Ji Lee, Creative Director at Google and designer of the “Bubble Project” (amongst many other things) has re-imagined the chess board. Lee’s version transforms the flat playing surface into 3 dimensional battleground that better visually represents the play taking place.
[Ji Lee via Trendhunter]

In a twist on the age-old practice of artists reclaiming unused and ex-industrial spaces to work in, the Red A.i.R. project is converting former brothels into studios. All this year, Artists-In-Residency In The Redlight are exploring the possibilities of transitory occupations of space within the slowly gentrifying red light district of Amsterdam.
Red Light Art Amsterdam
[via Luxist]

Filmmaker David Lynch discusses how he gathers, and uses ideas (and how they’re like fish).

[via Cultural Fuel]

Using the internet to learn new things is a commonplace practice. But what’s the cutting edge of the internet-education, DIY phenomenon? Cooking, building a car, hacking electronics? How about delivering a baby. Marc Stephens, a naval engineer from Redruth, Cornwall spent a mere 30 minutes watching YouTube videos on the birth process, and was able to successfully use this knowledge to help deliver his premature child.
The Guardian reports:
Feeling nervous about the imminent birth of his child Marc Stephens had a look at childbirth videos on his home computer.
Four hours later his wife, Jo, went into labour three weeks earlier than [...]

Grant McCracken wrote a salient blog post recently that discusses the difficulties of keeping up with all the information there is to keep up with. He voices the need for better “knowledge architecture” – new services that can discover, aggregate, filter and organize information in ways that are relevant, and make sense for individual users.
Grant talks about this need for better knowledge design:
The upshot of this conversation for me was that a market in the information space is emerging.  I won’t pay anything for access to the New York Times.  This is an interesting aggregator, but it’s way too chunky [...]

A small 82cmx82cm square of dirt has been created to represent a “dead pixel” in Google Earth by artist Helmut Smits. He burned out the square from a patch of grass, which would look like a non-functioning pixel at a vertical distance of 1km.
[via Laughing Squid]

Combining the mixtape-making functions of Muxtape, with the up-to-the-second music aggregation powers of Hypemachine, Hypetape aims to make it easy to find and stream exactly the kind of music you want to hear. Hypetape lets users search through the extensive listing of tracks from Hypemachine, and organize them into playlists. The concept is fantastic, and though it’s subject to random file takedowns, it’s useful, and functions pretty well.
Hypetape
[via Lifehacker]

Artist JR, known for his massive photo works, has enveloped an entire Aqueduct in Rio with giant-scale black and white portraits.
[JR via Wooster Collective]

An iPhone can now become a kind of virtual vinyl record with Theodore Watson’s innovative app. His “Spinning Vinyl” program plays a virtual record faster or slower as you spin the whole phone at different speeds. Watch below.
Spinning vinyl ipod app from Theodore Watson on Vimeo
[F.A.T via MAKE]

Philips has produced a fantastic new piece of OLED technology. They’ve created small panels that can instantly transform from illuminated to transparent…

Technology entrepreneur Joi Ito shares some brief but poignant thoughts about the unique opportunities for innovation during a recession.

[via Media Futurist]

Frito-Lay has announced one of their snacks is becoming just a bit more sustainable. Starting in 2010, all of the SunChips multigrain chips will come in fully compostable bags made out of plant-based materials. They claim the packaging will completely decompose in about 14 weeks. Let’s hope they begin using this type of bag for all their snacks.
Frito-Lay Press Release

Clean Technica reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been making headway with their exciting programmable matter project. In a nutshell, programmable matter is a way to create and disassemble solid objects on command – a kind of miracle material that can be instantly molded into anything.
From the DARPA press release:
The five research teams are pursuing a variety of scientific approaches.  The Harvard University team of researchers led by Professor George Whitesides is developing a sort of  “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that acts as a central organizer to encode information and assemble matter.  Professor David R. Liu’s Harvard team [...]

A study from the BI Norwegian School of Management has discovered that illegal music downloaders may not be as detrimental to record companies’ bottom line as previously thought. The research examined the buying habits of 2,000  online music users, and found that those who downloaded tracks for free (both legally and illegally), were 10 times more likely to pay for music. The subjects often said that the freely gotten music was used to inform their subsequent purchases.
[via The Guardian and Ars Technica]
Photo by: Fredrik Persson/Scanpix/PA

McSweeney’s has posted a course syllabus and overview for a fictional class called “Internet-Age Writing”. Prerequisites include LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less, ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking and ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming. While it’s a funny commentary on the changing state of modern communications methods, one can’t help but wonder if this kind of class will eventually become a reality. (Or has it already?)
From the introduction:
Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones [...]