Samsung Design Membership has nurtured the talents of  up-and-coming designers for over 15 years, and manages to consistently deliver award-winning innovation in the process.
One of their latest concepts, which earned them a 2009 Silver International Design Excellence Award, is Hello Haptic — sets of tactile flash cards for the blind.
The cards are categorized according to specific environments, such as “Zoo”, “Beach”, or “Forest”, and include braille on one side and tactile elements on the other, so as to offer visually impaired students a multi-faceted learning experience that stimulates the senses.
[via Yanko Design]

In a move to inject some sustainability into the usually very un-sustainable world of mobile phones, Sprint and Samsung are introducing a handset made of 80% recycled materials. The phone, made from cornbased bio-plastics will donate $2 dollars from its fifty dollar price tag to The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre Program and comes fully equipped with webrowser, GPS, 2 mega pixel camera and stereo Bluetooth.
We are not to sure about making phones out of food, but at least it is free from PVC and other harmful materials found in most other electronics. It’s charger consumes 12 times [...]

Using LED lights attached to the back of sheep, herders in Wales have created a massive LED display on the side of a hill to play PONG, simulate fireworks and even crop together the Mona Lisa.  The extreme sheep LED art project was sponsored by Samsung’s Smart LED technology.

[via swissmiss]

It’s surprising that touch screen vending machines haven’t showed up sooner, but they’re now on their way to a mall near you. Recently debuted at CES, the Sapient designed Samsung uVending machines feature a huge, fully featured touchscreen which uses animations and interactive menus to assist and enrich your soda ordering experience. They are also outfitted with WiFi to alert owners to dwindling supplies, or update digital content. You also may want to think twice about giving the machine a shake to pry loose a hesitant soda, motion sensors are embedded that dole out on-screen warnings – and there’s reportedly [...]

Gadget designers rarely get to think outside the box. Sure, they may get to give things rounded edges or the like, just to spice things up. But it’s the square that fundamentally shapes our technology–from TVs to Kindles.
That is all about to change. In the near future, technology will take on the same twists and curves as our own bodies. Fast Company saw several products from CES as harbingers of the trend, including:

Samsung’s flexible screen/display points the way towards scroll-shaped cellphones–just unroll the screen.
Apple’s new 17-inch MacBook Pro has a lithium battery specially shaped to fit the machine’s innards,  significantly [...]