Skip to main content

Artist Tokujin Yoshioka Designs an Anti-Virus Face Shield: Download the Instructions, and Use a Printer, Paper & Scissors

A few years ago we featured the Japanese art of chind?gu, or the invention of amusingly "useless" inventions. The chind?gu canon includes such simultaneously sensible and nonsensical objects as miniature toecap umbrellas (to keep one's shoes dry in the rain) and chopsticks fitted with miniature fans (to cool down ramen noodles before consumption). Today we present a Japanese invention that may at first glance look chind?gu-like, but would never qualify due to its simplicity and sheer usefulness: an anti-virus face shield that anyone can make in three easy steps. After you've downloaded the template, all you need is a printer, paper, scissors, and some kind of clear plastic sheet.

"Healthcare workers around the world are putting their lives on the line to fight COVID-19 but their battle continues to be fought uphill as a shortage of medical supplies threatens to disrupt an already overwhelmed system," writes Spoon & Tamago's Johnny Waldman. We've all read of the lack of necessities like face masks and ventilators in some of the most afflicted countries, and in such places having access to face shields could make a real difference in the number of lives saved.

"Face shields are typically made with multiple parts and would be difficult to create and assemble at home," Waldman notes. "But Tokujin Yoshioka’s brilliant idea simplifies the design greatly, allowing it to be held in place with ordinary eyewear." Best known as an artist and designer, Yoshioka has made his name creating striking sculptures, installations, works of architecture, and many other objects besides.

Yoshioka even designed the torch for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, shaped like a Japanese cherry blossom and made with the same aluminum extrusion technology used to manufacture the country's equally iconic bullet trains. Clearly the coronavirus-caused postponement of the games hasn't got Yoshioka too down to continue pursuing his calling. "I am grateful to the brave and dedicated healthcare workers for fighting the contagious disease," he writes in the note accompanying the video at the top of the post that shows you how to make and wear his face shield. As you can see, it's made to be worn with glasses, so the non-bespectacled will need to stick with other forms of protection against the virus — or take the opportunity to order some fashionable frames of the kind that all the best designers seem to be wearing these days.

via Spoon and Tamago

Related Content:

Watch “Coronavirus Outbreak: What You Need to Know,” and the 24-Lecture Course “An Introduction to Infectious Diseases,” Both Free from The Great Courses

Interactive Web Site Tracks the Global Spread of the Coronavirus: Created and Supported by Johns Hopkins

Why Fighting the Coronavirus Depends on You

The 10 Commandments of Chind?gu, the Japanese Art of Creating Unusually Useless Inventions

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Artist Tokujin Yoshioka Designs an Anti-Virus Face Shield: Download the Instructions, and Use a Printer, Paper & Scissors is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2VqM46c
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune

When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album  Love and Theft , he lifted the title from a  book of the same name by Eric Lott , who studied 19th century American popular music’s musical thefts and contemptuous impersonations. The ambivalence in the title was there, too: musicians of all colors routinely and lovingly stole from each other while developing the jazz and blues traditions that grew into rock and roll. When British invasion bands introduced their version of the blues, it only seemed natural that they would continue the tradition, picking up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and getting a little slippery about the origins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s history. In truth, most UK blues rockers who picked up other people’s songs changed them completely or credited their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tradition but it was ethical business practice. Fans of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, now listen to their...
Post a Comment
Read more