The sign for the Gallery Hotel Art in Florence is very discrete – you can only see it at night, and it’s fashioned from small bits of bent wire, which when lit from above by a spotlight project shadows that reveal the hotel’s name on the stucco facade of the building.
Category Archives: 3d
carving cartoons
CraftVillageUK is a web portal for a community of soapstone carvers in Kenya designed to allow them to sell their intricate carvings directly to consumers worldwide. According to their website, the carvers earn four times as much per sculpture by selling through the web, and their earnings represent a significant increase in quality of life. […]
Also posted in art, conviviality, fabrication, futurecraft, marketing, supply chain, traceability
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approximate chairs
These stereolithography models represent iterations of chairs generated voxel-by-voxel using a genetic algorithm seeking to ‘evolve’ a chair by random mutations judged for fitness in terms of chair-ness. Which means that instead of designing a chair like normal designers, EZCT Architecture & Design Research designed an organism made of little cubes that was virtually bred […]
Also posted in fabrication, furniture, futurecraft, product design
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generating flat-pack furniture
I’ve covered Kram/Weisshar‘s Breeding Tables before, and they’re now available for sale at Moroso. I was finally able to see them up close – including process documentation and parts splayed out – at the Pompidou center a couple of weeks ago. To recap, the tables are generated using a genetic algorithm; its parts are cut […]
Also posted in 2d, fabrication, furniture, livingbreathing, product design
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touch map 2
Another beautiful bronze map in Braille – this time in my favorite city (Firenze), in the middle of Piazza Repubblica, a large cast map of the city center with tactile labels on monuments and ridges on the river to indicate the direction of the current. More on Flickr.
Also posted in architecture, perception, tangible, universal design, visualization
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creative commons kiosk
Last week at the Fuori Salone the most memorable event was designersblock: held at a dilapidated public pool in Milan’s Tortona neighborhood, it featured booths by designers and collectives organized under the London-based design collaborative. One of the exhibitors was KithKin’s “Some Rights Reserved,” a kiosk offering creative commons-licensed digital wares at low low prices […]
Also posted in 2d, blogogracy, fabrication, futurecraft, marketing, open objects, product design, retail
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magic models
these videos by dassault systems are meant to sell design software, but they are far more powerful as inspiration for future kinds of tangible interfaces, maybe one day when nanotechnology gives us the ability to use atoms as dynamic input/output media the same way pixels move today:
Also posted in architecture, tangible
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design for the (tech-savvy) masses
design democracy is a yearly competition based on the belief that mass customization is a viable alternative to mass production. unlike ponoko, this competition is based on free trade in design patterns that you can then make yourself at your local highly computerized wood shop. but given that finding and manufacturing this kind of product […]
Also posted in 2d, conviviality, customization, fabrication, furniture, futurecraft, marketing, open objects, product design
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