But the Swedish company realizes that people in big cities want to stop by, grab what they need, and head home on the bus or subway, so they’ve recently started experimenting with a few new options. In 2019, they opened a few small, boutique-style stores in New York, London, and Paris that allowed customers to see and feel the goods and order them for delivery, but that still didn’t seem to satisfy the desire to actually shop.

Now, in a first for the retailer, a new urban store in Vienna will offer full service right by the Westbahnhof train station. There’s just one catch: there’s absolutely zero parking. That’s kind of the whole point. Designed by Querkraft Architekten, the new seven-story store consists of a bunch of airy, open modular boxes stacked on top of each other, with greenery poking out in every direction. It’s directly marketed to people who will be arriving on foot, bicycle, or public transit.

“The concept focuses on the current mega trends and takes into account the dramatically changed shopping behavior, as well as a new form of mobility without a car,” reads an official company statement. “Customers have little time and appreciate convenience and comfort. This is clearly noticeable in the furnishing [sector]: more and more customers no longer even think about carrying their purchases home themselves. You can have them delivered.”

In fact, the store will deliver large purchases that are difficult to transport within a maximum of 24 hours, so customers will still get the stuff they need fast, albeit (presumably) at an upcharge. But just as much as it will be a traditional retail store, the urban Ikea Vienna location also aims to be a local destination. The large green roof and terraces will offer plenty of spots from which to gaze out at the city, while the store itself will have the usual IKEA cafeteria and concessions.

Querkraft Architekten says they designed the store around two pillars: consumer convenience and sustainability. The large volume of trees on the facade are part of this strategy, implanted in hopes of influencing the local microclimate. The company adds that: “Vegetation is the most important measure in the city of Vienna’s urban heat island strategy. Trailing plants and moss facade elements are further factors which have a cooling and humidifying effect like the trees.”

Construction started on January 7th, 2020, and it’s expected to be complete sometime in 2021. Once open, it’ll be interesting to see how the public reacts to the new setup. Reception is expected to be positive in Vienna, which already has a well-developed and heavily utilized public transit network in place, but can you imagine how different it might be in the United States, where people feel entitled to drive and park personal vehicles wherever they want?

The post IKEA’s New Urban Store in Vienna Will Have Green Facades and Zero Parking first appeared on Dornob.

Most Walmart customers just want fast, efficient service — especially those that have signed up for the retailer’s home delivery feature that brings their orders directly to their doors without them ever having to leave the house.

Current Delivery Options

For some time now, Walmart has offered home delivery, recently increasing its “Delivery Unlimited” service to more than 1,400 locations. In three US cities, they’ve also debuted InHome Delivery, which already serves over 1 million Walmart customers. The company also employs 50,000 personal shoppers to fill orders for its online clientele.

Upgrades on the Horizon

To make its delivery service faster and more efficient, as well as to free up employees to provide better customer service and choose produce and meat for remote orders, Walmart is turning to cutting-edge technology.

The conglomerate recently partnered with the Massachusetts-based Alert Innovation to create a grocery-choosing robot program called Alphabot. The robotic operation is currently being housed in a 20,000-square-foot warehouse space in the back of the Walmart Supercenter store in Salem, New Hampshire, where it’s also expected to make its official debut.

How It Works

Self-directed carts and about 30 small, cubic robots circle around inside a massive shelving system, picking and packing grocery orders from a selection of about 4,500 items. They travel throughout the store’s huge, high-density storage system to fill their baskets with shelf-stable foods, as well as frozen and refrigerated items.

The Alphabot robots move vertically and horizontally, shifting thousands of blue bins around the shelving system as they group orders for delivery and pickup. The bots then deliver the items to store associates assigned to fill online orders swiftly and accurately.

Brian Roth, a Senior Manager of Pickup Automation and Digital Operations for Walmart U.S., explains: “By assembling and delivering orders to associates, Alphabot is streamlining the order process, allowing associates to do their jobs with greater speed and efficiency.”

The other advantages of the Alphabot system benefit both the customers and Walmart employees. Roth adds that “ultimately, this will lower dispense times, increase accuracy, and improve the entirety of pickup grocery. And it will help free associates to focus on service and selling while the technology handles the more mundane, repeatable tasks.”

Moving Forward

The company stresses that the Alphabot program is still in its early stages, anticipating problems and glitches that will have to be worked out later down the road. Spokespeople have said the New Hampshire project will be “studied, refined, and perfected.” Most importantly, Walmart is anxious to get feedback from store associates and customers to tweak problems before the system is considered for other locations.

The system is currently working at a small part of its future capacity. It was built to accommodate up to 20,000 products, and it’ll employ about 20 more grocery-picking robots in the future. Automated grocery systems comparable to Alphabot are projected to pick and pack orders as much as 10 times quicker than a human can. This could very well be a windfall for Walmart to rapidly expand as the demand for online grocery services continues to rise.

The post Grocery-Picking Robots Help Walmart Serve Customers More Efficiently first appeared on Dornob.

Truly Personalized Skin Care

This groundbreaking concept, tentatively called Identité, would provide you with the all cosmetics you needed based on your diet, schedule, and upcoming travel destinations. AI would analyze the data you supplied via an accompanying smartphone app, picking out and shipping extremely personalized selections of beauty and skin care products to your door on a weekly basis.

The AI analysis is two-tiered. First, it creates a profile based on each user’s personal and business lifestyle, skin type, and environment. Next, it refines that profile based on user-supplied information regarding upcoming events.

Each weekly drop-off would consist entirely of eco-friendly, single-use products like strength-appropriate BB (blemish balm) cream and sunscreen. On top of that, these products would be chalk-full of omega-3 enhancements and anti-pollution antigens. By using only single-use modules, the company can put fewer preservatives in their products without worry.

How It Works

Seymourpowell has given the public three different scenarios to illustrate the Identité business model, the first of which involves a client set to vacation in Tulum, Mexico. Identité analyzes the hot, humid atmosphere and the typical activities of a beachfront getaway and, without human intervention, ships the customer sea salt hair gel, bronzer, aloe vera after-sun lotion, and, just for fun, some temporary tattoos.

When that person returns and schedules a business meeting in New York, Identité automatically shifts gears. It automatically ships them a long-lasting lipstick based on the client’s skin and hair tones, along with double-cleansing, charcoal-infused purification pads to clean away a day’s worth of urban grunge.

If a client is going to spend a weekend hiking or doing double-time at the gym, the Identité AI would probably prioritize supplements to boost energy and stamina.

Looking Forward

Although Identité is still an abstract concept, it’s based on actual research conducted through extensive interviews with beauty market experts and influencers around the world. These conversations revealed that consumers are relying on digital culture more than ever to research and purchase beauty products and health supplements. Besides websites, social media platforms like Reddit and Instagram seem to be popular sources for advice and information sharing.

In a recent interview, Seymourpowell director Mariel Brown explained that “There’s currently a lot of disruption within the beauty category and as a result, many nuanced and contradictory behaviors to unpack. Widespread connectivity is having a profound impact on people’s attitudes toward personal identity. We became curious as to how new technologies might combine with these new behaviors.”

Identité also concentrates on using more natural products and more unobjectionable packaging. Currently, the planned packaging is made of injection-molded, fully biodegradable fiber.

The post Seymourpowell’s New AI-Based Delivery Service Lets You Customize Your Skin Care Practices first appeared on Dornob.

“Before Chris Sheldrick co-founded what3words, he worked as production manager organizing live music events in different parts of the world,” explains what3words Chief Marketing Officer Giles Rhys Jones. “Getting sound equipment, personnel, and bands to a certain mountainside or in the middle of the countryside were challenging.” what3words was born out of this frustration. The first company to use the system was the Mongolian postal service (Mongol Post). Since then, mail services in Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, St. Maarten, Djibouti, and Tonga have also taken it up.

To truly understand the benefits of three-word addresses over standard street addresses, consider the job of a parcel delivery driver anywhere in the world. The driver begins their shift with a map of all the deliveries that need to be completed within a given timeframe. All the driver has are the street addresses, which should ensure that the buildings can be found.

Even if the driver has the right address and finds the building, however, the exact location of the recipient is still unknown to them. They might even have an office or suite number, but they’ll still have to figure out where the recipient is. With three-word addresses, the driver could know exactly where in the building the recipient was expecting their parcel. Without the three-word addresses, consider the amount of phone calls that would need to be made throughout the day between the driver and the recipient just to find the right meeting place.

“We just did a test in London with a delivery company, where we gave two couriers 20 packages each: 20 with street addresses on them and 20 with three-word addresses,” explains Jones. “Now the courier with three-word addresses was 30 percent faster. He was three and a half hours faster than the other guy. If you think about that, that’s one vehicle off the road for three and a half hours. So all of a sudden you can dramatically reduce pollution, congestion, just by being 200, 30, 50 yards more accurate than an address.”
Parcel delivery is just one of many industries that are starting to use what3words to enhance their effectiveness. Onibag, a delivery company based in Menlo Park, California, uses what3words to make same-day deliveries of medical supplies, organs, blood, and other perishable items to hospitals. Knowing exactly where to take such items as fast as possible is essential when the health of a patient depends on it.
On the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten, where not all houses have standard street addresses, Domino’s Pizza uses what3words to make deliveries. The company prints three-word addresses onto their receipts, and the delivery driver uses the accompanying app to navigate to that spot.

In the modeling and entertainment industries, photographers and filmmakers use three-word addresses to find specific locations in secluded areas. For example, if there was a scene in a television show or movie in a remote part of Australia and a filmmaker wanted to shoot part of an upcoming project in the same location, it would be difficult to find without a three-word address. Adventure seekers and travelers looking for the same location to hike or mountain climb benefit from it, too.

When a natural disaster leaves destruction in its wake, aid organizations use what3words to locate and rescue stranded survivors. After the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that rattled Mexico City back in September of this year, for instance, both the Government of Mexico and humanitarian groups used what3words to find people trapped in ruined buildings. Another aspect of what3words that makes it so effective in disaster zones is that it works without internet service. Once you download the map to your device, you can use what3words anywhere, whereas the GPS on smartphones requires cell reception, data, and internet (all of which may be out of service after an earthquake or typhoon strikes).

With all the ways that three-word addresses have helped individuals, companies, and organizations find their way around, Jones believes that the need for them will only increase over time as people continue to discover how unreliable street addresses can be.
“Urban mobility is a massive challenge. Currently, 50 percent of people who live in cities in the developing world don’t have a street address. Even in cities like LA and London, addressing is poor. With the huge migration of people to cities by the year 2030, 70 percent of the world’s population will be in urban centers. So we’re piling people on an address infrastructure that doesn’t work today.” It’s no wonder finding a place can be harder than you think.

The post Why Finding A Place Can Be Harder Than You Think first appeared on Dornob.

This clock doesn’t just tell you what time it is – it automatically orders pizza when you tell it to. The world’s first smart clock that will feed you, too, PizzaTime by Artefact Group uses the Edison platform to connect to the Domino’s Pizza Tracker API so all you have to do is press down on the button, twist it to your pizza choice and press down again to order.

You pre-program the clock with payment information and your favorite types of pizza to streamline the process, so as long as you’re predictable in your pizza selections, it literally takes no more than the push of a button to have food at your door within 30-45 minutes. The clock was created as part of Intel’s global IoT Hackathon Roadshow, in which designers spend 48 hours imagining and creating.

“PizzaTime won’t exactly be winning us productivity awards any time soon,” says Artefact, “but our goal was to demonstrate the potential for the Internet of Things to be not only utilitarian, but also delightful. It is these edge scenarios and sort of Mad Lib situations that make the Internet of Things so exciting.”

Want to create your own? The designers offer up the ‘recipe’ on their website, including the code and an app for displaying the pixel images on the clock face.

About Artefact Group

“As consultants, we do plenty of client-oriented software development: building new websites and digital experiences, creating mobile apps, adding features to existing software, helping to improve process and workflow, and building prototypes for our clients’ great ideas. We’ve also created solutions to our internal barriers to collaboration under our sister company, 10,000ft.”

“As the engineering arm of a company that also offers user experience design, interaction design, industrial design, product strategy and a host of other services, we end up touching a bunch of things that are not typical engineering responsibilities (at least for me). This includes embedded software drivers for new hardware, virtual reality, 4k touch displays, voice recognition, unity gaming, BrakePack and PizzaTime. That’s right, PizzaTime!”

The post It’s Pizza Time! Smart Gadget Will Automatically Deliver Your Food first appeared on Dornob.

Keeping track of your daily prescriptions is a chore, even if you only have a few to manage. If your memory isn’t great, you might forget between morning and evening whether you’ve taken a certain medication at the correct time that day. PillPack is a revolutionary service that will do all of the hard work for you, keeping track of your prescriptions and even reminding you of the time you need to take them.

The online pharmacy charges $20 per month for its service, plus the co-pays for your medications. You give them your prescription information, and every two weeks you get a neat little package in the mail containing a roll of little packets which you tear off one at a time. Each packet contains the pills you need to take and is even marked with the date and time they are to be taken, eliminating any guesswork on your part.

There’s also no worrying about running out of refills and going without medicines while you wait for your doctor to phone in the information. The company also offers a service called Proactive Refill Management, in which a pharmacist will ensure that your medications get refilled on time. Currently, the service only serves 31 states with its mail service, but residents of all 50 states can get their PillPacks over the counter.

More about PillPack

“PillPack is designed to serve people who manage multiple medications. Each month, customers receive a personalized roll of pre-sorted medications, along with a convenient dispenser and any other medications that cannot be placed into packets, like liquids and inhalers. Each shipment includes a medication label that has a picture of each pill and notes on how it should be taken.”

“PillPack uses PharmacyOS, a software platform created entirely in-house, to help manage each customer’s medications, coordinate refills and renewals, and make sure each shipment is sent on time, every time. PharmacyOS also enables real-time notifications and and an online dashboard so customers can control their shipments, refills, and copays. Customers can also email, text, or call their PillPack pharmacist any time to ask questions or clarify instructions.”

“From the beginning, PillPack’s mission has been to deliver a delightful customer experience. We believe that simple, convenient service empowers regular people to take medications correctly and achieve better overall wellness.”

The post PillPack: Revolutionary Service Packs and Delivers Your Daily Meds first appeared on Dornob.

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Flat-pack furniture usually comes with one of two problems (if not both): either it requires a great deal of assembly (see: Ikea) or is heavy and hard to move around (also see: Ikea). This curious-looking aluminum chair is a one-piece object that is easy to move around at will yet sturdy as well, thanks to industrial-inspired grooves that line its legs, seat and back rest.

Dubbed the Pressed Chair, this elegant industrial work by furniture designer Henry Thaler starts with a thin cut aluminum sheet (only a few millimeters thick). Critically, the metal is warped to provide rigidity when the legs and back are folded into position. Much like a steel I-beam or corrugated cardboard box, shape is as important as inherent material strength in accomplishing maximum ends with minimal means.

While it is hard to say whether you could fold it back up at the end of the day, for one-way delivery these flat-pack chairs make a great deal of sense. They can nest and stack – imagine how many you could pack into a thin and relatively lightweight box (or the number that could be stuffed into a shipping container).

Since it is a solid-material design, recycling them would be much easier as well – no need to break the furniture down into component parts, since it is constructed from top to bottom of a single material. How could it get any simpler? There is a stool variant as well.

About the designer

“Harry Thaler is a designer whose work reinterprets fundamental design typologies by combining high quality and traditional craftsmanship with innovative shapes and materials. Trained as a goldsmith, whose background has a strong influence on his design process, he earned his MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art (2010). In the same year Thaler opened his own studio in London and developed the Pressed Chair, which immediately became very well known. “

“Thaler works with international companies such as Nils Holger Moormann, Pulpo, Davide Groppi, Monocle, Leaos and Olev Light. His field of activity also includes the design of indoor and outdoor spaces as well as projects in the field of architecture. “

The post Ultralight Flex Chair: Flat-Pack Aluminum, Strong like Steel first appeared on Dornob.

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