Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Fuel the concerts

As Ottawa's Bluesfest finished with a bang, literally (link) I came up with an idea that really doesnt relate to the stage falling down at all. The idea did however correspond the the festivals constant reminder to the crowd that it is one of the "Greenest" outdoor music festivals in the world. Interesting. It was honestly hard to tell. Apart from the cup suckers, lack of garbage on the ground and references to "less pollution emitting generators" the push to promote its greenly-ness fell relatively flat.
So alas my idea. In an effort to reduce strain on the grid, or fossil fuels needed in the hybrid generators, why not power the festival by (partly) using the crowd! Get the people to feel like they are contributing while just doing exactly what they would do anyway during an outdoor festival... (not drinking by the way)... Walking!
For some time a technology has existed that can harness human weight. Yes, simply stepping on the device will generate electricity. Take a look (here). Now imagine if rolls of this pressure absorbing marvel of engineering could be rolled out in strategic locations during a concert. The jumping, the shifting of weight while you fight to see through the 6ft5 tall guy in front of you and yes even the crowd surfing could all be harnessed. Pair that with letting the crowd know they are making a difference and people will jump and stomp for no other reason than to see what happens!
Even still we could take that thought a step further, these pads could actually be associated with some sort of effect, lighting? louder music? to give the crowd feed back for their actions.

Who knows maybe one day concerts could be literally powered by the fans. Neat concept right?

Here is a picture of something to make the article more interesting visually... its a colouring marker.



Jeff Pinard
ID

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Scissors

Spent the day coming up with a few concepts. I think I am going to revisit this one, I have had so many other ideas already to improve them. Take a look:

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Kúla



So some of you may have seen my previous chair post. After some great suggestions and realizations, it became apparent that the sphere chair design wasn't fully resolved. Even though it was just a concept rendering, realistically something like that would be expensive to produce. So drawing inspiration from the inner bent wood, I came up with the kúla chair.
The intention behind this one was to make it relatively cheap and easy to produce. Two bent plywood (bamboo) legs, two bent metal supports and one formed plastic seat (with ribbing underneath). Idealy the entire thing would be held together by 14 (ish) wing nuts on bolts, thus making it easy to disassemble.
Feel free to comment, I am not entirely sure if something similar already exists on the market, if so please msg me I would love to see how they resolved it!