Category Archives: Gadgets

Penny For Your Thoughts

minimum wage machine

Minimum wage in the United States is recognized as a sign of financial instability, but it is rarely understood exactly how incredibly draining minimum wage labor actually is.

Blake Fall-Conroy, an artist who strives to create “socially-conscious” pieces, has conceptualized an ingenious way to demonstrate the frustrating, monotonous, and often demeaning plight of minimum-wage worker.

Fall-Conroy invented the “minimum wage machine,” a device with a hand-crank that the user turns continuously, and dispenses a penny every 4.5 seconds. An hour will earn you $8 in pennies, which until eight months ago was the minimum wage in the state of New York.

The artist hopes that the machine will help people understand the amount of work that goes into making just $8/hour, and perhaps inspire sympathy for those who work minimum-wage jobs or provoke change in legislation that will raise the minimum wage (the minimum wage in New York is now $8.75).

What Sparks Our Fire: Art that serves a purpose and sparks social awareness.

Superheroes Built From Scratch

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It’s no secret that Google has a broad spectrum of interests, and they’ve even got a new parent company to prove it. Recently, the Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities, which strives to spur innovation that helps “create more access and opportunity for the one billion people living with disabilities,” granted $600,000 to e-NABLE, a nonprofit organization that uses tools like 3D printing and bionics to create solutions for the disabled.

Examples are the hot pink bionic hand that e-NABLE created for a little girl, Ari Solorio, who was born without a hand. e-NABLE, the Google-funded nonprofit organization of volunteers in charge of creating Ari’s bionic hand, takes advantage of the growing 3D printing trend and the do-it-yourself movement. AIO Robotics supplied all the 3D software responsible for creating the device, and so far about 40 have been made.

These prosthetics, rather than awkwardly attempting to imitate human flesh, are brightly colored and look like something out of an Iron Man comic, some with claws and flashing lights. They are designed with the intention of helping kids take pride in their artificial limbs, rather than be embarrassed by them.

e-NABLE has made it clear that subtle is not their style–and kids are loving it.

What Sparks Our Fire: Technology designs that are not only functional, but fun for kids and help

Dial In Your Creativity

Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 2.34.13 PM The benefits of playing with toys and games have long been understood simply by observing children, but new research has begun to point out the benefits for adults as well. Inc. and TechnologyAdvice.com have compiled a few of these benefits, including improved memory and increased motivation. And now San Francisco-based Hero Design has created Everbright, designed to have workplaces capture the benefits of adults playing with toys.

Everbright is a wall-sized mood board composed of 464 dials, and is reminiscent of the popular Light-Brite toy. The dials act as the pegs you’d plug into the Light-Brite, and by turning the dials, participants can pick any color in the rainbow to make pictures, patterns, or any other visual their heart desires. The Everbright board acts as a creative game for the office– Hero Design even points out it’s benefits over a typical ping pong table found in break rooms. One person or an entire team can work together to create the designs.

Office “toys,” such as the Everbright board, emphasize the importance of breaking up the work day with creative activities that inspire outstanding work, especially in creative fields like Marketing. Learn more on Hero Design’s website, and take a look at the video below.

Everbright from Romy Randev on Vimeo.

What Sparks Our Fire: Flexing our creative muscles in the office

Louis Braille, Meet the 21st Century

brailleipad

The creators of the Blitab, a new “haptic tablet,” are bringing new meaning to the word “touchscreen.” Designed to be a Kindle for the visually impaired, their device allows users to actually feel their electronic devices.

The device works like an e-reader with a few major changes. Instead of using an LCD display that users can read off of, the “haptic tablet” uses “smart liquid” that forms bubbles on the surface. Blind and visually impaired users can than read the bubbles as Braille letters. “We call the materials ‘tixels’ from ‘tactile pixels’ because we do not use any mechanical elements to trigger the dots,” says Bitlab’s founder, Kristina Tsvetanova. The software converts text from webpages and USB drives.

Tsvetanova has a working prototype and is still looking to get seed-funding to bring her product to market. And while similar products already exist with astronomical price tags of over $15,000, Tsvetanova’s goal is to make the “haptic tablet” more affordable, so that more people can use it.

What Sparks Our Fire: Creative design improving internet accessibility for the blind and visually impaired in the tablet-era.

Use Solar Power Anywhere

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With a majority of Americans and people worldwide that consider solar power to be their number one choice of energy, SunPort is introducing a new way to use solar energy, with their new innovative and affordable outlet adapter. This portable outlet adapter allows users to power all of their gadgets on clean solar energy. Once plugging in a device into the SunPort, the application will automatically calculate how much power you’re using and quickly give you the option to upgrade to solar energy. Once upgrading, it will automatically purchase solar micro-credits that are provided through a non-profit organization called ReChoice. It’s a more affordable and less cumbersome option than those industrial-sized solar panels.

3048930-inline-i-0-this-plug-automatically-runs-your-gadgets-on-solar-powerDue to cost being an issue when purchasing solar panels, the inventor of SunPort, Paul Droege, believes they will eventually offer their customers a chance to upgrade their entire home at an affordable and reasonable cost. This will allow those with high interest to use clean solar energy and help create a demand for more solar production.

The use of solar energy has increased tremendously throughout the years and will continue to grow. Nivea Sun ads, which generated a great deal of praise and attention worldwide, used a similar approach.

What Sparks Our Fire: Making solar power more affordable, more portable, and more accessible to change the way we use energy.