An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 17 August 2010

 

DesignBoom has been doing some great articles on South African design and architecture, including a few of the World Cup stadiums and how Makarapas are made. One of the latest is about Heath Nash, who works with recycled materials and is well known for his lamp designs. Nash’s ‘Anemone’ lamp is his most industrial product so far, the “lamp is packaged flat and expands into a flexible three-dimensional structure composed of connected four-wall cells. Anemone unzips to accommodate a protective metal sphere that serves as the lamp’s structural core. This safety feature turns Anemone into a malleable, interactive piece that can be moved and manipulated on a variety of surfaces.” Artecnica. Images: Artecnica.

Iceland has the potential to become the capital of electric cars due to infrastructure, urban population, geothermal and hydro energy. The country could potentially have some of the most interesting electricity pylons in the form of giant sculptures crossing the landscape. Land of the Giants from American firm Choi and Shine Architects originally received an honorary mention in the 2008 Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition and recenetly won the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture. The concept makes minor modifications to steel-framed tower design. Each pylon would be assembled from modular parts, which could be adapted into various positions to give the impression that the statues are walking, climbing or crouching. Via Dezeen, image: Choi and Shine Architects.

Meena Kadri has an excellent interview in Design Observer, Tinkers, Hackers, Farmers, Crafters with Emeka Okafor, founder of Maker Faire Africa. Meena has a follow up post, Amplifying African Ingenuity on Random Specific that covers some of the innovation from last years MFA event. This years event will also see the African launch of Steve Daniels’ book Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy. Daniels’ book explores jua kali, engineers in the informal economy who innovate under extreme constraints. Well worth the tweet to read. Image: Steve Daniels. 

Core77 picked up the 2010 James Dyson Award, US National Winner, MIT's SENSEable City Lab for their Copenhagen Wheel design. The innovative design has a lot of features, but the big idea is that regular bicycles can be adapted by replacing the back wheel only, which of course will increase user acceptance and scale the product rapidly when it rolls out. The project aims to increase the number of people in Copenhagen who ride bikes, which is already over a third of the cities population.

Twitter is hiring, pretty cool video that shows off the playfulness of the company. Via Textually.