If you happen to be in New York City in the next several months, a trip on the Staten Island ferry could be in order. The free ferry (where you can still buy a beer) is one of the ways to view the city’s newest outdoor art display—four man-made “waterfalls” cascading into the East River.

The waterfalls are located at the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, Pier 35 in Manhattan, Piers four and five in Brooklyn, and on the north end of Governors Island. Standing between 90 and 120 feet tall, the waterfalls churn 35,000 gallons of water per minute.

The art installation is the creation of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. According to The Washington Post:

“I wanted to do something appropriate in scale and fitting to the city,” Eliasson said at a news conference at Pier 17 yesterday. While much of Manhattan’s ethos is about consuming space, he said, this project is meant to encourage reevaluating relationships with space and with nature. At his side, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the falls symbolize “the energy and vitality that we have been bringing back to our waterfront.”

The waterfalls will be on display until October 13th. Evenings may offer some of the best viewing as the waterfalls will be lit after sunset. In addition to the Staten Island ferry, good views can be had on the free Governors Island ferry, downtown Circle Line boat tours, Manhattan-bound B or D trains, Brooklyn-bound N or Q trains, and of course at various spots along the water.

Florence, Italy-based architect David Fisher unveiled plans to construct the world’s first building in motion, the Dynamic Tower. The first tower will be built in Dubai, with a second one planned for Moscow, and the third in New York City. Each floor rotates separately from the the one above and below, which will constantly change the shape of the building.

There are many revolutionary elements to the design, many of which are green. First, the building will generate it’s own power with wind turbines positioned between each floor (the building is 80 stories tall and is naturally postitioned to capture wind) and it is estimated by Fisher that they can generate enough power and perhaps even give power to the grid. Fisher felt a building should work with nature and not against it. Wind is a big problem for skyscrapers and he found a solution that allows the building to interact with the elements.

Also, the building is prefabricated and each floor is built in a factory, which means construction time and costs are kept to a much lower cost.

The Dynamic Tower offers infinite design possibilities, as each floor rotates independently to create a building that constantly changes shape, resulting in a unique and ever evolving architectural structure.

“The Dynamic Tower is environmentally friendly and the first building designed to be self-powered, with the ability to generate its own electricity, as well as for other nearby buildings, it achieves this feat with wind turbines fitted between each rotating floor, An 80-story building will have up to 79 wind turbines, making it a true green power plant,” Dr. Fisher stated.

The Dynamic Tower is also the first skyscraper to be built entirely from prefabricated parts that are custom made in a workshop, resulting in cost savings, this approach known as the Fisher Method, also requires far fewer workers on the construction site, thereby dramatically lowering construction costs.

“Each floor of the building can be completed in only seven days. From now on, buildings will be made in a factory,” Dr. Fisher said.

By combining motion, green energy and efficient construction, the Dynamic Tower will change architecture as we know it, and herald a new era of Dynamic Living.

According to Los Angeles Times, Shell Hydrogen will open California’s first retail station to sell both gasoline and hydrogen, and only the second in the country after one in Washington, also operated by Shell.

General Motors and Honda have joined in partnerships with Shell and other companies to increase the number of stations in tandem with advancing technology and commercialization of fuel-cell cars in the next five to 10 years.

Honda is offering about 200 FCX Clarity hydrogen-powered sedans on three-year leases for $600 a month.

Hydrogen vehicles generate no tailpipe emissions aside from water vapor.

I recently had the chance to catch up with fashion designer and trend spotter Jennifer Wannarachue. As the co-founder of Worship Worthy, a fashion blog and design studio, Wannarachue is on the cutting edge of New York City streetwear. “We concentrate a lot on downtown New York City and things…that have an indie feel,” she said from her Brooklyn studio last week.

Dressed in a black one-piece romper and flat boots, Wannarachue looked comfortable on a summer day in the city. “I usually call my style casually awesome. Being a designer and designing for 10 years, in the beginning, it was really about I can afford to wear designer products. I can afford this label and that label and, now after 10 years of designing, I wear what isn’t too fussy, stuff that looks good and is just really casually awesome,” she said with a laugh.

The Worship Worthy site has been around since 2006 when Wannarachue saw a need for a female-centric trend spotting blog. “We just wanted to write about things that we thought were worthy of being worshipped, pretty much things we thought were cool,” she said, adding that she’s always been into finding the next hot thing. Now, with an ever-growing following, Wannarachue is bringing advice and cool T-shirts and totes to the masses.

Wannarachue also offered tips for women’s summer fashions, saying there are five things a New York City woman should have at the moment:

-A pair of flat walking boots or flat shoes or sandals that offer good coverage of the foot
-A pair of denim cut off shorts
-A pair of dressy, walking shorts, preferably linen
-A short sleeved v-neck white T-shirt
-A good rotation of tote bags or slouchy bags

Nike has launched a new mobile program in Europe that banks on the growing desire among consumers to customize as much as they can. With a service called PhotoiD, European customers can take a visually rich photo with a cameraphone, send it to a short code and then get a rendering of a sneaker in the photo’s two main colors.

The designs will be placed on Nike’s 1985 classic high-tops. Customers will be able to forward the rendering to friends, save it as wallpaper or of course buy a pair of the sneakers.

In the past, the brand has allowed people to customize shoes on their Web site but the mobile aspect of this makes it unique. According to the U.K.’s Guardian:

“Where past use of MMS in mobile marketing campaigns has typically focused on short-term, one-way interactions between brand and consumers, Nike PhotoiD opens a genuine creative dialogue between the brand and its audience,” said Paolo Tubito, the director of brand connections for Nike Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Last October, Radiohead shocked record execs and fans alike when they offered a pay-what-you-wish option for a digital copy of their album In Rainbows.  While record companies sat drop-jawed, fans rushed to the site in hordes to get their copies of the highly anticipated release.

Frontman Thom Yorke is noted for saying, “I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one.”

Gregg Gillis, the man behind the mash-up madness that is Girl Talk, heeded Yorke’s words and is following Radiohead’s example by releasing his fourth full-length album, Feed The Animals, for a name-your-own-price deal online.

Any price will get you a high-quality download of the entire album.  Five dollars or more will add on the options of FLAC files and a one-file seamless mix of the album.  If you shell out 10 clams or more you’ll be the proud owner of all of the above along with the packaged CD once it becomes available.

According to The New York Times, tech firms Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they created a non-profit–Information Overload Research Group–to study the problem.

Just how bad is the problem? A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.

Silicon Valley denizens speak of “e-mail bankruptcy,” or getting so far behind in responding to e-mail messages that it becomes necessary to delete them all and start over. Another relatively new term is “e-mail apnea,” coined by the writer Linda Stone, which refers to the way that people, when struck by the volume of new messages in their in-boxes, unconsciously hold their breath.

The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex.

MySpace rolled out its cleaned up new look today.

One of the big gripes and bones to pick that many users, myself included, had with MySpace is that the design layout was a mess. MySpace took the criticism to heart and began the redesign about nine months ago. It probably did not escape notice around the MySpace watercooler that main rival Facebook was gaining a lot of ground - and new “friends” - over the past year. Besides, in our here-today-gone-tomorrow insta-climate of short consumer attention spans, successful companies and people know that change is good.

Ryan Freitas, the project lead for the redesign, says his team’s focus was to change the old way of thinking that was gunking up the MySpace experience, namely that you don’t need to put everything in front of the user all the time.

“If you were to do a before-and-after comparison between (Tuesday’s) home page and (Wednesday’s), you’d notice there’s a big reduction in clutter and noise,” he says.

The sitewide navigation is much simpler. The number of links in the main nav bar has been reduced from 15 to 7. Extra links have been shuffled off into a drop-down menu. The site’s splash page is also much cleaner. The big gray box containing links to MySpace services like videos, chat and horoscopes (a whopping 28 links in total) is gone. In its place is a much cleaner tabbed interface with emphasis on video, music and friend discovery.

“We decided to pare away those things that were distracting — not to hide things, but make it easier for users to discover the things that might appeal to them.”

Besides dealing with the purely visual experience, the redesign team also began to address the many annoyances that many users consistently complain about on the site. We’ll see how well they did.

[via Webmonkey]

Billboard asked emerging country star, Taylor Swfit, about her MySpace page.

Q. Last year at the CMT Awards you said that you spend at least half an hour a day on MySpace tracking people down and thanking them for their support. Is that still true?

A. Yeah, actually it’s very true. I spend so much time on MySpace. It’s the best way to figure out what your fans and what your friends and these people that helped you get where you are, what they’re going through and what they want to hear from you, what they’re liking, what they’re not. My MySpace is something that I made. The background that you see on there, I went to a Web site and copied the code and copy-and-pasted my “about me” section. I upload all the pictures, I check the comments, I am in charge of everything on that page. It really is important to me and really special to me when someone comes up to me and says, “I’m your friend on MySpace.” I’ve always taken so much pride in it just because it’s really personal to me.

Her answer speaks for itself. But it’s also a lesson in authenticity and a reminder that while people might be geeking out on Facebook, MySpace is where bands of every stripe and music fans connect.

BMW’s automotive designers have come up with a very cool concept car they call GINA. What is so interesting about the car is that BMW’s designers looked at the skin of cars, which are usually made out of some form of metal, fiberglass or other rigid material, and then, thinking outside of the box, saw the very “flexible” design and functional possibilities that can be achieved by using an alternative skin.

Instead of steel, aluminum or even carbon fiber, the GINA Light Visionary Model has a body of seamless fabric stretched over a movable metal frame that allows the driver to change its shape at will. The car — which actually runs and drives — is a styling design headed straight for the BMW Museum in Munich and so it will never see production, but building a practical car wasn’t the point.

Chris Bangle, head of design for BMW, says GINA allowed his team to “challenge existing principles and conventional processes.”

The take away: Think Flexible.

[via Wired]