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Advanced Gadgetry: Milan Design Week |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Smart Design
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Friday, 25 April 2008 |
I've been splitting my time this week between San Francisco and Milan, which is exactly as complicated as it sounds. Luckily, I have my Nightcrawler 3000 Teleportation System, which at least makes things speedy. Still beta testing, though, and there are some bugs. On my third return trip, I somehow wound up at the bottom of a commercial trout pond in East Lansing, Michigan. Very difficult to explain yourself in a situation like that.
I was in SF for the Web 2.0 Expo, but I also wanted to hang around
Milan a bit more after last week's fabulous Milan Design Week. This is
the place to be if you're a serious gadget freak, which of course I --
unrepentantly, gloriously -- am. Milan is the fashion capitol of the
world, and that counts for industrial design, too. Here you'll find the
crème de la crème of the design world, or whatever the Italian
equivalent of that is.
 My two favorite items were gadgets on a slightly larger scale. Myers
Motors' "No More Gas (NmG)" electric car looks very promising. It can
reach 75 mph on electricity alone, and it looks rather frickin' boss,
too. The Myers folks would prefer you call their one-seater a personal
electric vehicle ("car" is becoming a prejudicial term in green
circles, evidently), and in any case the NmG is classified as a
motorcycle by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The second doohickey I particularly liked is one of those ideas where
you wonder why no one thought of it before. The economically named
"Light Wind" is simply a wind-powered outdoor lamp for the backyard.
Simple. Genius. A quick scan of the patent databases shows there is at
least one variant on this idea already on the books in the U.S. Damn.
For a nice roundup of other designs and prototypes on display this year
in Milan (with exactly 2,177 photos), click on over to designboom.com.
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