Back

What We Like This Week: Batteries, Brackets, and a Better Bangkok

Your local park is now multi-tasking and your car has lost weight. See what’s ahead for the future of making and building in this week’s picks.

Light the way. How much something weighs, how it works, and how you make it—it all matters. Wired takes us into GM’s process for making a better seatbelt bracket using generative design and additive manufacturing. And Autodesk’s Max Moruzzi talks to Engineering.com about all the things he wants to do with carbon fiber.

Batteries not included. German auto makers have dozens of electric cars hitting the market in the next few years. Why didn’t they make the batteries that go in them? The Verge explains.

Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn Centennial Park increases the city’s resilience against flooding and heavy storms– both of which are on the rise because of global warming. Image credit: Landprocess

Cities get smart. Bangkok is breaking up its paved infrastructure with crowd-pleasing parks that also reduce flooding (via Fast Company). Speaking of aquatic engineering, Quartz has a guide to the future of water infrastructure, because dams and reservoirs aren’t cutting it anymore. And the proposed Quayside neighborhood in Toronto looks great in illustration and is good news for Canadian lumberjacks (via Dezeen).

Sidewalk Labs is exploring how to use local Canadian timber for buildings in the Toronto’s new Quayside neighborhood. Image courtesy of Sidewalk Labs.