdriver.
Apple products are beautifully designed where most gadgets are useless toys, and the OS is peerless but there is a creeping sensation of needless and irritating lock in.
Inhalt
May 22nd, 2009 link to (permalink)
10 months ago
Inhalt is the multicellular caravan by Mehrzelle."Using the online Configurator, every user sets up ..(more...
Ten beautiful computers
May 14th, 2009 link to (permalink)
10 months ago
They ended their lives as museum pieces, aquariums, couches, and even at the bottom of the sea. But these are the ones that stay with us.nbsp; ZX Spectrum Flashes of prismatic color on Clive Sinclair's tiny ZX Spectrum mark the original from its vast army of clones.
A perfect folding bike design
May 12th, 2009 link to (permalink)
10 months ago
Industrial designer Mark Sanders' IF-Mode folding bike is now for sale in the U.S. Sanders stuck with a full-sized design because "people prefer larger wheels for ease of pedaling and smoothness of ride," yet the bike still folds up compact enough to fit into a suitcase that you could actually...
BUGlabs Modular Gadget Factory
May 12th, 2009 link to (permalink)
10 months ago
BUGlabs Modular Gadget Factory ThinkGeek are now selling BUGLabs. BUG’s are various items which can either secure things, track things with GPS, read barcodes, draw pictures, update Twitter and control robots.
Wonders of Jurassic Technology: Bartini Beriev
April 24th, 2009 link to (permalink)
10 months ago
The Bartini Beriev is one of those objects that scores on every level of Jurassic technology fetishism: highly unusual experimental design (check); looks like something from science fiction (check); Soviet (check); abandoned and rotting (check); looks like an enormous frightening bug (check).
Although only prototypes were built, in the 1970s, the Bartini was a revolutionary hybrid vehicle. It was designed to take of vertically - from water! To fly as a real plane at high altitudes and to use the Wing in Ground Effect to skim the water somewhere between a hovercraft and a plane. This gives it another delicious feature: cool name: (WIG) vehicle, flarecraft, sea skimmer, ekranoplan. The Bartini is all of these.
The image above shows it with the main wings removed (below is the original configuration).
From a design perspective it demonstrates the extreme difference between the boring flying cigar design of commercial aircraft and military planes.
Commercial planes occupy a single species, very stable ecosystem with little evolution of form. In the military, a literal arms race creates a more varied environment, resulting in all sorts of shapes, sizes and functions of planes. The Bartini is a very good example of this, being a world apart from a Boeing or Airbus airliner.
Head over to Airliners.net where they have more images of the Bartini.
Design elegance: How USB took over the world.
April 20th, 2009 link to (permalink)
11 months ago
Belkin released a trivial looking gadget today which demonstrates how USB has become the universal standard interface. It turns the car cigarette lighter, which in turn had morphed into a universal charging interface, into a USB one.
There are many features which made USB a successful standard but there are 2 which stand out and made it truly elegant:
1. software and drivers could be stored in peripherals themselves, and transferred, finally removing the headache of configuring external devices.
2. both data and power are carried across USB allowing things such as external drives to have one less cable and a lot less fuss.
ASUS Eee Keyboard video touchscreen demo
March 24th, 2009 link to (permalink)
11 months ago
The ASUS’ Eee Keyboard will, no doubt, generate lots of bloggery interest, as all gimmick keyboards seem to. But it is juts that - a gimmick.
Why Skype Phones Look Obsolete
March 23rd, 2009 link to (permalink)
12 months ago
There are a few of these devices around and they all share one thing in common - they look like obsolete cellphones.
The reason for this is, of course, that nobody developing a Skye phone has the economy of scale to create an innovative up to date handset, while no carrier will allow a device like the iPhone to have Skype.
The end result is pure farce.
If you’re looking for an alternative to using your computer’s built-in mic and speakers or a wired headset for use with Skype then Ipevo’s handset could be right for you. It has one simple purpose and works quite well.
What Apple got wrong with the Shuffle.
March 13th, 2009 link to (permalink)
1 year ago
This device which adds a usb socket to the end of the new iPod shuffle shows exactly why the second and third generation versions aren't as good as the original.
The first iPod shuffle pioneered the form factor that became the USB key - a stick of gum shaped item that carried tunes. It was magnificent and simple.
The second version then made the form factor smaller, for no good reason, but required carrying around a separate docking cradle.
Then came version three which has the stick of gum form factor AND the cradle. Leading to third party devices like this one, to cobble together the original elegance.
Truly Horrible Gresso Skeleton Gold Luxury Phone
February 25th, 2009 link to (permalink)
1 year ago
You would think that the credit crisis would have made crass badly designed objects like this, disappear. Sadly no, this hideous Gresso phone offers you inferior design and features for a premium price.
Why We Don’t Rate the Optimus Keyboard
February 25th, 2009 link to (permalink)
1 year ago
The Optimus keyboard shares something in common with the Segway. It is an idea which requires an overly complicated design solution to a problem that may be marginal but requires sophisticated engineering to solve. The proper term for this is a gimmick and gadgets which are innovative gimmicks have a curious property, they generate lots of discussion on blogs etc. but few people actually buy them.
Despite the hype the Optimus keyboard looks like an expensive failure, and nothing quite shows it in the worst light than this tacky and predictable World of Warcraft theme.
oobject - the kindle 2 from a design perspective
February 9th, 2009 link to (permalink)
1 year ago
Superficially the Kindle 2 is a marked improvement over its origami-like, unconventional shaped predecessor, it looks like a large minimalist paper Blackberry with obligatory rounded corners.
BlackBerry with OLED Keyboard [Concept]
February 6th, 2009 link to (permalink)
1 year ago
Remember the legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard that you’ve never bought? Billy May had an idea to adopt the technology into BlackBerry. He proposed the concept for MozPhone project, a design effort initiated by him.
