GENOMICON

Like most people, what I really want, is to live in a UFO… but like, a really untidy UFO you know? I don’t want one of those ones that needs constant tidying… because I’m the sort of person who leaves stuff about the place. That’s why “contemporary urban living-spaces” are such a let-down. They look great in the brochures, but after a while all the right-angles and clean-surfaces etc start getting you down… because the thing about clean-surfaces is that they don’t clean themselves. You have to clean them, yea you. That’s why wall to wall carpet is better than bare wooden floors. You’re constantly having to brush and dust – it’s like going back to being a Victorian. Fuck that.

So obviously this caught my eye.

(via)

Which is cool – it looks a bit like that clear Rubicks cube from earlier…

And would be absolute hell to live – the glass floors/ceilings mean that by chucking your socks, shirts, pizza boxes all over the floor in one room, you’d actually be making the mess of a ceiling in another.

It is actually quite cool – it would be excellent for mooning at the neighbours when they were having a dinner party in their similarly transparent abode… but… hmmm…. I don’t know. I think I’d go more for something like this:

Which is kindof indescribable.

It seems to be some sort of great big geodesicy hippie house

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built on similar principles to one of those pub games where you pull the bits out one at a time until the whole thing falls over, but inside they’ve put this giant knitted technicolour placenta… which would probably be a bit of an inconvenience once the novelty had worn off… and you’d probably wind up giving it to the people in the glass house at the top… to cover their chilly see-through abode, give them some warmth and privacy etc.

Lastly there’s this:

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and I can’t tell if it’s real or not.

But it looks a bit more like what a proper UFO interior ought to look right – right down to having a proper bikini-clad crew, like they would’ve done in the 70s – although they do seem to be a bit blurry. I think I’d have something with a proper view of space as well – and a greenhouse bit.

It’s worth visiting the site that they come from to read the utter nonsense that the designers(?) have written about it: “The big sinuous trees having long swaying arms which seem to float in the air searching for a melting embrace form a Pantagruelian Ring a Ring o’ Roses of phytomorphic souls by means of evocative reflects of the drops on the ceiling. “.

or

“In this wrapped space man is placed in a counter-reality which enables him to rediscover himself and to establish a new body and mind balance. All the ingredients contained in this signs ensemble such as light, materials and colours make it a destabilising symbol which underlines the new relationship among man and space, man and time, and man and present-future”

Brilliant. I’ve long suspected that the point of going to art school isn’t to learn how to do art, but to learn how to write unbelievably pretentious bollocks about it so you can charge an arm and a leg for it.

Well… this goes further than that. It almost reads like machine-generated poetry written by spambots. Beautiful (sniff), beautiful.

Cool design though. I wonder if the mirrors would get foggy… and the condensation would drip off them like rain.

This is cool

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No matter what it was, this would be cool. It could be anything – cellphone… a spaceship… some sort of lava-lamp… cool. It would even be cool if it was some sort of “intelligent” sex toy solution with an intermittent wiring fault which caused it to cut out at the crucial moment – just when you’d had a massive hit of amyl. Even then it would be cool.

But it’s none of these. It’s a house, and someone’s actually made it.

Faantastic. I want to live in a UFO – preferably a flying one – otherwise it’s just a UO – but in this case a UO would do.

Mind you – this one seems to be covered by what looks (from a distance) like bin-bags half-filled with old socks and such… But which on closer inspection are scaly things.

I’m not sure about scaly things – I’ve had experience with these things before – and the problem with them is, you spend the rest of your life trying to clean bird crap off them, because the little spaces etc behind each one, are ideal places for birds to live, especially pigeons. And pigeons crap a lot. Believe you me.

I imagine the scaly bits are for privacy etc – but again it’s a bit of an own-goal… because pigeons would nest on the inside of them, and would be watching your every move… your every move.

The bloke who designed this building also made this, which is also cool

Which is excellent as well. I don’t care what it is. Whatever it is I want one.

Building Skins.

from dailytonic and architonic.

Which caught my eye largely on account of having lots of shiny pictures etc

But which is quite a neat idea… especially as (apparently) in California, the amount of electricity saved by painting rooves white would be more than that saved by putting solar-panels on them. “Living Skin” on buildings could be quite useful for smaller buildings… a type of reflective air-conditioning.

The other thing of course… and this is an idea that the designers of themselves will be kicking themselves over… “it’s so obvious, why didn’t I think of that?” etc…

… you could put mirrors on a building and turn the whole thing into a giant fresnel lens… hooked up to a sensor on a tree outside so whenever if finds itself becoming a) warm, b) wet, c) smelly… the building focuses the sun on the offending dog and reduces it to ashes before it has time to say “arf”, providing valuable nutrients for the tree.

It’s a win-win situation, unless you happen to be the dog etc.

Seriously though – you could use it to incinerate litter, or burn chewing gum off pavements. It lasts for a million years you know, chewing-gum. Amazing. They should’ve made the pyramids out of it.

Still… this all reminds me of those wooden mirrors.

or variants therof

The Future is so here already… for some people. For the rest of us, the only way the future isn’t going to pass us by is if we make it ourselves… out of our own LEDs and things.

Ok, that’s a crap name. I’m not calling it that.

I’m still working (and by working, I mean sitting around and doing fuck-all) on my DIY camper-van idea… because every year I go on a grand-tour and… which tends to mean going up and living in Tallinn for a month… because you can get a whole posh apartment there for a month for the same price as a low-grade hotel across the water in Scandinavia costs for less than a week.

And for double that price you could make a campervan… and at the end of it, you wouldn’t just be left with a hole in your pocket. You’d have a campervan.

But I don’t like existing camper-van designs. They’re pokey and boxey and… well, there seem to be a lot of really nice designs for shipping containers around at the moment. I’m a web-dev. I need a view. I need quite a lot of space for lounging about in. I don’t need to cook, I do need a shower every morning.

So what I have in mind is something modular – to fit any sort of van… or in fact any sort of smallish space at all. A squat say. A portable squat-kit that is actually really cool, rather than being a bit crusty.

So anyway, I collect things that might be useful… and this would be useful because… it would be useful to have a bed where you can adjust the heights…. so it can still be flat when you park on a slope.

(from)

I saw these other things the other day as well… modular cushions:

And (also via) these modular bathroom fittings have potential as well,

Or would have were it not for the arse-quakingly bad design of the originating site which means it would be easier to make your own out of your own hand-mined (using stone implements) iron ore, than it would be to find what you’re looking for on the web.

Off-Gridity innit. Connected Off-Gridity.

All of this stuff (however) is for (an by) design fetishists who pay maximalist prices for their minimalism. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in getting people the fuck away from banks and landlords… although that said, the most expensive bit is still a bank of solar panels to keep your batteries topped up.

I used to have this flat in London overlooking the street… one Friday, someone put a skip outside and filled it to overflowing with all the junk etc from the flat next door.

Over the weekend, people came and took things, left other things behind… and by Monday, the skip was filled with entirely different stuff. Reminds me of the The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk, which is a really cute idea. Seems to work as well.

Anyway, I scored a load of old ornate gold-leafed picture frames. Put them up on the wall, sans-picutres… which neatly leads into this:

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Which I really like… although harbouring the sneaking suspish, that randomly placed and sized windows might be better on the outside than the inside.

Still…. cool, and another example of how our new frontier is the Ruins of the Unsustainable might not necessarily be bad… in fact it might be so good, that we wind up creating more unsustainability just so we can “recycle” it and turn it into something really cool, before it’s had a chance to go through it’s initial incarnation.

Faux-cycling. Or something.

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Anyway, I also like this because the people who made it also made those crapalot bags for emergency sanitation etc, and their website is a) bright orange, b) about 3 inches wide, and c) is about 80,000 pixels taller than it needs to be… all of which is cool. And D) everything seems to be pretty much on the same page. That’s cool as well.

OK, I confess, this is just a concept (and I hate concepts) but it’s worth it for the photo alone.

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It’s a type of window / glass that can be turned into giant moving billboards – or entire coverings for buildings, that change at whim etc. As far as I can gather, it’s a concept, which basically means it’s just a drawing, which basically means that it might just as easily have been a drawing of a perpetual motion machine or something.

About which I might be completely wrong of course. It’s happened before.

Anyway, the site that it comes from has some pretty cool other-stuff… dynamic surfaces etc. There’s quite a neat demo of a robotic membrane

with non-embeddable video on the site – looks like the robotic muscles aren’t quite figured out yet – but in terms of basic trigonomics etc, this is great – I’ve had this vague notion to make something similar via Ponoko for a while now – as soon as they start offering polyproplyene, that I could use for the hinges. Something like this would be ideal for modular solar concentrators. You might even be able to make the robotic muscles from springs and string.

This is tangential to what I meant in the recent rant about “by the time we get robots good enough to pass for human, it will be kindof irrelevant”

This is cool

Although there would be endless squabbling about who got the top bunk – and inevitably it would go to who ever had the most money, and lets face it people: we’re all getting a bit sick of that.

Still… really nice idea – assuming the prices matched the facilities rather than the view or the quirk-quotient.

I’ve always quite liked the idea of capsule hotels – been around in Japan for a while… and yes, even though The Fifth Element is possibly one of THE most annoying sci-fi movies ever made, they got their airplane design dead right:

This is what long-haul flights should be like. I do 20 hour flights a lot. Sitting next to someone is what makes them horrible. Separation… Please.

Capsule hotels have started to turn up (in a grudging, heel-dragging sort of way) in the West, with the advent of various trendy looking incarnations.

But I’ve tried some of these out (kindof) – the cheap ones in London were booked out, millions of years in advance and the other ones… are craftily priced so they look cheap, but when you come down to it they’re about the same price as staying at The Columbia, and at least you get to share the elevators with low-rent rock stars there.

Hotels aren’t there for your convenience. They’re there to squeeze every last penny they possibly can out of you – so in The West, anything new tends to be slight of hand for getting more money out of you… so you get all these hotels that look like they’re designed for and by web-designers, that web-designers can’t actually afford to stay in.

So anyway… here’s a Japanese version:

Which I find almost painful to look at – because I know what it is: It’s a special hell made for people with hangovers. I can feel the accumulated pain and suffocation of decades of mornings-after… and I’ve never ever been in one, but for me hotels and hangovers go hand in hand… and these look suicidally oppressive.

No. Give me a tent above the treetops, in the breeze. Please. Let me sleep.

Swedish Microhouses:

(from : English)

Or enchanting drawings thereof, each with a (de rigeur) million dollar view.

What I find interesting about these though, is that they’re designs by “some of Sweden’s best architectural firms” specifically commissioned to fit within a 15m by 15m 3m by 5m space… and if I’ve got this right (it was faithfully reported elsewhere) this is to escape the strict regulatory framework that large buildings need to comply with.

This reminded me straight away for the reasons that this was built with 3 wheels

If it has 3 wheels, then legally it’s a motorbike so you don’t have to be dealing with all the regulations that come with cars that would make innovation prohibitively expensive.

It seems that there’s this thing going on where innovation is happening in spite of rather than with the help of the legal frameworks that we have in place.

Which isn’t to say that all building regulations should be thrown out the window – when a force 6+ earthquake hits New Zealand (which they do periodically) cups fall of shelves. Everyone is a bit shaken. There’s talk of “the big one”. When the same sized quake hits Greece or Mexico, apartment blocks fall over and people are killed.

I’m fairly committed to the maxim “Rules for Corporations; Rights for People”, and I’ve very wary of the right-wing meme of “small government” which is basically slight of hand for weakening democratically mandated control over corporate power. (which is why corporations pour billions into the think-tank led propaganda machine to promulgate this idea).

But I think maybe there needs to be some sort of “fair use” angle on individual human innovation. Fair enough – we can’t be endangering other people, but we should be allowed to endanger ourselves.

No, they don’t exist.

I’m quite interested in camper vans – I’ve spent 1/2 my life living in one for some reason… but I don’t like the decor of what’s on offer. Everything is a bit bitty, and cluttered. I want an Ikea version – I want Zen etc. Something like this

But with wheels.

It also has to be unobtrusive… ie: look like a panel van on the outside, so you can park it anywhere without people thinking you’re camping. Mobile squatting etc. And of course the other problem with camper-vans is that they now cost more to hire than fucking hotels.

I was thinking of doing something along these lines this year – before I wound up broke, living on a boat and then winding up in hospital and having to move back in with my folks so I could be looked after etc. I was thinking of getting a panel van and building a modular kitset thing so the essentials were covered (ie: shower, toilet, bed, electricity)(no, cooking isn’t as essential as it looks)(yes, you can live on pizza forever)(mmm pizza) but everything went a bit wrong so I’ve been watching developments etc from the sidelines.

This turned up recently. Natty concept etc. Like living in a luridly coloured concertina, modeled loosely around A. E Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

(more pics here). What could possibly go wrong? Apart from being endlessly moved on by the cops etc.

Ok – something a bit more Urban and invisible… A dump truck (almost)

which is pretty cool, but it’s starting to get back into itty-bitty-land interior-decor-wise

(from via), and the prices seem to average around 400,000 US dollars – holymotherofgod. I mean they’re nice, but not as nice as the two houses you could buy for the same price.

So I think an idea that’s a bit of a goer is this sort of design asthetic:

(which is a shipping container) but made out of lego like stuff that you can use to line the walls of a generic panel-van.

In my experience, the most difficult thing about living in a van is temperature control. Security is a big one as well – I lived in a panel van in London for a month, and had two attempted break-ins, while I was in the van. The 3rd time they got lucky, and nicked everything.

A shower is crucial (solar, gas-heated hybrid). Electricity (probably solar/gas-generator). A toilet… less so, but when you need one, you need one – so I’d say that was pretty crucial as well. I also think access to daylight is fairly critical if you’re going to be spending long periods of time in it. You need some way of having big (like metre sq) windows or a skylight. The more I think about this, the more I’m thinking that ideally you need to be able to cut big holes in the van. You could achieve a lot using big neo-magnets and t-slot beams… but to really sort out the temperature control and daylight, you’re going to need to cut holes in things.

And to be honest, I have this nagging suspicion that what this is really about is a Child-Of-The-70s reincarnating the shaggin-wagon with ’00s minimalist styling. Shaggin Wagons were all the rage at about the same time that Star Wars came out…

And they had something to do with pornography, though I’m not sure what. It’s like the interiors were kindof like 70s porn decor, but with all the lust-filled fetishisation transferred from the porn-stars to the plush-velvet-over-everything obsession.

It’s like there was this weird transferal where the woman was no longer good enough for the fantasy (or was simply unavailable) so all the lust went into the upholstery. So to speak.

I can’t find any decent photos of just how extreme this got… but did find this rather lovely bit of paleo-futurism which kindof gets the point across etc:

This hasn’t gone away of course. The Japanese have gotten hold of it, and have (characteristically) pushed all the sliders up to 11, and created something way beyond what is remotely practical or workable. They’ve got an interesting take on super-normal stimuli:

(from)

And there’s some tragic irony floating around out there somewhere, that the design aesthetic that I have in mind is actually Japanese… but the Japanese themselves have taken vans and gone so far in the opposite direction that it’s not longer measurable using normal scientific instruments.

One of my favorite concepts is that anything that turns up in a Science Fiction movie will eventually be made… probably by fans of the movie. It will probably be made repeatedly, with better and better fidelity as technology improves.

In a funny sort of way this extends to the Movies themselves. One day someone will make Dune… and pull it off – in the same way that there were a couple of goes at Lord of the Rings before someone got it right. Not to trivialise the efforts of others – the existing attempts at Dune are so much better than I could do, it’s embarrassing in some ways even to comment – but face it, every Dune fan is still waiting for the definitive version. Casting Paul Atreides is always going to be hard.

Still, never mind about that, check this out:

Somebody’s actually built the house from Mon Oncle – a Jacques Tati film from 1958 which I saw when I was about 14. While not Science Fiction exactly, it’s about the old world meeting a vision of the new world in which every possible aspect of plastic modernity is pushed to a ridiculous extreme

And danged if it don’t have pretty much the same level of starkly minimalist design-fetishism that the pre-crash 21st Century had. The kitchen looks like an ipod.

Via www.architectradure.com

This is also another interesting example of this trend where a piece of work is not presented as a fait accompli – but rather the whole production history (or edited highlights thereof) are also presented. It’s like art/craft has acquired a new dimension along the time axis.