Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It all began as a “purely creative exercise.” “My freelance work had dried up, and I needed to keep myself busy. I wasn’t trying to capture the interest of a certain market. I simply wanted to try my hand at branding something that had a lot of components, that had a deep heritage and that I felt had practical use.”

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That’s Tyler Deep. Not so long ago, he put a $15 deck of cards up on Kickstarter, hoping to accrue the $6,000 to send them into production. What happened instead was one of those dreams Kickstarter is made of–4,000 backers showed up out of nowhere, pledging $146,000 to support the project. “I never thought people would care this much. . .not in a 100 years,” he says today. “I am floating in a sea of amazement.”

It wasn’t just any old deck of cards, of course. With a creative-sabbatical approach, Deep crafted his deck from top to bottom, designing every aspect, from the illustrations of royalty to his own font-like riff on the traditional hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. The effect is borderline antique without feeling retro, like a one-off deck built for a high-stakes poker game in some Hollywood period piece.

Now in their second printing, this edition of cards will feature metallic gold backs, and they’ll reside in a bold red box that’s printed with gold foil highlights. Red and gold–it’s an incestuous duo of royal opulence that will make your imported clay poker chips look cheap. And should you prefer to look more Wayne than Lannister, the deck will also be available in black.

Imagine Ford attempting to sell a car without lights. No doubt, they’d be bucking all sorts of laws, but consumers would never buy it, either. Who would fork up a few hundred bucks a month for a car with no lights? Who would settle to drive a car only during the day? Absurdity!

But expensive bikes are sold without lights every day.

Sparse is a new Kickstarter-backed company that wants to reimagine the world of bike accessories. As silly as that car/bike analogy may seem to a serious biker, Sparse agrees: There’s way too much to worry about when you hop on a bike these days.

“Getting on a bike as your primary mode of transport is more complex than getting in your car–you have to be mindful of weather, distance, attire, and all that stuff that we all need,” CEO Colin Owen writes. “The checklist is simply a bit longer when on a bike vs drive. It’s an underserved and under-considered region of the market.”

The company’s first product will be the Sparse Bicycle Lights. They’re a pair of die-cast aluminum LED bike lights, two standouts in durability, subtle style, waterproofness, and even security. The rear light fits on most popular seat posts, and it can’t be stolen without removing the seat. The front light doesn’t just fit on your handlebars, it replaces a spacer in their stem, integrating to actually become part of the bike itself. On top of the theft-deterring design, the company plans to announce some further security measures coming in the future.

For Sparse, it’s one of countless low-hanging pieces of fruit in the bike industry. Despite just launching their first successful Kickstarter campaign, Sparse already has 450 potential product sketches sitting on a wall. 450! That’s not just a lot of ideas, that’s sheer absurdity. You have to wonder, how any company can come into a major, established market and immediately bring with them such a massive pile of disruption? Sparse sees opportunity in the industry because of the lack of regulation stemming from a misunderstood customer.

“There is a shocking lack of standardization in the industry. One quick example: seat-post sizes. There are currently 22 (22!) different seat-post sizes in use (and that’s not counting the non-round aero posts). Some folks slam their seats against the frame. Others ride them such that the clamp can barely hold them,” Owen explains. “People attach bags, reflectors, lights, pumps, chains, and who knows what around these posts. From a manufacturer standpoint, addressing that space (and this could be said for almost every region of the bike), is just a difficult problem and one whose solution will have countless exceptions.

“Culturally, the bike industry is stuck in a rut of optimizing for performance in racing. Most folks in the industry are, by our own highly unscientific survey, hard-core bike nuts. They port that interest over to the job and optimize the bikes via metrics that aren’t fully aligned with the daily rider.”

In other words, bike manufacturers are selling highly customizable performance to the masses–treating the entire world like their geekiest contingent–killing usability and peripheral standards in the process. Sounds like the PC industry about a decade ago, right? And we all know what happened there.

If you’d like to order Sparse’s first pair of lights ($120), the Kickstarter campaign has ended, but you can no doubt inquire on their site.

If the Mayans are right (note: they weren’t) and the world ends in 2012 (note: it won’t), nothing we’ve written or recorded in history–not even the endless array of Discovery Channel specials on the world ending in 2012–will matter. We’ll be gone. Our records will be gone. And the pale blue dot on which all of humanity anchors will be erased from the stellar sky.

But maybe there’s a bigger tragedy, that in the face of our species’ annihilation, that our collective last words will be nothing more than “oh f#&@!”

Peter Dean has a different plan. His Kickstarter-backed project, Love Letters to the End, asks, “If the world were going to end this year, what would you say to it?” The premise is sort of like PostSecret without epiphanies about sober lifestyles or how great siblings look in a bathing suit. Using 2012 as a peg, Dean just wants to see people share more about their lives while they’re living ‘em. “While we don’t believe in the doomsday prophecies, they provide a great reason to share stories, whether they be joyous or melancholy,” Dean tells Co.Design.

Anyone can submit stories, videos, or pieces of art that contribute to the theme, which will all be part of a blog and larger collaborative video series. “Ideally, each person would recount a specific story that they want to share as if they were at a memorial for the world,” Dean explains, noting that he’s receiving about five submissions a week but would prefer much wider participation.

And who can blame him? Because as the fireballs rain down from the sky, casting an eerie rainbow as their embers refract through the Kelly green acid rain, the last thing any of us will have time to do is invest in artistic diversions. Unless your Kickstarter campaign is labeled “A Spaceship For Humanity” or “Coconut-Scented, Locust-Repellent Candles,” my final investments will be in a case of whiskey, 10lbs of prime aged beef, and the fastest motorcycle I can get my hands on. Which I guess that means my first pair of leather pants may be involved in there somewhere, too.

Vancouver startup FlyingFlips wants to build a community of socially conscious graphic designers.

The ecommerce platform lets shoppers vote for their favorite sandal designs, which they’d like to see become available for retail. The most-popular options will be manufactured and the artists will receive a portion of the sale proceeds.

“We’re trying to build a really good social network of graphic designers,” FlyingFlips designer co-founder Trevor Broad told Mashable. “We call it open source flip flops.”

The site, which is hoping to receive funding from Kickstarter, says its flip flops are eco-friendly, made from 20% to 30% recycled materials, and lets you trade in used pairs.

Once designers have submitted designs to the FlyingFlips community, the startup encourages them to share their submissions with their social networks to vote.

For each purchase made, FlyingFlips donates one pair of flip flops to a person in need in the developing world, through Soles4Souls and Fundacion A. Jean Brugger.

The Kickstarter campaign, which runs until the end of May, will fund the first run of flip flops and the creation of the online store. The store will launch one week into June, right after the Kickstarter ends.

FlyingFlips hopes to make eight pairs available by June — the two pairs advertised as Kickstarter rewards, five pairs crowd sourced by designers and one blank pair. Though the team was initially split on creating blank flip flops, lacking a crowdsourced design, they ultimately decided more people could join the buy one give one movement, if they offered a blank slate option.

Would you buy a pair of FlyingFlips? Let us know if you would back this project.

Bonus: Crazy Kickstarter Projects

A new Kickstarter project is aiming to redefine how you shoot video with your iPhone. The Galileo is an iOS-controlled robotic iPhone platform that lets you manipulate the angle your iPhone from another iOS device, giving you the ability to adjust your iPhone to almost any angle you could possibly want.

For instance, if you were video chatting with a child who moved out of sight of the camera you could move the platform to follow her using your own device. The platform could also be used in situations like meetings so you can can follow all the action going on in the room. The platform’s inventor originally created the device in order to have better chats with his son while he was away on business.

Galileo can be controlled from another iOS device such as an iPad or iPod touch by swiping a finger across the screen, and gives you infinite 360-degree panning and 200-degree tilting. You can see everything around the iPhone and above it, with the only unavailable angle being what’s going on below.

The platform is also offering its SDK (software developers kit) for app development, giving app developers the freedom to integrate Galileo functionality into existing apps or create apps and software specifically designed to work with the product.

Galilieo has currently raised close to $270,000 on Kickstarter, and only required $100,000 to go into production. The project will be officially funded on April 21, 2012, after which the device will go into mass production and be sent out to project backers and then likely general consumers.

What do you think of the project? Tell us what potential uses you see for Galileo in the comments.

Robots in movies may be evil more often than good, but they’re becoming part of our lives. And their tech is evolving so that they “feel” more like we do.

This happened recently, and we had to show it to you. NASA’s sort of recreated the look of one of the famous parts of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco with an astronaut’s space suit and Robonaut. 

Bot Vid: Leap Tall Buildings In A Single Bound

Boston Dynamics has a bit of a rep for making scary military bots, but its latest Sand Flea robot is different. While still being designed for military or policing purposes, the tiny robot can leap over high obstructions in a single leap and could almost earn the epithet “cute.”

Bot Vid: Hand Shake Robot

Osaka University is demonstrating its robotic prowess by developing a robotic telepresence hand that can communicate the grip, force, and the body temperature of the remote operator. It’s all about adding a more tactile aspect to telepresence meetings.

Bot News

Robots at Foxconn. Foxconn’s again in the news because of its plans for revolutionizing its production lines in China, but in this case it’s because CEO Terry Gou has another way to stop employees working in illegal conditions: He wants to add thousands of robots to his factories.

Robot teachers. The idea of robot teachers has been around a while, but the technology is getting a new spin courtesy of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a $100,000 prize competition to design a better automated “robotic” grading software. The idea is that teachers would assign more writing tasks if they didn’t have to grade them, and this would boost what’s seen as low writing skills in U.S. students.

RoboBonobo. A great ape sanctuary in Iowa has an unusual Kickstarter project underway: It wants to make a remote telepresence bonobo robot which the apes can control to interact with visitors. You may be skeptical, but bonobos are among the smartest great apes and have been taught to communicate using sign language–and the overall goal is to develop a super-clever touchscreen speech app so the apes can communicate with people better. As part of the Kickstarter project, if you fund it with over $500 you can get a Skype session with a bonobo.

Bot Futures: Tactile Robots

Giving robots human-like touch sensitivity is likely an important goal for the time when robots are more a part of our daily lives. Touch is incredibly important for things you may not imagine–such as detecting when you’re bumping into something gently, or for applying the right amount of force when, for example, helping someone out of bed.

Robot touch is actually something researchers at the University of Pittsburgh say is a “holy grail” of robotics, and they think they’ve got a technology that could enable it. It’s called Belousov-Zhabotinsky gel, and it’s pretty weird. That’s because if you don’t poke it or stimulate it in any way, it pulsates by itself.

The idea is that by engineering the BZ gel carefully it can be turned into a super-sensitive and soft sensor system for robots so that the machines could work out if their stiff, mechanical limbs are touching something that needs to be handled carefully–or, in the case of bumping into a human accidentally, to know it’s done so without necessarily having to “see” the situation happen and react accordingly.

It seems more and more likely that when robots do become a daily experience for us, they’ll be imbued with slightly human behaviors like touch sensitivity and, indeed, ethics.

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.