Link About It: This Week’s Picks
Best-yet cases for iPads and iPhones, auto-tattoos, Slinkachu’s new work and more in our weekly web round-up
1. Concrete Ocean
Concrete Ocean, a solo exhibition of London-based artist Slinkachu’s miniature installations, continues to explore themes that “reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city.”
2. Traumgedanken
Budding designer Maria Fischer’s thesis project on dreams, Traumgedanken, uses string to weave together literary, philosophical, psychological and scientific texts for a tangible interpretation of how “pieces of reality are assembled to build a story.”
3. Auto Ink
Artist Chris Eckert put together Auto Ink, an interactive sculpture consisting of an automated tattooing machine. If you dare to insert your arm and flip the switch, the machine will automatically assign you a religion and needle a symbol associated with it into your skin.
4. IPad 2 Smart Cover
Sure the new iPad ushers in just enough bells and whistles to rev up sales again, but we think the way the slim all-in-one cover remedies some of the device’s biggest form-factor problems is the real step forward.
5. Non-Sign II
Reduced to negative space framed by a haze of blackened stainless steel sticks, this poetic vision of a billboard by Seattle’s artsiest architects Lead Pencil Studio continues to make the Internet rounds for good reason.
6. Brit Insurance Design Awards 2011
Phaidon shows highlights from the fourth annual Brit Insurance Design Awards, a culling of the design world’s best additions in the categories of architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport. Flipboard took home the Interactive Award this year, and the highly-addictive game Angry Birds got a nod for its entertaining design.
7. TCase
LifeProof’s iPhone 4 Tcase is perfect for the techie adventurer. Designed to be super shock-, water- and dirt-resistant, the case can withstand falls from nearly seven feet and can survive the same depth underwater. While you can’t talk while swimming, an attachment connects headphones through a water seal so you can sing along to Adele in the tub without worrying about trying to save your device with rice.
8. Secret Stash Project
If you missed this when it made the web rounds the first time, this pretty video outlines design student Yiting Cheng’s “Secret Stash Project”. Chang takes everyday objects and modifies them to conceal anything from cash to a laptop, essentially hiding everything in plain sight with secret compartments meshing seamlessly into the environment.
