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What do you get when you combine Japan’s love of gadgetry with its cleanliness obsession? The highest-tech toilets on the planet.
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These high-tech toilets will measure your blood pressure, light your nighttime perambulations, and keep you warm and dry.
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This slideshow of seat patterns taken from public transport vehicles worldwide will surely make you more aware of the designs your bottom rests on and shares with thousands of commuters everyday.
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View patterns from the Vienna Underground all the way to London bus route 358 (Durrant Way towards Locksbottom).
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There is serious debate whether an entire R Train in New York City (750 feet of steel) was a display of true graffiti or whether it was an advertising ploy.
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Highlights of the piece on the train include the phrases "Made U Look" across the whole train and "Cash is King" on the front, as well as the Monopoly Man.
The question is which marketer is behind this and how much did they pay Mike Bloomberg and the MTA to pull it off.
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Read Graffiti Art: An Essay Concerning The Recognition of Some Forms of Graffiti As Art
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Subscribe for one year and and the full amount of your subscription fee ($20) goes to the organization of your choice.
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According to Good Magazine, most magazines do not make money on subscriptions or newsstand sales. Traditionally, the best way to get a bunch of new subscribers is to send millions of pieces of unsolicited mail—junk mail—to people who might have some interest. Good Magazine doesn't like junk mail, and they don't like the thought of spending millions of dollars on it. So they came up with the idea of giving away all subscription fees and allowing subscribers to choose which organization they would like to support.
This whole thing is an experiment. If it works, Good Magazine will actually spend less than half of what it traditionally costs to acquire subscribers.
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The long anticipated Apple iPhone has just been revealed… During Steve Job’s speech, he more or less mocked Blackberry and other technologies relative to the capabilities of the new iPhone. The iPhone also features no buttons on it's face - it’s all touch screen, which is pretty cool.
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Apple decribes the iPhone as follows, “The iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers.
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The first dark restaurant in Asia is officially opened on the December 23, 2006. This restaurant, located in Beijing, China, has its interior painted completely in black. Customers are greeted by a brightly lit entrance hall and will be escorted by waiters wearing night vision goggles into the pitch dark dining room to help them find their seats.
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Flashlights, mobile phones and even luminous watches are prohibited while in this area. The meal will be taken in this environment with the complete loss of vision. By starving one's sense, your other senses are stimulated to full alert - all so the theory goes - and your food will taste like it's never tasted before.
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The post-it pad that looks like an Onion.
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The Kokuyo Design award winners were announced a week ago, and this awesome post-it pad won the grand prix. The theme was "leaves." Each layer looks slightly different from the one before it, and the translucency and texture make it really feel like you are peeling off thinly cut layers of the onion.
http://tokyomango.blogspot.com/2006/12/post-it-pad-that-looks-like-onion.html
Meladur Set (for camping)
East German product designer, Günter Höhne, expert of consumer goods before the breaking down of the wall, designed this plastic dish set, enabling one of the great pastimes - camping, a vital outlet for east germans who were not allowed to travel.
Packaging and product design produced in the german democratic republic (GDR) reveals a little-known side of german popular history.
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The rise of modern design during the initial phase of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), product design was dominated by an official stalinist aesthetic, but the ideology of stalinism proved terribly unsuited for the postwar world. It relegated the needs of consumers to dead last on the priority list, demanding sacrifice in all areas of life in the interest of building heavy industry based only on primary and secondary production. clothes, toys, household items, and cars were all considered by the SED party to be wants, not needs.
The regime had been against modernism, it favored historicism in product design, and thus was initially against the use of plastic because of its modern aesthetic. The products of socialist industry and construction should reflect the cultural heritage of germany, imitating styles such as baroque, rococo, chippendale, ‘gründerzeit’, and others.
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Visit Günter Höhne designs by decade:
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The public are being given the chance to be part of Britain's biggest light artwork, Nocturne, by sending photographs to the website www.metronocturne.com.
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A countryside scene, a honeymoon and a balloon ride will be part of an ambitious artwork scheme to light up one of the Tyne's bridges. The Metro bridge is to be lit with an ever-changing spectrum of lights - and people are being urged to influence the choice of colours to be seen by millions every year.
Artist Nayan Kulkarni is seeking 6,000 different images to create the bars of light that will move back and forth every night for the next 15 years on the Queen Elizabeth II Metro Bridge. Nocturne will be completed early next year, when the lights will be switched on right across the 360m structure for the first time.
One hundred and forty LED lights will illuminate the strucutre of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge with bands of color using computer programmed controls. The level of illumination will change in relation to the rise and fall of tides. These controls will also be used each day to change bands of color as they appear to move through the 360 metre strucutre, sending messages of light between Newcastle and Gateshead.
Visit the Nocturne website:
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