Consider this a kind of follow-up to my previous post linking the One Laptop Per Child project with Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age “primer” concept. MoCO Loco posted an entry a couple of days ago titled “non·object” (Link) that included an iPod/book-ish looking picture. The image had that primer-grey, CG-rendered look I’m accustomed to seeing and which admittedly gets my attention; I suspected the object in it was modeled in 3D Studio Max but rendered with Brazil or VRay. Curious, I stopped back in this morning to learn more.
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A few days back when I was trying to learn more about the Euphoria demo shown at the Game Developers Conference, I did a search that landed me on the OLPC News site (Link)… for no good reason other than I’ve been following OLPC development for some time now and was curious about that search engine hit. Anyway, that’s where I first learned of the One Laptop Per Child Game Design Challenge (Link). Interesting news, but I didn’t consider it especially relevant to this blog, even though I saw related news pop up on 3pointD (Link) and then later caught mention of that on “The Click Heard Round the World” blog (Link). Though I’d read enough to know better, I still thought of the OLPC in terms of design (with a little “d”*).
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I thought this was interesting and timely: a story over on Jalopnik titled “From Bucket to Binary: Morrison Corvette Scanned into Gran Turismo” (Link) concerning the 3D scanning of a beautiful 1960 Corvette. From the article: Continue reading →

Last week I was lucky to catch some news over on Mashable (Link) mentioning a new design-centric social website called, appropriately enough, design:related (Link). I have to admit that the social networking arena is moving faster than I can track so I can’t really comment on the service in the context of what other services in general might offer, but it does seem as if it might be trying to offer some competition to stalwart design website Core77. Like Core, design:related is offering portfolio hosting, a job board, and design networking, but also infers that it’s trying to build something more cohesive, inspirational and perhaps a bit viral in nature. I’m not sure that’ll be enough as Core is extremely well-known and enjoys a mutually-beneficial partnership with BusinessWeek which further raises the site’s profile.
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I’m a sucker for a beautiful sailing vessel. Between my aerospace background (air is a fluid, just in case you didn’t know) and my years as a ship driver, engineer and navigator, it’s a wonder I don’t post more on their design. Be that as it may, I found this sleek little number, a “hydro-foil sailing yacht” called eXplorius, while surfing around looking for something inspirational. Luckily there’s more than just the above picture; the site on which it can be found (Link) includes concept sketches and CG renders. Nice.

via Core77

{Image Copyright (c) Arnold Freidling}