TokyoDesignersWeek
Latest
Inhabitat's Week in Green: of electric tractor unicycles, garbage-powered garbage trucks, and luminous nanoparticle trees
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. This week we were blinded by the light as researchers unveiled a way to transform city trees into luminous streetlights using gold nanoparticles. We also showcased a mesmerizing paper LED structure shaped like a tree at Tokyo Designers Week, and speaking of stellar architecture, check out this stunning star-shaped Taiwanese tower topped with a built-in wind turbine. In other news, strap on your rollerblades and hang tight - from the Department of Questionable Transportation comes the FlyRad, an insane electric unicycle that pulls you down the street at 25 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the city of Toronto is doing their part to preserve the environment by rolling out a fleet of garbage trucks that can be powered by the very waste they collect. Finally, the University of Rhode Island signaled a bright future for efficient transportation as they unveiled four designs that could tap the United States' 2.7 million miles of roadways for solar energy. This week we also looked at several new applications for futuristic manufacturing technologies - a dutch designer has pioneered a way to create 3D printed shoes that fit feet perfectly, and researchers have found that activated carbon cloth is a quicker picker-upper for toxic waste. Finally, with the holidays on their way, this week we rounded up our top ten green gadget gifts for 2010!
LG's concept phone contest winners should please art house gadgetphiles
When we see alluring phone concepts that'll never leave the lab, we end up wishing there was a little more innovation in the handsets out in the wild. There was a wealth of eyebrow-raising examples of that principle when LG Japan exhibited top entries to its Mobile Design Contest last weekend. We're keen on the fbt, a phone designed for braille text messaging, and the Tap, which is shaped like a light switch and functions like one too -- when you tap it, the phone turns off so you can live once again in peace. The winner, though, was the above-pictured Planet Phone, the surface of which is dotted with LEDs representing your friends; if you don't talk to someone for a while, their light gradually moves out to the edge. It's supposed to remind you to keep in touch, but it has darker connotations -- if you become angry with someone, you can revel in the pleasure of watching them slowly tick away into oblivion. That's absolutely a feature we want to see added to the Storm.[Via Hallyu Tech]
