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Preview issue 9, up at Ambidextrous

In this issue, learn about the design of stoves for the developing world, as well as why you should be wary of design for the developing world. (We thrive on studied controversy.) And, since inspiration comes from random places, indulge in the inspiration of competitive beard growing.

Issue 9 launches at Stanford d.School and the Flickr photos are up!

Ambi staff with MIT Media Lab professor Hiroshi Ishii, whose talk was the Ambi pre-party ;) (kidding, kidding)

Come talk about The Artifact’s Place in Design * Design in Developing Countries * Pimp My Workstation * Stoves for Darfur * Style * Competitive Beard Growing * Design Process * The Next Big Thing in Design

There will be tasty treats to snack on, food for thought to munch on, and the best company the Bay Area’s design community has to offer.

The AMBIDEXTROUS launch party will be immediately preceded by a talk hosted by the d.school by Professor Hiroshi Ishii of the MIT Media Lab from 6:30-7:30pm. You are invited to that as well!

RSVP and get directions

A while ago, we posted about Victimless leather, part of MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” show.

Well, Paola Antonelli had to put the victimless leather coat to death when it started to grow too quickly and outgrew its test tube. While the thought of killing a living product makes us sad, it’s an interesting site for feeling out what reactions might be to futuristic living materials we might imagine around our homes or on our bodies.

RIP, fleshy leather coat. We barely knew you.

Ambidextrous was at Maker Faire this weekend. We’re not sure how many attended, but they ran out of parking and 101 and 92 had tons of traffic, so we take that as a sign of its popularity.

Check out photos of Ambi’s magazine-making and mechanical dissections:

Sorry it’s been quite on the Ambi blog front lately. Between getting issue 9 to the printers and getting issue 10 rolling, it’s been busy at the Ambi-plex.

But we’ll be at Maker Faire in the bay area Saturday and Sunday! Come to the Ambidextrous table for discounted magazines, mechanical frog dissection, and mini-magazine making.

The Maker Faire is located in San Mateo. For more information and tickets, go makerfaire.com.

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things. It’s put on by the publishers of Make and Craft magazines and attracts 45,000+ people over the course of the weekend.

When? Saturday, May 3, 2008 (10am – 10pm) ; Sunday, May 4, 2008 (11am – 6pm)
Admission? Adults: $25; Students (13-21): $15; Youth (4-12): $10; and children under 4 are free

Come get your Ambi sticker and balloon!

This is old news, but I thought it was too cool not to share. In January, Team Aqueduct won Google’s “Innovate or Die” competition to design a way to get clean water to rural communities in the “developing” world. The bike treis to solve the problem of storage, transport, and filtering all while getting you to and from the water source.

Does Guitar Hero have too much rock star attitude? Rockband too complicated and pricey? Shawna Hein and Ambidextrous contributor Kevin Lim and editor Lora Oehlberg brings you Jug Hero, featured both in Kotaku and Make.

Make writes:

Two players are assigned one jug instrument each, which they blow puffs of air into to score points. Players also “clink” their instruments together in a social “cheers!” that allots them bonus points. Each jug includes a microphone to sense resonant puffs of air in the mouth of the jug, and a force-sensor to sense social “clinking” of two jugs at the side of the instruments. The interaction is kept both simple and social.

There’s nothing like the smile that a sunny morning ride across the fabled Brooklyn Bridge can paint on your face, or pulling off the West Side Bike Path at 14th Street to discover that you’ve led an impromptu bicycle calvacade halfway up Manhattan. Against all odds, I’m a sometime bike commuter in New York. Since life in this city is so unpredictable, bike parking — especially in-building bike-parking — is what makes it all possible. I’m lucky to work in at a company with an indoor bike room; if I end up meeting friends across town, or leave work as the spring sleet begins to fall, I can always beg off until the next day, knowing that my bike is safe inside.

Not everyone’s so lucky, though. “A study conducted by the Department of City Planning found that lack of access to secure bike parking was the primary reason cyclists did not ride to work. The current standard fixture for bicycle parking consists of variations of a fabricated square steel tube called the “CityRack” that is mounted on sidewalks. These fixtures occupy little space on the sidewalk and do not obstruct the flow of people or goods…. The CityRack design, however…. does not fulfill the potential to be an icon for New York City cycling.” — CityRacks Design Competition website.

The Big Apple is looking for some new sidewalk dressing that’s elegant, innovative, durable, and iconic, and it’s doing so via an international design competition with four disparate but significant sponsors: the NYC Department of Transportation, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, Google, and advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.

Unlike many design competitions, there’s a user testing cycle built in! Up to 10 teams will receive up to $5,000 to fabricate their solution, which will be installed and tested at 2 public locations throughout NYC. Final winners are selected after that period. It sounds like the challenge is to improve on a generally useful and usable status quo, while adding an element of desirability to the new design.

Register your team by April 30, and submit your design by June 9 at http://nycityracks.wordpress.com/

In the next Letters to things, designer and researcher Catherine Forsman explains the magic behind her pillbox.

For anyone who has been addicted to cigarettes, there is a ritual to the cigarette pack. One could call it an experience, but in reality it is much deeper than an experience because it is repeated and becomes fetishsized, learned, compared among smokers, and becomes invisible to the ritualist in a way that only ritual can as a person repeats it. This ritual starts as soon as the addiction begins. What becomes ritual to the cigarette smoker, who purchases them over the counter, are things like tapping the top of the pack, box or not, taking the plastic wrapping off of the pack, un-origami folding the foil, then tapping or plucking or simply dispensing each cigarette out. Until I tried to quit smoking, I wasn’t aware of how the ritual was as soothing and as indicative to a sense of self and place as the cigarettes were.

Chantix, the new “wonder” drug that blocks receptors in the human brain that parse out nicotine and give it to the other parts of the brain. When a person decides to take that plunge and quit smoking, the Chantix chemical arrives in its weekly packages. Opening the first pack is very familiar to a smoker because the packaging is an emulation of the ritual of the cigarette pack. The box is thick, nicely designed folded cardboard. As you open the top flap, there is another layer, and the pills cannot be revealed until one pushes a “button” and pulls out the pill dispensary. Once the pill dispensary is revealed one needs to push rather hard in order to dispense the tiny pill inside all the packaging. The package itself, in practical terms, would not need to be designed this way, unless the chemical itself needs to be protected from light, but a dark bottle would do this. Rather than seeming “practical,” is this packaging about creating another ritual of drug dispensation? Has Pfizer hired ethnographic consultants and to study the fetishsization of the cigarette pack and emulated this in their packaging to soothe smokers as they begin to wean themselves off of the nicotine chemical?

Check out another blogger’s packaging photos of Chantix.