20 Tech Trends That Will Define 2013, Selected By Frog

December 13th, 2012 Comments Off

From Fast CO, written by FROG:

Yes, it’s already that transitional time when our current year ends and another begins, and today and tomorrow are quickly changing hands. Rather than look back at significant trends of the past 366 days (2012 was a leap year, remember?), we asked a wide variety of technologists, designers, and strategists across Frog’s studios around the world to take a look to the future. The near future, that is. “Near” in that 2013 is not only upon us, but also “near” in that these technologies are highly feasible, commercially viable, and are bubbling up to the surface of the global zeitgeist. We believe you’ll be hearing a lot more about these trends within the next 12 months, and possibly be experiencing them in some form, too.

Here is the summary. Link below to full article at Fast Company Design:

SMARTPHONE ACCESSORIES BECOME SMARTER

WE LOSE CONTROL OF OUR CARS

WE EMBRACE A NEW TYPE OF PATINA

HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION GETS MORE HUMANISTIC

APPS BECOME INVISIBLE

WE FACE MORE TECH DISRUPTION–BY NATURE

DATA ECOLOGY BECOMES MORE DIVERSE

OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR SMARTPHONES GET MORE PHYSICAL

FACES BECOME INTERFACES

AUTOMATED INTELLIGENCE AIDS OUR DIGITAL DOPPELGÄNGERS

WE REACH THE TABLET TIPPING POINT

USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) IS THE FUTURE OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION

THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY COMES OF AGE

RIP, MIX, BURN GETS PHYSICAL

VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING STARTS SMALL

THE DAWN OF ROBOTIC HANDICRAFT (AND THE ARTISANAL HANDSET) ARRIVES

INTERACTION CHOREOGRAPHY GOES SHOPPING

THE ART OF INNOVATION GETS EVEN MORE ARTFUL

SENSORS, SOCIAL NETWORKS CHANGE HEALTH BEHAVIOR, ON A LARGE SCALE

MICRO-NETWORKS RISE

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“Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” Chris Elvidge. NASA Earth Observatory proves this.

December 7th, 2012 Comments Off

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Black Marble – City Lights 2012 [hd animation]

The night side of Earth twinkles with light, and the first thing to stand out is the cities. “Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” asserts Chris Elvidge, a NOAA scientist who has studied them for 20 years.

This new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

The nighttime view in visible light was made possible by the new “day-night band” of Suomi NPP’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. This low-light sensor can distinguish night lights with ten to hundreds of times better light detection capability than scientists had before.

Additional high-res imagery:

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Architizer Blog » A Life In Architecture: Oscar Niemeyer, 1907-2012

December 6th, 2012 Comments Off

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The greatest period of Niemeyer’s career would precede one of its gloomiest. After he assumed the Brazilian presidency, Kubitschek laid out his ambitions to build a new capital city for Brazil. He enlisted Lucio Costa to plan the new city, located further inland and without the heightened geography of Rio, and consulted Niemeyer about crafting Brasília’s institutional buildings. Niemeyer’s designs were to become emblematic of the Modernist utopia, one forged along egalitarian principles that would be conferred upon the city through heroic gestures, cast in concrete. Niemeyer had given form to the new heart of Brazil, and his hopeful, lofty structures speak to a humanistic dimension of Modernism long forgotten. As Niemeyer put it, “Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift.” The aesthetic and social responsibility of building that Niemeyer cultivated at Brasília, and the stark futurism that gave the buildings their socialist space-age aura, would inform his work throughout his career.

Additional photos and overview and Architizer link above.

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BBC News – Oscar Niemeyer, Brazilian architect, dies at 104

December 6th, 2012 Comments Off

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Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed some of the 20th Century’s most famous modernist buildings, has died just before his 105th birthday. He was still working on projects up until early this year.

Full article, obituary, and work at above BBC link.

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‘Heirloomness’, by CW&T, is the one principle that guides everything to own. Here are the objects.

December 5th, 2012 Comments Off

Came across this wonderful site today. The link below, “The Ones”, is a catalog of items that one can pass down to generations. Long lasting items. Good design. From the site:

‘Heirloomness’ is the one principle that guides everything on this list. Is this something we want forever? Is this something that our grandkids could want forever? These are hard, bordering impossible, questions. But let’s step away from external forces that drive current desires and trends and consider the objects we acquire on a generational time scale.

The design is simple, timeless and long-lasting. We want to love it today and forever.

It’s over-engineered to take a beating and age gracefully. We trip, fall, spill and drop things. It’s part of life. Engineer it to account for abuse, misuse and wear.

It’s built with quality in mind, using the right tools and materials. There’s a time and place for every material. But, let’s not kid ourselves, a plastic case with a metallic finish will not perform the same as a piece that’s milled out of a solid block of metal.

The interface is intuitive to use and works as expected. No manuals please. Who reads those anyways?

It’s intuitive to fix if and when it breaks. Even the best designed, accident proofed, over-engineered things eventually break. When they do, we’d like to be able to fix it, with simple tools, and with ease.

Spending a lot of time and effort finding “the ones” made us realize how important this was to us. We started this repository for our reference and we’re hoping you might find it useful too. This is our catalog of the best stuff for us, you and future generations.

“CW&T is an art and design studio. At CW&T, we create multidisciplinary work in collaborative environments where we leverage technology and computing. With the latest tools and processes, we imagine near future possibilities and build them into reality. Our design approach is to create lasting designs while questioning conventional thinking. In our quest to fulfill our goals, we tend to favor minimal aesthetics, intuitive interfaces and over-engineered construction.”

CW&T »

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