The stories behind the architecture in our cities are ones seldom heard. When structures like the Empire State building or World Trade Center are erected, unbuilt monolithic buildings and scrapped city plans are quickly forgotten. Two designers want to give these concrete ghosts some virtual recognition.

Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder design for their own firm, Cheng + Snyder. They created a mobile media project in the form of a smartphone app called Museum of the Phantom City. It’s a database of unused plans, futuristic structures and hidden stories. Users of the app are directed around Manhattan to specified spots, where they can access pictures that juxtapose the past and future with the present.

According to their website, “typical urban navigation apps like Google Maps and Yelp seek to clarify and make the city more legible,” while the Museum of the Phantom City is “interested in deepening and intensifying urban experience.” It’s a trendy alternative for travelers to explore Manhattan – realized and re-imagined.

The post What Could Have Been: App Shows Alternative Manhattan first appeared on Gajitz.

We’re living in an ever more-connected world, and it’s only a matter of time before absolutely everything is electronic and equipped with wi-fi. Points is a futuristic internet-enabled directional sign with arms that spin to point the way to your desired destination.

A small control panel on the base of the sign gives options for places you may want to go. These options change throughout the day; for example, displaying “coffee” in the morning or “drinks” in the evening. Just push the appropriate button and the arms spin to show the three nearest destinations.

Points, designed by New York design group Breakfast, connects to the internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Using social media, it can figure out if there are any special events nearby and point users toward them. It can also point tourists toward popular destinations.

Another function of the nine foot tall aluminum sign is to act as a news ticker for important current events. The Breakfast team worked on the device for more than three years in order to create arms that could rotate 360 degrees without tangling wires. Breakfast is currently taking orders to place Points at special events to direct people toward important locations.

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In climates where the transition from winter to spring involves dramatic temperature changes, potholes are a familiar feature of roads. They aren’t just annoying, though – potholes can cause serious damage to cars. A group of college students in Ohio has come up with a simple and brilliant way to fill potholes temporarily until crews can patch them permanently.

The idea makes use of a non-Newtonian fluid: a mixture that is liquid under normal conditions but which stiffens up instantly when force is applied to it. Although the group is not releasing its specific recipe pending a patent application, the mixture likely contains cornstarch and water. The mixture is simple, inexpensive, biodegradable and even edible.

The plan involves placing the non-Newtonian fluid into heavy-duty plastic bags, throwing the bags into potholes, and then covering them with black material so that drivers don’t mistake them for obstacles. As cars drive over the bags, the fluid inside stiffens up and lets the vehicles pass without the familiar jarring. The bags are not meant as a permanent solution, but they could help prevent damage to vehicles just long enough to allow crews to get out there with some hot asphalt.

The post Bags of Non-Newtonian Fluid Are a Temporary Pothole Fix first appeared on Gajitz.

Jaywalking has been decried by lawmakers and cursed by motorists for as long as cars have darted along streets. Yet most of us still do it on a regular basis. Why? Because crossing the street where we want to, when we want to is easier than waiting until we get all the way to the crosswalk and the little green man lights up. In the interest of keeping pedestrians safe but still giving in a little to all of our impatience, Korean designer Jae Min Lim designed the Ergo (as in ergonomic) Crosswalk.

The new crosswalk design doesn’t exactly make it simple for anyone to just dart across the street, but it does make it easier for pedestrians to start crossing the street as they approach the crosswalk. By giving the ends of the crosswalk a little curve near the pavements, the design cuts out that very dangerous (and currently illegal) few seconds when a pedestrian is stepping out into unprotected vehicle territory. As seen in the images above, most walkers don’t stick to the crosswalk territory when crossing the street. The Ergo Crosswalk would extend that territory just a bit to match up with the way people actually walk.

If this design were implemented, it might cause drivers to stop a bit further back from the crosswalk than they are used to. This would, in all likelihood, enrage a lot of people in cars. But it would also likely reduce the number of vehicle-on-pedestrian collisions at crosswalks, which is always a good thing. Lim imagines that the crosswalk could be illuminated with green and red lights that would tell pedestrians when to walk and would run on piezoelectric panels under the street. We would like to point out how dangerous putting red and green lights on the street’s surface would be, particularly when they would be so very likely to cause the very vehicle-on-pedestrian incidents the designer is trying to avoid. But aside from that small detail, the idea seems like a simple to intelligent tweak to an existing design.

The post Innovative Crosswalk Idea Makes Street Safe for Jaywalkers first appeared on Gajitz.

It has to be said: most bikes are only beautiful to cycling experts who know exactly what they’re looking at. For the rest of us, bikes look like utilitarian machines designed to get us from one place to another. The “Full Circle” urban bike design from Sanghyun Jeong and Jun-Tae Park is a little different: it’s beautiful, lightweight, foldable and simple to take with you just about anywhere.

The chain-less bike looks a bit like an alien creature with two big eyes. Its large 20″ wheels are meant to make navigating through big cities easier, while the absence of a chain makes it lighter and cleaner than traditional bikes. Its ease of folding – and the way it can be simply rolled along behind one’s body when walking – make it the perfect urban bike to take along when part of your commute involves a train or bus.

The Full Circle is one of the shortlisted entries in Designboom’s Seoul Cycle Design Competition 2010, chosen from more than 3000 entries. Its unusual shape and unfamiliar functionality may draw some critics, but this isn’t meant to be a mountain bike – it is a machine designed to roll easily through city streets and be carried into an office building. And for that purpose, this strange-looking grown-up version of a Big Wheel might be just what urban dwellers need.

The post Street Smarts: Big-Wheeled Folding Bike for City Dwellers first appeared on Gajitz.