I've got an IDEA...

BusinessWeek and IDSA just revealed the 2009 winners of their jointly-held International Design Excellence Awards (aka: IDEA Awards) with the exciting result that one of my designs was selected for an award! I received a Bronze Award for my ecoDeck Sustainable Skimboard in the Student category. As an additional compliment, my project is also featured on the article's cover page as the product to represent the whole body of student winners. The announcement will also be published in the latest hardcopy issue of BusinessWeek magazine. Also of note is a Silver Award given to a design by a fellow Art Center student and personal friend of mine, Juan-David Quiñones. Well-deserved congratulations to him as well. Thank you to everyone who supported and facilitated!

Below are images of the featured web pages, and you can see the whole article at BusinessWeek.com.

Stereo Styrofoam

In keeping with the theme of visualizing everyday phenomenon in new ways, this is another awesome example of acoustic resonance propagating through a medium. In this demonstration, sound energy is manifested in styrofoam chips as patterns on a plate and as standing waves in a tube, respectively. I've seen this put to some great Drum&Bass...amazing!

Fun with Fire and Physics!

I'm on a science kick right now and have either discovered or rediscovered a series of cool ways to visualize sensory phenomenon which otherwise don't have an inherent visual form. Almost as cool as a Ruben Sandwich, a Ruben's Tube is an old school way to visualize sound. Based on Heinrich Ruben's 1904 proof of concept, the idea is simple: pass sounds waves through a tube of flammable medium to see their effect over the length of the combustion. While I try not to make it a habit to get my inspiration from left-over Gen-Xers with bad hair (and probably a sweet '89 Firebird parked out front), this guy's visible pyromania was just too cool to pass up.