The prospect of retirement doesn’t just signal the end of a career; it offers the chance to recalibrate and re-prioritize in life.
Friday Finds 08.23.13
August 23, 2013
A folding car inspired by an armadillo, typography flashcard game, and vintage snaps of San Francisco? All that and more in this installment of Friday Finds!
Jaime: Post-Apocalyptic Dioramas
Found on Fast Company's Co. Design, these mini dioramas, by artists Lori Nix, portray what the built world may look like after humankind goes extinct. It's a very haunting series, showing nature taking back our domestic and public spaces. Her photographs of her pieces are now collected in a book called The City. Get a preview by clickthing through the slideshow here.
Olivia: Armadillo-T Foldable Micro Electric Car
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) released a small electric car that completely folds in half when parking to alleviate city crowding. The team named the car after an armadillo because they studied the animal's movements when rolling up into a ball to help create the car's design. Armadillo-T has four-wheel drive, is all electric, and seats two, when folded, it takes up a third of a normal sized parkingspace in Korea. Watch the video here.
Ok, we're all magazine typeface lovers here, and this game accentuates our mad font skills. Fontspotting is a flashcard game you can download for free that tests your knowledge of typeface recognition. Created by designers Dustin de Souza and Jessica Witt for their own typographic memory testing, they decided to share it with the rest of us word geeks.
Diana: Crop Circles by Land and by Sea
2013 might be remembered as the digital fabrication era, with all manner of goods now producible on increasingly accessible 3D printers. Now a similar technology is being applied to farming, dubbed "agricultural printing" by Benedikt Groß, a speculative and interaction designer. His Avena+ Test Bed project "applies algorithms to partition and to create an environmentally beneficial arrangement of plantation to establish, or improve, the connectivity for fauna and flora between habitats." Using GIS, he subdivides the plot of land into pixels and then uses a tractor to "print" a precise pattern using different seed mixes. Quite the complex feat! Makes me wonder: If earthwork artist Robert Smithson were alive today, is this the type of work he'd be doing? On a related note, this video of a small fish creating elaborate patterns on the sea floor is a no-tech (but equally awesome) variation on the crop-circle theme.
Eujin: Justin Cogley for NOWNESS's Instagram
Justin Cogley, Executive Chef at Aubergine, a modern California cuisine restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea, recently took over NOWNESS's Instagram. His beautiful gastro snaps such as a silvery starfish seen while foraging for sea lettuce, mussels with yuzu, and porous sea urchins (seen here) instantly take me back to the ocean and gives me a taste of his exquisite menu.
Erika: Bay Bridge Traffic, Circa 1958
Does this look familiar, Bay Area dwellers? Here's the approach to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge at morning rush hour from Oakland, circa 1958. Source: General Electric Co., courtesy of Lost San Francisco Facebook page.
Jaime: Post-Apocalyptic Dioramas
Found on Fast Company's Co. Design, these mini dioramas, by artists Lori Nix, portray what the built world may look like after humankind goes extinct. It's a very haunting series, showing nature taking back our domestic and public spaces. Her photographs of her pieces are now collected in a book called The City. Get a preview by clickthing through the slideshow here.
To see last week's picks, click here!
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