Dornob | Design Ideas Daily

Dornob | Design Ideas Daily

Color-Seeing Machine Sorts Your Sweet Candies by Hue

Posted: 15 Mar 2013 10:00 AM PDT

Although the question of whether different colors of M&Ms taste different has yet to be settled, we all know that Skittles come in five delicious flavors and thus need to be eaten with care. There are just some colors you can’t eat together, and some people prefer to never combine flavors at all. For all of you Skittles purists, electrical engineer Brian Egenriether has come up with a mostly-hands-off way to separate your candy into flavors.

The Candy Sorting Machine is a brilliant invention that takes a load of Skittles and sorts them into little white bowls – one bowl for every color. You pour a bag of the fruity candies into a funnel in the top of the machine and flip the switch, and inside a hopper grabs the pieces one by one. Each piece is passed beneath a color sensor which determines what color the candy is. The piece is then sent down a chute and into the appropriate bowl.

The outside of the machine is white to avoid overloading the senses with color. Egenriether would prefer for the eye to be drawn to the neatly-sorted bowls of colorful candy at the bottom instead. Unless you are a very patient and committed person, the chances are you don’t get to see such a sight very often. Egenriether built the machine for fun, not for profit, and has no plans to commercialize it.

Overall, the machine took five weekends to build. Egenriether encountered issues getting the color sensor to read correctly thanks to the large white “S” that is on one side of each candy, but he was able to work around the problem. The machine also works with M&Ms and Reese’s Pieces. But because M&Ms have six colors while the machine only has five bowls, two colors will be deposited in the same bowl. For the type of obsessive person who wants their candy sorted by color, this may be an entirely unacceptable proposition.

Crazily Contorted Conversation-Starting Park Benches

Posted: 14 Mar 2013 04:00 PM PDT

The familiar form of the outdoor bench is so ubiquitous that most of us don’t even consciously see the benches unless we’re looking for a place to rest our bones. But Danish artist Jeppe Hein has made sure that park benches get noticed.

Hein’s project “Modified Social Benches” is a public art installation that distorts everyone’s favorite park seating surface in a variety of crazy ways.

Some of the distortions are minor, some add beneficial features to the benches, and some make the benches entirely unusable. But all of the modifications do one thing very well: they draw attention.

According to the artist, the goal of the project is to encourage interaction. Interaction between the public and the benches, and interaction between the people who use the benches.

Imagine walking up to a bench at your local park and finding it contorted into one of these insane shapes. Would you walk on and find another place to sit, or would you stay and try it out?

Although most of the benches look fairly comfortable, there are a few that would be risky to actually use. But as for the artist’s goal of encouraging interaction, the project has undoubtedly been successful.

Curved Walls + Concrete Flawlessly Unite Modern + Antique

Posted: 14 Mar 2013 10:00 AM PDT

In a suburb of Istanbul, a young couple requested a home interior that would unite their collection of antiques with a more modern aesthetic. GAD Architecture took up the challenge and created the impressive Buama House interior renovation.

The home has an appearance of being almost cave-like, enclosed and very comforting. The floors, walls and ceiling all seem to be continuous, with little delineation between them.

Rather than traditional walls and doors to separate each room, the home features multiple levels separated by smooth, low steps. Coupled with small recessed lights in the ceiling, this openness contributes to an overall feeling of organic beauty.

Bathrooms sparkle with fine tiles and are finished perfectly with stone accents. The curved walls surprisingly make the bathroom areas seem cozy and inviting rather than enclosed.

Perhaps the most mesmerizing part of this interior redesign is the stacked fireplace. The gorgeous feature is whimsical but elegant, adding an especially interesting focal point to the home.

The bedroom is particularly noteworthy. With a curved ceiling, rich wood floor, subdued lighting and neutral color palette, this feels like a room that would inspire the most restful – and, dare we say, stylish – sleep ever.

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