joel laumans » holland

big air rotterdam

Joel Laumans — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:12:38 +0000

Last Sunday Rotterdam held the Big Air Snowboard World Cup, I dropped by for a couple minutes to take a couple snapshots. Unfortunately I didn’t have a great view, but to compensate for the bad photos I decided to make something a little bit more interesting in flash.

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Panorama of Rotterdam, NL

Joel Laumans — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:25:29 +0000

I figured it would be a nice idea to show everyone where I’m living, so I decided to compile a panorama of some pictures I took a while back.

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This second panorama is of the Rotterdam Port, one of the largest ports in the world.

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Unfortunately it started to rain while taking the pictures, so you see a couple small water drops blurring the image of the first panorama on the left. But it should give you a good idea of what Rotterdam looks like, and truly how flat The Netherlands is.

Hope you like it =)

Pooping in Public

Joel Laumans — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:10:48 +0000

Sitting on the pot, pushing brown, desecrating the throne, doing the doodly-squat, faxing a cigar to Castro, or whatever else you want to call it, it usually is our private moment of Zen.

However Monica Bonvicini came up with a design with preserves our privacy without obstructing us from the environment around us. Bonvicini’s ‘Don’t Miss a Sec’ is a public toilet built with walls of one-way mirrors. From the outside it looks like a large silver box, but inside is a toilet with a 360 degree view of the street around you.

It seems this toilet is “touring” through different cities, and will now be in the center of Rotterdam (Netherlands) until some time in November. I’m sure many of you have read about this before, so had I. But the moment I saw it in person, walked inside and started urinating while watching people walk by it amazed me how directly design had an impact on my immediate environment. It was sensational, I felt like I was starring in “Hollow Man” as I could watch world while being completely invisible to them! There is not much else I can say about

Anyone in the neighborhood should definitely take a look, because peeing in public never felt so good. The toilet is in the center of Rotterdam in front of the Stadhuis, and shouldn’t be hard to find.

Don’t know how one-way mirrors work? Read this

Perspective of information

Joel Laumans — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:30:50 +0000

Today I came across two very noteworthy examples of clever information design which make understanding sets of data both more visual and relative. The best way to grasp what data means is often to put it into perspective with other sets of data so you can easily make a comparison. This is when charts and illustrations quickly become a better data medium than numbers.

How the World Really Shapes Up

The first example takes a map of the world and distorts each region size, relevant to the category it is in. For example, while viewing the map on HIV presence, Africa will be bloated compared to the rest of the world.

See more maps or read more about the project at the UK Daily Mail.

(These maps were produced together by the universities of Michigan and Sheffield)

Size of the Universe

Universcale is a very interactive example of helping us putting into perspective the size of the universe. We quickly can understand how small we are compared to the billions of light years which span across the universe, whilst still being millions of times larger than the building blocks which make up the universe.

(I found Universcale through a design website which I frequently visit, Position Absolute)

Here is a video which also helps us fathom just how large the universe really is