bird | GIZMODO.cz

I live in a city where seeing birds out in the concrete jungle is very rare since all the noise, smog, and the tall buildings have probably scared them away. So when I visited New Zealand and saw birds just “walking” around and mingling with people (and stealing their food at times), I was enchanted and wished our cities were bird-friendly as well. It’s a good sign when an urban space has birds freely flying around and not afraid of people and their environment.

Designers: Mikołaj Nicer and Paweł Frej

Numbird is a nesting box that can invite small birds to rest and stay in it while also doubling as a street address marker since they’re shaped as digits. There’s a small hole in the middle that serves as the space where the birds can nest. So it’s just tiny birds that can fit into that although the bigger birds can perch on the numbers if they wanted to. The birdhouses are easy to assemble so it can be a group activity in your family or it can also be a community project to show that people and birds can co-exist even in a highly urbanized area.

The nesting box is made from waterproof plywood components that were impregnated with natural oil. The kit has all the necessary parts and tools needed to put together the birdhouses that are also your house or building number. It looks pretty easy to assemble so both kids and grown-ups can have a fun and easy time putting them together. They say that the shared number is not only a practical thing but also a symbolic element into “improving the lives of all city inhabitants”.

A lot of the natural habitats of these birds, particularly the small ones, have been destroyed by rapid urbanization. These digit-shaped nesting boxes cannot bring back their original homes or make them less afraid of interacting with humans but it’s a step towards helping humans and the avian species in our urban spaces “co-exist peacefully”.

The post Street number is a nesting space for tiny birds in the cities first appeared on Yanko Design.

Owls sending mail might be pure fiction, but there was a time when birds were indeed used to send messages across distances. Taking advantage of their natural homing instincts, pigeons were used to send messages in the fastest way possible when using humans on horseback was too dangerous for various reasons. Of course, all that is ancient (or medieval) history by now, but the image of a mail-carrying bird has forever been etched into our minds. Some might even use that association to brand certain services that simply ferry bits and bytes of data from one device to another. That’s the inspiration behind this rather charming USB thumb stick concept, though its seemingly whimsical design carries some important practical implications as well.

Designer: SHS Shih

Even in this day and age of the cloud, it’s sometimes still more efficient, not to mention more secure, to store your files on a small USB flash drive. You have instant access to your data, as long as you can plug it into your device, and only those who can actually hold the flash drive in their hands can actually use it. Over the course of the years, the technology behind this gadget has moved forward by leaps and bounds and it’s now possible to see a 1TB flash drive, even if few can actually afford it.

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These advancements open up flash drives to more interesting designs, like this Pinge “bird-style” design concept. Right off the bat, you will notice that it isn’t your usual flash drive, even if you can’t immediately make out that it’s supposed to resemble a bird. Instead of staying flat as almost all flash drives do, its end curves upward, forming the bird’s neck and head. A small golden triangle protruding from that end forms the beak, but it also has the added function of being a pendant or lanyard hole. As you might have guessed, the actual USB interface is the bird’s tail, which is perfect considering the alternating white and gold lines resemble feathers, with some stretch of the imagination.

As unconventional as the design might be, it has merits that go beyond its eye-catching shape. The upward curve makes it easy to pick up the flash drive, and it gives your fingers something firm to hold onto when pulling it out from a computer. Curiously, putting Pinge down on a flat surface makes it rest on that curved portion thanks to a shifted center of gravity. That means that no matter how much you tip or rock the flash drive, it will always return to that stable position. Coincidentally, that makes Pinge a potential desk fidget toy.

Of course, there are drawbacks to such a non-flat design, like how the bird’s “head” might snag on things more easily or how it would take up more room in an accessory pouch. It might also make the flash drive more prone to breaking if something heavy was dropped on it or if it was sandwiched between too hard surfaces. It’s still an interesting design experiment, especially considering how most flash drive designs focus solely on functionality without paying attention to aesthetics. It doesn’t have to be the case, and it requires a bit of outside-the-box thinking to come up with interesting designs that don’t sacrifice functionality in return.