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The ultimate sponge

The winners are in for this year’s annual Industrial Designers Society of America awards — and predictably, it’s a smorgasbord of incredibly cool products. As usual, my favorites are the “student” projects: Stuff that was created for a grad program and which thus does not even yet exist. One particularly cool one is the Sink Sponge by Stephen Hornbeek of the Cleveland Institute of Art, which works thusly:

The product is suctioned to the bottom of the sink, so only a single hand is needed to get glasses sparkling clean. A two hand interface is necessary for most non-commercial cleaning solutions on the market today, therefore this Sink Sponge’s single hand approach is one of a kind.

Now that’s just plain brilliant. Could some company license the design from this kid, like, now?

(Thanks to Sensory Impact for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

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“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson