Here's a neat material technology you can integrate into your next product concept: Thin film tactile surface sensors. Sensor Products Inc. is a company specializing in the mapping of tactile pressure, and the data they glean can lead to design improvements for everything from windshield wipers to mattresses to body armor.

A few examples: Their Tactilus Real-Time Surface Pressure Mapping Technology, for example, is an electronic skin that precisely measures pressure distribution and magnitude and relays that data to a computer; their Bodyfitter surface sensor measures seat surface, back rest and head rest pressure for furniture and wheelchairs; and they even make a Damage Indicating Paint that can be sprayed onto a product or part--and once a predetermined amount of contact pressure is applied, microcapsules suspended in the paint will burst, revealing the precise wear spot as a different color.

Check out their dozens of applications and products here.

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Woah!

Antonio Scarponi, founder of Conceptual Devices, has worked out a way to fold your regular hoodie into a laptop bag, baby carrier, pillow, backpack and strap bag. Memorize it to impress people in a pinch. Might also be good for that lazy look (come on, we know you can pull it off).

Follow the instructions below or watch more videos. More information here.

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We love this idea: for its April cover (the 10th anniversary issue), Real Simple commissioned three clocks from three US designers: Boym Studio, Scott Henderson, and Harry Allen, as pictured from left to right. The issue offers readers "the gift of time," something the one-off clocks reflect very well.

These pieces are, unfortunately, not in production yet, but there is the additional bonus of a clock screensaver by Alan Dye, coming soon.

More magazines should follow suit!

via NYTimes

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The Social Innovator Series is the culmination of a major two year collaboration between the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and The Young Foundation to develop a rich, practical resource for social innovators. It is a collection of publications and accompanying website that reveal the vast potential of a new social economy.

This emerging economy can be seen in many fields, including the environment, care, education, welfare, food and energy. This 'social economy' goes beyond the state and the third sector, and includes social enterprises, co-operatives and social movements.

The Social Innovator Series surveys the methods used by innovators in this new social economy and presents a varied, vibrant picture of social innovation in practice. It features hundreds of examples, methods and tools from all over the world.

Though social innovation is a rapidly emerging practice, methods for developing this vital field remain relatively hidden. Having a better understanding of social innovation - the new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations - is increasingly urgent as existing structures and policies struggle to make an impact on the most pressing issues of our time.

Download the books from the Social Innovator Series:
- Open Book of Social Innovation
- Danger and Opportunity: Crisis and the new social economy
- Social Venturing

Visit the Social Innovator website: www.socialinnovator.info

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Following Eat with your Fingers and Scenter (pictured below), Earshell is the third object in Kawamura-Ganjavian's series about sensory experience, amplifying hearing through a device that is part-jewelry, part-listening horn.

From the studio:

We use earrings as symbols of distinction since time immemorial, however they are not particularly useful items. The EARSHELL is a simple, efficient and elegant sound enhancing device. It can be used to improve our listening of music or opera. Its refined and sleek profile gives it a jewellery feel.

We love the idea of a whole audience sitting in an opera house wearing these things—the image evokes a sort of undersea sci-fi quality.

Click through for more.

Scenter

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Itay Laniado, whose Family Photos project we blogged last year, has created a new series that utilizes tension, comprising of three projects: a walking stick, a ladder and a wallet.

The walking stick is made from a broom handle that's split partway down the middle and held in tension by an orange cord and a wooden strut. Simple enough, but also weird and ingenious.

His wallet is equally direct: a routed block of hardwood provides a cavity for change and bills; a credit card is rubber banded over it to close it up.

Finally, the collapsible ladder—the series' centerpiece—is held together by a ratcheting strap clamp, which also forms two of the rungs. The ladder packs down compactly, with the legs tucking into the routed grooves that held them up.

It looks a little scary, but Laniado seems confident enough.

Much more after the jump.

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The recycling symbol is actually kind of deceptive. The three arrows in a circle implies that by recycling, we are enabling the material to live forever in our little product ecosystems. Yet there's lots of stuff that can only be recycled once, which is better than nothing but worse than great.

Take plastics, for instance:

Chandrasekhar Narayan, who leads I.B.M.'s science and technology team at its Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the presence of metal catalysts in plastics means that they often can only be recycled once before ending up in a landfill.

"When you try to take a product and recycle it, the metal in the polymer continues to degrade the polymer so it gets increasingly less strong," said Mr. Narayan.

However, Mr. Narayan, along with his IBM colleagues and researchers at Stanford University, have discovered a workaround to extend the life of plastics:

"If you use organic reactants, you can make certain types of new polymers that are quite different and have other properties plastics don't have."

That could give new life to the 13 billion plastic bottles that are thrown away each year in the United States.

...Organic catalysts could create a new class of biodegradable plastics to replace those that are difficult to recycle, such as polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, used in a variety of consumer products, including plastic beverage bottles.

via green inc blog

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A newscast released today by CCTV discusses China's industrial design boom. Unfortunately the newscast is poorly produced, poorly written ("industrial design" is written "industries design," for instance) and laden with good ol' Commie propaganda-speak (i.e. "highest levels of achievement," etc.), although, if the figures are to be believed, there are some interesting takeaways:

Chen Dongliang, Director, Beijing Industrial Design Center, said, "The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector."

...The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it's not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change "Made in China" to "Invented in China".

Chen said, "Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output...."

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Artist: lunchbreath
More: View all cartoons

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Ron Arad's I.P.C.O (Inverted Pinhole Camera Obscura), 2001

Guest post by Victoria Kirk Owal

To make it as a designer in London in the '80s, you had to pretend you knew what you were doing when you really didn't. This was the central message from Thursday's panel discussion at the Barbican Center in London between Ron Arad, Katharine Hamnett and Rolf Fehlbaum, moderated by Deyan Sudjic of London's Design Museum. It accompanies Restless, Arad's first major survey in the UK, showing through May 16.

The conversation focused on the designers' career paths rather than the shift from readymade to industrial production, the suggested topic. The designers recalled their individual journeys to creative and professional success in a time when London's design scene was diffuse and less sophisticated than it is today. Fehlbaum contributed his perspective on the growth of their respective design talents and the expansion of London's pool of designers.

Several memorable themes emerged:

The role of constraints in creativity
Ron and Katharine both recalled a strong desire to liberate themselves from norms, practice design without marketing constraints, and answer their own briefs. The real constraints lay in the capabilities of mass production and, in Katharine's case, the need to stay commercially viable to pay the bills without compromising creative vision. Ron was working within the creative and technical constraints that he set for himself, which gave him unprecedented autonomy and room to experiment.

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