Japanese Love Hotels
Via Trendland, photographer Misty Keasler examines the strangest places on Earth, Japan’s themed love rooms, which resemble everything from gigantic bird cages to outer space to subway cars. In the future, they are where all romantic activity will be conducted:
The Love Hotel is an intensely unique Japanese institution. The themed rooms [are] rented by the hour. There are an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 of them in the country and they are so prevalent that the Japanese take them for granted.
____________
Joint Stockings Are Eerie
As androids/dolls/CG figures become more lifelike, flesh-and-blood humans may desire to head in the other direction. Girls (and boys) can now pick up chic joint stockings to give themselves the look of a robot/figurine attempting to mimic a human being. Asiajin provides some explanation and unsettling photos:
Kyutai Kansetsu Sutokkingu (Spherical Joint Stocking) is a coterie stocking sold at Bungaku Furima (literature flea-market), a dojinshi sale dedicated for literature-related things only, by circle Ojosama Gakkou Shojo Bu (preppie school girls section). The stocking has globe joint painted on knees, to make your leg like real figure.
The stockings, 2,000 yen(US$25) seems sold out on their online shop, currently on order.
But why? I guess some people might love figures too much so that now they want to become like that. It is interesting because those joints originally showed their incompleteness of mimicking human beings.
Band Presses Vinyl Record On Chocolate
The glitch-y electro tunes by Scotland’s Found seem perfectly fine, but the real treat is their groundbreaking edible, playable vinyl pressing. Ah, art meant to be consumed with all five senses — is this the future of physical product for the music industry? Via DesignTAXI:
This record can easily go from turntable to coffee table. Scottish band Found, looking for an inventive new way to release a new single, baked up a sugary idea: to press the 7” record on chocolate.
The band enlisted the help of a friend, baker Ben Milne who, after several failed attempts, managed to successfully created the Willy Wonka-like treat; the entire record, including the paper label, is edible. While not audiophile quality by any stretch, the chocolate disc plays a decent version of the band’s “Anti-Climb Paint” single.
An Origami Phone You Can Fold And Use
Photo: Weii Designs
Via Inventor Spot:
The Origami Handset is a sublime expression of lightness crafted by Chengyuan Wei (魏呈远) of Weii Design.
Currently living and working in the city of Hangzhou, Wei has been putting his education at Zhejiang University to good use, designing a number of esthetically pleasing items such as a self-balancing, Segway-style scooter for the INNO company and the eco-friendly, solar powered Light Gap clock.
It’s Wei’s minimalist telephone handset, however, that perhaps most succinctly expresses the artist’s rejection of “a unified system… created by big commercial corporations.” After disassembling a telephone handset one day, Wei discovered that “all the functional parts only took a small space inside the handset. So I thought maybe I can design a unique handset which has a light and material-efficient structure.”
Looking at the Origami Handset, you can see that these kinds of electronic devices really have very few parts and most of those are comprised…
Steampunk Cell Phones
Trying to cultivate a traveler-from-another-era aesthetic but concerned that the look is ruined every time you pull out your Blackberry? Designer Ivan Mavrovic has a line of frightening steampunk cellphones to help stay in character. Now you’ll never have to pull out a bland businessman’s phone again.
See the rest via How To Be A Retronaut.
The Gadgets We Never Heard Of
Did you know that the iPod is basically a ripoff of a German transistor radio from the 1950s? Via the Atlantic, selections from Bill Buxton’s collection of little-known gadgets (such as early touchscreen devices, the first robotic chess game, and a “mindblowing Casio watch from 1984″) which sadly are in the secret dustbin of history:
Pepsi Unveils Plastic Bottle Made Entirely From Plants
Pepsi is trumpeting its creation of a plastic bottle made entirely from plant matter. Great — now we’ll be filling our landfills with plastic forever, even after we run out of oil. Via Gizmodo:
Soda’s bad for you, but plastics—especially the petroleum-based PET plastics used widely for bottles—are bad for everyone. Thankfully, after millions of dollars and years of research, Pepsi thinks it’s cracked the code on a 100% plant-based PET bottle.
It looks…just like the old bottle. “It’s indistinguishable,” says Rocco Papalia, PepsiCo’s senior vice president of advanced research. But instead of drawing from our planet’s diminishing supply of petroleum, it’s made entirely from plant waste—currently switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and eventually incorporating orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other materials leftover from its food business.
Pepsi’s going to test the bottle with a run of a few hundred thousand in 2012, and if all goes well they plan…
Do You Know What These Objects Are?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is into historical inventions, including the revolutionary, strange, and ill-conceived — everything from primitive 45 rpm record players to radiation monitors. However, some items in their fascinating digital archives defy explanation — no one is sure where they came from or what their functions are (time travel dial? witch detector?). The government is asking for your help in identifying mystery machines:
Do you hold the key to solving some gadget mysteries from the last century of U.S. science and technology? Visitors to the site can view the items and offer clues about the history and origins of some of these important artifacts.
Inflatable Crowds For Rent
In need of a massive crowd of people, but don’t have thousands of adoring followers at your disposal? Why not go with Inflatable Crowd? The company rents out blow-up versions of giant masses of humanity, for use in films, political rallies, or other needs. When decked out in clothing, wigs, and masks and viewed from a distance, the blow-up denizens are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, and are far cheaper than paying large numbers of extras. Their Flickr is pretty disturbing.
The Inflatable Crowd Company was created for SEABISCUIT in 2002. Since then, our Inflatable Crowds have been seen (but not noticed) in over 80 feature films & many TV shows & commercials.
Augment Your Body With Brainwave-Controlled Cat Ears
Completely real and available for purchase now from Japanese startup outfit Neurowear. Being a bionic cyber-feline has never looked cuter. Via Wired UK:
The ears twitch through a range of different positions, which correspond to different brain activity. So when you concentrate, the ears point upwards and when you relax the ears flop down and forwards. Mind control isn’t new, but lately advances have been made to make mass market control devices at affordable prices.
Britain’s Stylishly Mod Secret Underground City
How To Be A Retronaut has an arresting set of images of Burlington, the 35-acre “Cold War City” lying twelve stories beneath Wiltshire, England. Built during the 1950s, it was to be home to the prime minister and a few thousand others in the event of nuclear apocalypse. With record players, rotary phones, and Singer sewing machines folding out from enclosures in the walls, it makes the prospect of a post-disaster future seems quite charming:
It was equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain and a BBC studio from where the prime minister could make broadcasts to what remained of the nation. 100,000 lamps that lit its streets and guided the way to a pub modeled on the Red Lion in Whitehall. The bunker’s very existence was meant to be top secret until it was decommissioned in 2004.
Mask For Full-Head Pixelation In Public Places
If you long for privacy in a world of near-constant surveillance, take note. Finally there is an analog device for pixelating one’s face while walking the streets. Wearing this will definitely liven up your day. Via Co.Design (thanks to John K. Smith for the tip):
Martin Backes has designed some conceptual fashion headwear to assuage your paranoia. “Pixelhead” is a full-coverage mask decorated in pixelated colors, so that if you do get caught by Google Street View’s cameras, your privacy is assured.
Clearly, Mr. Backes has his tongue at least partly in-cheek with his design: as he explains on his site, that pixelated pattern is actually a “fashionable” de-rezzed image of German Secretary of the Interior Thomas de Maizière. Pixelhead is no tossed-off piece of conceptual art — created with advisement from fashion designer Liza Sander, this “media camouflage” is made from the finest stretch satin.
If you feel like your commitment to upholding…
A Visual Study Of Computer GUI In Cinema
Access Main Computer File is a Tumblr that bills itself as “a visual study of computer GUI in cinema”. That is, it’s an overview of computer screens in movies. Enjoy it as an alternate, imagined history of computing or simply a lot of strangeness.
Clothing In The Year 2000
A video in which fashion designers circa the 1930s were asked to design clothing as they predicted it would look in the year 2000. More fun than accurate (”transparent nets to catch males”, “an electric belt will adapt the belt to climatic changes”, “a dress of aluminum”), although their vision of the tie-less, goateed 21st century male — with his portable phone/radio and pockets for “keys, coins, and candy for cuties” — is fairly prescient.
The Video Game Preservation Crisis
Perhaps they were conceived as toys for children, but video games of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are significant artifacts of 20th-century technological, cultural, and design history. Much of that history is being lost or thrown away. Gamasutra discusses the Game Preservation Crisis:
Trash cans, landfills, and incinerators. Erasure, deletion, and obsolescence. These words could describe what has happened to the various building blocks of the video game industry in countries around the world. These building blocks consist of video game source code, the actual computer hardware used to create a particular video game, level layout diagrams, character designs, production documents, marketing material, and more.
These are just some elements of game creation that are gone — never to be seen again. These elements make up the home console, handheld, PC and arcade games we’ve played. The only remnant of a particular game may be its name, or its final published version, since…
Fake Plastic Trees For Our Urban Future
A Parisian design team has conceived the Treepod, a synthetic tree that soaks up CO2 and expels oxygen without requiring water, soil, or years spent growing to full size. Should our planet’s trees be killed off by plague, pollution, or water shortfalls, this is what will fill the void. Via My Modern Metropolis:
When tasked with creating a synthetic urban tree for the City of Boston (or any city) that could provide all the benefits of a real tree (de-carbonization and protection) without requiring soil and water, a team from Paris rose to the challenge. Their innovative concept is called Treepods. The systems are capable of removing carbon dioxide from the air and releasing oxygen using a carbon dioxide removal process called “humidity swing.”
Inspired by dragon blood trees, its wide branches and umbrella style tops support large solar panels. After some testing, they found out that the trees couldn’t be powered…
The Weird And Wonderful Sketchbooks Of Alexander Graham Bell
The Atlantic has scans from the notebooks of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who had an abundance of ideas for serious and non-serious devices. It’s a delight to peruse his sketches, of both nature and such inventions as helicopters, futuristic eyeglasses, playground equipment, the “radiotome”, and (at right) the horse-pulled kite:
It was on March 10, 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call. “‘Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you,” he said to his assistant, who was in the next room. Bell recorded those early telephone experiments in his lab notebooks from the time, as he did with countless other experiments and ideas.
The books are a priceless treasure of an incredibly fertile mind working through one of the most exciting periods of technological innovation in the history of the world. The sketches, though, are more than just dry recordings of physical principles. Bell’s drawings are expressive in ways…
Prosthetic Tentacle Arm
Lost a limb, but dissatisfied with the normal prosthetic options? Recent University of Washington industrial design graduate Kaylene Kau built a functioning prosthetic tentacle. Powered by an internal motor with control buttons, it allows the disabled, or anyone fed up with being “too humanoid,” to live a more serpentine existence.
Mobile Bubble Homes In France
Initially produced by designer Pierre Stephane Dumas, “bubble tents” are now available for use at a growing number of campsites across France, the Daily News reports. Equipped with wardrobes, shelves and electric lights, the bubbles can be rented for around $600 per night, or purchased outright for $12,000. Right now they’re a luxury option for European campers, but I dream of a day in which this will be a viable housing option:
Grab A Can Of Spray-On Clothing
Don’t have time to deal with negotiating tricky sleeves? Just pick up a Fabrican aerosol and spray a t-shirt onto your torso. In all seriousness, the spray-able fabric has all sorts of applications (spray-on bandages, for instance), but I like the idea that in the future, this is how we will get dressed.
