Climb inside the mind of street trials rider Danny MacAskill who, with the help of Red Bull and Imaginate, has released a new riding film.  Seven minutes of tricks, stunts and unbelievable balance as Danny spins, hops, and pedals his way through a childhood fantasy.

Enter Danny’s mind and enjoy

UPDATE! VIDEO LINK CORRECTED – Should work fine now.

Surrounded by oversized versions of kids toys, the stunt rider ‘makes do’ and builds himself a course and terrain worthy of any five year-old’s bedroom floor.

I love the attention to detail in using ‘plasticine’ to secure the extra large colouring pencils-cum-telegraph poles, and the army men that spring to life.

Absolutely stunning stuff.  Jealous doesn’t even cover it.

Revealing that there is so much more to arts and crafts than all the mess of glitter and glue at primary school, I give you Design In A Nutshell – Arts and Crafts.

We do not reject the machine, we welcome it

Part 3 on Bauhaus follows next week.

In the wake of Apple’s announcement of iOS 7 there has been huge volumes of criticism.  With barely a breath taken, Twitter and the blogosphere were a wash with negative comments.  Let’s not deny there are some fantastic ideas and functionality in the latest version (some even love the new look too!), but the main issues people seem to be having are with the aesthetics and (lack of) consistency.

In reading lots of opinions and tweets I think that Frank Chimero and Joshua Topolsky have probably made the most sense to me.  Frank’s Generosity of Perspective and Joshua’s on The Verge seem to make the most valid and well-considered points, based less on a knee-jerk reaction than some others all to eager to Twitter-bash on Apple.

Circling back to my original point on design intent, it seems that however well (or not) iOS7 has been received Apple’s heart was always in the right place.

A beautiful little animation.  Enjoy.

Whilst trying to discover my Design Alter-Ego I came across some more fantastic work from the Open University, and so, instead of packing them all into one bundle of information-overload, the plan is to post one extract per week for the next six weeks.

Are you ready to get your goth on?

 I give you Design In A Nutshell – Gothic Revival.

Stay tuned for part two on Arts and Crafts coming next Friday.

Following on nicely from the Champions League Final between Dortmund and Bayern last weekend The Guardian have provided the match highlights wonderfully recreated in Lego.

The champions of Germany, the champions of Europe again

They have got the instant replays spot on, and when paired with the style of pre-match television coverage overlaid with the original commentary the whole thing is impressively accurate!

Combining this with slow motion video capture or long exposure photography we have seen before with the likes of the LED Surfer, but Red Bull have taken it to the next level by incorporating a similar idea into wakeboarding.

Three Red Bull wakeboarders (Mike Dowdy, Adam Errington, Dallas Friday), one photography studio (Snap!) and one light artist (Patrick Rochon) came together in an entirely experimental collaboration.

The plan was to “fuse sport, art, and technology” to capture the excitement and creativity of wakeboarding, by using the movement of light and the riders across the water.

Focus on art, creativity and beauty

Even Patrick himself was impressed with the outcome.  The planning and capture was tough, but his motivation was simple.  Trusting the boarders to rise to the occasion and achieving final shots that “are so fluid in the water … it is precisely what we are trying to do.“

See part 2 of the Red Bull enterprise where they take to the skies with a paramotorist!

Designed to solve the problems that traditional fast food packaging offers of, broadly speaking, too many packets and not enough hands.

Instead of grabbing a a rolled up paper bag in one hand, a drink in the other, and then somehow picking up a straw and napkins on the way out, this solution neatly wraps it all up together.

Your burger, fries and drink are held in a single container with carry handle, leaving you with one free hand to send a tweet about the latest packaging design, high-five your mates, or even open the strangely heavy doors that fast food restaurants often have.

GIF above via Funri.

Capturing, positioning and shaping atoms to create an original motion picture on the atomic-level is a precise science and entirely novel
Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research

The stop motion was made by a team of IBM’s nanophysicists not only having a bit of fun, but gaining amazing insight into how to move individual (yes, individual!) atoms.

Crucial in the field of atomic memory and data storage, a scanning tunnelling microscope uses a super-sharp needle to carefully select and move molecules of carbon monoxide along a copper surface to extremely precise locations.  Then, in a similar fashion to more traditional stop-motion style capture, the 100-million times magnified image is recorded and then the atoms are moved again to create the next frame.

With the potential to create devices containing unprecedented levels of storage, this is a very exciting step towards the future of computing and “the new frontiers of math and science”.

More information on the science behind IBM’s big data storage here, and you can see how they made the actual tiny film here.

Certainly one of my favourites, Saul Bass was a fantastic graphic designer (and Oscar winning film maker!), known particularly for his bold and creative style of film title sequences, posters and logos.

The animated Google Doodle above is inspired by some of his more famous works including those from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.  Superb work.

Bass’ portfolio of work also included a number of corporate logos, some of which still remain unchanged today.  Though even taking into account those that have been updated, the average lifespan of a Saul Bass logo is an impressive 34 years!

A great execution of a brilliant idea but then, being Google, we’ve come to expect nothing less.

More on the life of Saul Bass here and a fantastic looking book on the subject here.

With the technology of cars advancing impressively to include all manner of smart sensors, “green” electric motors, parking assistance, and even driverless cars, none of this really matters if we don’t have suitable roads to drive on.

Roads.  Just a bit of tarmac laid down (relatively) smoothly with some painted lines, right?  Well, yes, but why can’t we incorporate some technology into them.  Improving them to adapt to traffic and weather, making them more sustainable, making them safer.

Well that’s exactly what Daan Roosegaarde of Studio Roosegaard thought when he set about designing technological advances to our roads as part of a Smart Highways project.

I was completely amazed that we somehow spend billions on the design and R&D of cars but somehow the roads – which actually determine the way our landscape looks like – are completely immune to that process.  They are still stuck in the Middle Ages, so to speak.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, upgrade to our roads is to use a phosphorescent paint for the road markings.  Inspired by deep sea jelly fish it fuels the idea of a energy-neutral street, as the paint “charges up” during daylight hours and then glows throughout the night.  This is ideal in rural areas where existing street lighting is minimal, and perhaps one day even removes the need for any altogether.

Following on from that idea, in the colder months temperatures can drop quickly leaving drivers unaware about looming icy and inclement conditions.  The use of a dynamic temperature-sensitive paint would provide a simple alert system to drivers by ghosting up snowflakes on the road to act as a warning system when the tarmac becomes cold enough for ice to form.

In order to keep running and maintenance costs down, most of the ideas here focus on free and renewable energy resources.  Linked neatly to that is wind power.  At either end of tunnels large amounts of wind and air flow can circulate which is essentially wasted energy at the moment.  The plan is to use harness this air and, when combined with other air flows from the central reservation of cars passing in opposite directions, use it to power small turbines and further light sources for edge lighting.  Similar sorts of applications are already in use on the railways (certainly in the UK anyhow).

With an increasing presence of electric vehicles on the roads, the idea of an Induction Priority Lane doesn’t sound far away.  The concept is to build-in coils capable of recharging electric cars as they pass overhead, extending the battery life and range of which a current electric motor and battery setup can provide.

Yes lots of these ideas are costly and perhaps difficult, or near-impossible, to implemented at the moment.  But so is any new idea, particularly one as revolutionary as this.  Roads haven’t been gradually iterated over past decades, they have essentially remained the same over a very long period of time so to break into that infrastructure is always going to be tricky.

As a designer I fully commend and support the approach and ideas here, and as general members of society everyone (designer or not) should too.  I think the key thing to remember here is that the suggestion isn’t for every road in the world to have these.  Starting out with just major routes and motorways, and gradually trickling the technology down to commuter routes and, who knows, by that point maybe even bicycles will have been given some more consideration in this!