Maker Faire Detroit opens tomorrow [Saturday] - the first ever held in America's cradle of industry and what many view today as a post-industrial laboratory for the future.

The two day event will be packed with inspiration and enjoyment for people of all ages and walks of life, including Maker Faire favorite The Life-size Mousetrap, hot-rodded Power Wheel racing, demonstrations on everything from circuit-bending to screen printing, rocket building and cheese making, and lots of robots. Lots and lots of robots...

It's a Friday, so I feel free to rail out at what I see as ridiculous or wasteful design, especially projects that get tons of blog attention for being "stunning." I don't know what Colier Sparkling Wine's eco-credentials are, but this packaging can't be green; the bizarre container the bottle comes in, "targeted to [sic] business women [sic]," looks like a carbon-fiber egg.

For God's sake look at the size of this thing. Imagine handing this big black egg to a female executive in congratulations. If someone handed this to me as a gift I'd have them removed from the premises. And what's with the egg metaphor? Also what are you supposed to do with the egg after you take the bottle out, use it as a purse? Keep it around to show guests? "Look, it splits down the middle!" This thing doesn't make any, freaking, sense!

In office furniture design we've seen tons of would-be successors to the cubicle, but nothing's really taken root yet. The latest to throw their hat into the ring is Italian furniture manufacturer Tecno, with their Red-Dot-Award-winning Beta workplace, designed by Pierandrei Associati:

Beta is a fresh furniture system that addresses the needs of the creative office. Using flexible system elements, offices can be creatively reconfigured and redesigned, while constantly adjusting to the user's individual work style. The starting point of this innovative concept was the idea that a progressive office should provide space for working on both an individual and a team basis as well as space for relaxation, while fostering the shared use of knowledge. Thus beta is not just a simple furniture system, but rather an atmospheric work environment.

At press time Pierandrei Associati's website was down, but Contemporist has got tons-o'-shots of the Beta system up.

Photographer Sergey Larenkov uses computational rephotography (as shown above and explained here by Wired) to overlay extant WWII-era photographs on their corresponding modern settings. The results are both spooky and stunning:

The shots really do have to be seen large, so check out Larenkov's LJ page for the rest of 'em.

via gizmodo

More proof that it takes (x) years to make an overnight success: Karlsruhe-based communications designer Felix Vorreiter invented the txtBOMBER back in 2005, but it's just in the past few days that it's exploded onto the blogosphere.

What is it? It's basically a handheld skywriter that prints on walls using an Arduino processor and seven markers. Pretty damn rad!

TEXTBOMER from H@nnes at HfG on Vimeo.