Portugese architect, Alvaro Leite Siza Vieira, created this unique vacation home that is sort of molded along the side of the hill it is built on. Instead of using stilts or other common architectural elements, this home slopes upwards, just like the hill. The home starts at the top of the hill, appearing like a series of flat, concrete panels. Outer stairways, pools, and blocky rooms with panoramic windows add an artistic feel. I would LOVE to live here.

Source: designboom

Looks really cool, but what about safety? Could you imagine getting into even a minor accident in this vehicle? There’s a million reason why this wouldn’t work today, but what about in the future? Is it possible to have such safe, clean roads, with strict enough traffic rules and enforcement that something like this would work? Maybe. Makes me think of futuristic movies, like I, Robot or Minority Report where our terrible traffic problems and congestion have been solved using automated vehicles that drive themselves or automatically run on tracks at speeds five times what we drive on the freeway. Maybe this wearable vehicle concept will sort of be what mopeds and electric cars are to us today: an alternative to the norm.

Source: CrunchGear

I just wanted to post a little information about Steve Bewley’s artwork at Bewley’s Rerun Productions, in Arroyo Grande, California. Steve and family make beautiful, artistic lamps and other furnishings out of discarded materails. The lamps are made from scrap metal, computer parts, guitar and piano strings, baseball bats, brake rotors, space shuttle parts, typewriter parts, reclaimed woods and much more. Looking at them, you wouldn’t know that each one is around 80% recycled. Even the handmade shades are organically made from banana tree leaves and vegetable dye. They are truly unique.

Bowtie in “Amber”

Dynasty Floor in “Amber”

Baseball Bat Lamp

Bewley’s Rerun Productions website

For purchasing, please call (805) 489-5152 or email bewley@rerunproductions.com  

Veer is a great example of a company that exercises intelligent and effective marketing practices. Veer really gives designers what they want, not what they want you to have.Instead of forcing their message at you like many big companies, they give you fun, memorable little things that appeal to the designer within. They are consumer-oriented, and as a result their marketing efforts are exciting, and most definitely effective. Lots and lots of Kudos to Veer for their fantastic marketing efforts.

Since joining the Veer design community several years ago I’ve received a wealth of new and creative marketing promo materials from them. Yesterday, I received a very interesting poster (partiall depicted above), which is accompanied by a smart little flash application “viewer” at http://www.veer.com. Their previous promo, created an elaborate secret designer order, “The Very Secret Order of Creatives Understanding”. I found it both thought-provoking and challenging. Veer sent out these little “member handbooks” packed with subliminal imagery, cryptic design riddles and games, desktop widgets, wallpapers and much more. It was a lot of fun, and and look forward to the next promo.

“Lumen is a series of acid-etched, stainless steel, oil lamp shadow projectors. Each Lumen is sold on adamfrank.com for $48.00 plus shipping and handling. Please allow up to 14 days for delivery due to high demand. For wholesale prices and ordering information please email info@adamfrank.com“

I think these are really cool, especially the “Nest” model. It looks like Corvids to us.

Source: AdamFrank., Inc 

The fellas over at Boing Boing posted this information regarding the Beijing Olympics Screensavers. PLEASE READ THIS IF YOU’VE DOWNLOADED ONE.

Boing Boing reader Bruce Satow tells us:

“I’m a Systems Administrator at a large university and I think I may of found something important, but not sure, but I think it is worth reporting. One of my friends said that it would be a good idea maybe to post this information somewhere that is popular, like boing boing.I’m a big olympics fan so I often check the official Beijing 2008 olympics page.

One of the sections is called the “fun page.”

This page has wallpapers and screensavers for your computer. I have reason to believe that the screensavers are keystroke logging programs hidden inside the Flash animation.

On my Windows XP workstation, I run Symantec Corporate Anti-virus, Zone Alarm Pro, as well as Spybot manually. I do many scans and security checks to make sure that my computer is never infected or compromised because of the type of work that I do.

Today I put on a wallpaper and installed one of the screensaver. The one I installed is called “The Spring of Beijing”. It is a flash based screensaver.

I set my screensaver to autolock the console so when it is running, you have to type in a password to unlock the screen. I had left my workstation unattended to do some work on another computer and when I came back to my computer, the screensaver was active and running. Normally, I just hit a key or move my mouse and the screensaver stops and then the login prompt appears requesting for my password. However, this time the screensaver was still running, but I could not interrupt it. So I did a cntrl-alt-del to stop the screensaver and I noticed that my Zone Alarm had gone off. A message balloon came up saying that the FlashForge Screensaver has a keylogger type program running and it had blocked access to the internet.

Then I thought — how clever. You have to type in your password to disable the screensaver, so basically it was sending the password and other information somewhere.

I did an anti-virus scan with the latest defs and a spybot scan with the latest updates, but it did not detect anything. I am not a Flash programmer so I really can’t validate my findings. I figure there are probably thousands of people who have downloaded this screensaver, and if they are not running some type of security program such as Zone Alarm Pro, it would go completely unnoticed and undetected. I am hoping that you guys might know someone who could dissect the screensaver and validate my findings. I hope that I am wrong about this, but somehow I feel that my finding is correct. I just don’t know enough about Flash programming to investigate it further.

The detection was made by Zone Alarm Pro with advanced settings. After the screensaver ran for a while, I came back to my computer and it was still running, tried to interrupt it, it would not stop, I did a cntrl-alt-del to kill the screensaver and notice the warning and process block from my Zone Alarm Pro.

Someone with some time might be able to setup a computer on an isolated network and to monitor packets coming from a Win XP pro computer with that screensaver installed to see what the heck it is doing. I normally don’t get excited about things like this, but I thought it maybe too important to just ignore.”

Regarding Mr. Satow’s testimony here to Boing Boing, Infowar Monitor editor Greg Walton tells us:

Such tactics are not only political weapons. The start of the Beijing Olympics last week kicked off a slew of malicious internet activity. Some are relatively indiscriminate – using malicious software embedded in innocent websites, often of news organisations with audience numbers boosted by their sports coverage, which then infects the visitor’s computer. Some are more sophisticated.MessageLabs, a security company, detected a bogus email sent to at least 19 national sporting organisations that purported to be International Olympic Committee information on media plans for the Games, but was actually carrying a trojan which takes control of the PC and scans all files and networks to steal information.

See this related news story in the Independent.

Related: Update on China/Tibet cyberattacks (and Russia/Georgia), and call for testimonials.

“Alex Dragulescu is a Romanian visual artist whose practice embraces both traditional and new media. His projects are experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets. ”

“The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.”

“Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism. ”

“The ASCII values found in the text of spam messages determine the attributes and qualities of the Spam Plants.”

Source: Alex Dragulescu

“So its no great surprise that plastic is now the “Soup of the day” for marine wildlife. Hundreds of marine species - from seabirds, to turtles, to cetaceans, to fish, have been found to ingest plastic.

For over 10 years, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has studied plastic marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. What we have found – exponential increases in the quantity of plastic debris – have a range of ecological impacts we are only beginning to understand.

To put a cap on it, we’re sounding the alarm, by sailing across the Pacific on 15,000 plastic bottles. Along the way, we’ll report our findings, collect ocean surface samples, and answer your questions through our blog.

Out of sight, out of mind no longer, We need for people to begin paying attention, before our oceans turn to plastic soup.”

Source: JUNK: The Problem, JunkRaft Blog

Matt Clark, an industrial designer from Southern California, has designed a new recycleable inversion-1 bike. It looks pretty cool to me.

“This bicycle prototype is aimed at improving and solving multiple issues involved in production. Particular attention was paid to maximize the potential utilization of automated processes and more cost efficient materials (IE: plastics).

The bicycle consists entirely of reinforced and unreinforced recyclable polypropylene. The patent-pending bicycle features a two component
frame: the plastic INNERFRAME and the plastic outer structure, both (in this iteration) dual components sets. Ideally, the material would be sourced from recycled plastic sources (IE: previously used consumer products such as bottles, containers, etc) to reduce environmental impact and to reduce material costs.”

Sourece: Bike Commuters

“plastic, steel and glass. where should the data go? an icon regains its physical form.”

I wish this was available in the US. I would definitely buy one.

Source: dialog05