Archive for the 'Technology' Category

This fascinating software program created by Dr. Ariel Shamir analyzes images by gradient magnitude and removes or adds irregular lines. Watch as images are reduced and expanded – not by scaling or cropping but by algorithmically removing “empty” space. Rocks slide over one another, objects are eclipsed by other elements, and proportions of each element are generally preserved.

The use of gradient magnitude to “block” meaningful areas of an image is fascinating – our brains already edit out a huge amount of what we see and this technology may be performing a similar function. Also interesting is the emphasis on the technology’s use for displaying images at various sizes and aspect ratios – to me, the ability to “shrink” information out of an image simply by resizing the frame is fascinating on a deeper level than simply to aid page layout. (Note that the title of the linked article refers to the removed material as “the useless”) And the implications for the integrity of photos we see on a day-to-day basis give me pause as well.

Via OhGizmo.com

Popularity: 7% [?]

Google launched a new version of its Google Earth program today. It in addition to letting you zoom around the Earth, you can now explore the Sky! If you thought NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was cool, imagine how cool it would be to fly into one of the Hubble Telescope’s photos. Many of these photos are geo-referenced to their locations so you can search for “Betelgeuse” just like you can search for “New York City.”

Hubble’s photos aren’t the only ones you can zoom into. Similar to Street View in Google Maps, this new version of Google Earth lets you zoom waaaaaaaaaaaay into Gigapxl photos in the normal Earth view. Turn on the Gigapxl layer under “Featured Content” in the “Layers” panel in the lower left-hand corner of the program and fly into high-resolution photos of Devil’s Tower or Seattle’s Space Needle. Both of these features are yet another neat way to better view and understand our world. It’ll be exciting to watch how the world will use these new tools!

Search for “Pillars of Creation” in Google Earth’s Sky Mode to view this photo in context.

Link to download Google Earth 4.2 (and link to Sally Ride video)
Link to Google LatLong Blog Post
Link to Gigapixl demo video

Popularity: 6% [?]

One of our most recent clients, GreenVolts has just launched their new site, which we spent the last month or so designing. In their own words:

GreenVolts, Inc., based in San Francisco, was founded in 2005 to deliver solar power at fossil fuel costs. Through low cost and high efficiency, GreenVolts can access large markets previously inaccessible to solar power. GreenVolts changes the economics of solar energy.

Please check it out! We welcome any feedback.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Click image above to play video

Freestyle Walking: No longer just a euphemism for your friend falling on their face! Check out this great new video for RJD2’s “Work it Out.” (click image above) While just plain cool, reading the blurb from the YouTube page is simply inspiring:

Bill Shannon who was born with a degenerative hip condition. His legs cannot carry his own weight and so he has lived a life on crutches. He has developed a new way of moving through life on his skateboard and the crutches.

At our current rate of consumption, the human population can similarly not “carry its own weight” and is leaving a massive ecological footprint. In the same way this young man has “developed new ways of moving through life,” I think we should jump on the problems at hand as opportunities to develop something just as creative and unique. Just look at the neat design of those crutches! They look a lot more like fun than a necessity. Solving climate change and a host of other green problems should leave us with the same fly-high kind of feeling. So let’s do this thing in style.

Link to Bill Shannon’s website
Link to video

See Also: Hip Hop 1930s Remix, Roykopp’s Diagram Music Vid, World Changing Book

Popularity: 10% [?]

Click above image to view animation

This narrated time-lapse animation from a recent article on obesity spread through social networks in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) does a beautiful job visualizing the issues. Considering that, more and more, folks like the World Health Organization (WHO) are framing the discussion of obesity as an epidemic, being able to watch it contagiously spread through this visual representation is quite powerful. While the colors and lay-out may not have been quite as graphically impactful as it could have been, (colors not quite bright enough, links too thin, etc.) it’s reassuring to observe people working on these important issues avoid a drier presentation of their findings in lue of these dynamic tools made available by new technologies. Hopefully we’ll see more of it as these tools become more accessible.

Link Washington Post article
Link to animation
Link to original NEJM article

See Also: Gapminder, Breathing Data, Vestal Tree Simulator

Popularity: 7% [?]

Here’s some food for thought as we go into the 3rd week of my look into packaging: What if packaging design was just a little more considered?

Could our sidewalks and road-sides be free of bottle caps and cigarette packs? Maybe our gutters wouldn’t be clogged with plastic bags and blister packs. Perhaps our oceans might have one less gigantic garbage patch.

I’m a fan of Clif Bar’s recent effort to keep litter in its place. The Litter Leash is a pretty clever little piece of design (it’s covered by two utility patents).

Its elegant design inspires me. It’s so simple, effective and “obvious,” yet unmatched. Now, it’s by no means perfect, but in essence, the litter leash takes a step to build a mental connection between litter and the environment and makes the user take responsibility for this tiny piece of trash.

Futureproofed might be a good word for it… What inspires you?

Patent 6,702,462
Patent 6,244,467

Popularity: 9% [?]

Yup, that’s right. The fun, ‘how-to’ Instructables group is teaming up with magazine Popular Science and environmental blog Treehugger to host a contest encouraging folks to post instructions on how to do things greener. We here at Vestal are super excited to see what inventive stuff folks come up with. Most posts on Instructables already use affordable and recycled materials and show impressive resourcefulness, so it’ll be fun to see what people do when given this specific task. We’ll be sure to update y’all on the stuff we thought was neat. But hurry, you only have until Aug 19th to post!

Link to Contest

See Also: Solar Oven from Reflector, Plastic Bag Wallet, Make Your Own (Real) Diamonds

Popularity: 10% [?]

During a trip to China, I was shocked to find a Coke can with a ring pull tab (also known as a rimple). For those of you who are not familiar with the ring pull, it’s probably because they haven’t been very widely used for decades now. (They were phased out of use in the 80’s due to sharp edges and the tendency for the tabs to be casually tossed aside and become litter.)

In 1975, Dan Cudzik patented the ubiquitous “stay-tab” which offered a safer and more environmentally responsible solution which we now find on virtually every aluminum beverage can. The design is delightfully simple and keeps the tab attached to the can unless the user intentionally breaks the tab free.

So, when I found this can, I thought it was rather odd that the multi-national Coca-Cola corporation would use this arguably less responsible packaging solution in China. My guess is that this type of packaging is fractions of a cent cheaper to manufacture, providing financial savings to Coca-cola. However, given the undesirable traits of the ring pull, this would imply that the executives at Coca-cola make the conscious and deliberate decision to use an obsolete, dangerous and environmentally irresponsible packaging solution to increase profits at the expense of the public good. I find this juxtaposition of 44 year-old pull tab technology with modern boy-band, pop-icon graphics quite unfortunate.

Link to 1963 Ring-pull Patent
Link to 1975 Stay-tab Patent

Popularity: 11% [?]

We’ve been so busy the past few months (and by busy, I mean working hard this spring and then enjoying a vacation in June), that we’ve neglected to mention CleanScores.com

In the fall of last year, we were approached about designing a website which helped people learn about how clean, or dirty, their favorite restaurants are. We literally started out with a one-page sketch from CleanScores’ founders, and a gigantic database from the San Francisco Health Department. A few months later, CleanScores.com, which allows you to see a restaurant’s health inspection scores, was bringing a new level of transparency to the typically murky subject of government reports (see San Francisco’s Health Department website)

Along the way, we were given a lot of freedom by the founders to determine the website’s look and feel. This led to some innovative uses like Sparklines in the search results and another layer of content for expert users (try hovering over a restaurant’s current violations to see more in-depth explanations).

Additionally, we spent several months debating how to display a graph of a restaurant’s inspection scores. One of more challenging aspects of the site was to have a restaurant’s page look simple and uncluttered, but allowed an expert visitor to quickly discover all the information they could need.

Link to CleanScores.com (only serving San Francisco for the moment)

Popularity: 8% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Once in college, in some seminar I took, there was an angry discussion about what it means to have the title “architect” rather than “builder.” I remember claiming that anyone can do architecture, that the act of designing a building makes you an architect; maybe not a good architect, but an architect nevertheless. To claim a separate world known as Architecture, guarded by gatekeepers known as Architects, is pretentious and delusional; as if I need a trained chef to supervise all my dinners. What architects need to do (as my table of grad students grew increasingly restless) is give up on the economics of construction and focus on becoming artists, sculptors of the built environment.

The point is, you simply don’t need a MArch and years of experience to design a good, interesting, beautiful building. You only need those things in order to place yourself into a specific professional position to be taken seriously in the industry that is architecture, not in the artform. The grad students did not accept this idea one bit. I wouldn’t either if I had to pay the tuition they were paying.

I am, in no way, a professional architect, but I designed my home with architecture in mind. The beauty of a program like Google Sketchup is not in its sophistication – at times it resembles MS Paint – but that it even exists, for free, for all the world. As I tried to design my house, any idea could be almost instantaneously manifested in front of me – no blueprints, no $8000 software, just rendering pure and simple. It was beautiful, even if my ideas sometimes weren’t.

My final design, more or less, ended up as a multicolored futuristic tea house; a strange facade, made stranger by being completely removed from this (or really any) context. I had followed my own advice and “sculpted the urban realm” with a combination of free software, intense pretension, and a basic knowledge of aesthetics. I figured I could build this structure without major hiccups. It turns out, I grossly underestimated Peru disdain for multicolored futuristic tea houses.

Things went poorly.

Popularity: 14% [?]