Just a quick note regarding postus interruptus. Late last week I was approached with a request to do some point-of-purchase work; mostly taking some very rough concepts, generating Pro/E CAD from them, and exporting geometry into Maya in order to generate some low-level but presentable renderings (I also helped with design, but that wasn’t actually part of the arrangement).
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The above video showing traditional toolmaking comes courtesy of a post on Core77. Meanwhile, Ars Technica is talking (Link) about the Fab@Home effort.

Witness the slow death of old-school manufacturing. Slooooooooow death.

There’s a fair amount of buzz surrounding David Armano’s piece for BusinessWeek, “It’s the Conversation Economy, Stupid” (Link). I believe a fair amount of the buzz is coming from BW’s hypemeister, Bruce Nussbaum (it’s good to be MSM). Not that Armano’s piece is bad. In my opinion, however, it misses what I believe to be a larger truth. A truth that even Nussbaum probably has trouble acknowledging; as I believe is evidenced by how he deals with the “conversation” on his pseudo-blog.
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There’s a bit of carryover from my previous post regarding avatars (reLink); how they’ll be increasingly adopted by users and how they may become increasingly important information containers… with or without our consent.

The Simulation Weblog posted a related entry on avatars (Link) and the topic in comments has turned to avatars merging with passports (you can get a look at the relatively boring, RFID-enabled U.S. passport over on the Spychips RFID blog – Link).
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In hopes of trying to pair related items which come from at least somewhat different arenas, I wanted to call attention to a couple of toy-related efforts that lie on what I’d call the outskirts of design. The first is a relatively old project called “Virsual” (Link) which is a digital rocking horse for children. This interactive toy works along the same lines as exer-cyclists sweating in place while viewing a dynamic landscape on a screen in front of them, but is much, much more cool. From the Virsual website: Continue reading →