ideometric

Maybe I should have titled this ‘an ode to felt.’ I don’t know, but a lot of it has been popping up on design blogs over the past year. I like minimalist and functional design, which these tend toward. Without further ado: I present cool stuff made of felt.

My favorite: Carga’s line of felt messenger bags. I want one of these recycled industrial felt bags to go with my recycled truck tarp bag from Freitag.

Etcetera Media’s felt wine rack is also cool. It’s simple and functional, a pretty elegant solution.

Wine on the go, by Graf & Lantz.

I dunno about the metal legs on this chair by Nondesigns, but I like the felt surface, and the contrasting red logo.

Working class heroes’ new ‘Macbook Air’ felt envelope is pretty slick looking and has a similar red contrast detail.

Felt. It’s good stuff.

TechShop is a fully equipped workshop opened to the public on a pay-per-day, or monthly membership basis. It gives ordinary people – hackers, artists, hobbyists, crafters, students, tinkerers, etc. – access to high end equipment, and the knowledge required to use it.

” TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…or a Kinko’s for geeks.”

“The TechShop workshop provides a wide variety of machinery and tools for the open and unlimited use of its members, including milling machines and lathes, welding stations and plasma cutters, sheet metal working equipment, drill presses and band saws, industrial sewing machines, hand tools, plastic working equipment, electronics design and fabrication facilities, tubing and metal bending machines, electrical supplies and tools, and pretty much everything you’d ever need to make just about anything all by yourself.”

The best part is that they have a ton of classes to spread the knowledge required to use the various tools, with a low $30 pricepoint that makes it pretty accessible. They’re expanding to LA this summer too.

Amputee May Hold an Unfair Advantage

Track and field’s world governing body is expected to announce that Oscar Pistorius is ineligible to race against able-bodied athletes because his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage.

Just a little ironic. The NYT article doesn’t get too analytical, but it does say that this has caused “debate over what constitutes disabled and able-bodied and how limits should be placed on technology to balance fair play with the right to compete.”

On a somewhat related note, a Nature article about professors using drugs like ritalin to get an edge. The world seems more like a cheesy cyberpunk novel every day.

Andrew Huang aka Bunnie has a lot of interesting posts chronicling the production of something called ‘chumby’ in China. It’s always interesting to see what globalization looks like on the ground, and this series of posts has video and interesting little bits of anecdotal experience and information. Check them out here, under the ‘Made in China’ category tag.

“One interesting fact is that every facility I went to had separate utensils and plates for guests. You can see in the above photo how my food is on a styrofoam plate with disposable chopsticks, where as the factory worker’s food is served on a steel plate with steel chopsticks. This is because I haven’t passed the factory’s physical examination. They do this to prevent me from contaminating the factory with potential foreign diseases.

[...] the scale of some food operations is pretty impressive. I heard that Foxconn–the place that makes the iPods and iPhones–consumes 3,000 pigs a day.”
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“Foxconn is where all of the iPods and iPhones are made. It’s a huge facility, apparently with over 250,000 employees, and it has its own special free trade status. The entire facility is walled off and you apparently need to have your passport and clear customs to get into the facility…just short of the nuclear-powered robotic dogs from the nation-corporation franchulates of Snowcrash.”
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“I asked her if she knew what the internet was. She said no. I was stunned. Here is a girl who is an expert in building and testing computers–I mean, on some projects she has probably built PCs and booted Windows XP a hundred thousand times over and over again [...] yet she didn’t know what the internet was.”
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“Shenzhen’s skyline is growing at a frenetic pace, and it’s a very planned city, as evidenced by the regularly arrayed skyscrapers–it’s almost as if the city planners played way too much Sim City in a previous life. ”
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A few photos (I didn’t take) of Yri Cafe, one of the coolest spots I came across in Korea. Filled with art books and magazines, sketchbooks at the tables covered with doodles and poems from whoever sat there before you, and often host to performances, art exhibitions, etc. It fits in well with the bohemian vibe surrounding Hongik university.

The interior is what drew me, as I’d come across their website before visiting the country. Red & chrome chairs, stained and scuffed wood floors, exposed ductwork, rough cement walls, melted candles, artwork on display, shelves of books and other media. Every color, texture, surface, and object — every detail — combining to create a space that begs for exploration. The kind of environment where you’d have to try to be uncreative, try to be uninspired. I think there was even a tree trunk sitting in there. It’s a nice change from the typically boring cafes in the states.

I’m not the only one inspired, check out the user submitted photo gallery on their site. There’re also pretty active message boards, but my Korean isn’t good enough to decipher those. Makes me wonder what kind of community exists around this place, and how it might be reinforced by its virtual manifestation.

I’ve put up an initial reading list for my thesis. It needs to be whittled down to a more focused short list. I’m sure it’s missing a lot of really important stuff too. Also put a list of everything I can remember reading that’s atleast tangentially related. Who knows, might come in handy.

Got this for Christmas, it’s better than the original director’s cut I think; the story flows better and the visuals have been cleaned up without any of that George Lucas style editing that ends up ruining a retouched classic.