Author: Michael Pedersen

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Tell your boss to quietly f*ck off with this LED indicator

Latvian design firm GreyNut has recently launched their attempted solution to workplace interruption problems, Luxafor, on Kickstarter. The LED connects to a computer via USB or Bluetooth and displays your status with a green or an uninviting red light. It can be set manually or automatically through compatible applications.  A 2010 study from the University of California that concluded it takes the average worker 25 minutes to get back into a workflow after an interruption. In an article from The Guardian that cited this study, they wrote, “this suggests that, if you’re interrupted 16 times during an eight-hour day, you…
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Soon you’ll be able to own Marty McFly’s self-tying, LED-equipped Nikes

“Power laces, alright!” Marty McFly was first shown the Nike Air MAG trainer on September 8, 2015 in Back to the Future II, a future where shoes have LEDs and tied themselves. It turns out that the film wasn’t so far off the mark. Back in 2011, Nike auctioned off 1,500 pairs of the shoes—LEDs and everything. In the after-market, the kicks went for thousands of dollars, but, thankfully, designer Tinker Hatfield has an update for seekers of the futuristic footwear. Hatfield took to the stage at the Agenda Emerge creative and brand-building conference in Long Beach, California, to announce…
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Drift Stage is the neon-soaked anime arcade racer the universe needed

Growing up with diecast cars and car carpet city, there were two main camps: Hot Wheels and Matchbox. Matchbox represented something to appreciate from afar—nice details but not built to throw in a racing track. The raging colours and tough builds of Hot Wheels, on the other hand, screamed, “I want to go sideways!” The synthed-out neon cityscapes and sports cars of Drift Stage’s Sunset City are much more 60’s “Redline” Hot Wheels, with heavy metallic greens and reds giving off edgy vibes, vibes of going fast. I’ve been getting familiar with the sharp turns of this metropolis, having spent…
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Chaos Reborn, from the maker of X-COM, is playable now

Chaos Reborn, the latest entry into the tactical turn-based strategy genre from Julian Gollop, creator of the X-COM series, is now available for early access Steam. The current lineup of features in this boardgame-meets-Magic: The Gathering title is austere, as only online multiplayer is available. However, each of the modes not yet unlocked show a text explanation, with one glimpse highlighting possibly the game’s most interesting feature. While players start as a lowly apprentice wizard, through hard work and effort, they can attain the first social rank, “Wizard Lord.” From there, they can ascend further by collecting “artefacts,” winning multiplayer…
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Conquest dives into the grim side of space exploration

For those that don’t have three hours to sit through Christopher Nolan’s bombastic Interstellar, Outlands may provide an alluring Cliff’s Notes. The brief title gives its own interpretation of the dark side of space exploration and its victims. In it, you wander a planar base, waiting for a ship to arrive with the corpse of one of those victims; you spend time exploring and finding notes and other objects, but beyond that the place is a ghost town. The base, you find, is essentially a grave, an expedition-gone-wrong like the Lazarus mission of Interstellar. In this sense, you’re sort of…
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E-TRACES turns dance moves into data

Electronic Traces, a concept created by Spanish designer Lesia Trubat, plans to turn real dance moves into viewable files. By combining a pair of ballet shoes with e-textile microcontroller technology by LilyPad Arduino, the shoes register both the pressure and the movement of the dancer’s feet and then beams the data to an app. The output that results from the futuristic footwear is reminiscent of elegant brush strokes. Almost a neon variant of a paintbrush sequence straight from Okami. Parallels can also be drawn to the mobile game Bounden, made in collaboration with the Junior Company of the Dutch National…