Design

Steve Jobs' yacht, a floating goddess of a dinghy dubbed the Venus, was freed from impound in the Netherlands in time for Christmas. It's a typical feel-good holiday story, except that it involves a dispute over an extravagant boat and millions of dollars between the estate of an American icon and a renowned French designer.

Apparently when superstars of their respective industries get together to collaborate on hundred million dollar projects like the Venus, they don't necessarily sign very explicit contracts.… Read more

What are you willing to sacrifice to make your iPhone really stand out from the crowd? How about the use of its camera? OK. How about your dignity, too? Great, I have just the case for you. It's the Lobster Mobile Telephone Case from Noddy Boffin.

Way back in 1938, Salvador Dali created a piece known as the "lobster telephone." It involves a lobster attached to the handset of a rotary-dial phone. Flash-forward to 2012 and Australian designer Elliot Gorham channels the ghost of Dali into an accessory for modern smartphones. … Read more

Who needs an Xbox when you can just put on a sweatshirt and thrash your arms about? That's the idea behind Woven, a wearable gaming platform by two Dutch designers.

Christiaan Ribbens and Patrick Kersten, recent graduates of the Utrecht School of the Arts, embedded a sweater and pair of jeans with a small Bluetooth module, speakers, motion sensors, shake motors, a three-color LED screen, and other gizmos to create their concept gaming platform. A trio of LilyPad Arduino microcontrollers process the data and operate the LEDs (and are, incidentally, washable). … Read more

Bike riding is already a more environmentally conscious pursuit than driving around in a car, but you can really take it to the green extreme with a bike made from 100-percent-recycled aluminum. ReCycle is working at raising funds on Kickstarter to put its first full run of bikes into production.

There are some nice design tweaks that make the ReCycle bikes stand out. The usual seat tube support is gone. Two of the models have belts rather than chains. The eco-friendly aspects go beyond the use of recycled aluminum. The bikes also have saddles and grips made from cork. … Read more

Amazon has been granted a patent for protecting gadgets from accidents by using tiny airbags and even jets of air.

The patent application made waves immediately after it was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last August. Amazon filed for it in February 2010 and was granted it today, Engadget notes.

At its core, the patent details a system that uses your gadget's built-in gyroscope, accelerometers, camera, and other onboard sensors to figure out if the device has gone airborne. If so, a system can keep the device from getting too badly damaged by changing its … Read more

Let's say you just bought a 6-foot Christmas tree and want to decorate it just so. According to a quick treegonometric calculation, you should use approximately 30 feet of tinsel. (I got that number, incidentally, by multiplying pi by 13, dividing that number by 8, and then multiplying that figure by the tree's height in centimeters.)

Didn't study treegonometry in high school? That's because it just got invented by members of the University of Sheffield's SUMS math society. Two students at the U.K. school set out to calculate the amount of baubles, tinsel, and lights needed to give a tree just the right amount of decorative zing.

Their math might not add up to anything worthy of complex analysis, but it's a festive and amusing idea. "The formulas took us about two hours to complete," 20-year-old student Nicole Wrightham said in a release. "We hope the formulas will play a part in making Christmas that little bit easier for everyone." … Read more

Regardless of my clothing brand preference, I can't help but get when excited major players in fashion tease a future filled with techy clothes that change color or size with a flick of the wrist.

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Polo shirt in 2013, Lacoste collaborated with ad agency Mnstr on a video that envisions a future in which the high-end shirts contain some extraordinary technology. … Read more

We've seen transforming robots before, and I'm not talking about anything related to Hasbro.

Researchers from MIT are among many engineers and tinkerers trying to design robots that perform different functions by changing their shape or appearance.

Japan-based Brave Robotics has designed a 1/12-scale RC car that can transform into a humanoid robot. It can shuffle around, grab footage with its Wi-Fi camera, and even fire little missiles from its arms. … Read more

Picture eliminating camera shake with what looks like an old film canister. Japanese brand Gizmon, which brought us the quirky iCA case, has released a remote shutter that looks like a used roll of 35mm film.

Hidden within the "film cartridge" is a retractable cable that plugs into the headphone jack of any iOS device, with a button on top of the canister acting as the shutter button. This makes the remote shutter useful for long-exposure shots or even self-portraits. The button can also be used to start or stop video recordings. … Read more