Three designers in NYU's ITP program, Adrià Navarro and DI Shin, along with Ananya Mukherjee, have designed a desktop printer and browser extension that allows one to print the best moments of our online lives in the style of a Polaroid instant photo. The project is called the "Polaroid Cacher." After framing and "shooting" your screen with the Chrome browser extension, you can print the image to a Polaroid camera, actually the wireless printer built into the shell of an iconic Land Camera. By the way, even the printer pays homage to Polaroid. It uses the Polaroid-developed ZINK printing system.
What's significant about the project is that the designers aren't just using the Polaroid camera's form simply to add a level of kitsch or nostalgia to the modern habit of posting social media updates. Instead the Polaroid Cacher is designed to function in the same way as the original Polaroid instant camera: to make a physical, visual artifact from a fleeting moment or interaction. The designers aren't passing any judgments about the role of status updates or Tweets in our daily lives. The students believe digital updates are just as significant as instant photos were decades ago, but because they don't have a physical form, they can be easier to forget.
The xx and Grizzly Bear toured the U.S. and Canada together and Manchester's Dr. Me designed a very handsome poster available only at the shows. Some superfans couldn't make the gigs, however, and petitioned for their own posters. So the designer has wisely made the posters available to the rest of us.
Stalk desktop speakers are actually designed to stand next to a crowded desk, rather than take up valuable desktop real estate. The two models (taller or shorter) are built with colored steel legs and a 3D-printed dome, both meant to be chosen by the owner to personalize the set. The designer, New Zealand-based Ella Bates-Hermans, developed the cone patterns by experimenting with 3D printing textures, and drew inspiration for the speaker's form by studying the shape of speaker drivers. [via NOTCOT]
At one point in time, we took them for granted. Payphones were a must—if you were running late, lost, or traveling and needed to make reservations—or perhaps didn't have a home phone. The eventual affordability and popularity of mobile phones wiped them out, destroying the market for their use and making payphones, it seems, not worth the time or money to maintain. Some still exist, sometimes in the oddest of places, and we're sure that some of us still need them in a pinch. By now, their increasing rarity makes them ripe as a photographic subject. #payphoneography is a bit like a chronicle of the last days of a connected, cheap public communication network—with the occassional shot of an exotic callbox from a far-flung locale. Particularly sad, we think, are the "carcasses" of ripped-out phones.
As part of an exhibit at this year's Design/Miami Basel fair celebrating Swiss design and promoting tourism, seven designers were given discarded gondolas from the Verbier resort in the Swiss Alps and told to use the materials to create new work. Some kept the basic form of the gondolas and created rocking benches and tables, while others deconstructed the cars entirely, creating new installations that only vaguely suggested the shape of the classic gondola. The seven designs will be shown during a brief tour of Switzerland, and auctioned by Christie's to raise funds for the Make-a-Wish foundation. [via Yatzer / photos © Annik Wetter]
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