Am I misunderstanding what’s going on here? Is Lego selling killer drone play kits? And attack jet kits? And does “Character Building” refer to constructing a character from Lego to play with, or is it making the case that playing with military-themed Lego will “build character”? I’m going to assume the less ironic option, I guess.
(via Greg Foster)
I make maps, create open source science tools and software, and other stuff at the Pirateship in Somerville, MA, and as one of the founders of Public Lab. I am a fellow in MIT's Center for Civic Media. I'm on Github. Email me at jeff@unterbahn.com
Public Lab is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible "Do-It-Yourself" techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.
Tools and techniques for participatory grassroots mapping, emphasizing subjective and narrative mapping as a form of expression. By using low-cost tools like kites and balloons along with inexpensive digital cameras and mobile phones, communities can explore, document and assert their own local geographies. We are developing a map-making curriculum for kids and digital tools to publish grassroots maps in standard formats such as KML, Shapefile, and GeoJSON.
Cartagen is a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.
NEWSFLOW is a dynamic, real-time map of news reporting, which displays both the latest top stories as well as the news organizations which covered them. All articles are from the last few minutes. Viewing news in this way lets us see how the choice of 'top stories' by news bureaus is geographically unequal, or rather, what areas of the world are neglected by various national news sources. Built with HTML5 on the dynamic mapping framework CARTAGEN, NEWSFLOW draws on real-time data from over 200 news organizations as well as Google, Yahoo, and other sources.
WHOOZ is a project to map urban wildlife in realtime with SMS messages throughout Manhattan, the Bronx, and Cambridge, MA. Users can request realtime 'safaris' to find animals recently seen near their current location.
ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year's exports) and 228 government entities.
Kogbox is a communal programming site where users write short re-usable snippets of code and run them in the cloud. Snippets can be shared and combined to create more complex applications.
A project mapping the flow of coffee on global, urban, local, architectural, biological, and personal scales. The full collection includes over 50 pieces on cardboard, paper, and chipboard in ink, paint, graphite, chalk, charcoal, and coffee.
I was a partner at Vestal Design, where worked with Dave Pitman and Mike Lin on lots of stuff like Xobni's user interface and branding and information design for Intel, General Electric, and others. I also taught information design workshops for General Electric and Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai.
I work occasionally and excitedly with Natalie Jeremijenko as part of her xDesign Lab at NYU.
Weardrobe.com was a site for tagging and organizing clothing online, which I created with Suzanne Xie and Richard Tong.
Cut&Paste Labs was founded by Diego Rotalde and myself; we taught workshops on web design and development with open-source tools in Lima, Peru in 2006-7. Some of our students went on to found their own firms...
I've also designed a few zany things which people have enjoyed, like the DoubleSpace Kitchenette:
as well as the SHRIMP Refugee Shelter (with Alice B. Philips):
August 13th, 2012 at 6:33 am
Nintendo almost lost their early market dominance because they hesitated (for a time) to produce violent video games. Perhaps the military theme is an example of the toy industry catering to a certain market rather than shaping it.
Lego occupies an odd niche when kids are switching to digital entertainment and many types of toys are becoming obsolete (I was trying to find a “bouncy ball” the other day, lots of people didn’t know what I was talking about). They bridge the gap with things like programmable Mindstorms robots, but those don’t preclude kids from building their own character by making killer-robots.
September 6th, 2012 at 8:05 am
Twisted, but I don’t think this is actually a Lego product.
Some companies appear to make Lego “compatible” kits that are much more militaristic/violent than the Legos I grew up with. I don’t know if these are licensed by Lego, but I don’t see any reason why they’d necessarily have to be (since key Lego patents have expired)…
http://www.amazon.co.uk/100-Lego-Compatible-Anti-Aircraft/dp/B00466ZHWK/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_2_2