Tag Archives: water

Stay Fresh

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Everyone’s been there before, you’ve worn a shirt once so it’s not exactly clean, but you don’t want to send it to the dry cleaner just yet. Swash is here to save you that trip to the dry cleaners, and in the long run could save you money too.

Swash is a clothing refresher for your home. It removes wrinkles and faint smells from clothes in just 10 minutes. Items are placed on a hanger and pushed into a pod that expels the odor. It claims it can increase the life and restore the fit of your clothing without needing to be connected to a water supply – just plug it in and freshen up.

Laundry isn’t exactly the industry we look to for product innovation. But, this right here is an awesome solution to a very common problem.

What Sparks our Fire: Always staying fresh.

Do you have any tips or tricks on how you keep your clothes fresh?

Mass Displacement

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Most of the time on this blog, we cover things that are technologically significant, or trending, or culturally relevant in some way. However, sometimes we just like to show you something cool. This is one of those times.

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That is what is known as a Hydrofloor, a pool masquerading as a floor, or vice versa. The pool water is always there, but the floor can be raised or lowered through it to create a dry area above the water. There’s something so natural about it, as if the structure blends with its surroundings better because of its’ transitional, amphibious nature. This is the kind of thing you’d buy a house just to be able to install.

What Sparks Our Fire:  Sometimes, it’s just cool things.

Do you feel the Hydrofloor accentuates or takes away from the natural scenery?

 

The End of the World as We Know It

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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.

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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?

In the Beginning…

It’s extraordinarily difficult to conceptualize what scientists refer to as “The Big Bang”. The theory that from infinite nothingness, a singular explosion containing all matter in the universe erupted, is not easy for a layman to comprehend.

The video above, titled Beginning, is the product of animator Grzegorz Nowiński and Novina Studio, it shows in grand stylized detail, the bullet points of the existence of the universe, Earth, and Life itself. Portrayed in stark black and white on a canvas of running water, the video leaves one with not only a concept of how science theorizes how we came to be, but how magnificent things like the impact of meteors or the formation of a planet may have looked or felt.

It’s one thing to read these things in a textbook, but it’s quite another to be shown them on a curtain of water within the span of several minutes. Such an elegant portrayal is truly a thing of beauty.

What Sparks Our Fire:  The visualization of things that normally couldn’t be visualized.

Does this video help attenuate your understanding of the Big Bang?

Like Water Off A Duck’s Back

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Actually, for all our sakes, please wash your shirt. Even if the shirt repels any and all water-based liquid in the same way that a smelly shirt repels a date. This shirt uses hydrophobic technology, which are in essence nano particles embedded in the shirt’s fabric that create a minuscule layer of air between the water and the particle, in essence shedding the liquid droplets, leading to the world’s first completely stainless shirt.

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Hydrophobic substances aren’t a new innovation. However, previous iterations of the substance have not been very applicable to daily use. Certain spray-on versions aren’t permanent and need to be constantly re-applied, as well as ruining the clothes that they get on. This shirt is created with the technology already within the fabric, in addition to a stylish fit, so we have to assume that’s what makes it worth the $50 per shirt commitment.

The Kickstarter campaign is currently at four times the funding goal, so these shirts should be ready to ship sometime in May.

What Sparks Our Fire: Nanotechnology is the future. We just need to find applications for it.

Is this shirt worth $50?