We love creative instrument design here at Serious Wonder, so last weekend when I got my hands on Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 I had to write about it. The Japanese instrument makers created something special with the OP-1, I’m floored by the physical design, interface, and quality. The OP-1 is an intriguing instrument for a few…
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With traditional industrial age methods of food production and delivery proving to be highly unsustainable, humanity is in search of an alternative model for our future. Carlo Ratti and MIT have designed a micro-environment that puts housing, markets, and “farms” in close proximity, and are calling it the Future Food District. They will present this…
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CLOG is an seasonal architecture magazine that investigates a particular topic. CLOG issues are made up of short, usually one page articles by various architects, critics, and writers. Their latest issue points CLOG’s contributors at science fiction. Contributors are often left to cover a wide variety of subjects within that topic. Mark Durmel discusses the homegrown…
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Monome, one of the more innovative instrument builders of the computer age have added a brand new device to their line of interfaces. Unlike their previous products, the Monome and Arc, The Aleph is a “soundcomputer”, or a dedicated computer tailored specifically for musical creation. It’s entirely programmable and [easyazon-link asin=”1453719989″ locale=”us”]open-source[/easyazon-link], so users can…
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Whether or not a team will actually make it to the Moon and complete Google’s requirements, Google is dead serious about fueling the next step towards the Lunar age. Willing-to-pay-$30-million-to-whoever-does-it serious. Just think: a company that started off as a search engine is organizing humanity’s next step toward a commercial space future. The Lunar XPRIZE competition…
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Last year, Mayor Bloomberg launched a competition to completely redesign and re-imagine public phones in New York City. With modern technology all but completely replacing our need for public pay phones, could something once so necessary in the city be reinvented for the 21st century? [easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”B0042FV2SI” locale=”us” height=”80″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41r51J9HwXL._SL110_.jpg” width=”80″]FXFOWLE’s answer is the…
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[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”B001PB8EJ2″ locale=”us” height=”80″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31C7DmHS6ZL._SL110_.jpg” width=”80″]Futuristic home appliances are a staple of futurist design. Dishwashers and microwaves that could ‘sense’ when your food was cooked or your dishes had cleaned were a huge part of the mid-century futurism movement. As the average household became more and more ‘electrified’, many people (including those heads of…
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The Soundplotter vase is yet another creative use of 3D printing from SHAPES iN PLAY. The German design studio takes recorded sound and plots it as a multi-layered digital 3D shape. The louder the sound, the bigger the shape of a given layer. These layers are printed from the bottom up to create a vase…
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Bolid is a futuristic design by Christoph Proessler for an automated tractor aimed at aiding with one of the most labor intensive human trades: farming. [easyazon-link asin=”B00542NVDW” locale=”us”]GPS[/easyazon-link] and CPU control systems allow a farmer to control multiple Bolid tractors simultaneously, bringing down the required labor, time, and cost allowed by current technology. With a team of…
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A year after the historic space jump, Red Bull just released this incredible POV video of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the stratosphere. It also has a ton of interesting mission data collective during the jump. If you had any doubts of just how high 23 miles straight up was…well, this should quell them: [youtube id=”raiFrxbHxV0″…
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You’ve probably seen the recent commercials for Samsung’s new [easyazon-link asin=”B00FH9I0FQ” locale=”us”]Galaxy Gear[/easyazon-link] smartwatch. It cleverly compares their new wristbound smartwatch with pop culture’s famous future watch computers from shows like the [easyazon-link asin=”B0001MZ7IC” locale=”us”]Jetsons[/easyazon-link] and Star Trek. Of course the Galaxy Gear is nowhere as cool or handy as some of the gadgets in the commercial,…
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Let me start off by saying year-end music lists are terrible, unproductive ways to somehow discuss and rank the work of established and up-and-coming artists of the day. I hate list titled in any/all of these formats and more: “Best Albums”, “Best Artists”, “Biggest Letdowns”, “Biggest Disappointments”, “Best Albums by Bands with Stupid Band Names”,…
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