Peel Engineering Company produced 50 of these microcars during the early 1960’s on the Isle of Man in the United Kingdom. They are the smallest cars ever to go into production. It’s got three wheels, one door, a 49cc engine with a three speed manual transmission. A Peel P50 could do 38 mph at max speed and weighed in at 130 lbs with a claimed fuel consumption of 100 miles to the gallon. Kind of amazing. Check out this article about the car in the Daily Mail. There have some great photos.

The next speaker in the David H. Liu Lecture Series in Design at Stanford is Alex Wipperfürth.

The talk will be at 8:00pm on Thursday, May 21st, 2009. It will be in (Braun Hall, Building 320) in Room 105 at Stanford University. Hope to see you there!

Wipperfürth is a partner at Dial House in San Francisco. He is the author of Brand Hijack, and upcoming books, The Co-Creation Myth and The Fringe Manifesto. Dial House is part think-tank and part creative hot shop. The client list is diverse: from fringe (Napster, Doc Martens, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jones Soda, Red Stripe, Altoids) to cutting edge (Current TV, New Yorker Magazine) to blue chip (Diageo, IBM, P&G/Clorox, Toyota, Coca-Cola). Projects range from innovative strategy, innovative research, meaningful creative expressions with DIY production to brand innovation. In earlier work, Wipperfürth had interviewed actual cult members and people in "consumer cults" (like Apple or Harley-Davidson fanatics) and made fascinating insights about their similarities.

Just thinking about a project and quickly found this free online tool by Wise Geek that finds the average color in an image. Seems to be good! I’ve done things like this in MATLAB before, but it’s unnecessarily complicated and Photoshop doesn’t seem to have a good way to do this… please comment if you have a better solution.

The photo here is of the Stanford Solar Car.

Google Image Search has a new feature that lets you filter results by color.

“Volvo 940” goes from ho-hum

to red hot,

just like that.

via The Font Feed

For this upcoming summer, the midway point of my two years of graduate school, I’ll be working near Los Angeles at a company that is probably best known for designing and building the Gossamer Condor and the Gossamer Albatross (shown above). They are human-powered flight vehicles masterminded by the late, great Dr. Paul B. MacCready and made history by successfully completing a fully human-powered flight across the English Channel on June 12, 1979. They’re not doing human-powered flight anymore, but they are getting into some pretty amazing wind-power systems, solar vehicles (including solar flight vehicles), unmanned aerial systems, and electric vehicles and charging systems. Should be a good time!

My amazing friends are working on this amazing blog, Food’lebrities, which mashes up celebrities and menu items. Be sure to leave a “condiment” on your favorite posts.

Pita Gabriel

Quiche Richards

Check out this “record player” iPhone app. The author, Theodore Watson, threw it together in one morning. I really like projects that get the point across quickly. It’s a build-to-think mode and sparks dialogue (like this blog post) that gets people thinking about how to use what’s around them.

At Free Art and Technology, via NOTCOT

On May 6th, Stanford’s d.school is hosting a book launch lecture and reception for Dev Patnaik’s Wired to Care. The book explores the role of empathy and human-centric design principles for driving successful business practice and strategy. Dev Patnaik is an alum of the Stanford Product Design program, founder/principal at Jump Associates, and adjunct professor at Stanford University. I had the pleasure of being in his Needfinding class… one of the results of this class included a drum machine for dogs using the Arduino platform, some piezoelectric sensors, Ardrumo, Garage Band, a MIDI library, and a speaker output. All controlled by a border collie.

RSVP for the launch by May 4th. Lecture and reception at the d.school from 7:00-9:00pm on May 6th.

The next speaker in the David H. Liu Lecture Series in Design at Stanford is Dr. Jon Cagan.

Dr. Cagan is the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s graduate program in Product Development and a distinguished professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering. Cagan has written two fantastic books on the topic of product development: Creating Breakthrough Products and The Design of Things to Come. Both books skillfully navigate the arc from the fuzzy front end of product development all the way up to program approval. The texts also bridge the chasm between qualitative and quantitative values in a way that is actually understandable. His Liu Lecture will be about the emerging research in the creative Design process and the role of emotion in product usage.

The talk will be at 8:00pm on Monday, May 4th, 2009. It will be in Braun Hall (Building 320) in Room 105. Hope to see you there!

Here’s the abstract:

Emerging research is uncovering the cognitive basis of creative design and the emotional basis of product usage. This talk will present studies in both of these areas. From the perspective of how designers create innovative solutions, we will look at a series of cognitive studies that uncover how designers utilize both useful and misleading information while carrying open goals of unsolved design problems. From the perspective of the person using the product, emotion plays a critical role. We will examine new methods to capture aesthetic preferences and agent-based computational tools that use those preferences to guide generation of preferred design forms.