I don’t often get to post about practical developments that directly apply to home appliance design, so news via Wired of A123 Systems new product, the M1 battery, is more than welcome. Read this part from the article (Link):

Cofounder Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials science professor, succeeded in shrinking to nanoscale the particles that coat the battery’s electrodes and store and discharge energy. The results are electrifying: Power density doubles, peak energy jumps fivefold (the cells pack more punch than a standard 110-volt wall outlet), and recharging time plummets.

Maybe now we’ll finally see a cordless clothes iron that’s worth a damn. I know that when I spent a couple years designing irons, that option would have been a blessing.

There’s an interesting entry over on BrandNoise (Link) discussing the online custom t-shirt business. It’s starts off by mentioning Spreadshirt, a name that might be familiar if you read my entry regarding Chuck Norris and his effort to regain control over his own brand (Link). It also mentions CafePress’s move to provide users with the option to create black t-shirts (I remember that issue from when I looked into their service some time ago; lots of people wanted black). But this is the part that caught my attention:

These sites need to be quick in their response to customers. Within hours of the recent Cheney incident, CafePress Shopkeepers had already uploaded the first designs expressing their views, and shoppers had already begun searching for Cheney/Shooting related products. By Monday morning 48 designs had been added to the CafePress Marketplace to create 714 unique new products.

This has me wondering how closely fab-on-demand 3D products will follow these once-unrelated markets.

I used to post on the “Speedmodeling” section of CGTalk. Perhaps I need to head back for a tune up.

A few weeks back I caught a Vinyl Pulse blog entry (Link) showcasing a LeBron James limited-market edition vinyl toy; the first in what is to be a series of toys tied into the Nike ad campaign, “The LeBrons”. At the time I didn’t give it much thought. However, three things have happened since I read that entry:

1) the Brands In Games website has raised the issue of virtual doppelgangers (Link)
2) Vinyl Pulse has posted an entry for the second Lebron toy (Link)
3) Second Life resident Kim Anubis recently posted a question on the SL forum effectively asking about protective “marks” for virtual products/avatars

While these are all interesting subjects in their own right, when brought together they raise a bigger one.

Imagine what would happen if Nike commissioned Ms. Anubis to create a virtual representation of LeBron for Second Life. Unlikely? Perhaps. But the vinyl toys being fabricated are already intended for a specific audience; they’re not the typical mass market toy. And if Nike were – for whatever reason – interested in sending a virtual LeBron into Second Life to do a little public relations, imagine what would happen if he met another LeBron James in Second Life. In fact, what if another player had already co-opted the name, “LeBron James” and looked just like the genuine avatar?

Of course the Second Life Terms of Service appears to already prohibit that sort of reputation hijacking. But it is already occurring in at least four cases.

Imagine for a moment that someone assumes the online role of a virtual Paris Hilton (btw, I’m not limiting this now to the Second Life service). In that role – for the sake of roleplay – the character engages in outlandish behavior. Imagine (and this might be tough) that the virtual Paris goes beyond what even the real Paris would consider appropriate; yet, in the process, begins to garner sufficient reputation capital to spawn her own virtual fan club. The virtual Paris might be invited to online social activities… might even be compensated for attending. Someone could invite a real world brand into some virtual space, plan an activity, and pay the doppelganger to help raise awareness of the real brand.

It gets more interesting.

Imagine that the virtual Paris is outside the jurisdiction of laws protecting identity. Imagine that virtual Paris is not hosted on a server in San Francisco, but is embedded in a peer-to-peer virtual system like Croquet. There would be no persistant, central host for real world authorities to “take down”.

Imagine that at one of these virtual events one of the attendees grabs the 3D data from the videostream using a program like OGLE, and with it creates manufacturable data such that a doppelganger Paris Hilton vinyl toy could be fabricated; maybe even competing with a genuine, licensed vinyl toy. And that data could find it’s way into the hands of a toy manufacturer as I previously outlined (Link).

Fun times.

(p.s. For those Second Life residents who might stumble across this entry, the above is not why I’m asking questions on the SL forum about the “U2 in SL” group. However, engaging me in polite (sic) conversation has spurred my thinking in this matter. Thank you.)

{Original image source: Vinyl Pulse}

Second Life acquaintance qDot (aka robotics engineer/toy designer Kyle Machulis) has definitely made an impression. If you’re unfamiliar with his extracurricular activities or his increasingly (and this is a big hint, folks) popular website Slashdong, go read about him and his fellow… toymakers over on Wired (Link).

Do I need to say this is probably not safe for work?

This is not safe for work.

Okay, I’ve gone on about the future of design both on this blog (as recently as earlier today actually… well, kinda), and on the Core77 design forums and elsewhere. If the Industrial Design community doesn’t want to listen to me, read these clips from an entry on WorldChanging.com (Link):

As fabrication technologies take on an increasingly digital form, this distinction will become less clear. When I send you a copy of Firefox, what I’m actually sending is a set of instructions telling your computer how to organize bits of magnetic material on a hard drive to create another instantiation of Firefox. Similarly, at some point in the next decade or two, I will be able to send you a “copy” of my phone simply by sending a set of instructions telling your computer how to organize bits of carbon in a desktop nanofactory to create another instantiation of a phone. Very soon, a more software-like open source physical world paradigm will become possible.

But what will really make a big difference will be the emergence of tools allowing you to take that set of instructions for the phone and modify it to meet your particular needs prior to it being printed out.
…
I suspect that professional product or architectural designers are already sharpening their knives — clearly, this is a scenario in which everyday citizens don’t necessarily need the full range of services from designers to accomplish some otherwise moderately sophisticated tasks. But just as it’s possible but not desirable to use the tools to modify Firefox in order to use it as a word processor, these “plug-ins” for physical objects wouldn’t be a substitute for dedicated design. Furthermore, someone has to come up with the code for how the plug-ins work in the first place — this scenario doesn’t eliminate designers, just moves them up the food chain a bit.

Are your knives sharp?