Helsinki named World Design Capital!

Congratulations!

They call it a mobile office. I call it a giant pop up!

And that's a good thing. I saw this, and my childhood fantasies just went on hyperdrive!



The "Pop Up" office is created by Liddy Scheffknecht and Armin B. Wagner. It fold up into one panel, and you can take it anymore. It doesn't look like it's strong enough, though, but looks fun nevertheless.

Source.

Adults may be proned to Visual Illusion more than children.

Sometimes seeing means deceiving before believing, depending on your age. Children and adults size up objects differently, giving youngsters protection against a visual illusion that bedevils their elders, a new study suggests.

This unusual triumph of kids over grown-ups suggests that the brain’s capacity to consider the context of visual scenes, and not just focus on parts of scenes, develops slowly, say psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland and his colleagues. Even at age 10, children lack adults’ attunement to visual context, Doherty’s team concludes in a paper published online November 12 in Developmental Science.

As a result, visual context can be experimentally manipulated to distort adults’ perception of objects’ sizes. But Doherty’s group finds that children, especially those younger than 7, show little evidence of altered size perception on a task called the Ebbinghaus illusion.

“When visual context is misleading, adults literally see the world less accurately than they did as children,” Doherty says.

This pattern holds for Scottish children and adults in the new study as well as for Japanese children and adults who participated in other investigations conducted by Doherty’s team.


Some researchers argue that East Asians focus broadly on the context of what they see while Westerners focus narrowly on central figures. Doherty says the new findings instead indicate that adults in both Scotland and Japan can’t help but track visual context, although this tendency was stronger in the Japanese adults.

Other investigators have noted that children with autism don’t succumb to visual size illusions, consistent with the idea that autism involves an excessive focus on details. But visual context largely eludes all young children, not just those with autism, Doherty asserts.

Even if the new findings hold up, it’s still possible that further research will show that children with autism develop a susceptibility to size illusions more slowly than those without it, remarks psychologist Danielle Ropar of the University of Nottingham in England.

Psychologist Carl Granrud of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley calls the new study convincing but “somewhat surprising.” Children exhibit sensitivity to visual context on some other visual tasks, he says, such as one in which two equal-sized horizontal lines are perceived as differing in length when flanked by diagonal lines.

Earlier research has yielded conflicting evidence that children fall prey to the Ebbinghaus illusion, partly because of weaknesses in study designs, Doherty says.

His team studied 151 children, ages 4 to 10, recruited from a Scottish primary school and nursery school. Another 24 volunteers, ages 18 to 25, were college students.

Participants viewed a series of images containing pairs of orange circles in which one circle was 2 percent to 18 percent larger than the other. An experimenter asked participants to point to the circle that “looked bigger.”

Control images showed only two orange circles. In other images, each orange circle was surrounded by gray circles intended either to hinder or aid accurate size perception.

Misleading images showed the smaller orange circle surrounded by even smaller gray circles to boost its apparent size. Large gray circles surrounding the larger orange circle were intended to shrink its apparent size.

In helpful images, large gray circles surrounded the smaller orange circle to make it appear smaller than it actually was. Small circles surrounded the larger orange circle to magnify its apparent size.

Four-year-olds correctly identified the larger circle in 79 percent of control images. That figure rose with age, reaching 95 percent in adults.

For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.

Source: Wired Science

UP AME update: A more detailed map

Again, it's this Saturday, November 28, 2009 in A Venue hall.

Pre-sale tickets are P90. Get them now~!

Design comments

So here are some designs and my take on each of them.



Chris Duffy's chair that seems to defy gravity. At first take, you'll notice that this chair doesn't have any back legs, and yet it's still standing. But if you do a double take and notice that the shadow itself is part of the chair (Woopsie. Did I just spoil you?) It's a really fun furniture to...scare your friends, maybe. Source.



Shrub Tables by Zhili Liu. I think that this set is fine and all, but what really took me was this picture:



I know it doesn't have anything to do with design, but isn't it that in making a prototype, proper protection is a must? Then again, this also tells something about the welder's resourcefulness...Source



Oaza Zdravlja Pharmacy by Karim Rashid. First words that came into my brain was "BUBBLEGUM DRUGS!!!"

Yes, that's a pharmacy. I'm unsure about this design, firstly because it's inappropriate for the function of the establishment (drugstore). The kids would prolly take it as a candy store instead of a drugstore. Source.

And last but not the least...





Cellulose Meeting Pods by Paul Coudamy. I give it an A for functionality, but a C on design. Well, it looks like a makeshift house for the homeless. Give it a little color, at least, so the meeting experience will be a bit...memorable.

Oh, and I think this will be perfect for a small study group. Source

Best Plurk Layouts for 2009

See full list.



Yes, I have a plurk account. Hahaha.

Finally found that Lady Gaga vid!

...where she's wearing some crazy pair of shoes:


Here it is:




For more information, you can go to that post (already edited because I already found it).

Wallpapers are not so boring anymore

Remember when I put up a post about some wall treatments that one can do in their home some days ago? Well, here's another interesting take on wall treatments. It's decorative and functional as well. It's a wallpaper design by Kicki Edgren Nyborg (hm, last name rhymes with Cyborg. Interesting).








Source.

The Art of Tim Burton (Standard and Deluxe Edition) is now taking pre orders!

The Art of Tim Burton is the definitive compilation of forty years of Tim Burton's artistry, including film concepts and hundreds of illustrations from his personal archives, edited under the creative guidance of Burton himself. This comprehensive 434 page book is grouped into thirteen chapters that examine common themes in Burton's work, from his fascination with clowns to his passion for misunderstood monsters, to his delight in the oddities of people. Many of Burton's friends and collaborators offer their thoughts, insight and anecdotes about Tim Burton's style and artistic approach to life.




Artwork from the following films and projects are included in this book:
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride (both 2005)
Big Fish (2003)
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Sleepy Hollow, (1999)
Mars Attacks! (1996)
Ed Wood (1994)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Batman Returns (1992)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Family Dog (1987)
Batman (1989)
Beetlejuice (1988)
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
Frankenweenie (1984)
Vincent (1982)
Hansel & Gretel (1982).

The book also contains additional drawings from his illustrated book of poetry The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997), and from The World of Stainboy web shorts (2000).

You can arrange for your pre-orders in Steel Publishing.
Official Site of Tim Burton

AME no Jidai

Again, advertising the UP AME's anime fair for this year.

AME no Jidai. November 28, 2008. A-Venue Hall, Makati.