When I was younger I would occasionally catch a show on PBS imported from Canada called the Red Green Show.  I’m not really sure what it was about exactly, but it featured a gruff, scratchy-voiced Canadian named Red Green, who attempted to solve all of his problems with duct tape.  All of them.  For instance, I seem to recall an episode in which Red Green taped the bumper back on his van when it fell off, and he probably used the same roll to install a basketball hoop in his backyard, albeit temporarily – the …

Most of the time reading ebooks on my phone or tablet makes me happy as a lark, and I love that these devices can do a million things AND store all my books. In fact, there is only one circumstance related to the consumption of ebooks that prevents me from skipping about gaily with a song on my lips: reading books on my phone makes me irritatingly pale.  First, may I say that I am aware that the sun is evil and that reading by the pool without wearing copious …

When I think about a gas mask, for some reason my mind flits to a memory of a series of drawings by British sculptor Henry Moore, which I encountered at the Hirshorn while wandering through the Smithsonian one afternoon during college. The London Underground functioned as a shelter during WWII, and Moore made a series of dark gray moody drawings that convey his experiences sleeping in the tunnels along with thousands of other Londoners at the height of the Blitz.  I’m not really sure if any of the drawings actually depicted people wearing gas masks, but that feeling …

It’s always a shock to find out that something you thought you made up is actually (or at least mostly) true.  Take the post I wrote for April Fool’s Day about a new plastic made from pulverized Tulip leaves: I thought that heating and then pulverizing plant fibers into a fine powder and suspending them in a polymer matrix to make a super-strong material was a crazy idea of my own making that sounded faintly feasible.  As it turns out, Brazilian researchers at Sao Paulo State University are at this very moment working on a new plastic …

Most buildings don’t fly – well, I suppose that somewhere there may be some that do – but for the most part our built environment tends to touch down in one place and stay there.  In contrast, airplanes carry large groups of people at high speed, hurtling through the air over great distances; and the design of a plane must overcome a host of messy, complicated issues relating to flight with which your house or office building will never contend. Modern airplanes, like modern buildings, are functional and getting the job done, but I think …

In the early 1600’s, the Dutch found themselves completely overcome by Tulip mania. Demand for these perennial flowers skyrocketed to the point where you could have fed six modest families for thirty seven years on what some people paid for a bulb.  People were making fortunes trading rare species.  Had the flower joined Twitter, it would have made Justin Bieber look profoundly unpopular.  But within a short period of time the “tulip bubble” burst, leaving fields of flowers to rot and leaving many merchants as ruined as victims of a …

In ninth grade English class I was forced to read a book called Frankenstein, which I found horrifying not only because it chronicled the slow march to destruction of a hideous, emotionally overwrought monster created out of various bits and pieces of the recently deceased, but also because the denouement takes place up at the north pole. In my imagination the north pole is bitterly cold and dark, full of craggy icebergs, ancient snow, and super predators including walruses with pointy tusks, hungry polar bears, and ferocious cold-adapted velociraptors.

Image courtesy mirror.uncyc.org
In the case of Frankenstein’s monster, manufacturing a …

Sometimes I think that discarded plastic bags have the same kind of dangerous beauty as poisonous tree frogs, toxic waste, or Courtney Love. Have you ever spotted a lone grocery store bag tumbling down the road or lodged in the topmost branches of a tree? They tend to billow and pulse with currents of air, and to produce subtle crackling noises like a slow-burning fire. But most of the time I don’t feel poetic, and it just seems like trash is everywhere around us and I grow disheartened.

Image courtesy dartfrog.co.uk
As it turns out, there …

When you’re a designer, having problems can be a good thing. Well, I suppose I ought to be clear that I am talking about certain kinds of problems (for example, not even one of Jay-Z’s 99 problems would qualify). FORM US WITH LOVE, a design collective based in Sweden, turned a problem they were having with an echoing studio space into a partnership with a woodwool cement manufacturer. Träullit is a 20-man factory located in Österbymo, “little more than a fleck on the map between Stockholm and Malmö” and it’s the only manufacturer of woodwool cement …

Isn’t it delightful when materials demonstrate unexpected capabilities? It pleased me to no end to discover that plastic, which is normally such a poor conductor of electricity that it is used to insulate copper wires, can practically lead Beethoven’s Ninth under the right conditions. The feeling is similar to what I imagine I’d experience upon finding out that a block of cheddar cheese can be MacGyvered into a supercomputer.

Image courtesy www.samcooks.com
Australian researchers at the University of Queensland and UNSW School of Physics have managed to manufacture cheap, strong, flexible and conductive plastic films by placing a thin film of metal onto a …