Almost there! You can download the entire conference guide at Geekend!

Also, we’ve just announced the Geekend Block Party! November 7 @ 7pm.

Unleash The Geek!

We see people in wheelchairs all the time, but have you ever stopped to think about how wheelchairs really haven’t changed very much since the first one was invented. It’s still a pretty basic design. Wheels & a place to sit. If you have no use of a wheelchair or are not around anyone who does, then you probably don’t think about them very much.

But, if you do have to use one, this is something you probably think about a great deal. While there have been far strides in wheelchair design, this is not stopping a new generation of designers from trying to create even better chairs that make mobility and life for those who have to use them much easier.

Check out this array of technologically innovative wheelchair designs coming from some of the best minds in the world of design & engineering.

We’ve all seen less than enthusiastic folks in sandwich boards for local businesses. But occasionally, a business taps into a sign holder with a little more personality. I recently saw one such person on a trip to Traverse City, Michigan.

To locals, he’s become known as The Domino’s Dancing Kid, and they can count on him for entertainment and Domino’s promotions at various intersections during rush hour.

Once hooked up to his iPod, this somewhat awkward looking guy is transformed into a breakdancing spectacle. His dancing alter ego has become so popular in Traverse City that the Domino’s Dancing Kid even opened up for well known musician Keller Williams a few weeks ago.

A video of a recent performance at the intersection of Front Street and Garfield in Traverse City:

Anything that makes noise is fair game for musicians to use to create music and mobile phones are pretty noisy little buggers. One thing we’ve all gotten used to in our lives is the sound our phones make when we recieve a text. Well, Vodafone New Zealand wondered what it would be like if you took 1000 phones, wired them up and sent a series of texts to them to create a symphony and so they set out to do it.

They hired a production team to orchestrate a wall of cellphones into “playing” Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 Overture. The musical director created text tones with real instruments and then once it was all set up started sending a pre-arranged sequence of texts to the phones and the result is pretty cool.

Here are the behind the scenes making of videos:

To celebrate its 70th anniversary the design company Vipp has partnered Design Within Reach and a round table of famous artists who have made their own versions of Vipp’s iconic pedal trash bin.

Yoko Ono, David Rockwell, Calvin Klein, Nigel Barker, David Stark, Yves Béhar and others all donated signature bins that will be auctioned off for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA).

While the actual auction is by invite only, five of the cans are being auctioned on Ebay through October 28 and all of the bins can be seen at DWR: Tools For Living in Soho (NYC).

“What is the use of a book,” mused the title character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “without pictures or conversations?”

If you happen to share Alice’s sentiment, you’ll be delighted to know that a very famous book has just made its way back onto shelves—this time around with illustrations by a very famous artist.

Robert Crumb, the counterculture comic artist who illustrated album covers for The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and created such subversive characters as Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, has tackled what might seem to be an unlikely text for a skeptic and self-proclaimed Gnostic—The Book of Genesis.

Now, the greatest hits from the first book of the Bible—God creating earth, Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark among them—have been brought to life in explicit Crumb fashion (the book’s cover carries the warning, “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors”).

The notoriously misanthropic and curmudgeonly Crumb spent four years illustrating Genesis; so far, the book has been met with a predictable mixture of largely positive critical reception and outcry from a handful of religious groups who claim Crumb sensationalized and sexualized the subject matter for commercial gain.

In a quote to The New York Times, Crumb said of Genesis:

“I had no intention to scandalize the Bible. I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.”

See an excerpt of the book here.

It’s a wonderful thing when fashion and art meet. Moschino is one label that gets that.

Since setting up shop in New York City’s Meatpacking District last year, their store window has become known for its artistic flair. Last spring’s Dali tribute is just one such example. Now the store has teamed up with the Whitney’s Contemporaries group and Vogue for a collaboration.

Ryan Humphrey is the artist behind the window that’s being called “Darkness at Sunrise.” With a focus on biker chic elements, Humphrey makes a promotion for the Autumn 2009/Winter 2010 collection gallery-worthy.

One of my geekier passions involves Twitter as a storytelling device, so I was excited by a project author Neil Gaiman (Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and The Sandman series) has going with BBC Audiobooks America.

Essentially, it’s an interactive story Gaiman started yesterday on Twitter with the update: “Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, ‘We don’t love you anymore.’” Now it’s up to the Twitterati to get their creativity flowing with the next parts of the story. Eventually, @BBCAA will pull together the Tweets into a complete script for an audiobook.

It’s projects like these that show the possibilities a network like Twitter opens up. I’m often surprised when I bump into people who still view Twitter as a limitation since you only get 140 characters. It’s those naysayers who could learn a lot from something like this. 140 characters is only the beginning.

If you find yourself in Atlanta, Georgia, this weekend, keep an eye out for the mappers.

Starting this Saturday, some 200 GPS-toting volunteers will be hitting the city’s streets with the common goal of making Atlanta the world’s most digitally mapped city.

Conducted by OpenStreetMap, or OSM—a free, user-generated world map that has been called the Wikipedia of maps—the Atlanta “mapathon” aims to map everything from major freeways to bike paths and coffee shops. Maps can be accessed, as well as updated and edited at www.openstreetmap.org.
 
The emerging OSM technology offers a free and flexible alternative to other map services that are either unaffordable or non-customizable, opening up a myriad of possibilities ranging from iPhone apps to community crime maps and more. The not-for-profit service counts a network of approximately 160,000 volunteers out mapping the globe.

Ah, nothing like a good teaser. Dyson, known for its bagless vacuum cleaners, put this teaser video out to get people excited about a new product and it worked. The video shows a bunch of people in a focus group environment being shown something. It is never revealed what they are looking at, but they are all equally amazed by it.

There are a few moments when the people’s expression might actually give away what it is they are looking at and their words are bleeped and their mouths are pixelated for effect (or maybe these bleeps are just carefully placed and perhaps unnecessary and only used to amp up the tease? Perhaps they are being used in the way Jimmy Kimmel’s show does it with its very funny “Unnecessary Censorship” segment where they bleep out random words of people in videos to infer that what they are saying is not ready for prime time).

The teaser worked for Dyson because legions of Twitterati got revved up trying to figure out what the product is. Can you guess? No? Well, here it is.