stay tuned for a rundown....meanwhile here are some pix of a week that included torrential downpour, significant debate and some fantastic hotlaps in the fabulously-bodied Jag supercar and the Merc C63 AMG!
Just back after a punishing week on the track and in the boardroom for Drive Car of the Year.11/12/2011 Add Comment No ordinary bicycle for me at Burning Man this year - instead I got to trial a Diggler Elite: a rugged, well-sprung, all-terrain electric scooter. The dirt on the playa varies according to the weather and usage - towards the end of the week it is heavy soft sand, when a water truck passes it is inpenetrable mud, and for the rest of the time its generally hardpacked but with sneaky pits of soft stuff to bog the unsuspecting cyclist distracted by sculpture and spectacle. I was able to successfully Diggle in all but the wettest mud and it was FUN - the electric battery charges up fairly fast - which is lucky becos the scooter itself, laden with old-skool batteries - is no fun to push. The hub mounted motor pushes out 750 watts and best of all the Diggler glides for ages - at least 120 metres on the playa - which not only saves power but is really exciting. It was invented to replicate the sensation of skiing, snowboarding and mountainbiking in a human/motor all-terrain hybrid. Get down low over the superwide handlebars, thumb on the throttle, and gliding across the wide open playa is laugh-out-loud fun! 
Me ripping it up on the playa
and the fabulous Miss Rachel Diggles too!
So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that a friend will be importing Digglers to Australia....and you can imagine my frustration when, in writing my review for the DRIVE section of Fairfax papers, I realized that these "two wheeled recreational devices" are banned from all public roads and footpaths...along with Segways! Since Segway technology and similar balancing innovations form the core of many new concepts for urban commuter propulsion - like the GM/Segway P.U.M.A. project and others - I am curious as to how Australia is planning to implement sustainable transport strategies into its cities. Not all of us want to hike up our work gear and ride a bike - sometimes a stand-up option makes way more sense. I have just written a fairly chunky review/criticism for Fairfax which will run in their Drive Bike liftout soon. Stay tuned for fallout! I am almost ready to launch a new range of consumer products and I have been obsessed with containing them in recycled content plastic bottles. It seems crazy not to be using recycled plastic when the contents are not for consumption...and even more crazy that I cant find any suppliers of such bottles in Australia. BUT I have just found a company in the USA who can do up to 100% recycled HDPE content in opaque white bottles - and if I have my way it will start a similar trend down under. Another curious observation about dealing with the packaging industry - many of the sales people seem to be repeating a tired and generally incorrect line: that bottles cannot be recycled if they have paper labels on them. Bizarre if you just stop to think that in order to melt the plastic into reusable pellets it needs to be heated to way higher than the burn temperture of plastic..... Anyhoo on my internet trawling to seek out kindred green bottle companies I came across Mike Biddle, "The Garbage Man" who has cut across the confusion by using mining industry high tech to efficiently sort and recycle plastic waste and "fluff". Check out his TED talk here: Incidentally we are currently redesigning HOG for another plastic molding process that will allow me to incorporate significant percentages of recycled polyethylene without significantly affecting the "creep" of plastic over time. Its early days but we Periodically I google Cork just to see what designers are doing with one of my favourite tactile materials. I am still waiting to bump into a friendly patron-like cork supplier who wants to give me some play cork to experiment with.  Jasper Morrison is a designer with a thing for cork and he has several covetable stools on the market including these little rotund earth-coloured beauties for Moooi.   Up there on the left is another Jasper Morrison, this time for Vitra. Its "Stool A". On the right is a designer I have only just found - Daniel Michalik and his beautiful layered cork forms. Design Within Reach run an annual cork design competition where would-be-corkies make chair designs from a champagne cork. I am not allowed to enter because I am one of their designers - lucky because intricate craft is really not my thing! Below is the judges pick for this years Cork Competition:   And click on the image here for a terrific overview from the Inhabitat site on how cork is made. This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.  Check out this cool design that landscape architect Jim Davidge has planning for Parking Day this Friday in SF! Note judicious use of Rainwater HOG tanks..... I am currently in the Napa Valley as a guest of Mercedes, driving the SLK 350 fitted with their new myCOMAND (not a typo just an unfortunately wrong-looking acronym) social interface system. Johann Jungwirth, CEO of Benz R&D North Amercia walked us through the four social trends ID'd by his group as the keys to understanding the digital lifestyle revolution: * the constant connection that means we are "always on"; * "Simplexity" - the demand for intuitive, efficient and aesthetic interfaces - the hallmark of Apple; * "Innovation acceleration" as demonstrated by the disruptive business practices of some of Silicon Valley's best known social network phenomenons; and *social networking and the ability to effect rapid change from bottom up empowerment best evidenced by the soclal uprisings in some of the Arab countries this year.  We visited Google - always a highlight! - and learned what it meant to be googly.....and with a couple of minor nav mishaps that are to be ironed out before the November launch and bunch of German journalists and I made it across the Golden Gate Bridge to Napa. The concept of a driver being assaulted by facebook updates, diary updates, navigation inputs, video conferencing and a bunch of other informational inputs while steering a car through traffic alarms me - and the fact that technically savvy and needy San Francisco drivers (as reported by Jalopnik yesterday) have a 55% higher chance of crashing than other drivers in the USA suggests that we are already too distracted by incoming information...... This morning I plan to quiz Johann and co on how they work with the Benz passive and active safety engineers to make myCOMAND safe. Surely the answer is the Google autonomous (driverless) car? Do we want cars that are essentially mobile media rooms careening On my afternoon hillside walk I rounded a wooded corner straight onto - what looked at first glance like a battered and testosterone-upsized version of Marc Newsom's concept Ford....  but what turned out to be a rather spectacular (underneath a fairly chunky patina of age) orange and white rendition of the 1974 Winnie Wagon.  Unfortunately this advert doesnt show the futuristic moulded tail that wraps like a handlebar moustache right around the rear window in a sinuous extruded shelf...desperate to know more about this vehicle I dragged the dog homeward and looked it up. A rare beast - not many for sale and not many images online either...  you can get a sense of the moulded rear in this shot (kids get out of the way!!). And I found one online for sale - in Tennassee, for $2500. VERY tempting. In an ignoble ending a google of Winnie wagon reveals an inelegant folding wire shopping trolley bearing the name and a host of ugly images. I am on a quest to learn more about the Winnie Wagon. Stay tuned..... Our Japanese distributors just won a Design for Kids award for my Rainwater HOG and I am so excited about the photos they have just sent us - kids making HOG-centric Lego designs!  This primary-coloured reinterpretation of our classic HOGS on the HOUSE diagram is pure gold! Last year I wrote a piece for Fairfax on Designer Cars and dedicated significant space to one of my all-time gansta favourites - the Bill Blass Lincoln. Here is what I wrote then: At a time when Mercedes Benz and other European marques were making inroads into the US auto market Chrysler, Ford et al harnessed homegrown and imported “high end” fashion talent to create exclusive, limited run options for their top range cars. Lincoln’s Continental “Collector Series” circa 1979 featured a massive, expensive boat of a car with Thurston Howell III overtones competing with Cadillac Eldorado to be America’s homegrown luxury car. In 1976 Ford introduced the Designer series to cement the exclusive image of their flagship Lincoln towncar and to topple Cadillac’s new Seville. Lincoln’s Designer series offered the European fashion houses of Cartier, Pucci and Givenchy and homegrown haute couturier Bill Blass free range over the interior finishes, with signature upholstery, a 22-karat gold plated plaque on the dash and logos highlighted in the cars’ oval “opera” window. The Designers series was a sales success for Lincoln and the trend for Designer logo options continued into the 1980s. With Pucci, Givenchy and Bill Blass options. American designer Bill Blass created a particularly natty option for the 1984 Continental Mark V, augmenting the already chrome-heavy “land yacht” Lincoln with a jaunty nautical theme including white piping on navy bodywork, matching piped upholstery, canvas-look roof material and matching logo cufflinks. The Bill Blass Lincoln is still a collector car and his signature finishes have weathered thirty years of wear and tear and fashion change. The Bill Blass edition still conjures heavyset wealth and might still appeal today to a lavishly monied demographic – or a rap mogul. So yes, I really like the Bill Blass Lincoln. But who knew that my dad would feel the need, during a particularly lavish online shopping therapy session, to BUY one for me to drive around??!! Two months ago I got the call: "Sal, remember the Bill Blass? Would you like to drive one around San Francisco?" My answer - yes if it would get up the hills...which it wont. His reply: "hmmm I didnt think of that when I bought one....". We took delivery of the BB in LA last week and Dad and Brother Jono drove it to Corte Madera via Santa Cruz. The car is immaculate, with navy below the belt, an intact gold double pinstripe with tricky flourishes, BB nautical seat buttons and acres of squishy navy leather with white piping. Runs a dream apart from the occasional cutout that mechanic Dave is sorting out as we speak.  the original Bill Blass Lincoln Brochure  Jono in our Great White Shark Just back from a terrific two days in Disneyland where once again I marveled at the multi-layered beauty of Mary Blair's creations - around the park, all over Its a Small World (designed for the 1965 World Fair in New York) , and in the figurine studies and posters at Disney's Mary Blair exhibition. From Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella to a bunch of Golden Books and various murals happy bobble-headed children and friendly colourful animals could coax a smile out of any hard-hearted Scrooge. Here are a couple of examples and a terrific quote from Disney animator Joyce Carlton who worked with Blair:Mary was very friendly and very artistic. She had a lot of glasses. She used to have a lot of different colored contact lenses as well. She used to wear green or blue or any color to go with the outfit she was wearing that day. I’d watch her put them in and I thought, “I wouldn’t want to wear those.” Maybe that affected her colors. Her colors were always bright. She used theatrical gels and cut them up and put them on top of her artwork. I had to match the colors she picked and that was a problem because those colors didn’t exist with the paints we had.  Mary Blair at work     | AuthorSally Dominguez writes, skis, designs and teaches, is curious about most things and loves Dr Seuss. 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