Tag: design

Reuse Design

Aluminum panels are marked by grade and the car is designed for disassembly; at the end of its life, technicians can easily sort the materials for recycling by specific type, rather than melting different aluminum grades together and compromising the material. The company is doing away with the standard practice of bonding unlike materials in the interior. When you glue a veneer to a plastic, then glue metal trim around the edges of it, you’ve rendered all 3 materials unrecoverable. In contrast, Missoni and his team have designed all of the soft-touch interior elements to be monomaterial, made of “a highly recyclable thermoplastic.” These interior elements “can be recycled as one material, and not only that, they can be recycled over and over again.”

Segway Postmortem

now that there’s Segway equivalents for $100, time for a retrospective.

The Segway’s delays, cost, weight, and battery problems all derived primarily from 1 issue: how beautifully engineered, perhaps overengineered, the Segway was. The Segway was almost absurdly well-made, with custom components and redundancies built into every system to avoid breakdowns and accidents. Segways even had 2 identical motors, attached to 2 separate batteries, just in case something failed. The effect of all this redundancy and extra weight was to cause the batteries to drain quickly—especially considering how early in the development of rechargeable batteries 2002 was. Ideally, you’d be able to swap a drained battery for a fresh one—except, of course, that the Segway’s battery compartment was hermetically sealed to make it waterproof. The death of the 1 guy who still loved Segways enough to invest in Segway, killed by his Segway, basically seemed to put a cap on the dark comedy. It was too expensive, it looked doofy, it was cursed. End of story.

Put Silk in it

Researchers kept searching for the path to engineered silk. Yet, year after year, they failed. Each ran into scaling issues, production costs, and regulatory due diligence. After all this time, silk-based tech is weaving its way into health care, the food industry, and clothing.

SilkVoice is a gluey mix of hyaluronic acid and microscopic particles of regenerated silkworm silk meant to treat vocal fold disorders. SilkVoice is authorized for human use. The majority of the 40 people who have received the injections have retained their improvements.

Mori has commercialized silk as a way of protecting food. Unlike wax, Mori’s coating can cling to both water-repellent and porous surfaces, like the outside and inside of a zucchini. Mori already has pilots running at farms and food companies around the US, and larger-scale manufacturing is supposed to start later this year.

Kraig Labs claims to have produced the first “nearly pure” spider silk fabricated by silkworms and has scaled up production. It has partnered with a company in Singapore to make luxury street wear and is working with Polartec on performance outerwear. The company is also considering biomedical uses and bullet-resistant protective apparel.

Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile. “By spray-coating smart clothes with highly hydrophobic molecules, we are able to render them repellent to water, oil and mud. These clothes are almost impossible to stain and can be used underwater and washed in conventional washing machines without damaging the electronic components sewn on their surface.”

Surprise Pasta

3D shapes can now be pre-printed onto flat sheets of uncooked pasta and only revealed during the boiling process. The 2D pasta morphs into 3D shapes when boiled because each piece is lined with tiny grooves, less than 1 mm wide, in particular patterns. The grooves increase the surface area of some parts of a piece of pasta. Areas with a higher surface area absorb water and swell faster

Rethinking designs

Some fun entrants:


Amsterdam’s Smart System of Underground Garbage Bins

Liquid-Filled Window Absorbs Heat During the Day, Releases It at Night
2021-11-05: A bit more on underground trash systems:

While the wave of waste tubes hasn’t materialized, Roosevelt Island’s experience gives us reason to believe that the concept is more than a pipe dream. After 45 years, the island’s waste system is still humming along. It breaks down only occasionally, when residents shove a toaster oven or a Christmas tree or some other oversized piece of trash down one of the cutes, according to chief engineer Al Digregorio. He says workers can usually clear those blockages out in a few hours.

Japan phone rests

You placed the receiver atop the cradle, and the weight of the receiver pressed the large button in the center. That activated a wind-up music box. This was a super low-tech way to put a caller on “hold” and treat them to a little ditty while you hustled off to find Matsumoto-san or whomever they were calling for.

Liquid-filled window

When sunlight hits the liquid-filled window, the water begins to absorb the heat, blocking it from entering the room. The hydrogel causes the liquid to turn opaque in sunlight, further reducing thermal transmission. The result is that less energy is required to cool the space. As the sun goes down, the window turns clear again and the heat is released. As a side bonus, the liquid between the panes also doubles as a sound insulator. Testing indicating that it “reduces noise 15% more effectively than double-glazed windows.”