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China

“The Great Wall of China”: a documentary

Youtube carries a documentary about the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall of China is a series of stone and earthen fortifications in China, built, rebuilt, and maintained between the 5th century BC and the 16th century to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire during the rule of successive dynasties. Several walls, referred to as the Great Wall of China, were built since the 5th century BC. The most famous is the wall built between 200 BC – 220 BC by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang; little of it remains; it was much farther north than the current wall, which was built during the Ming Dynasty […]

Categories
Design Innovation

Experience it before it’s real: Rapid Prototyping

Modeling software lets designers create everything from Michelangelo’s David to shock absorbers. 3D printers deliver a rapid prototype to test designs before they go into production. Jason Medal-Katz, Senior Manager of Autodesk‘s Customer Briefing Center Program, talks to Wired magazine about how 3D printing lets designers send a file to a machine that prints it out using materials like plastic, rubber or metals, and it can make both static items and ones with moving parts…

Categories
Design Information Technology Innovation Software

Look Into the Future with Autodesk Labs: Multi touch wall (Part III)

Watch Brian Mathews, Vice President, Autodesk Labs, working with Autodesk Design Review on a Perceptive Pixel Multi-touch device […]

Categories
China Design

Chinese Calligraphy: Master Yue Le

In previous post in which I discussed chinese calligraphy, I talked a little bit about chinese calligraphy’s history, and my impressions of its influence in contemporary chinese design. Since a lot of people have been asking me for more on the topic, I’ve decided to post on YouTube some videos of a trip my wife, a couple of friends and I did to Zhu Jia Jiao, one of the many river towns just outside Shanghai. In Zhu Jia Jiao, we’ve met Master Yue Le, a local artist that makes his living on creating banners/posters for tourist that visit that town: with our little domain of Mandarin, we’ve asked him to create some banners to represent something he would consider typical […]

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Design Innovation Software Trend Watching

Look Into the Future with Autodesk Labs: Multi touch wall (Part II)

Doug Look from Autodesk Labs experiments with Autodesk’s design software on a Multi-Touch Wall device, produced by Perceptive Pixel and invented by researcher and (TED conference luminary) Jeff Han. Multi-touch human-computer interfaces may dramatically change how products, infrastructure, and buildings are designed […]

Categories
Design Innovation Software

Look Into the Future with Autodesk Labs: Multi Touch Wall

Doug Look from Autodesk Labs experiments with Autodesk’s design software on a Multi Touch Wall device, produced by Perceptive Pixel and invented by researcher and (TED conference luminary) Jeff Han. Multi-touch human-computer interfaces may dramatically change how products, infrastructure, and buildings are designed […]

Categories
China Economics Information Technology Innovation Trend Watching

China: Technology, Innovation and the Environment

Since the beginning of its economical opening — when the first 5-year plans were devised in 1979 — China has being growing at an incredible speed, with its GNP numbers jumping from 44 billion dollars to 1.6 trillion dollars in just 20 years. Such growth has pushed the Chinese manufacturing industry into devouring huge amounts of natural resources in a alarming way: in 2004, China — the 8th largest economy in GNP scale — consumed 8% of all the oil, 31% of all the coal, 10% of all the electricity, 30% of all ore, 30% of all steel, 19% of all aluminum, 20% of all the copper and 40% of all cement produced in the world […]