Geeko friendly's List: design

• • Wii & Google Earth mashup
• • Google, Yahoo, Mozilla different mashup ideas
• Think it, find it, match it, mash it!
• 'Mash-ups' refer simply to the end result of bringing together two or more different creations or applications that were not originally intended to work together, and the concept is a firm part of the Web 2.0 world.
• Mash-ups date back as far as the 1960s with the mixing and sampling of different songs, and like those creations, the first computer-based mash-ups were largely music or image-based.
• mash-up culture is also booming with software and application mixing.
• The Wii remote control and the Wii fit board have been coded by mashers to be used with Google Earth, enabling you to use it as a flight simulator so you can 'fly' over the globe using the Nintendo controls.
• There is also a Web site which showcases the best of the Web's mash ups and gives out a daily and monthly award. Past winners include "twitzu" where users can send out invites to friends and they can RSVP via twitter. "Typobuddy" users can find misspelled eBay auctions and Craiglist items to get the best deal.
• On a more practical note, the Chicago Police Department uses a system called "Clearmap," a mash-up web application that integrates the department's reported crime database with Google Maps.
• Google and Yahoo both have mash-up editors where users can mash what they will. Just last month the Mozilla Lab announced Ubiquity, an experiment in using natural language to invoke Web services.
• But all of this excitement isn't without controversy. Much of the content that is mashed is done so illegally.
• The largest support for mash-up culture comes from the Free Culture movement and organizations such as the Creative Commons.
• "Mashing up is a good thing... people are being creative and expanding peoples' works.

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• three sections housing a theater/lecture hall, a bookshop/galley and a workshop. 
• Endo’s design aesthetic throughout his career has focused on numerous experiments with steel and the seemingly limitless possibilities the material has in the built environment.  He continually sets out to prove that architecture can possess diversity while simultaneously following the rules of geometry, and Bubbletecture H is certainly not an exception.
• the superstructure was prefabricated from local Japanese cedar.
• And like a cliff temple, the supporting structure clings to the earth only where necessary – the building is over 10,000 square feet in size, but it is connected to only sixteen deeply buried five-foot wide beams – and that’s all that goes in the ground.

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• A large percentage of municipal landfill waste is from construction and demolition debris, estimated to be between 20 and 30 percent nationally.
• We recycle cans, bottles and even plastic bags, so why not reuse older buildings? There are many good reasons to do so, and opportunities and benefits abound to reduce such waste.
• First, it's very costly and energy consumptive: Municipal waste that must be loaded, hauled, transferred from trucks to trains, processed and dumped into landfills costs between $50 and $75 per ton.
• Second, it pollutes:
• Most construction debris — such as land clearing, wood, metal, glass, asphalt and concrete rubble — is fully reusable at lower cost than the production of new materials.
• Third, it's wasteful:
• Upstream, reducing construction and demolition waste reduces the need for the extraction and processing of raw materials, product manufacture and eventual disposal.
• And finally, the preservation and adaptive reuse of older buildings — especially historic landmarks — as compared with new construction is considered to be one of the most sustainable "green building" practices achievable.
• Climate-protection strategies must address the issue. In the United States, building construction and operations account for 48 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions.
• While preservation laws help protect our valued historic landmarks, incentives and possibly new regulations are needed to address waste of building stock. For example, Portland, Ore., mandates that all building projects valued at over $50,000 separate on site and recycle all nontoxic construction materials. New York City provides tax incentives, electric rebates and employs rezone strategies to encourage reuse and conversion of commercial buildings to residential.
• The bottom line: Landfills should no longer be an option for used but otherwise clean and durable building materials.
• • Main thought
• Policymakers, preservationists and architects need to push green building practices into the 21st century by promoting the environmental, economic and community benefits of building reuse and recycling.
• State and local governments should establish working guidelines, programs and incentives to promote the reuse, retrofit and reinvestment of older buildings.
• The energy invested in the existing built environment must be seen as a tangible resource of economic, environmental and cultural value, not to be wasted. In this way, preservation and reuse can be our "greenest" tools of sustainability.

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• The iPhone has seen tremendous success in the market thanks to Apple's fanatic dedication to good user experience, its willingness (and ability) to strong-arm its carrier partners, and Apple's easy-to-use App Store
• Some developers have already used the platform to make serious money, to the tune of $250,000 in just a couple of months.
• But Apple keeps tight reins on its developers. It has a slow and seemingly arbitrary process for vetting App Store software, it shackles developers with a restrictive NDA, and it charges $99 just to get access to the developer's kit.
• It's a sure bet that many developers, given the opportunity, would flock to a less restrictive environment.
• A big part of the iPhone's success is due to Apple's clout, which enabled it, in effect, to tell AT&T to sit down and shut up about this or that feature requirement. Once other carriers saw the iPhone's success in the United States, they wanted in on that action, so Apple was able to dictate terms globally, just as it had a year before in the U.S.
• Carriers typically retain fanatic control over every aspect of the customer, from the menus on the phone to the applications that customers are permitted to download. Carrier feature requirements dictate the laundry-list of useless gewgaws that most phones sport. (Does anyone ever actually use the "calendar" app on a Nokia or Motorola phone?) And it's that dysfunctional relationship that means most phones are so horrible to use: They're doomed from the start by companies that care more about their own requirements than those of their customers.
• That's why I predict that Android will soon have as many different flavors as there are carriers.
• And that's their right. Because Android uses the Apache license, anyone is free to take it and customize it to their heart's content, even if such customizations are appalling to the open source community.
• (There's also no requirement that customizations be themselves open-sourced for the benefit of the whole Android community.)

  • well that sucks
• In short order, "Android" will become meaningless to consumers, and most carriers won't even advertise the fact that their phones use the operating system. Instead, they'll advertise their phones' features, as they always have, and emphasize the benefits of those features to the users.

• It should designate a few core applications that all Googlephones must have, including Gmail, Google Calendar and other Google apps, such as Google Maps. It should specify minimum requirements for processor capabilities, memory and wireless data access. Perhaps GPS and Wi-Fi support should be required, as well as a minimum 2 megapixel cameraphone (the better to interface with Picasa).

    

  Then Google needs to set up a carrier/handset certification program to guarantee that phones in this program meet the requirements it specifies. Those that qualify gain the right to be called "Googlephones," regardless of which carrier or handset manufacturer they come from. Qualifying phones may sport a Googlephone logo on the phone and in advertisements about it.

    

  The result: Googlephones will become a trusted, branded subset of the Android phone marketplace. No matter what other features a phone may or may not have, consumers who buy a Googlephone from any manufacturer will know that they have guaranteed access to their mail, calendar, contacts and Google Maps. And that guarantee -- which is based on the capabilities and benefits that consumers actually care about -- will help drive the growth of the mobile Google market.

  • what Google shoudl do to successfully compete with the market
• There's just one way Google can forestall this eventuality and triumph in the handset market. The company needs to set up an aggressive "Googlephone" partners program
• If Google doesn't do that, Android will quickly disappear into the morass of poorly-branded smartphone operating systems that consumers don't give a damn about, alongside Symbian, Windows Mobile and the Palm OS. And Google will have lost the mobile game.

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• print it remotely, and have it delivered to your house in just 10 days, even without knowing any 3D software
• Shapeways is a spin-off from Philips' Lifestyle Incubator. On one side, it's a website where you can upload your 3D models—which can even have joins—or use an online 3D creator with access to everyday models. The online 3D creator is extremely easy to use, so anyone can modify them without any technical or product design knowledge.
• Advanced users to access to 3D packages can upload any model they can imagine in a 3D standard format, like STL, Collada or X3D.

  • RA!!!
• On the other side, there are different types of rapid prototyping machines that can create that model using a variety of materials, from nylon to plastic composites, each with different properties
• Once you select the material and submit your model to 3D printer, you will get it in your hands in 10 days, with an average cost of $50 to $150, including shipping.
• While the system is not perfect yet, there's no color yet and you can get different textures for the surfaces, the start is very promising and the possibilities are endless.
• There are loads of other companies out there doing this. Here in Europe I use Materialise (materialise.com). They're able to print in all sorts of great materials. In the US, I've used RedeyeRPM before. Typically these places just require an .STL file (which can be exported from any 3D CAD program, it's just your design replicated using a triangular mesh).

  • RA!!!

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• I still can’t decide what looks best. Is it the sophisticated large spaces interior or the stunning contrast at the exterior between the white walls and the black windows? Or the fact that it avoids detailing using homogeneous transitions? Maybe all of them.
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• deemed unfit for modern cities as they are a both a physical obstruction and not profitable enough as an investment.
• Here is a look at the 10 best modern wind turbines that take clean energy forward in a classy and silent fashion.
• Energy Ball works on the principle of the Venturi Effect. Making use of the change in fluid pressure at different points to produce motion, it acts a lot more effectively than wind turbines and is a lot more quiet and adept for city life. The wind turbine can be put on your roof or in your backyard, and it will start immediately producing energy. Silent and effectiv
• unique and highly efficient vertical blade design.
• simple and compact offering a fluid mechanism to capture and generate energy from winds that go waste atop many roofs in cities across the planet. The structure also seems good for desert lands where low land winds also produce sustained and substantial energy.
• mall enough to hold in your hand or attach to a bike. It needs only 9mph of wind to start charging the internal battery, which can then be used to charge many devices, such as mobile phones, digital cameras and iPods.
• flexible futuristic wind turbines are shaped in a way to utilize wind power to the fullest on the rough seas.
• completely submersible and hence can withstand even the toughest of storms.
• Architectural wind is a collection of many turbines that form a small modular wind turbine system.
• a viable option for urban centers, because it doesn’t require a massive tower.
• arely looks like a wind turbine, but this wind machine can apparently produce enough energy to power up to 60% of domestic energy needs.
• pace, efficiency and silent power
• Swift is a pioneer in its field
• capable of operating from any direction and under adverse weather conditions. Its advantage lies in its ability to automatically and interactively adjust the pitch or angle of wind.
• a propeller-free vertical-axis design, and is expected to produce about 1800 kilowatt hours per year in 11 mph average wind conditions. That amount of wind power is roughly 25% of a typical household’s energy. Unlike the other turbines in the list, this one is 30 feet tall but is still fir for residential use.

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• Taekwondo Park, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's entry to an invited competition for the Taekwondo World Heritage Cultural Center in Muju, Korea.
• the buildings and outdoor program spaces are connected organically within valleys and along ridges balancing and blurring the distinctions between nature and culture
• The "new architectural interventions grow out of the topography: spanning, terracing, burrowing into, and wrapping existing landscape features to provide spaces for building programs," which include "facilities for tourists, Taekwondo students, Taekwondo professionals and Federation administrators."
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• Alas, Diller Scofidio + Renfro did not win the Taekwondo Park competition. The winner, announced on August 28, is New York's Weiss/Manfredi:
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• William McDonough aims to create buildings that produce oxygen, sequester carbon, and produce more power than they use.
• Ford Motor Company gave him $2 billion in 1999, with which he transformed the company’s ancient Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, into an icon of green design, complete with the largest living roof on the planet: a 10.4-acre assembly-plant roof blanketed with sedum, a drought-resistant ground cover.
• there will be a large-scale trend to buildings that start to act like organisms. The green-roof movement, for example, will be promulgated so that buildings make oxygen. We’ll also see roofs that make energy, as in solar energy. In effect, the buildings will become photosynthetic and make either oxygen or energy, or both. We’ll see materials that are derived from healthy sources and are designed for reuse and recapture.
• What kinds of healthy materials will we be using?
  Well, sustainable forestry, recycled metal, things like that. They’ll be characterized in terms of where they were sourced. Right now when you order wood, you don’t necessarily know where it came from. If you order metal, you don’t know if it’s recycled, you don’t know where it came from. But I think in the future, materials will have passports. We’ll know where they came from and where they’re going.
• renewable energy is potentially the largest job-creation program in the history of the planet.
• hese forms of energy are inherently local and are not exported. In the deserts, for example: solar thermal. In the Great Plains: wind

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• How do you create a Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) for yourself or a company — and increase profits — by tweaking your surroundings?
• Thanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.
• he man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:
• The man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:
• What are the new tasks of the management ? No longer to check whether someone is there, but to define the output and control it. It takes months to incorporate this culture into a company.

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• A considerable effort. What are the benefits for the company?

   

  Nooteboom: The company requires 50% less square meters. All cleaning and other maintenance costs will be reduced accordingly. In addition, Interpolis increased 20 percent in productivity through flexibility and sick leave, by nine percent 10 years ago, now dropped to two and a half percent. Thirdly, it is good for image and culture of the company - Interpolis receives 90,000 visitors a year. The office is marketing tool number one.
• freedom of choice: What to do when and where? You can freely decide on work time and place more or less, depending on the function. Secondly, it is now festive to come into the office. It is an open and transparent work space designed for meetings and exchange
• During the telephone call one will be able to see the image of each other, exchange data, show presentations and work together on documents. Therefore there will be less business travel than today.
• The concept of the office is basically old-fashioned, but we still need it. It will be used almost solely for meetings in the future. More and more companies will let their employees work from the home or while traveling.
• First, I want positive emotional associations with each object within my visual field. Limiting associations is often better than careful selection.

  • !!!
• The greenhouse you see is essentially a private rain forest with automatic ion generators and timed water systems. It is entirely self-contained with eight sun roofs and no openings. This is the morning oxygenation chamber where I have breakfast. I love it.
• Second, I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking. When in doubt, I take a digital photograph of documents (I prefer this to a scanner, which consumes real estate).

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• In 1988, Jaime Lerner announced his candidacy for mayor of Curitiba with only 12 days remaining before the election

• As Mayor, Lerner employed unorthodox solutions to Curitiba's geographic challenges. Like many cities, Curitiba is bordered by floodplain. While wealthier cities in the United States such as New Orleans and Sacramento, have chosen to build expensive, and expensive-to-maintain levee systems to build on floodplain. In contrast, Curitiba purchased the floodplain and made parks. The city now ranks among the world leaders in per-capita park area. Curitiba had the problem of its status as a third-world city, unable to afford the tractors and petroleum to mow these parks. The innovative response was "municipal sheep" who keep the parks' vegetation under control and whose wool funds children's programs.

   

  When Lerner became mayor, Curitiba had some barrios impossible to service by municipal waste removal. The "streets" were too narrow. Rather than abandon these people, or raze these slums, Lerner began a program that traded bags of groceries and transit passes for bags of trash. The slums got much cleaner.
• Similarly Curitiba has a nearby bay that was a dumping ground, and would be extremely costly to clean up. Lerner began a program that paid fishermen for any garbage they retrieved (by the pound). This way, they can fish even when it's not the season for fish to be running and can supplement their income. The savings to Curitiba is in the millions.
• This is one of the few transit systems that is not subsidized. It also has increasing ridership even though per-capita auto ownership is rising in Curitiba.

  • !

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• The Namib Desert, one of the driest regions in the world, gets less than half an inch of rain per year. But early in the morning, a light fog drifts over the desert, offering the plants and animals living in that harsh environment their only chance for a life-sustaining drink.
• Namib Desert beetle is ready with a moisture-collection system exquisitely adapted to its desert habitat. Inspired by this dime-sized beetle, MIT researchers have produced a new material that can capture and control tiny amounts of water.
• The material combines a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) surface with superhydrophilic (water-attracting) bumps that trap water droplets and control water flow. The work was published in the online version of Nano Letters.
• Scientists had already learned to copy the water-repellent lotus leaf, and the desert beetle shell seemed like another good candidate for "bio-mimicry."

• When fog blows horizontally across the surface of the beetle's back, tiny water droplets, 15 to 20 microns, or millionths of a meter, in diameter, start to accumulate on top of bumps on its back.

   

  The bumps, which attract water, are surrounded by waxy water-repelling channels. "That allows small amounts of moisture in the air to start to collect on the tops of the hydrophilic bumps, and it grows into bigger and bigger droplets," Rubner said. "When it gets large, it overcomes the pinning force that holds it and rolls down into the beetle's mouth for a fresh drink of water."

  • how the beatle functions

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• The Garcia Home is based on a steep north-facing slope in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains with commanding views of city lights and the surrounding mountains. The challenge was to design a structure that would appear to grow out of the rocky desert hillside without dominating the landscape.
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• in Minnesota, real silence can be found in a room. In fact, the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Laboratories Inc. is the Quietest Place on Earth, as awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records.
• the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Laboratories Inc. is the Quietest Place on Earth, as awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records.
• How does one achieve The Quietest Place on Earth? Start with a room within a room, within a room: the Orfield Labs six sided anechoic chamber is a small room floating in a pit on I-beams that are on top of springs. A five sided chamber of identical construction surrounds it on the edge of the pit. Both chambers are made of double wall steel-insulation-steel. The anechoic chamber was manufactured by Eckel, the largest anechoic chamber builder in the country.
  
  Both steel chambers are held within a larger room that was built with solid one foot thick concrete walls and ceiling panels. The smaller room is filled with 3.3 feet thick fiberglass acoustic wedges. This approach led to the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Labs being measured by engineers on January 21st of 2004 at negative 9.4 dB (with A-weighting), thus earning it the title of Quietest Place on Earth. By comparison, the low threshold for human hearing is considered to be 0 dB.

  • how they achieved it
• After a few moments in the anechoic chamber, you'll begin to feel a touch jumpy. Hearing your heart beat, your blood pulse, the sound of your own ear buzzing and your body functioning like you've never heard before has a tendency to be a bit unnerving. And in complete silence, you lose all sense of space and surroundings. The absence of reflected sound and reverberation makes "feeling out" the room impossible.
• If someone can last 45 minutes in there by themselves with the lights off, then they get a case of beer. If I remember correctly no one has been able to make it past a half-hour yet.

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