As kids, we all loved playing with Play-Doh. We could let our imaginations run wild to build, mold, cut, flatten and create anything, yes anything. Well, thanks to the people at inventables, a technology company based in Chicago, you can now make those childhood dreams a reality. Inventables has developed the perfect technology, Carvey, a successfully funded Kickstarter project expected to be in full production by Fall 2015.

 Carvey is quiet, clean, easy to use and can carve your project in 3 simple steps.

1. Make your design with the integrated softwaresoft
2. Choose your material (wood, plastic, foam, wax, cork soft metal, etc,)
3. Click “Carve” and let the machine do the work until it achieves your desired form

Here is a list of items you can easily make with Carvey: jewelry, wooden sunglasses, street signs, can openers, etc. Fell free to watch the video of Carvey in action here.

What Sparks Our Fire: A 3D machine that is easy to use and can help us turn ideas into real objects in under 5 mins.

What would you make with Carvey?

With Foldable Studio aka Foldio you can become a pro photographer no matter where you are without having to rent a professional lighting sets. Foldio is an intuitive light box for photographers of all  levels, made possible by OrangeMonkie of South Korea and Los Angeles. The project was Kickstarter funded and received nearly 20 times its goal!

In a nutshell, Foldio is a one-of-a-kind mini photo studio for smartphones that allows anyone to take high quality pictures with a smartphone, anywhere, quickly, easily and at anytime. It eliminates issues of bad lighting, shadows, and gives you a seamless background. The perfect box for snapping awesome photos of your food, crafts, and much more, especially if you are going to sell online.

Foldio comes with a white wall and 1 or 2  built-in LED lights to give you just the right amount of light under any condition. The box unfolds to a 10.2” and works with a 9 Volt battery. When you are done, it folds like an envelope and can be easily stored into your backpack or a briefcase. Foldio comes with different color washable backdrops: black, white, and gray for impeccable pics. What is fun is you can even make your own backdrops with any paper or fabric.

What Sparks Our Fire: A portable tool allows us to share our creativity on-the-go.

Are you ready to rediscover the joy of smartphone photography with Foldio?

Cameras are powerful tools to control the memories we make. In a 2010 TED Talk, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner professor Daniel Kahneman, presented the idea that millennials see the present as an “anticipated memory.” In other words, when a person takes an Instagram picture, that person is both experiencing the present reality and actively shaping how that reality will be remembered in the future. As a result, many will argue they are betraying the present by not living in the moment. But, are the memories the real motive why the ‘Instagram generation’ is so addicted to capturing the moment?

Internet surveys indicate over 80% of social media posts to sites like Instagram, Twitter and others amount to “announcements about one’s own immediate experiences”. We post pictures of what we eat, drink, where we’ve been and calmly await for the next tsunami of likes. But what is it that makes us post those pictures on Instagram? Can’t we keep those for our private use? It is undeniable we like the attention but, why do we like the attention so much?

In 2012, Harvard University National Academy of Sciences conducted a study to assess how much people liked talking about themselves and why. The results is that Humans get a biochemical buzz from self-disclosure. We devote almost 40% of conversation sharing our own experience. Sharing personal information activates the reward areas of the brain. The same as we experience after sex, food or getting money. Talking about other people in contrast does not activate the rewarding part of the brain. What is most interesting is the findings also revealed people actually love self-disclosure if they knew people were listening. All of this goes along way toward explaining the appeal of self-promoting social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

What Sparks Our Fire: The power of self-disclosure on social media through pictures.

Do you agree with Daniel Kahneman’s statement or do you think this entire generation is sharing Instagram pictures with the ultimate goal of a social validation? We would like to hear your thoughts.

While reminiscing about your childhood I’m sure you have fond memories of digging through the biggest Crayola box to find that perfect color. Now, as an adult, you may not be digging through that same crayon box, but if you’re a designer we’re sure you wish you could.

Scribble is the pen that changes how we interact with color. All you do is hold the back of the pen up to a surface and the pen will scan and reproduce the color within seconds. Most graphic designers would love this capability to be digital in order to replicate the color onto their computer rather than paper. No problem, there is a scribble stylus that functions the same way to easily translate the colors from the world around you, digitally. This pen makes designing and recreating colors easy. The scribble also has an associated app where you can find colors you previously scanned to use again, or share with others.

The Scribble recently started funding on Kickstarter, so if you’re ready to bring some more color into your life, go ahead and contribute.

What Sparks our Fire: A great design tool that is fun and easy to use.

What’s your favorite color?

In the vision of the future held by artist Evan Holm, ‘there will be a time when all tracings of human culture will dissolve back into the soil under the slow crush of the unfolding universe’.  In essence, he believes all traces of human culture and creation will slowly be worn away and covered by dust of the future.

In order to express this slow, inexorable decline and burial, Holm created a technological masterpiece, a record player submerged beneath the surface of a still pool that produces near-flawless playback. Laid in the center of an installation combining natural and man-made elements, Holm has given form to his darker thoughts, as the video below demonstrates.

What Sparks Our Fire: Artistic and technological creativity used to express the submersion of all human creation beneath the waves of time.

What do you interpret from this installation?

Apparently grungy is in. You have your reclaimed wood tables, exposed brick walls, and raw metal beams, all of which add to a certain aesthetic and serve to add a certain hip-ness to the area. Now, according to sociologist Gordon Douglas, a certain amount of graffiti can contribute to the gentrification of a neighborhood.

Long the symptom or result of economic malaise or poverty, graffiti has a predominately negative connotation. According to Douglas “A huge amount of social science throws [graffiti] into a camp of being a sign of crime and disorder.” Baruch College sociologist Gregory Snyder compared rates of violent crime versus graffiti and found that places with more tagging had lower rates of crime. In his book Graffiti Lives, he writes that in SoHo, “residents, tourists, and high-end boutiques, co-exist with graffiti vandalism in a relatively symbiotic fashion.” He claims graffiti-ed neighborhoods “[attract] the type of urban ‘cool’ consumer marketers call ‘taste makers’ and advertisers and retailers so desperately want to reach.”

So that’s probably not an excuse to tag any old wall, but in a world where the works of artists like Banksy can command prices of $100,000, this kind of organic street art may just attract the kind of people that gradually gentrify neighborhoods.

What Sparks Our Fire: The shifting perceptions of what is art vs. vandalism and how the public as a whole reacts to it.

Do you feel graffiti adds to the je ne sais quoi of a neighborhood?

“Tell me a story.”

“There’s an app for that.”

It’s been said that storytelling is a lost art. The oral tradition of telling a story vocally, injecting the emotion and creativity of the teller, has not been the preeminent form of information transfer since the invention of the Gutenberg Printing Press and the literacy that came along with it. However, the oldest form of information transfer has been integrated with the newest, enter an app that brings the stories of thousands to your fingertips.

The Moth is an organization that collects and collates recordings of real people telling their own stories in their own words. The organization has been doing this since 1997, when it was founded by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda’s porch. The movement grew, and has brought more than 3,000 live stories to over 100,000 audience members.

This October, The Moth has launched its own app, effectively bringing the common threads of thousands of stories to your iOS or Android device.  Previously only available by podcast, The Moth app focuses on the listening experience, allowing you to save your favorite stories, share them, or download them.

What Sparks our Fire: We are inspired by the unique stories that people are willing to share with others.

Will you download this app and share your personal narratives?

Usually when your meal is moving, it’s not cooked all the way. However, in designer Minsu Kim’s new project, Living Food, the movement is the meal. She uses a method of synthetic biology to create edible dishes that have the qualities of living things: expanding and contracting as if breathing, wriggling on the plate, or gently waving tentacles.

Since this is artificial life, it’s not a breathing animal you’re eating, but you can eat it, and it’s quite fascinating to watch your meal move.

What sparked our fire: Visualizing food in unique ways, both as edible and as art.

Will this revolutionize the way we see food? Or change the way chefs plate their dishes?

It’s easy to tell the difference between art created by humans and art generated by computers. No one could fail to distinguish the small nuances and imperfections of a human-created painting against a technically perfect, but somehow stilted and cold, computer piece of art. However, a new algorithm developed by Kenichi Yoneda, better known as Kynd, creates curiously human-looking paintings with an automated painter.

Using the program, called openFrameworks, the artist is able to simulate realistic painting methods, using a brush or a palate knife, blending pigments drying at different rates. It’s a intriguing process to watch digital paint drying, much more so than watching actual paint dry.

The objective, rather than making a beautiful work of art, is to explore how closely computers can come to re-creating the way humans paint, and perhaps investigate the gray area between man-made and computer-generated.

What sparked our fire: The precision in which a computer can mimic the human act of painting.

Will this new algorithm make art enthusiasts skeptical about authenticity?

Absolut recently sponsored Open Canvas, an outdoor art festival, where over 20 artists converged on Brooklyn’s 6th Street in Williamsburg. All types of surfaces were painted white, forming a blank canvas for artists to create whatever they pleased. This stunt was in conjunction with “the future is yours to create” campaign, where the goal was to inspire people to envision and achieve their dreams.

What sparked our fire: DIY future.

How are you writing your future?

Enjoy!

-Canopy Team