Spain Tower of power, the solar power (by CNN)

A quick review on the large thermo-solar power plant in Spain. And also a comparision between thermo-solar power generation and photo voltaic harvesting.

Augmenting Reality | Product Design and Development

this is a sample of the features in the next generation cars, where Augmented reality it's included as a part of driving experienced

Augmenting Reality | Product Design and Development

What we can lean from what we have forgot

The great tragedy of our era will not be ecological, but ethnographical

''...Biologist suggest that perhaps 20 percent of mammals , 11 percent of birds, and 5 percent of fish are threatened, and the botanist anticipate the loss of 10 percent of floristic diversity, linguist and anthropologist today bear witness the imminent disappearance of half the extant languages of the world.'' '' Of the 7000 languages spoken today, fully half...will disappear within our lifetime.''

-Wade Davis. The Wayfinders, Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world

The Ethnosphere, humanity's greatest legacy is in extintion danger. With the disappearence of the half of our own diversity we will loss also the half of our history, of our spirituality, and the half of our knowledge on wich we can stand upond to face the challenges of the future. Challenges like the climate change and the lost of biodiversity, because when these voices fade out it will fade away too the cultures wich have develop and conserve the most extensive knowledge about how to live in a true and simbiotic relation with nature.

the next video it's a sample of a lecture given by Wade Davis, for the complete lecture clickHERE

Artificial foot recycles energy ...as a silicon gun!!

Probably the engineers from the University of Michigan weren't thinking about this when they came with the idea of storage energy through the same kind of mechanical device that makes the silicon gun works (looj at the hhel clutch in the upper picture), but the design analogy it's perfect. This hight-tech electromechanical prosthetic feet works (in the mechanical part) with the same basic principle that a silicon gun, a clever solution for a very complex problem and a really good sample of analogous thinking in the design process.

for the complete article with all the explanation follow this

for a video of the device working folow this

and for the paper who explain... everything follow this

Joshua Prince Ramus

Everyone that has work in theater know the face of the building administrator when you tell him that you need to put some screw in his floor or do anything that may be perceibe not quite as a damage, but a modification.

Well there is an Architect that includes that face in the design process of a new theather house in Dallas. This guy, against the idea of architecture based on self expression, take the function of the building and put it in the center of the process, together with the notion of ''architectural manifestations'' should follow the position taked by owner, the user and the designer of the building at the beggining of the design process. That is a quite interesting approach (in times were the magic pen of ''starchitects'' fly full of petrodollars) that leads to a very funtional, responsive and striking architecture.

A virtual view of Haiti's earthquake

I Have found a very powerfull tool to realize the scale of the devastation after the last big earthquake ocurred the afternoon of the Tuesday 12th of January in Haiti. This map provides information in several layers, including one that shows a detailed damage assessment.

(bing maps may be required)

http://www.virtualdisasterviewer.com/vdv/index.php?selectedEventId=7

The view from the ground

How to help through America solidaria foundation

Mirror system, or the empathy mechanism in our brains

Recently I came across with a video that introduces the idea that we have a neuronal mechanism that allows us to share the experience of other people just by look at them or heard them. This mechanism it's call the Mirror System. This neuronal device, that don't depend on any specific brain structure, was first found on monkeys as an unexpected neuronal response when some scientific team in Parma were studying the response of some neural groups related with conscious movement. The exercise was grab a piece of food, when the monkey grab it the neurons ''turn on'', the surprise was when the exactly group of neurons also ''turn on'' when the monkey saw one person of the team grab the food.

That found opens a complete new research branch in neuroscience and until now it has been prove that this system has incidence in motor, sensitive and symbolic system. This means that through the ''mirror system'' it can be trigger motion, sensitive and emotional responses in the subject that look or hear an action. This is why we make funny faces when we see a football player get kick by another, or why movies make us cry.

The mirror system it's the only mechanism that has proven to be fundamentally social, that means that it is a specific device to learn and behave socially. The thing that I see as a relevant issue here is that when you are worried about to understand human behaviour (like Design as a discipline it is) you have to be conscious about the importance of firsthand experience and above all, of observation; because this means that through experience and observe the human behavior you can easily address gestures, emotions and comprehensions that can drive conceptually and formally the develop of a project.

The relevance and functions of the mirror system go, of course, far beyond the field of design and can give us a knowledge greater than confirm a fact well know by experience (observation and firsthand experience are our best tool for design) and it can put us in the real and deep understanding of human behaviour.

more info:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html