Interactive stairway lights --how cool is this?

My cousin Tim sent me this video this afternoon and I think it's just about the coolest thing I've seen in ages.




It wouldn't bee terribly difficult to put together. All you need is a series of motion detectors and timers and you're set. Thanks Tim!

Geek-to-Chic at New York Fashion Week

The following is a guest post by my friend and colleague Mark Johnson, FAIA. Mark attended two events last week I had to miss. In a 24-hour period he went from the granola-loving heights of Google's Boulder, CO campus to the glittering streets of Manhattan where he took in a Fashion Week runway show. Mark has a great sense of humor and amazing stamina. Without further ado, here's Mark:

Last week’s guest post from Google 3D Basecamp was pure “Geek.” Full immersion in the deep woods of virtual camping left me yearning for an experience with more panache, a contrast from the wool caps of Boulder. New York Fashion Week fit the bill, nowhere near the great outdoors and intoxicating for its whiplash dose of “Chic.” I admit Google SketchUp and Kitchen & Bath (K&B) Design are light-years from the fashion runway… how many 20-something runway models cook, anyway? But to my surprise, SketchUp was the toast of the town when placed in the hands of able K&B designers armed with their computers, iPads and Google apps! Here’s my take on “Chic Week” from New York.

Mannequins at New York Fashion Week? They're really Google SketchUp avatars descending on NYC.

The Bath Challenge results from Fashion Week are…“faaaabulous, simply faaaabulous.” So let’s start with some inspiration from the Jason Wu runway show. His first dress is a literal smattering of Geek to Chic. I respectfully call it: “Tribute to hand-drawing with Rapidograph ink pens and ruined shirts in architecture school”...splat! I could have worn a suit like this to design studio every day and never cleaned it. Where were you, Jason, when I needed you? It’s a lovely suit. Practical, and no pocket protector needed!

My favorite suit of the show! Stylish and hides everything I ever spilled. Easy on the cleaning bill.

For the Luxury Bath Challenge, four teams of designers/architects/bloggers were the guests of Brizo Faucets and competed in the Brizo Luxury Bath Challenge, cosponsored by KraftMaid Cabinetry and DeNova Countertops. To pull this off in 2.5 hours and not miss Jason Wu’s runway show was the challenge. It meant finding a quick, easy way of designing, drawing and presenting four luxury bath designs. The choice was multimedia; a combination of hand-drawing and narrative for developing design concepts, followed by team workshops where online images, SketchUp and 3D product models from the sponsors’ collections in Google’s 3D Warehouse were all employed. Not for the faint-hearted… I guess that’s why a few of the architects skipped the Challenge. Since I’m an architect, I can poke them to a point, then they get testy.
Here are pictures of the Design Challenge teams hard at work on their luxury bath designs. Their presentations and the awards ceremony later at the Showtime Show House capped off a wonderful day in NYC . How did we crash a penthouse party during Fashion Week? It’s another win for K&B designers and SketchUp! Check out the descriptions with each picture:

Hard at work on the Luxury Bath Design Challenge - Gloria Graham, Erin Beneker Loechner @erinloechner, Trevor Williams and Eric Schimelpfenig @SketchThis

Corey's team - Linda Merrill @surroundings, Nancy Hugo @nancyhugo, Corey Klassen @coreyklassen, and Michael Tadros @MikeTadros

Kimberly Dowdell, explaining her team's design concept for a luxury bath "Oasis"

Corey Klassen @coreyklassen, takes the judges through his team's bath design. Very architectural in feeling.

Our esteemed panel of judges; Brendan "Cannon", Judd Lord, and Keith Baltimore

Paparazzi and cameras everywhere. They heard about the Luxury Bath Challenge and beat us to the party.

Trevor Williams, Erin Beneker Loechner @erinloechner, Gloria Graha, and Eric Schimelpfenig @SketchThis

Cannon shares the judges' choice for first place; a "Spa" inspired design concept by Veronika Miller @Modenus. Her team members include Bob Borson @bobborson, Maggie Stack King @ecofabulous, and Celine Kwok

I’ll wrap up by sharing another gorgeous Jason Wu’s dress. It captures all the connections between Geek and Chic. If you’re a Google SketchUp geekster, you instantly see how the “sketchy line” tool would make it a breeze to draw this high-fashion dress without crashing your computer. If you’re a K&B designer, the colors may inspire your next project. If you’re a Fashion Week Celeb who found this post on Paul Anater’s blog @Paul_Anater… why of course, it’s a “Jason Wu.”

Jason Wu's tribute to the "Sketchy Line" tool in Google SketchUp? Maybe...

It's another Blog Off: do social sites like Facebook connect or isolate?

So today's another Blog Off, an event where bloggers of all stripes weigh in on the same topic. This week's topic is "Do social sites like Facebook connect the world or isolate people?" The topic was spawned by a flawed scrap of research that the mainstream media pounced on like vultures on road kill. Never mind that the research in question amounted to a poll conducted by an undergraduate of her peers in a  psych class. What mattered was the finding that Facebook is a magnet for narcissists and self-haters equally. Because no one seems to understand statistics or how to construct a logical argument, headlines exploded in August. Within days, the conventional wisdom had jumped to yet another flawed assumption. Namely that Facebook causes narcissism.

From the Telegraph

Facebook provides an ideal setting for narcissists to monitor their appearance and how many ‘friends’ they have, the study said, as it allows them to thrive on ‘shallow’ relationships while avoiding genuine warmth and empathy.

From the Toronto Star

Compelled to tell your 500 Facebook chums every time you can’t find your sunglasses? Want the world to know you look like Robert Pattison? Post new Photoshopped pictures every day?

You, my friend, are narcissistic and insecure.

I could go on and list quotes and back links for days but you see my point. The mainstream media seems to be threatened by social media, the new kid on the block, and the results are predictable.

I have my share of problems with Facebook. I think of it as a cul de sac on the World Wide Web. It's the new AOL I tell people all the time. Facebook is a duplicated, smaller version of the web and despite the fact that it connects people from their respective pasts and presents, the only thing it isolates is people from their futures. I'll get to that in a minute but I love having a site where I can catch up with my nieces and nephews, my siblings, old friends from high school and college and the rest. But my past is my past for a reason. It's pleasant to hang out there from time to time but it doesn't help me get to where I want to go. I think that's Facebook's Achilles' heel by the way and it will be what does it in. It's all but impossible to meet new people there.

I don't know about anybody else, but my life has been completely and utterly transformed by social media. I document most of it on Facebook, but none of this transformation starts there. For me it started with Blogger.

Two-and-a-half years ago I was an unknown designer in a second-tier city tucked along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks to the kick start I got from my Blogger blog, here I sit as some kind of an industry thought leader (I hate that term) with a network of peers, colleagues and friends that spans the globe. My involvement with Blogger, and later Twitter has brought me face to face with a good number of these colleagues and friends. From the first half of 2010 alone here are a few of my personal/ professional connections.

Kelly Morrisseau writes the blog KitchenSync. She is the first designer/ blogger who ever reached out to me as a new blogger and we've maintained a a strong friendship ever since. Here we are in New York last February.

This is the community of design bloggers as it looked last winter. That photo was taken at a cocktail party in New York hosted by Brizo faucets and Manning, Selvage and Lee Public Relations last February.

Here's Saxon Henry, me, Sabrina Velandry, Paul Velandry, Johnny Grey, Chuck Wheelock and Andie Day. We met on Twitter and we're sitting in the first and second rows of a Fashion Week fashion show. We've been brought together by Brizo because we're design bloggers.

This is me speaking at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show (KBIS) in Chicago last April. I got to that spot because a year-and-a-half ago Google itself found me via my blog and pulled me out of the scrum. They recommended me to Masco and fast forward a few months and there I am speaking at Kraftmaid's KBIS booth.

This is Zoe Voight and I hanging out in the press room at a trade show. I'm in the press room as a credentialed journalist because somebody at Veeder + Perman Public Relations loves me and loves my blog.

Here's a bunch of design bloggers at a seminar sponsored by @brizo.

Here I am giving another talk at another trade show, the Southeast Builder's Conference this time. Masco is paying me to deliver a talk on how much my blog has changed my life. Pinch me.

Everything that's going on in those photos, all of those personal connections, were made possible through my social media presence. When I hear claims that I'm further isolated I laugh at the absurdity of it.

As my travel schedule starts to take form for 2011 I just shake my head. On the inside I still think of myself as that unknown designer in a second-tier city. Based on the events where I'll be speaking, it's pretty clear that that's no longer the case.

Social media sites make the world a smaller place. They present an opportunity for real, personal connections that transcend geography to a degree and with an immediacy that's never been possible in the whole of human history. Social media generally and Twitter in particular, is where I find my future.

As is the case with anything, thew only thing social site offer is a set of tools. By the time sites like Facebook grow to the size they are (they claim 500 million members worldwide) people are bound to abuse those tools and some people can find themselves more isolated. But just as is the case with anything, it's not automatic. Facebook doesn't cause anything but compromised privacy. People who are thrown to narcissism or isolation are going to be those things with or without social media sites. All of that is a distraction from what's possible though. Better than anything I know, social media takes what's possible and makes it what's probable. As I look forward to the career shifts, adventures and challenges headed my way in the next few months I can't help but say that I owe all of it to Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Posterous and yes, even Facebook. Me isolated? Don't make me laugh.

As part of a Blog Off, you can go to the official site and see the links to all of participating bloggers' posts. As the day goes on, I'll start listing them here as well.

A logical next step in shower design

Back in the day, this was glamor when it came to shower design.

Gold-tone shower frames with opaque glass were once objects of great envy as hard as that may be to believe. The bathroom post I ran last week has had me mulling over ideas on how to strip down what's expected from a bath design while keeping it elegant and efficient. I'm not alone in that quest for a streamlined bath by they way.

At some point in the last ten years, we lost the metal frame on a glass shower enclosure.

Shortly after we lost the frame, we lost the curb and well-designed showers these days bury the shower pan under a subtly pitched floor. But there's still something  off here. There's one last thing to remove from center stage.

I'm talking about the drain of course. Being able to keep the drain from drawing the eye down is a logical next step.

Enter Infinity Drain and their linear drain systems.

Linear drains first came into use in the deck that surrounds an in-ground pool. A great idea's a great idea and it makes sense that linear drains from Infinity should migrate indoors.

The bathroom I wrote about last week will have an Infinity Drain, mark my words. Linear drains are the logical next step in the evolution of the shower, spend some time on Infinity's website and learn more.

Late-summer rerun: From the land of the shoo-fly

This post ran originally on October 3rd, 2008. In an effort to reclaim some part of my life, I'm dipping into my archives on weekends for the time being.

I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; and no, I'm not Amish. I've been away from those gently rolling hills for a long time but Thanksgiving makes me nostalgic. I may not be Amish, but it doesn't take an Amishman to appreciate pretty countryside and an urge to make things by hand.

Arguably, Lancaster County's signature dish is a little something called shoo-fly pie. Shoo-fly pie is one of those things that everybody's heard of but never encountered first hand. Shoo-fly pie is one of my favorite things to bake and it can't be the holidays in my house without it.

The first time I ever made one for a party, everyone thought it was so exotic and cosmopolitan. That is funny on so many levels at one time I can't stand it. Anyhow, here's my recipe for cosmopolitan and exotic shoo-fly pie.

Pie dough for a nine-inch pie
1 cup of all-purpose flour
2/3 cup of firmly packed, dark brown sugar
5 tablespoons of unsalted butter (softened)
1 cup light molasses
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup boiling water

Roll out pie dough and turn into a nine-inch pie plate. Trim and flute the edges. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, brown sugar and softened butter. Mash with a fork until it reaches a consistent, crumbly consistency. In a separate bowl, beat together the molasses, egg and baking soda with a large spoon until blended. Stir in the boiling water and mix thoroughly (this will begin to foam). Stir half the crumb mixture into the molasses mixture and pour into the crust. Sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture evenly over the top. Bake a 400 degrees, on the center rack, for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake until the pie filling has puffed around the sides and is firm in the center, about 20 to 30 minutes more. Cool on a rack.