Piet Hein Drink Cooler

It’s a stone, it’s an egg, it’s… actually a sort of metal ice cube designed to chill your drinks without the diluting effect that ice has. The Piet Hein Drink Cooler is made of seamless stainless steel and has a liquid core, which hardens when the egg is frozen and allows the cooler to actually cool your drink.

Read it in full on Luxist

Audiopad

Audiopad is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music. One can pull sounds from a giant set of samples, juxtapose archived recordings against warm synthetic melodies, cut between drum loops to create new beats, and apply digital processing all at the same time on the same table. Audiopad not only allows for spontaneous reinterpretation of musical compositions, but also creates a visual and tactile dialogue between itself, the performer, and the audience.

Read it in full on James Patten

plen: the rollerskating robot

PLEN, the Desktop Hobby Robot is a little (9-inch tall) robot from Japan which is capable of balancing itself on a mini-skateboard or to skate on its own included rollerskates.

Read it in full on technabob

Bone furniture

If evolution could create a chair…
Trees have the ability to add material where strength it is needed. But bones also have the ability to take away material where it is not needed. With this knowledge the International Development Centre Adam Opel GmbH, a part of General Motors Engineering Europe created a dynamic digital tool to copy these ways of constructing used for optimizing car parts. In a way it quite precisely copies the way evolution constructs. I didn’t use it to create the next worlds perfect chair but as a high tech sculpting tool to create elegant shape with a kind of legitimacy.

Read in full on Joris Laarman