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Various photos from the New York Auto Show, or, how a madhouse of forklifts and crates turns into a temporary car museum / theatre.

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WANT! (via iOS ‘86 - Anton Repponen & via)

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Experience Design can encompass a lot of things, but at the core you might say it's about crafting a feeling. If your canvas for experience design is, say, a bridge, and you want to ignite the senses of one laying eyes on that bridge, you might shoot for "awe" as a feeling to engender. But that is a bit overdone, no?

The city of Trenton agreed when, in 1935, they designed the ultimate (and probably only) feeling of passive aggression ever to come from a bridge. The city inverted a phrase coined by state senator S. Roy Heath when they slapped on the side of the Lower Trenton Bridge for all the world to see: "TRENTON MAKES    THE WORLD TAKES"

Spaced out just as it is here, with a few beats between "MAKES" and "THE" for dramatic (contemptuous?) effect*, and illuminated every evening, it was perhaps not the most forward thinking phrase for the city to adopt. Nonetheless it is still there; the words' back turned to passing motorists escaping the city with loads of Trenton-built... well, we won't rub it in. We know what it's like to come from a former manufacturing hub.

Suffice to say, Trenton, that's one unique example of experience design you've got going there.

Listen to more about the Lower Trenton Bridge here.

*Or, likely, out of engineering necessity...

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Ralph McQuarrie went from drawing dental equipment to designing Darth Vader, AT-ATs, and the rebel base on Hoth. These, of course, are iconic pieces of the Star Wars universe. Hired by George Lucas to do concept art for Episode IV, McQuarrie breathed life into Lucas' script (which we all know to be fairly lifeless).

You can find this on McQuarrie's Wikipedia page, but I liked the quote so much I wanted to repeat it here: "Christian Blauvelt of Entertainment Weekly praised McQuarrie's works as 'pioneering of the "used future" aesthetic which unlike other science-fiction, 'imagined a lived-in galaxy that was gritty, dirty, and in advance states of decay."

This concept was the forefather to the film-noir, grungy aesthetic of later works like Blade Runner and what I would consider, thus far, the pinacle of "retro-futurism," the Fallout video game series.

Ralph McQuarrie died March 3rd at the age of 82.

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I can’t stop looking at this thing, help…

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I could watch this for ages and ages and ages. It’s so nice. On and on and on and on. Today is only Tuesday...

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Today is only Tuesday, indeed. This is quite a GIF.

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“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

Designed by Julijona Urbonas

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I made mention of these little buggers yesterday, but it's worth bringing them up one more time given that they've mastered the James Bond theme in the last 24 hours.

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Drill Inc. is a Japanese advertising agency that has created this epic, wooden, instrument. It plays a 144-foot rendition of Bach’s Cantana 147 to support NTT DOCOMO’s launch of the “Touch Wood” mobile phone. It’s quite elegant, and quite beautiful.

Do take a look at Drill Inc.’s website, too, which is, ah, refreshingly lo-fi.

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A trailer for Ridley Scott's "Prometheus," presented in the guise of a TED Talk from 2023. Guy Pearce takes us off-world. Finally.

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Ping Pong ball + Friday + Fire = ...

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Every time we're in the Detroit airport, Al gets caught in the vortex of a pimply kid at Brookstone, floating one of those Parrot AR drones around. Cheap, at $300 on Amazon, for the beginnings of your drone posse.

Plus, your surveillance arsenal is expanding. Take the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which has gone to "Politics and the English Language"-level lengths to avoid the moniker, "Camera Grenade." The Camera Grenade takes panoramic photos from its many lenses at the apex of its arc.

While it is farther from market-ready, U Penn's modestly named YouTube video displaying their "Swarm of Nano Quadrotors" is quite a thing to behold.

Tim Maly, maintains a blog called "Quiet Babylon" which does a fantastic and responsible job following developments in what Maly refers to as "The Panoptiswarm" (a name that must, though I can't be sure of it, come from a Neal Stephenson book somewhere).

In Maly's vision of the future: "Perhaps future police actions will be announced by an EMP blast, to clear the twittering airspace. Rogue journalists load film cameras as occupiers brace for the assault. The policeman’s mic declares the assembly unlawful. The burst is ineffective. The net interprets a gap in coverage as censorship and rushes to fill it. New drones buzz into position and an enterprising trike journalist, sensing a chance for a payday careens through the police line in the hopes of catching something good."

We'll have one of those drones patrolling above the bleachers at Comerica this season in the meantime -- hooked up with a net for Prince's first home run ball.

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Win a 911 for a year?

From the competition description:

“We’re looking for designs inspired by Porsche’s signature car. Enter by April 6th, and you could win a one year lease on your own Porsche 911 or cash equivalent worth $20,000.”

Parameters are to design something larger than a wallet, smaller than a living room, that incorporates three Porsche design elements. That’s fairly broad, but sounds fairly fun.

Carrera Captain’s Chair? 356 Speedster Sunglasses?

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This Kickstarter for "LifeCycle Bracelets" is a nice idea -- creating a system for bike shops to ship unused bicycle chain to designed Ben Gould, at his expense, so he can create jewelry from the material. The gold-plated bracelet is slick. 

But buried at the bottom of the page, for the $400, $500, and $2,500 levels, are the fantastic, "Red and Gray Bug-Eyed Mask," "Blue Welded Oculus Mask," and, simply named, "Long Trenchcoat," which all look something like Hellraiser, multiplied by the character design from "Brink," mated with a Koosh Ball. Very nice.

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Students from University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning turned the formerly bland, cinderblock façade of this repair shop into an slick, angular, metal façade.

The one-time repair shop is in Detroit's North Corktown neighborhood at 2801 14th Street and, as Curbed Detroit reports, is being converted into a creative living space -- in both senses of the term, I'm guessing, as in, a space that is creative, and also for creatives.

Before and After, above.

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This is a lot of things we like; a public works project, a repurposing of something obsolete into something useful, and done by a group with the word "interventionist" in their title.

via designboom:

"On the streets of New York, architect John Locke has repurposed phone booths into communal libraries or book drops, installing bookshelves within the structures filled with books for residents to take, borrow, or exchange. The phonebooth shown here, DUB 002, is part of his "Department of Urban Betterment" interventionist project."

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The B&B Syndicate

Design fiction, let's call it, in the Wikipedia style. To commemorate The Day of Two Mustaches.

Read about B&B Syndicate and their travels to Mauritius with William S. Burroughs.

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We came into the office today and it was 1971.