Fast Company

The Boy Scouts Vote To Allow Gay Youth

Zak Stone — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:30:39 GMT

But adult gay scouts are still banned.

With a vote this afternoon, the Boy Scouts of America made official a policy that’s been in the work for months: gay youth will no longer be excluded from the troop. As for gay adults, they’ll still have to sit on the sideline.

This, of course, causes a problem for all those gay youth who will one day grow up and become gay adults. Reuters reports that:

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Tracking: Drones And The Law

Neal Ungerleider — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:39:11 GMT

Armed drones abroad and autonomous commercial and law enforcement aircraft at home are entangled in ever-changing legal issues. Here is Fast Company's look at the evolving legal aspects, and what they mean for the future.

6:15 p.m., 05/23/2013

Obama's Drone Policy Speech

In a historic sea change, President Barack Obama redefined the United States' military drone policy and set new parameters for the use of unmanned armed aircraft abroad. Bluntly put, limits were placed on the country's sprawling drone warfare program. Responsibility for most drone attacks will shift from the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, where a somewhat more public level of checks and balances will change the trajectory and timbre of America's drone warfare efforts.

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Can This Sleek Lighter Challenge The Zippo?

Sammy Medina — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:30:00 GMT

Alessi’s new Sushi lighter is at home both in your pocket and your kitchen.

Design is a search to perfectly integrate form, function, and meaning. A single design can take years of iterations and refinements and still may never embody that ideal. But if it becomes iconic--think the Coca-Cola bottle or, for our purposes, the Zippo pocket lighter--it ceases to be in flux and moves beyond time and style.

But, and sooner or later, change needs to be introduced--either directly injected into the design itself, or at the very least, by admitting alternative forms into the cycle. As every designer knows, neither is easy to pull off. Especially the latter: Exactly how do you go about making something that aims to displace or rethink an icon?

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Hop On Prague’s New Love Train To Find A Date

Ariel Schwartz — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:00:26 GMT

The city is planning to introduce cars for single people, in an attempt to get their young people having babies.

Prague has one of the most heavily used public transport systems on the planet; most local commuters use the system four times a day. At the same time, fewer women in the Czech Republic are having children, and the marriage rate in the country has dropped dramatically since 1970. Clearly, a love train is needed to make things right.

Ropid, a local transport company in Prague, is launching a real-life "love train" where single commuters can have awkward conversations away from the judging eyes and ears of regular commuters. From the International Business Times:

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Farewell, It’s Been A Privilege

Cliff Kuang — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:45:00 GMT

Co.Design’s founding editor bids adieu.

After three-and-a-half years as founding editor of Co.Design, I’m departing to pursue another opportunity. But it’s just me leaving. Co.Design’s talented staff, which has made this site what it is day after day, is ready to take it to the next level.

From the outset, Co.Design was built upon a two-part strategy: To provide cutting-edge thinking, ideas, and inspirations to a talented audience of designers shaping the future, but also--and perhaps more importantly--to raise design’s profile in the broader conversation about where our culture is today. Put another way, we want to serve people who have the word "designer" in their job title but also the broader audience of people who, in myriad different ways, are creators and designers in their own right.

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Watch Musical Water Dance Inside A Bottle Cap

Mark Wilson — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:15:00 GMT

A simple DIY rig becomes a beautiful, interactive exploration of music flowing through water.

Amongst all the CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the visual that’s etched most deeply into my memory is a simple glass of water. As the tyrannosaurus loomed closer, ripples in the water’s surface grew larger. We couldn’t see the monster yet, but this simple image demonstrated how outmatched the puny humans were about to be.

Sonic Water, by Sven Meyer & Kim Pörksen, is a flowing, undulating art installation that explores the same phenomenon--cymatics (or the study of vibration)--as the Spielberg classic. Though in Sonic Water, the dinosaurs have been replaced by music. And music is a stand-in for the most primal, sonic building blocks of the universe.

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Summer Heat Is Going To Make New York Deadly

Zak Stone — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:57 GMT

The amount of people dying from heat-related deaths in the city is going to rise rapidly thanks to climate change.

Summer heat waves can transform East Coast cities likes New York and Washington, DC, into humid, odiferous swamps of misery and stagnation. But with climate change conspiring toward increasingly hotter summers, New York and other towns won’t just be more unpleasant; they’ll be deadlier.

As The Guardian reported:

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Gorgeously Complex 3-D Printed Sculptures You Can Eat

Sammy Medina — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

The Sugar Lab makes geometric confections, fittingly, from sugar.

Much has been made about the game-changing uses and applications for 3-D printing. The technology has made headway in every field you can think of--from prosthetics and bionic organs to design and architecture to, yes, functioning firearms. There have also been plenty of printing experiments with food, an idea not everyone finds so appealing. Printers can be modified to print both cooked and raw foods, whose shape can even be customized.

It was just announced that NASA is investing in 3-D printer food prototypes that use “cartridges” of oils and protein-enriched powders to print meals for astronauts. In the coming weeks, the developers behind the system will attempt to print their first savory food--a freshly “baked” pizza. But what’s for dessert?

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The Fifty Shades Factor: Amazon Gives Fanfic Authors A Shot At A Publishing Payday With Kindle Worlds

Chris Baker — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:48:04 GMT

Recognizing that the world of fan fiction has produced a bona fide blockbuster, Amazon is now turning fanfic from a grey market to a sanctioned revenue opportunity with Kindle Worlds.

The site FanFiction.net, one of the larger outposts of amateur storytelling based on pop culture franchises, lists 25,000 separate contributions based on The Vampire Diaries alone. All of those works were created out of sheer love for the characters and premises of the books. Since fan fiction is not offered for sale, the copyright holders behind Diaries and many other works have turned a blind eye.

But that’s about to change.

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Is “I Wish My Son Had Cancer” Appropriate Ad Copy?

Morgan Clendaniel — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:29:19 GMT

An ad for a rare disease makes an uncomfortable statement.

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The Hilarious, Befuddling Charts Of The U.S. Congress

Morgan Clendaniel — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:26:01 GMT

Floor Charts catalogs the visual aids--good, bad, and ugly--that drive Congressional debate. Okay, mostly they’re just bad and ugly.

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These Deadly Weapons Are Made Entirely From Plants

Teressa Iezzi — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:24:33 GMT

What if our instruments of violence were actually made of something a little more friendly? Harm-Less is a project that reimagines firearms as parts of the natural world.

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Building A Social Network For Clean Water With Apps And Cheap Tests

Ben Schiller — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:59 GMT

The app mWater provides low-cost water tests to people in the developing world and then crowdsources their results, creating definitive maps of where water is safe to drink.

John Feighery became interested in water testing while working for NASA. Spaceships have sophisticated systems for recycling condensates and urine, and it was Feighery’s job to ensure that what astronauts drank was safe.

When it comes to water testing, a space station isn’t so different from, say, rural Africa. Both places lack expensive equipment for analysis and storing samples. So, Feighery is transferring a little of the space program to Planet Earth.

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Renovation On The Sly: Same Footprint, Twice The Volume

Margaret Rhodes — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Christopher Polly’s eco-renovation of the Cosgriff House is a study in thrift.

Families grow and need space to stretch out. Just not in the last few years; economic woes halted people’s enthusiasm for renovation projects. That’s poised to change: Home improvement spending is expected to bounce back, post-recession, at the rate of about 17% this year. In response, architects are being calculated about what they propose: renovations that are beautiful but easy on the wallet.

Christopher Polly's overhaul of the Cosgriff house doubled the size of the property--but is neither a gut renovation nor a showy extension onto the original home. To turn the two-bedroom, one-living-room house into one with double of each, the architect, based in Sydney, Australia, decided to insert a living room on the ground floor, where a foundation didn’t exist. Intent on preserving the original shell of the home, Polly decided to embed the new room into the original footprint.

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You’ve Shipped Your Pants. Now Get Big Gas Savings At Kmart

Jennifer Miller — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:48:31 GMT

Kmart follows up its viral blockbuster with more ass-focused wordplay.

Remember when Kmart instructed you to Ship Your Pants and created a viral sensation?

Well, now the retailer and agency Draftfcb are telling you the truth about your Big Ass…Savings, that is. This new ad for Kmart brings back the funny-sounding word humor, this time emphasizing how funny the term "big gas" sounds in different accents.

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A Line Of Cards Tells Millennials Living With Mom & Dad To GTFO

Teressa Iezzi — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:00:46 GMT

A campaign for Bloomberg Businessweek revolves around cards that gently nudge live-at-home millennials with subtle messages like: "Spoiler Alert: You End Up Middle-Aged And Single."

Depending on whom you ask, millennials are either planet-wise, tech-savvy givers who are going to deliver the world into a brave new era, or entitled, dubiously skilled whiners who think they’re going to deliver the world into a brave new era (you know, like every generation before them). But one thing is clear--twentysomethings haven’t had the easiest ride in these straitened times.

As a new campaign for Bloomberg Businessweek states up front, 22.6 million 18- to 34-year-olds are living at home with mom and dad. And the campaign, from New York’s Walrus, positions the business title as just the tool to help those Gen Y "house barnacles" acquire the kind of edge that can rocket them to career success--or at least their own apartments. The agency cleverly targets not only the stay-at-home millennials but their friends and parents with a line of cards that act as hints to get a subscription, get some job savvy, and get the hell out of the house. The cards are available in electronic format at BBWgetsyouahead.com, and physical cards can be found at Papyrus stores in New York and San Francisco (they come with a link to a free subscription to BBW).

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Not Even Tesla Can Make Battery Swapping Ubiquitous In The U.S.

Ariel Schwartz — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:00:34 GMT

What if instead of charging your electric car, you just popped a new, fully charged battery under the hood. It’s an idea that’s been tried--and failed--but Tesla is hinting they want to bring it back.

Tesla may have made a big splash by paying back its loans from the government, but buried in Tesla’s latest filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission is this hint of things to come:

Other factors that may influence the adoption of alternative fuel vehicles, and specifically electric vehicles, include…our capability to rapidly swap out the Model S battery pack and the development of specialized public facilities to perform such swapping, which do not currently exist but which we plan to introduce in the near future.
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Minimalist Posters That Reduce Your Favorite Movies To Basic Shapes

Sammy Medina — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Graphic designer Michal Krasnopolski creates 22 movie posters that are head-scratchingly metaphorical.

In the future, when the history of the Internet is taught alongside social studies and algebra in middle school, there will be a brief, marginal mention of minimalist posters and how they, for a moment, encapsulated a bit of the late-aughts web. Curious students may do a little research of their own, going on to discover just how much of a hold the design trend once exerted over the popular imagination (or, at least, that of micro-bloggers). They may even come across Michal Krasnopolski’s set of minimalist classic movie posters.

Speculation aside, Krasnopolski’s posters are the latest to crop up in the meme’s short but copious history. The typical minimalist poster combines movie iconography and a pared-down midcentury aesthetic, something we’ve seen again and again and again. But don’t roll your eyes just yet. Krasnopolski’s designs are not just more of the same.

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Bondsy Adds Trust To Transactions For a New Kind Of Social Bartering

Sarah Kessler — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Instead of selling to strangers, Bondsy wants you to trade with friends.

Privacy is usually a tangential feature, but in Bondsy, it's the most important one.

The app, which allows people to post their things for any price—whether that be $50, ice cream, dinner, a book, or a gluten-free snack—organizes the user experience around privacy. It only allows friends you add and friends of friends to see your posts.

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Could Bondsy Become eBay For The Instagram Era?

Mark Wilson — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Bondsy is an iPhone app that allows you to sell your things for more than just money.

Over the last five years, the web has become a lot more personal. The buzzword “social” really doesn’t do it justice, not when you compare the transaction-based interactions that practically founded the Internet--PayPal, eBay and Amazon--with the ability to see photos of friends and family on Facebook and Instagram. But as things have shifted so much, to be so much more personal, e-commerce has been left behind. Buying and selling things online feels very much the same way today as it did a decade ago.

Enter Bondsy, an iPhone app for buying, selling--and maybe most interestingly, trading--things with friends. Its chief brainchild is designer Diego Zambrano, who’s worked as a creative director in advertising for some of the biggest firms (Ogilvy, R/GA) and clients (Nike, IKEA) in the world--though his greater claim to fame may be that he hasn’t shaved since 2009. With a new five-person team in Dumbo that snacks at a “nut bar” and prefers to work in “sexy mode” low light, Zambrano is rethinking what it means to sell things online--not to the anonymous masses of e-commerce but to your own friends and friends of friends.

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This Founder Trained At The Police Academy To Build An App For Cops

Ciara Byrne — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:38:27 GMT

Nick Selby wanted to build data-driven tools for local cops to find fugitives faster, so he trained as a cop before starting StreetCred. Now his company gives law enforcement tools which aggregate, analyze and prioritize the data they need--without forcing them into an alien interface or tons of training. Here’s why every product developer should embed themselves with their users.

Today, local warrant officers find fugitives of misdemeanour warrants in the same way they did in the 1970s: paperwork and legwork. Nick Selby’s company StreetCred seeks to change all that by synthesizing data from police, tax, court and public records to prioritize fugitives, so that cops can focus on so-called “frequent flyers,” the kind of repeat offenders who tend to be violent. FastCo.Labs spoke with him about how his time in uniform influenced the project--and why empathic abilities are crucial to building niche software products, especially for businesses and governments.

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This Founder Trained At The Police Academy To Build An App For Cops

Ciara Byrne — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:38:00 GMT

Today, local warrant officers find fugitives of misdemeanour warrants in the same way they did in the 1970s: paperwork and legwork. Nick Selby’s company StreetCred seeks to change all that by synthesizing data from police, tax, court and public records to prioritize fugitives, so that cops can focus on the fugitives who are easiest to find. By flagging so-called “frequent flyers,” who are repeat offenders, and those with a history of violence it also helps keep officers safe. FastCo.Labs spoke with him about how his time in uniform influenced the project--and why empathic abilities are crucial to building niche software products, especially for businesses and governments.

What's the problem that StreetCred solves?

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The Hilarious, Befuddling Charts Of The U.S. Congress

Kyle VanHemert — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:30:00 GMT

Floor Charts catalogs the visual aids--good, bad, and ugly--that drive Congressional debate. Okay, mostly they’re just bad and ugly.

A few weeks ago, we brought you the story of Jonathan Schwabish, the intrepid Congressional Budget Office employee who’s trying to harness the power of data viz for the benefit of our elected officials in Congress. Inspired by one of Edward Tufte’s data viz courses, Schwabish started taking the dense, doorstop-heavy reports that came through his office and distilling their most salient findings into concise, easy-to-follow charts--visual crib notes, essentially, that he hopes will encourage members of Congress to delve deeper into complex issues. It’s a noble project, to be sure.

But it’s not like Congress is totally unfamiliar with the power of a good visual aid. Far from it. Members of the House and Senate routinely come prepared with graphics of one sort or another when they make their arguments on the floor, and thanks to a dedicated C-SPAN employee who’s been archiving screen caps of those moments on Tumblr, you can follow along with all the Congressional data viz action right from home.

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Your Healthy Greek Yogurt Harbors A Deadly Secret

Zak Stone — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:00:54 GMT

Greek yogurt is healthy and good, but the process of making it creates something called acid whey. Acid whey is very bad: accidental spills of it have killed thousands of fish. But Greek yogurt is booming, so what to do with its dangerous byproduct?

For every container of Greek yogurt you see on a supermarket shelf, picture another container (or two or three) of deadly poison. It’s called acid whey, and it’s a toxic byproduct from the yogurt-making process that’s becoming a big problem for manufacturers as their product continues its assault on the hearts and minds of health-conscious Americans.

Never heard of "acid whey?" Neither had we. Modern Farmer explains:

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New Ads Provide Parents An Early Warning About Autism

Jennifer Miller — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:52:08 GMT

A new campaign for Autism Speaks encourages an earlier diagnosis.

Parents may not realize that their child’s failure to make eye contact or that a preoccupation with certain objects--like a toy truck--could be an early sign of autism. Autism Speaks and the Ad Council have produced two new TV spots designed to appeal to African-American and Hispanic parents (the campaign backers say that according to research, children in these communities are often diagnosed later than other children) and encourage them to seek a medical consult if their children are displaying possible signs of the condition.

The PSAs were created by BBDO New York and LatinWorks.

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