GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

A bike rack should do two things. It should be secure, and it should be easy to get your bike in and out. A secondary consideration is the amount of bikes that can fit onto one bank of racks, and last comes aesthetics. Thankfully, the just-installed artist-designed bike racks in San Francisco conform to all of these requirements, and they do it with some clever and sometimes site-specific style.

The racks are the winners of the Treasure Island competition, and the designs are inspired by the SF Bicycle Coalition’s plans for this reclaimed island in the San Francisco Bay. Here they are, along with some pros and cons.

Todd Gilens’ sloped (and winning) design (above) is based on the diagonal street plan of Treasure Island, although it looks like it could be inspired by the hundred of abandoned bikes found in any city, fallen and stomped into death. You can find it on Market and 6th.

Pros: Locking points are almost identical to those of a standard staple-shaped rack.

Cons: Too tempting for drunken vandals to mash a bike until it matches the bends of the rack.

Kirk Scott’s Map Rack is shaped like Treasure Island, and the conceit is that an internal cross-hairs pinpoints the actual street location of the rack on the island. You can find this one in front of City Hall on Polk Street.

Pros: Almost identical to a standard rack. Easy to line up a lot of them in a small space. Extra cross of metal for better locking.

Cons: The extra bars are thin, encouraging bad locking. Every rack is different, making it harder to lock-up with your routine style.

Ryan Dempsey’s Wave Rack represents the waves that will engulf Treasure Island when the next big earthquake strikes, just before the very island itself liquifies due to being built on soft, reclaimed land and its building sink into the earth. Actually, it just references the waves in the Bay. You can find it near Scott’s rack, in front of City Hall on Polk Street.

Pros: The main legs are vertical enough and close enough to work like a proper rack.

Cons: Takes up a lot of space. Has annoying crest section to catch on handlebars and baskets. Reminds residents of impending, unavoidable doom.

New Artist-Designed Bike Racks in San Francisco [San Francisco Bike Coalition. Thanks, Teri!]

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Matt Richardson’s friend Lauren wanted a device to hold down the down arrow and physically scroll through Google Reader, like a sustain pedal on a piano. Matt built it for her using an old USB keyboard, wire, solder and a little DIY invention.

It’s surprising we don’t see foot pedals more often in mainstream desktop computing. They’re a natural, well-established interface: besides analog tech like pianos, drums, bikes or a spinning wheel, think of cars, table saws and electric guitars.

If you’re curious, there are plenty of commercial USB foot pedals available, mostly targeted for disabled users or industry-specific uses. For example, they’re extremely popular in professional digital voice transcription, often coming bundled with transcription or dictation software. These usually have three controls: play/pause (center), rewind (left) and fast-forward (right).

Musicians, too, continue to experiment with foot pedals: we’ve written about AirTurn’s Bluetooth sheet-music turner for iPad, with a special eye towards its potential for disabled users.

Other USB foot pedals are extraordinarily versatile and programmable. But because they aren’t a universal accessory marketed to mainstream users like a mouse or keyboard, all foot pedals tend to be expensive and often highly tailored to individual users’ needs.

Building a foot pedal yourself using a keyboard’s guts is one way to solve this problem. But I can’t help but wonder what a determined hacker could put together with an Arduino board, a weekend and a little imagination.

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At first glance, electronic circuit boards may seem as far from art as you can get. But look closer, and the boards have patterns & mdash; horizontal and vertical grids that have a strange, precise beauty to them.

It’s the kind of beauty that we perceive in the whorls of a seashell or a grain of wood, says Theo Kamecke, an artist who is taking vintage circuit boards and transforming them into pieces that can adorn homes and galleries.

Kamecke has harvested the etching from the boards, then affixed them to hardwood to create the effect of polished metal on stone.

The results are exquisitely decorated chests, sculptures and boxes.

“Either you get it or you don’t, either you like it or you don’t,” says Kamecke. “I don’t mass-produce these, and no one else makes them.”

Kamecke uses a technique called marquetry that’s popular among furniture makers. But he has added a high-tech twist to it that hasn’t been done by anyone else.

“There is a neat aesthetic to it,” says Phil Torrone, senior editor at Make magazine and creative director at Adafruit, an online store catering to the DIY crowd. “It has a futuristic, yet Egyptian and retro, feel to it.” Adafruit has featured Kamecke as its summer artist on the company’s website.

Kamecke’s work has found a place in art galleries and has been acquired by Hollywood director James Cameron and Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger.

The pieces cost anywhere from “a few thousand dollars to many thousand,” says Kamecke. But each is painstakingly crafted by hand.

“It’s unique and going to go away after Theo,” says Torrone. “The kind of circuit boards that he uses are not being manufactured anymore.”

Above: Theo Kamecke named this chest Byzantine, because its motifs remind him of art from that era.

Photo: Theo Kamecke

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Source:wired.com

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This trike would fit right into a remake of The Shining, only instead of being ridden by the bowl-haired Danny Torrance, it would be piloted by a stretched, nightmarish cross between a creepy child and a psychedelic, broken-backed dachshund. The movie would, of course, be directed by Terry Gilliam.

The tricycle is in fact a sculpture by Dallas, Texas-based artist Sergio Garcia, and would likely be no less useful than a normal bike in that big, car-friendly state. The 50-inch-high piece is titled “Its not always easy to tell whats real and whats fabricated” and could probably be ridden if you sat backwards and didn’t mind people staring, pointing and murmuring “Red rum, red rum” over and over.

I wonder if Garcia would be interested in a commission. I snapped the frame of my bike at last weekend’s Bike Bolo World Championship in Berlin. I imagine fixing it up with a vertical version of Garcia’s looping tube, arranged around me like a big, skinny steel forcefield stopping any other player for getting near the ball.

Trike Sculpture [Sergio Garcia via the Giz]

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Does your Twitter/Facebook/IM avatar suck? The answer is likely to be a resounding “probably”. You need a custom caricature, and being a proper geek, you should get it not from the dodgy street-artist with the portfolio of sample “work” downloaded from the internet, but over the actual internet.

That’s just what Dave Lanham, artist extraordinaire and designer at the Icon Factory (the people behind Twitterific and a lot more besides) is doing. Dave is holding FaceTime calls with his iPhone 4 and drawing the portrait of the person at the other end. The hi-resolution Retina display no doubt helps him to see deep into your soul.

The fun started when Dave broke his foot and was left lounging around the house. His friend Gio Gutierrez (right) volunteered for a portrait and then things just got bigger and bigger. Dave is charging $50 per portrait, which you can then use as your online personality (or print on a T-Shirt, we guess, if you are really narcissistic). The demand is likely to be huge, so even if you can’t get on his list, you should check out Dave’s website, which has time-lapse videos of his work being made.

FaceTime Portraits [Dave Lanham on Flickr]

@dlanham [Twitter]

Dave’s website home-page [Dave Lanham]

Picture credit Dave Lanham (Under Creative Commons)

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Pay & Sit is yet another device to drive the poor from shared public spaces and let them instead be monopolized by apple-munching, mineral-water-sipping yuppies. Pay & Sit is a park bench dreamed up by designer Designer Fabian Brunsing. When at rest, it becomes the porcupine of the street-furniture world, deploying vicious metal spikes to keep soft rear-ends away. Only when a 50-cent coin is dropped in the slot do the spikes lower mechanically and offer up a smooth, comfortable surface.

Even the office-goers aren’t welcome to linger or dilly-dally in their relaxing: After a short interval, an alarm sounds, closely followed by the spikes popping back out. The message is clear: You sit, you pay.

If the Pay & Sit were ever to make it into the real world (unlikely, as this design is already a couple years old), then bums would have yet another sob-story designed to separate us from yet another few quarters: “Spare some change, guv’nor. I haven’t sat down for a week.” And then of course, there are bound to be people who find this new arrangement very comfortable indeed.

PAY & SIT: the private bench [Vimeo via Neatorama]

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The fabric of the future won’t be just plain chiffon, silk or cotton. Instead electroluminescent material, microprocessors and LEDs may be woven together with clothing fibers to create smart textiles.

“Clothing can be considered a second skin and by implementing technology in it, you are bringing it into your intimate space,” says Nicky Assmann, an e-textile designer whose work was part of a recent exhibition in the Netherlands. “You are not just carrying technology like a laptop or an iPhone, but wearing it constantly.”

The exhibition, Pretty Smart Textiles, which closed last week, gave a glimpse into what happens when technology meets fashion. Among the exhibits: a dress made entirely of circuit boards that generate music, a garment that uses its wearer’s heartbeat and other sounds from the body and remixes them into music, and a trench coat that reads fabric punch cards and tells stories.

Electronic textiles are outgrowing their geeky reputation, says Melissa Coleman, who with Dorith Sjardijn curated the exhibition.

“The open source hardware movement has allowed for quicker and easier development of electronics and made it accessible to artists and designers,” says Coleman. “The result is that smart textile applications have become more interesting conceptually and aesthetically.”

The exhibition featured 16 works and seven interactive samples.

Most of the artists who showed their work were women. “Electronic textiles appeal more to women than men,” says Sjardijn. “Women who are already in technology find it a nice way to combine the stuff that they find appealing with the more clinical world of technology and programming.”

A Musical Circuit Dress

A dress with 35 old circuit boards stitched together is not for everyone. But Nicky Assmann, who built the dress over a four-month period, says she chose circuit boards as the fabric for her dress because she liked their look.

“There’s a certain aesthetic about them — they have many details and are very systematic, like a grid or a city map,” she says.

The circuit dress is not just clothing but also a musical instrument. The dress is based on the idea of circuit bending, which involves deliberately short-circuiting electronic musical devices to get unexpected noise.

Twelve coils are incorporated into the dress, each of which is played by connecting to one another through copper finger plates. The musical composition results as the fingers explore the dress. There are two speakers on the front of the dress, and the entire dress runs on batteries.

The straps on the dress are made from electric cables that are are used for rewiring the circuit-bended board from the back to the coils to the front. “It’s very functional,” says Assmann, since it solved the problem of where to leave the wires.

Overall, the dress weighs about 20 pounds. Assmann says if she’s practicing for a performance, she can’t wear the dress for more than hour because the straps hurt her shoulders.

Ultimately, the idea of the musical circuit dress is to display what many people consider ugly when it comes to technology: the innards of a device with its circuit boards, the wires and the chips. Assmann, an artist who’s studying for her graduate degree in Music at the Royal Conservatory and Academy in The Hague, says the circuit dress put an aesthetic that’s normally hidden out in the front.

“The unwearability of the dress defines its performance,” says Assmann.

Source:wired.com

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