Elsewhat

I’m planning a solo trip to Nee York City this week, and on my list of activities is visiting the Brooklyn-based museum dedicated to Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. As well as being an artist and designer (he designed this iconic coffee table) Noguchi was a frequent collaborator with Buckminster Fuller, who has appeared on this blog numerous times. Noguchi worked on the Dymaxion Car, which was Fuller’s somewhat ill-fated concept car which never saw wide production.

Pictured here is a fountain from Noguchi’s Expo 70′ installation. Photos via Noguchi’s archive.

My day job as a designer of Mac apps gives me a special fondness for computer concepts. This is a little-known Apple prototype from the 80’s which was a candidate to be a new platform alongside, or instead of, the Mac. Inspired by a bookshelf, “This concept envisioned a computer that would expand with the needs of the user, through the use of modular components”.

The user would add modules depending on what they needed to do, like disk, drives, storage, video cards, or specialized components. Modular designs often work out better in theory than in practice, and it’s likely that in this case getting all the pieces to work with each other would have been a technical nightmare.

Read more at 512px →

Via Daring Fireball