City trucks – the ones that sweep the streets, haul garbage and plow snow – are essential to keep a city operating properly, but they are all rather limited in the scope of their usefulness. Instead of having three separate fleets of trucks that do one thing each, why not combine them into a kind of super-truck? That’s the idea behind designer Michal Markiewicz‘s Multifunctional City Sweeper Concept.

The concept truck would sweep the streets in the morning and gather trash in the afternoon. In the winter, it would plow the streets to make them safe for residents to drive on. Combining the three functions together would save on gas as well as storage space for trucks that are only used seasonally.

Perhaps the Multifunctional City Sweeper isn’t yet a fully fleshed-out idea. One thing the design ignores is the fact that garbage trucks are huge in order to fit in a lot of garbage. The crews usually work from sunrise to sunset, five to six days a week, just to pick up all of that trash. When would trash crews also find time to use their trucks for sweeping and plowing? Still, the design is an elegant answer to the vehicles that sit locked away and unused for a large portion of the year. Perhaps a more efficient idea would be to simply combine the sweeper and plow trucks since the two are rarely used in the same portion of the year.

The post Multi-Functional Municipal Vehicle Does ALL of the Dirty Jobs first appeared on Gajitz.

Being a science and technology website, we get to see a lot of truly over-the-top concepts. But this is one that is firmly within the realm of reality – and it’s a pretty great idea at that. City Context is a solar-powered streetlight that contains a waste bin in the interior of the pole.

Designed by Li-Te Lo, Song-Jung Chen, Tai-Yen Lee, Chun-Wei Hsu and Cheng-Yu Tsai, City Context was a 2011 IDEA Award winner. The winning design is simple, yet entirely brilliant. Public waste bins are taken off of street corners and put into light poles where they can’t be tipped over or stolen. City sanitation workers have special key cards that allow them to open the compartment and empty the bin inside.

The bins are color-coded to tell citizens which type of refuse goes in each bin. Of course, public recycling bins are hardly ever effective (in the U.S., at least) since people seem to throw their garbage into whatever receptacle they happen to be near at the moment.

The garbage bins are far from the only “green” feature of this design. Solar panels on the tops of the lights collect sun power during the day to light the streets at night. Presumably the lights would also be hooked up to grid power just in case the sun happens to hide away for a while – but using solar power even part-time would cut down on the overall energy needs of the public lights.

The post Ingenious Integrated Garbage Bins/Solar Lights Prettify City first appeared on Gajitz.

All around us, there is an invisible landscape surrounding and permeating everything that we can see. This second urban topography exists in the wi-fi networks that crisscross the physical topography, beaming data invisibly all around us. Visual artist Timo Arnall wanted to be able to see these streams of information, so he created a video and a series of photographs bringing to light the wi-fi networks all around Oslo, Norway.

The project is called “Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi.” Timo, along with Jorn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen, built a light stick that operates somewhat like the reception bars on your cell phone. The stick detects a wi-fi signal and lights up according to how strong the signal is.

Using this lighted measuring stick, the group employed long exposures and light painting techniques to create a sort of real-life digital painting of the respective strengths of wi-fi signals all around their city. The pictures captured what look like fences of wi-fi rather than the actual sizes and shapes of the network fields, depicting something that is reminiscent of a city-wide light trail leading somewhere spectacular.

In the process of creating this series of photographs, the team learned that wi-fi signal strength can be vastly influenced by the size and shape of the existing (visible) urban landscape. The existing buildings and land features do play a part in the signal strength as it is experienced in various spots.

But even more fascinating is the fact that the invisible landscape is extending the visible boundaries of certain zones in some way. A university building, for example, provides wi-fi that extends into an adjoining park so that students are able to work outdoors. This effectively makes the university building’s reach a little broader for those who can access the password-protected network, but does not change the landscape for passers-by without the proper access.

This compelling project serves to bring an invisible part of our world out into the visible realm in a fun way, but it also reminds us of how our cities and towns are changing. Even if we can’t see the information being constantly shared over the air, we can feel the effects of every coffeshop becoming a workspace and every public park turning into a homework hotspot.

As much as we love this project, we can’t help but wonder how incredible a 3D version would look: one that showed not only a “fence” of wi-fi, but a real topographical map of wi-fi signal strength covering an entire town.

The post Invisible Urban Topography: Visualizing City Wi-Fi Fields first appeared on Gajitz.