Great Lakes

Joy Charbonneau and Ed Zec teamed up to design their Great Lakes. These sculptures are solid metal castings of the topography of the floors of each of the great lakes. The the "mold" of the lake floor is turned upside down to create an abstract entity. I love the work done here. The designers have exposed the hidden beauty of nature.

Public Seating Concept

Two students from ABK Stuttgart, Louisa Köber and Lara Salzmann, recently developed what is being called a public seating concept sculpture, which is a fancy phrase for...bench. Due to it's insanely geometric modernistic form, I'm not a fan. It looks more like a deformed iceberg than an place to sit. And don't even think about bringing children around all those sharp edges. I never thought I'd see a bench that looked dangerous. This "public seating concept" has a parallel with the snuggie, oddly enough. They hail the snuggie as this innovative and wonderful product, when in reality it's just a backwards robe. Same goes with this ugly public seating sculpture. It's just a bench.

Emperor 200

Being a guy, of course I had to check out the super-gadget being reviewed on core77.com. The Novelquest Emperor 200 is the latest and greatest work station out there. The chair comes with 3 wrap-around 19" HD flat screens, a noise cancelling sound system, 360 degree rotation, and it's own climate control to name a few features. Although I wouldn't mind having my own Emperor 200, I have to agree with the blogger's cynical review of the product. Not to mention the cool 40 grand you'd have to cough up for such a chair, this chair represents the beginning of the decline of all physical activity as we know it. Right now the thing isn't affordable but in time the price won't be so steep (maybe Apple will make one) and more and more people will have one to work and to play from. People will start moving around and exercising less and less until we resemble the people living on the spaceship in the Pixar movie, Walle.

USBee

I really admire the creativity of designer Damjan Stankovic's for his USBee flash drive. Along with it's appealing and fun design, the flash drive has some cool structural innovations as well. The casing is made from flexible silicone instead of the traditional hard plastic we're all used to. Also, the black "bee" stripes act as cooling vents for the circuitry inside. Very clever. My only complaint is that there is no visible attachment for a key chain. What if the USBee has little wings that clipped onto your keys?

XAV Vases

I am not a fan of David des Moutis's XAV vases. To me they look like nothing more than unremarkable smaller vases stacked on one another like glass legos that don't quite fit. The retro 80's like color scheme of the vases is ill thought out and unpleasant to look at. The bottom pictures of the vases do look better than the ones at the top of the page, but that is simply because flowers focus your eyes away from the glass! All in all, this looks to me like a lack of effort rather than the presence of vision.

Jar Lamps

I was impressed by the Jar Lamps designed by Gautier Pelegrin and Vincent Taiani from Noon Studio. A light source is concealed within a smooth oak canister, whose lid can be rotated to adjust the amount of light it emits. As soon as you look at the lamps it is obvious they have a very modern design - maybe even futuristic. I'm not usually one for modernistic designs, but something about the jar lamp captivates me. It may be the fact that although it is modern in design, it still holds natural beauty from the highly visible wood grain of the oak. This gives the Jar Lamp the added flair of an eco-friendly product (even if it really isn't one).

Notes:How to Scan an Image

• Epson scan icon on bottone left
• put picture on scanning platform
• click preview
• select which area you want to be scanned
• click scan
• scan as a tif. file
• name file
• click ok
• Find scan and drag into photo shop
• click image --- rotate to get it to the right orientation if needed
• crop it
• save as an esp. file