Photo reblogged from Emergent Futures Tumblelog with 200 notes
A new app called Moves could be the simplest fitness app ever.Essentially, Moves gives you no more excuses.
- It lives in your iPhone and tracks your activity in the background, so there’s no separate device to learn how to use or remember to carry (you already have your phone on you at all times).
- There’s no setup: You install it, turn it on, and that’s it.
- And there’s no management, syncing, or any other “interactive” bullshit to forget to do or get bored of and stop doing altogether. You don’t even have to launch it—Moves will simply ding a little summary of your physical activity into your Notifications Center every day, where you’ll end up seeing it regardless of what you’re doing with your phone.
I use this app and love it!
Source: fastcodesign
Photoset reblogged from TEDx with 224 notes
tedx:
Michael McDaniel & Jared Ficklin are designers at frog design, a firm in Austin, TX responsible for a multitude of products, from ovens to compost systems to apps to breast scanners. At this year’s TEDxAustin, the pair introduced their plan to re-invent urban mass transit through flying cars: high-flying gondolas running via cables stretched over cities — a little bit like ski lifts.
How would this crazy idea work? From their talk:
What if I told you — in the whole area of mass transit, there is one industry that competes on the basis of how many people they can carry per hour without a schedule? Further, they do it moving only 1 to 6 people at a time.
I’m talking about the ski industry: the Zillertal ski area in Austria — they hold the record for lift capacity. They have a system of 174 chairs and gondolas that can move 298,000 people per hour. So if you ran that on a 24-hour cycle, that would be 74 million people a day,and if they weren’t skiing down, and you were carrying them down, that’d be 14 million people per day. That’s a lot of people. And to put those max capacity numbers into perspective, the New York City subway only has to carry 5.3 million people on a given weekday…
Now we’re not exactly saying chairlifts are the best solution for urban transit — there would be a lot of dropped iPhones — but if you were looking for inspiration on how to move a lot of people without a schedule, the ski industry is an excellent place to start. And one innovation you’re going to find there is called the high-speed detachable gondola.
Now these are essentially 4-6 person cars that cruise along at about 12 to 15 MPH attached to a cable supported by towers. For all practical purposes, they are flying cars. So they’re called “detachable” because as they come in through a station, they actually let go of the cable — release from the cable — and slow down to just below walking speed (about 2 MPH) as they glide through the station. Now this allows people to easily load and unload off the cars across a flat, level platform. Then the cars essentially accelerate back up and to line speed and reattach to the cable.Now, the operation is continuous — it doesn’t stop — so you catch the first available car as it drifts through the station. Some of the other advantages of it being a detachable car is that, essentially, we can add and remove vehicles to the line in real time. Now this really eases maintenance, cleaning, and also helps us save energy by matching peak demand…All of this together forms a new form of mass transit for cities called urban cable.
The Wire is our vision for a user-centered, practical mass transit system for cities like Austin...The Wire can cover the exact same routes as [urban light rail], but it can go places surface rail simply can’t go.…Imagine flying into Austin, and catching The Wire at the airport. The stop could be located right on top of the attached parking garage, so you would simply walk and roll your luggage right on the first available car and fly out. There’s not waiting and no schedules because it’s constantly in motion…there’s no stoplights in the air; these things run constantly…The ability to put [stations] in the air means they can sit on top of parking garages or they could be over the top of intersections…You could have one that had a rooftop pocket park, or one integrated with retail.
With all these possibilities, it creates new opportunities for public / private partnerships. You could even envision a stop integrated into the lower floors of an existing high-rise building. This means more ways to share costs. It encourages smart growth. It allows us to build community around commuting.
For more information on urban cable and The Wire, watch Michael and Jared’s entire talk, “A mass transport system in the sky” from TEDxAustin 2013.
Photo reblogged from Emergent Futures Tumblelog with 433 notes
Energy harvesting pavement powers its own streetlights.
London-based startup Pavegen has developed tiling that can harvest kinetic energy from people’s footsteps, turning it into up to 8 watts of electricity per footstep.
The tiles are made of 95 percent recycled tyres, and use a proprietary wireless communications technology to transmit data about the number of footfalls and the energy generated via the Internet. A wireless network of the tiles could provide valuable information to city planners and nearby business owners about the number of pedestrians in the area at different times of the day.
At the last Summer Olympics in London, the tiles were installed outside a tube station where they generated enough energy to power lights in the area for five hours a night.
Wow!
Source: designnews.com
Photoset reblogged from Emergent Futures Tumblelog with 71,826 notes
December 5, 2012 screening of Life of Pi at the Piscine Pailleron in Paris, France
pour capu, anne et mimi
This is so cool, but what do they do when they have to go to the bathroom?
Source: insidemovies.ew.com
Photoset reblogged from TEDx with 56 notes
tedx:
Above: A program you can wear — TEDxBoulder’s letterpressed event guides.
At TEDxBoulder’s very first event, attendees were treated to hand-printed programs that served not only as guides to the event’s program, but nametags as well. The programs, designed by local Boulder design firm Good Apples, featured a giant cut-out ‘X;’ accordion flaps with maps, speaker information, and schedules; twine for wearing around the neck; as well as cover space to finish the sentence, “I am…”The design was later chosen as a winner in the Communication Arts Design Annual for the year. We understand why.
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