This Inflatable Lounger (GBP 20; about $40) built-in two speakers that you can connect your i-Pod, MP3 player, or CD player. It also has another desirable feature to make you time at sea more enjoyable. The Inflatable Lounger features it is easy to inflate and deflate, and does not need batteries or power cables. Of course, most important of all, it has a acceptable price.
Kaare Klint’s Safari chair (1933) was inspired by an English camp chair. It was one of the first Danish chairs that could be taken apart and delivered unassembled. Materials: Ash-natural or smoked. Manufacturer: Rud Rasmussen, Denmark.
“SpareSpace transforms empty shop- and office buildings into mobile offices. SpareSpace offers beginning entrepreneurs in creative industries affordable and representative offices in an inspiring environment. As soon as the empty space is put up to let or for sale, the entrepreneurs will move to a new building.
Using specially designed crate furniture by designer Jack Brandsma, SpareSpace gives substance to the term Mobile Office. Work spaces can be folded and transported in no time, as can the bar, the meeting table and the foldable wall (in progress).
SpareSpace expects the temporary reshaping/redecoration of the buildings to give a new impulse to creative industry. Additionally, SpareSpace expects a positive outcome for real estate owners since unused space is given a representative goal.”
Fashion and mobility have at least one thing in common: their ephemeral nature. Nowadays, “Mobility” seems to be a trendy branding strategy to fashion designers:
Hermès commissions Didier Fiuza Faustino (Bureau des Mésarchitectures) For the H Box, “Une sorte de “caméra obscura” mobile et fonctionnelle” seen (my pix below) exhibited at the Pompidou Center (November 29, 2007 - January 7, 2008). Art traveling exhibit.
Chanel asks Zaha Hadid to design the Mobile Art: Chanel Contemporary Art Container. Featuring the artists Sophie Calle And Yoko Ono, among others.
Image from Nokia. The Morph Phone Mode: “A nanotechnology concept Morph demonstrates the functionality that nanotechnology might be capable of delivering: flexible materials, transparent electronics, self-cleaning surfaces, ability to observe local environment and harvest energy”.
“L’Atelier : Voyez-vous ce type de produits - dotés de matière flexible, intégrant des nanotechnologies - remplacer à moyen terme les appareils mobiles actuels, plus fonctionnels et moins ergonomiques ?
MP : Impossible d’anticiper l’appropriation par les utilisateurs, qui passe par du symbolique, du ludique, de l’émotionnel, et pas seulement du fonctionnel, de l’ergonomique. Si ces objets souples, transparents, multifonctionnels et très adaptables, y compris physiquement, ces objets avec lesquels on a envie de jouer, supplantent les technologies mobiles actuelles, ce sera sans doute parce que le gain de fonctionnalité est aussi un enrichissement existentiel, une nouvelle expérience physique, psychologique, relationnelle. C’est comme cela que nous sommes passés des téléphones fixes et cabines téléphoniques aux mobiles, des ordinateurs de bureau aux ultra-portables, aux baladeurs MP3…”
“To create Adour’s virtual sommelier, the first high-profile example of an interactive tabletop menu, Rockwell hired a much smaller outfit, Potion Design, a New York firm started by two graduates of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology Media Lab. Their system uses high-end projectors, computers, a Web-based database, and a vision-sensing system, all tied together with proprietary software. The technology has been installed before in office spaces and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Asia Society. But, Potion partner Jared Schiffman says, “this is the first time we’ve used this in a restaurant or service setting.” Total cost of the project: about $250,000.”
Royal College of Art students were set the challenge of designing a mobile phone to “outperform, outsmart, and outmanoeuvre everything on the market.” Read the BBC article.