Darwinia has made it’s presence known on the Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Darwinia+. This game has won multiple awards and received lots of attention in the past in it’s PC incarnations. Introversion Software has now brought it to the console where it is surprisingly easier and more natural to navigate. They even threw in the multiplayer incarnation ‘Multiwinia’ to boot.

The game exists in it’s own little digital tron-esque universe. It’s an ecosystem populated with industry, civilization, wild life, and various stimuli. It’s a virtual ecosystem where evolution and artificial intelligence is studied. There even religion as a component. continue…

Pure Digital Technologies Inc. isn’t the most well known of brands. Ask people what they make and most wouldn’t know but show them a Flip Video camera and they’re instantly interested. Its quite a nice lineup of products they’ve got with a very focused direction; simplicity in photography. The Flip Video series has been tremendously well received by bloggers and social media aficionados but yet the brand, in Canada at least, is relatively unknown.With a value price point and a solid product you would think the original Flip Video cameras would be tremendously popular but soon after their release in Canada they started to show their age in as much as they did not support high definition. By that point it was fast becoming a necessity. The cameras promoted their Easy-To-YouTube abilities so then once YouTube began to support HD footage, the lack of HD in the Flip cameras became the elephant in the room. continue…

There is a new stylish space saver in town. Theres a lot of horrible junk-invention masquerading as industrial design these days so its refreshing to see something both new and good. Its nice to have a Cheval mirror if you have the space so you can evaluate your look head to toe. Its also nice to have a full size ironing board so you can, you know, iron your clothes. Using them both simultaneously is extremely rare yet once you see what Aïssa Logerot has done, the combination seems so obvious (which is always a sign of good design) and graceful. Hopefully Aïssa continues refining the design for durability and practicality and gets these into mass production soon.

[Aïssa Logerot]

Jack Schluze and Matt Webb’s design consultancy in London has produced Here & There (seen above) which visualizes Manhatan simultaneously as a map in bird’s eye view and as a projection at eye level view. They invert the curvature of the earth to create a horizonless view. It seems pretty effective in visualizing the environment both. Thankfully they aren’t silent about it too. If you check out their Blog they go in to detail to explain their influences and what they were thinking. They even go so far as to offer prints for sale.

[Schulze & Webb]
[Here & There]

Get a load of this handy little tool design from Lee Valley & veritas. It’s called the Brush lugg and it helps you open paint cans, but also can be either clipped or magnetized to them such that they provide a handy place to put your brush when not in use via another inclined magnet. They even have design consideration factoring in the fill level of the can in question. Wonderful design work here.