Collaborate Disseminate
Noisy open offices don’t foster collaboration, they kill it, according to a Harvard study that found the less-private floor plan led to a 73 percent drop in face-to-face interaction between employees and a rise in emailing. The problem is plenty of young companies and big corporations have already bought into the open office fad. But […] Continue reading To fight the scourge of open offices, ROOM sells rooms
Nearly every femme-identifying person I know, myself included, has wrestled with tall bar stools, director’s chairs, and the dreaded microphone dance. Continue reading Dear Conference Organizers: You’re Doing Chairs Wrong
The history of the fake electronics that you sometimes see in furniture stores or in houses for sale. No, that 60-inch flat-screen TV doesn’t turn on. Continue reading The Real Industry Behind Fake Electronics
Many people got their start with 3D printing by downloading designs from Thingiverse, and some of these designs could be modified in the browser using the Thingiverse Customizer. The mechanism behind this powerful feature is OpenSCAD’s parametric design capability, which offers great flexibility but is still limited by 3D printer size. In the interest of going bigger, a team at MIT built a system to adopt parametric design idea to woodworking.
The “AutoSaw” has software and hardware components. The software side is built on web-based CAD software Onshape. First the expert user builds a flexible design with parameters that could …read more
Continue reading Robotic Wood Shop Has Ambitions To Challenge IKEA
Berlin-based colormass, one of the startups presenting today at TechCrunch Disrupt as part of the Battlefield, has developed a platform that lets you recreate an IKEA-style experience for your own merchandise: highly realistic, but digitally manipulated 3D facsimiles. Read More Continue reading Goodbye, photo studios. Hello, colormass virtual photoshoots
Nobody is likely to confuse it with the beautiful joinery that makes fine furniture so desirable. But as a practical technique, using plastic bottles as heat-shrink tubing for composite joints is pretty nifty, and the pieces produced are not without their charm.
Undertaken as an art project to show people what can be done with recycled materials, [Micaella Pedros]’ project isn’t a hack per se. She started with bottles collected around London and experimented with ways to use them in furniture. The plastic used in soda and water bottles, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), turns out to shrink quite a bit when …read more
Continue reading Soda Bottles Used as Heat-Shrink for Wood Joinery
[Michal Zalewski] has radiation on the brain. Why else would he gut a perfectly-horrible floor lamp, rebuild the entire thing with high-power RGB LEDs, and then drive it with a microcontroller that is connected up to a Geiger-Müller tube? Oh right, because it also looks very cool, and Geiger tubes are awesome.
If you’ve been putting off your own Geiger tube project, and we know you have, [Michal]’s detailed explanation of the driver circuit and building one from scratch should help get you off the couch. Since a Geiger tube needs 400 volts DC, some precautions are necessary here, and …read more
Continue reading Mood Lamp Also Warns of Nuclear Catastrophe