By I am not totally convinced that this is a very practical idea, although I do think that it is an interesting concept that could be developed further. Simple as Lego and easy to build (and re-build) as you play with them, Bloxes are flat-pack die-cut cardboard 3D cubes that snap together to make super-strong, lightweight, infinitely configurable dividers, shelves, tables — and they’re also sound-dampeners. They come in multiple colors as well. You can visit their website at http://bloxes.com/
The Pro’s for Bloxes, I thought were:
- Easy to build
- Versatile for setting up and moving around or re-assembling according to your needs
- Great for conferences or trade shows
- eco-friendly (if made from recycled paper as well)
Cons for Bloxes:
- Easy for dust to collect in them, especially here in PNG
- Moisture and Dampness from our environment
- Highly flammable
- Expensive at US$60 for 20 boxes (so about K160 for a 20 pack and if you wanted to build something like a wall as per the pic below…well you do the math. Might as well buy a table for K400 at Theodist)
- Cockroaches would love it
I think if they can just give us a template to cut our own bloxes or just have them made in China then it will be cheaper for us to give it a go here in PNG. I also think they’re simply ugly, but anyway it highlights a number of interesting possibilities.
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By the way one of the founders of Bloxes is an interesting bloke by the name of Aza Raskin. Aza is a 24 year old, software user interface expert. He has made it his mission to make human communications with PC’s so intuitive that you’ll forget that you’re using a device. With his friends they started their think tank called Humanized, in 2005.
Last year they launched 2 products to put their theories into practice. The first was Enso which is a free software that lets you do common computing tasks easier and faster than ever before. They claim that you get a huge productivity boost and a simpler digital life. For example as Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal explains:
“Enso is dead simple to use. You just hold down the Caps Lock key and type an Enso command, which is displayed in a translucent overlay. Once the command is typed, you simply release the Caps Lock key to activate it, and the overlay disappears. If you type fast, it all happens in a flash. For instance, to launch the Firefox Web browser, you just hold down the Caps Lock key and type “open firefox.” To look up the meaning of the word “proclivity,” you just hold down the Caps Lock key and type “define proclivity.”
The second project was a music search engine and jukebox website called “Songza.com” which is an interface showcase, showing habituatable pie menus instead of linear menus; few icons; a high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction; undo instead of warnings; and transparent messages designed not to break the user’s train of thought. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs.
Raskin gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 at the local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI. By 20, he was speaking internationally. He holds bachelor degrees in math and physics from the University of Chicago. He attended Caltech briefly as a Ph.D. student in Physics, continuing the Dark Matter research he had participated in at both the University of Chicago and University of Tokyo. The University of Chicago was the only school Raskin ever completed, having left middle school, high school, and graduate school. He is also an accomplished French Horn soloist.
His late father was Jef Raskin, a human-computer interface expert best-known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s.
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