This week's selections will have you wishing you could go there, drive that, do that, wear that and own that. Feast your eyeballs.
1. ‘Universe Mind’ Video Projection
For the New Media Night Festival in Moscow, design studio Radugadesign mapped a video projection over the Universe Mind sculpture by artist Nikolay Polissky. See the video here.
2. Bus Stop
Wouldn't it be great if every bus stop looked like this one that recently opened up in Baltimore? Each wood and steel letter stands 14 feet tall and seven feet wide. Stand in the "B," lie back in the "S," or sit in the "U." The bus stop is a permanent public art project. We'd like to see more.
3. Hybrid Solar-Sail Yacht
This 130-foot boat combines the best of both worlds: sailing and motor boating. The Kira Sail Yacht has a mast designed to hold solar panels that harvest sunlight to power an electric motor (excess energy is stored in a battery that makes up the keel) and to support a cloth sail powered by the wind. It was designed by freelance industrial designer Sebastian Campos when he was at the Savannah College of Art and Design and recently won a Bronze Prize for IDEA '14.
4. New Supercar
Carmaker Bugatti wants to out-do itself. It's nine-year-old EB16.4 Veyron is already revered among supercar enthusiasts for its 8.0-litre engine and its 0-to-60-mph performance in 2.4 seconds. But the Volkswagen Group is working on a new model that will be even faster. It's reported that the car, scheduled to make its public debut in 2016, will have advanced hybrid tech, carbon fibre construction and a top speed of 285 mph. Bugatti officials told Drive that the new car will have “the fastest top speed of any series production road car together with the sort of drivability to allow you to use it as everyday."
5. Floating Snowflake Hotel
Book your rooms now for the 86-room floating hotel scheduled to open its doors - and its docks - December 2016 off the coast of the Norwegian city of Tromso. Krystall, designed by architect Koen Olthuis of Dutch Docklands, will exude "cool" thanks to construction materials such as transparent bricks that resemble ice. A glass roofs will offer clear views of the northern lights.
6. Wearable Origami
Designer Tine De Ruysser has found ways to transform metal laminate into origami jewellery, clothing and decorative tableware. The first involves stitching a layer of plastic or paper in between two layers of fabric; the second is way to apply copper platelets to fabric. The results are gorgeous pieces of metal that curve and conform to the shape of the human body. She presented her creative work this past week at the the 6th International Meeting on Origami in Science in Tokyo. You can find more by clicking on the link to her website above.
7. Fluctuating Fabric
In other innovative fashion news, a kind of "mood" fabric from UK-based artist Lauren Bowker of the material studio THE UNSEEN debuted during London’s Fashion Week 2014. The colour of the fabric fluctuates, not according to the emotions of the wearer, but according to the temperament of the weather. The cloth is treated with a special ink that reacts to seven stimuli: heat, UV, pollution, moisture, chemicals, friction, and sound. See a video here.
8. Origami Robot
In other innovative origami news, scientists from MIT and Harvard presented a self-assembling pop-up robot that goes from flat to to chunky in four minutes and then crawls away - all without human intervention.
9. Lotus Flow
The combination air purifier-light, Lotus Flow, is made from electroluminescent fabric with a hydrophobic coating. An internal fan pulls air through the petals toward a filter in the centre that removes dust and pollutants. Ultraviolet light helps kill bacteria, while a negative air ionizer produces fresh air. Lotus Flow is an entry from Rodrigo Capati for the 2014 Electrolux Design Lab entry.
10. Brain-like Computer Chip
This week, IBM announced the development of a powerful computer chip, TrueNorth, that mimics the workings of the human brain. Not only does it simulate millions of neurons firing, it performs complex tasks using very little energy. In this thermal image, TrueNorth is on the left, cool as a blue cucumber, and a conventional chip is on the right, red hot with jealousy.
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