IDFuel interviews Nic Roope, the man behind the Pokia vintage cellphone handsets about the future of the cell phone industry, and how cell styling will pan out in the next decade of design:

Technology has a tendency to always be pushing forward, outward, upward and this can create cultural vertigo, a tension that stems from not knowing who we are any more. Nostalgia creates a warm feeling because not only can we connect with it (because we’ve experienced it before) but it also has inherent meaning to us because of all the cross references it has with a lot of other meaningful experiences.

Read on.

If you’re looking for instant design karma for your shop, office or home, than you can’t go wrong with Bd Ediciones’s transit concept furniture (pictured above). A complete set including the lamp seat below. Contact manufacturer for price.

Designer: Ross Lovegroove
Company: Bd Ediciones

Metropolis Magazine examines the winning entry for a new Baha’i temple in Chile. The competition brief wanted “a space (that would) clearly feel like a house of worship but must not prioritize the iconography of any one religion over any other. It must be welcoming to everyone—the type of place, they said, that a six-year-old child would be attracted to—but it must also be as perfect in form as humanly possible. And it must be domed, with exactly nine sides and nine entrances”. Read on.

Forget those cold gravestones, now you can get your human DNA bonded within that of a tree courtesy of Biopresence. Dubbed as ‘Living Memorials’, the company has figured out a way to encode human DNA underneath the DNA of a plant cell without damaging it genetically.

Unfortunately for us, you can’t have one for now until the company is operational. Meanwhile, you can catch a glimpse at the Science Museum in London till mid 2005.

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Bio Presence: Official Website

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Spotted in the culture section of this month’s Esquire magazine is an excerpt from Michael Winterbottom’s futuristic film, Code 46:

William: Tell me something about yourself.
Wolfe: I have una cosa about freckles. I find freckles a turn on… It’s like its clothed and not clothed. There’s no freckle pornography. Women get famous for breasts and legs but not for freckles.
William: Anne of Green Gables.
Wole: I regard Anne of Green Gables as an erotic classic.

And if that isn’t reason enough to watch it when it comes out, the film uses modern day Dubai and Shanghai with their shiny new architecture as its futuristic backdrop, so there’s a plenty more eye candy than just freckles.

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Indiewire: Code 46

Imdb: Code 46

Well, Not quite but atleast for 30 seconds, the Deja View Camwear 100, safely perched on your sunglasses or hat, allows you to record what you see in a continuous buffer, so if something worth recording happens in the last 30 seconds, you can easily rewind the footage and watch it on the nearest TV set or archive it on a Secure Digital (SD) card.

The camera records in the MPEG-4 format at 30 frames a second, so if you get the 512 mb SD card, you got yourself a consideration amount of footage. Sure, it isn’t exactly as practical as its future incarnations will be, but its a great toy. Asking price tag: $399.

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MyDejaView

Mad Cow Tie (Yellow/Red)

Want to make sure your boyfriend gets tested? Give him a HIV boxer courtesy of Infectious Awareables.

In order to raise awareness, IA has been printing t-shirts, ties and other merchandise with prints of bacterial and virus patterns. Malaria, TB, Ebola, you name it, they have it.

We think they would make great gifts for the morbid among us:

slappityhappitysam: (in a cheery tone) oh hey depressive_driss, thats quite a tie.
I just love how bright and cheerful the colors are. Didn’t know you had it in you.

depressive_driss: Its a pattern print of the Mad Cow virus.

slappityhappitysam:

oh

Our personal favorites are the Testosterone and HIV/Aids boxers, for obvious reasons.#

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IA Wearables

Name: Twin (via Wrist Facism)

Not only can you switch your ties around to your liking with the “Twin”, but it makes it easier for your boss to strangle you by pulling them apart. More information at our sister site, Wrist Fashion.

Chrome Urinal

It all started when IT professional turned creative Ivan Markovic wanted to light up a collection of etchings by his artist friend, Mark Visione.

“I wanted to do them justice by hanging and lighting them properly”, He writes on his website.

But dedicated lighting was costly, so by the time he finished with his first fixture, he had caught the bug.

He has been creating original light sculptures ever since – Lighting fixtures that double as well-lit art.

Light Rain – A large installation piece, on display at the Victoria Park Plaza hotel.

“It’s important for me that the work be as original as possible, different and hopefully thought provoking.”, He adds, “I am keen to advance my work, to create larger more complex pieces, to challenge the limits of the materials and peoples perceptions of what a light fixture should be.”

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Pininfarina concept car

Don’t worry, you’ll have designer helmets to go with it. With a price tag of $ 1.2 million, the car is going to have a limited production of seventy five.

Its creator, the italian design house, Pininfarina, has already made a name with its avant-garde designs for Ferrari and is going to be building its own car for the first time as part of its (take a good guess) 75th anniversary.

Oh, and it can go 0 to 100 kilometres per hour in about 5 seconds.

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USA Today ran an article recently on mutlifunction products featuring several examples such as the lamp slash table pictured on the right. (Read)

(link via Core 77)

If you haven’t seen it already, the results from this year’s Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) are online and we spent hours digging up our favorites from a hundred and thirty winners:

Name: UnBathroom, Gold, Student
Contact: Martin Smith, IDSA, Art Center College of Design, 626.396.2343, danielle.conte@artcenter.edu
Credit: William Hsu, Art Center College of Design

First up is the ingenious UnBathroom that took gold in the student category. Its a temporary toilet for use in emergency situations that is fully recyclable and biodegradable. Also, after the liners are used up, the base can be burned as fuel.

Name: Circular Printer: Gold, Design Explorations
Contact: Kang-il Chung, Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd, Korea +82.2.750.9472, ki.chung@samsung.com
Credit: Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd, Korea and Seoul National University, Korea

Second, A circular portable mini concept printer that uses rotational, instead of linear, movement to reduce its size.

And finally -

Name: DEVO Underwear & Packaging: Gold, Design Explorations
Contact: Catherine O’Connor, fuseproject, 415.908.1492×20, catherine@fuseproject.com
Credit: fuseproject
Client: Devo, Inc

• The future of packaging -> Not only would you be able to tell if you’re picking up the right size with these packages since they’re shaped like their content but when you reach home, you could throw it in the wash, and the package will dissolve right off thanks to a material composed of dissolvable cornstarch and a small amount of detergent.

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If you’re wondering why Si has been updating less often, its because our editor, who loves to talk about himself in third person, has been on the run for the past few weeks, living out of a suitcase and starved out of a reliable internet connection, otherwise he would’ve kept up the appearance.

We’ll eventually return to our regular updates by the end of the month, meanwhile if we skip a day, this is why.

IDFuel’s second Bonfire design competition begins this weekend. Designers, both professional and student, are invited to explore personal electronics for the summertime. Think picnics and road trips. Apply here. Also check out last year’s winners.