Quite a few projects made my day over there. The ones of Yuri Suzuki for example. That guy is so talented it should be illegal. He’s an artist, musician and now a fresh graduate from the Design Products department. His project is concerned with revamping and giving new forms and meanings to the almost obsolete turntable, a device which very few of us still have in their house. We don’t buy disks of CDs anymore either. Nowadays music is more abstract and immaterial than ever. Sound has been reduced to data.
Sound Chaser
Sound Chaser
Sound Chaser looks like a little toy train that rides on record rails. You can align and connect each chipped pieces of second-hand records one to another and compose a new track that the train will play.
Tip Tap
The TipTap, developed in collaboration with Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, is a little hammer that reveals the dormant sounds around us.
A small metal tapper housed in the object taps out a rhythm on any object or surface that you hold it near to. The rhythm is set either by the user or can be defined by the controller. Alternatively, a beat can be taken from your favourite record, allowing you to play along while keeping perfectly in time. The TipTap can also synchronise with other users to make a social tapping experience.
Prepared Truntable
The Prepared Turntable is an analogue answer to the digitalized DJ. The turntable has 5 tone arms, each of which can have its volume controlled by its own fader. Users can make or play music with special loop groove records.
Finger Player
The Finger Player is a wearable record player. Insert your fingers into one of the little rings, play the record just by holding your hand over the disk and feel the physicality of making sound.
Sound Jewellery
Sound Jewellery conceives sound as something precious that you can offer to a friend or wear as a memory of a shared laugher, a romantic conversation, any sound moment from your daily life. The record is made up of components which of course you can play but they can also be worn as bracelet, brooch or other pieces of jewellery.
Susan Blackmore says, a meme is not an idea, rather it’s “that which is imitated.” In other marketing 2.0 words, a meme is viral. Since, most of us in advertising today are trying to create viral videos, it might be worth taking 21 minutes to absorb this TED lecture.
Coca-Cola and its design firm Turner Duckworth made their mark on Cannes yesterday, capturing the Grand Prix in the ad festival’s inaugural design Lions.
The majority — about three quarters — of the design Lions winners were from what one would consider ad agencies, rather than from design shops.
Rodney Fitch, head of the design jury and chairman-CEO of Fitch, said “Design companies have never heard of Cannes.” He added: “That will change. The design industry will be rushing to submit work.”
“We live in a in a complicated, integrated world. Design is a thread that runs though everything we do.”
Down at the Keystone Design Union headquarters everyone is always busy with the pile of work that keeps on coming in, however, good ol’ coleague David Harris (A.K.A. SON) has been taking the time to interview a few of our family’s featured members.
Xtra-talented, xtra-young, xtra-humble, xtra-friendly homie Nelson Balaban Jr. (A.K.A. Xtrabold) has turned 19 years old today and to celebrate he drops in his all new portfolio with killer killer work as always.
Only 19 and already killing it. Amazing. Who knows what he’ll be doing in 5 or 10 years!.
Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology, by Sabine Seymour (Amazon UK and USA.)
Published by Springer, abstract: The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. The practical application is explained in detail and numerous illustrations serve as clarification. Over 50 well-known designers, research institutes, companies and artists, among them Philips, Burton, MIT Media Lab, XS Labs, New York University, Hussein Chalayan, Cute Circuit or International Fashion Machines are introduced by means of their latest, often still unpublished, project, and a survey of their work to date. Given for the first time is a list of all the relevant information on research institutes, materials, publications etc. A must for all those wishing to know everything about fashionable technology.
Lags, a series of patches for coping with social jet lag, by Teresa Almeida
The book contains only 15 pages of theoretical discourse. It might not sound like a lot but they have the virtue of going straight to the point. Sabine Seymour knows what she’s writing about. Because the Vienna slash New York-based designer and researcher has spent several years dedicating her energy and brain to the exploration of what the next generation wearables would bring, she can see beyond the hype and detect what is truly inspiring or meaningful design-wise. Mondial Inc is a commercial entity born from her research and her role as an educator. She has lectured and exhibited her work internationally and she’s currently a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and the University of Arts and Industiral Desin in Linz, Austria.
Taiknam Hat, by Ricardo Nascimento, Ebru Kurbak and Fabiana Shizue, reacts to medium wave radio signals
The theoretical intro covers briefly the history of wearable computing, comments on the technology used to enable garments to interact, underlines textile innovations, adds some design considerations in the process, etc.
After the intro, there’s just a magnificent show and tell of some of the latest (a number of them haven’t been published anywhere else) and most interesting techno-fashion projects. You’ll find the big names of the industry (phillips, Nike, Adidas) but also pioneering and fearless fashion designers (Hussein Chalayan), the explorers of poetical fashion (Ying Gao), the young stars (CuteCircuit), the makers of fermented dresses (Donna Franklin), the always elegant (Despina Papadopoulos), the unclassifiable Kate Hartman), the lady ready for the catwalk in outer space (Kouji Hikawa), the geeky knitters (Cat Mazza, Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz), etc.
The book won’t tell you everything you dream to know about fashion and technology, how to make a singing skirt or used nanotech in your next project, but it will definitively enable you to have an idea of the breadth and scope of the discipline. Besides it demosntrates that techno-fashion designers have gone a long way since the time “wearable technology” consisted of a keyboard roughly distributed over the body.
There are many books about fashion and technology but this one is truly unique. It’s engaging, intelligent and it will make you smile and inspire as you turn the pages over. Besides, it makes a fantastic resource for students and anyone interested in the subject. There’s a bibliography, a glossary of innovative materials, a list of blogs and websites but also events and institutes which will enable readers to dig further into the subject.
The book was launched last Thursday in New York. Phil Torrone from Make magazine was there. Just for info, Ulrike Reinhard had a chance to video one of Sabine’s presentation a while ago.
Image on the homepage is Diana Eng and Emily Albinski’s Inflatable wedding dress.
Time Magazine’s ”100 Most Influential People” hit newsstands a couple weeks ago. But what you didn’t see when cruising by in your local grocery store was the cover submitted by Euro RSCG in New York. A slice from each of the selected people were pieced together to create a single face. Here’s where the story gets good – it’s featured on Time’s website - here – and was done by two of their junior creatives. Other covers were created by well-known graphic artists, all of which you can see on the website. But bravo to the juniors at Euro for their work!
The almighty Favourite Website Awards just couldn’t get enough showcasing the best websites in the world. Now they had to show the greatest videos, reels, VFX and trailers out there.
There are a lot of things left unanswered as far as our future is concerned and a lot of it has to do with where we will find ourselves in the course of time. One thing we have to note is that global warming and eco-friendly issues will be beside us all the way and with that in mind, we cannot help but think what companies such as Sony will have for us by that time.
Sony can help us get a glimpse of things to come and they are showing this to us with this video that gives us highlights of the future. Take a look at this video so that you will have an idea on whether to look forward to the future or simply keep on wondering what we have in a couple of years ahead of us.
Apart from Joshua Davis’ talk, the other main highlight of OFFF, the software and visual communication conference which took place last week in Lisbon, was the panel on Data Visualization curated and moderated by the European evangelist of the discipline: Jose-Luis de Vicente.
Lounge at the LX factory where OFFF took place this year
As the abstract of the panel reminds: data visualization is a transversal discipline which harnesses the immense power of visual communication to explain, in an understandable manner, the relationships of meaning, causes and dependency found among great abstract masses of information generated by scientific and social processes.
Aaron Koblin, Manuel Lima, JL de Vicente and Santiago Ortiz (image JL de Vicente)
Interaction designer, information architect and design researcher Manuel Lima discussed the story of the website Visual Complexity and the lessons he learnt since he launched it 3 years back. Visual Complexity is not a blog, it is a collection of (so far) over 570 projects of data viz, it is also a space for people to discuss about what is happening in this area.
One first important factor for the development of data viz is computer storage.
Our ability to generate data has by far outpaced our ability to make sense of that data. As someone at Razorfish said, everything that can be digitalized will be. When Lima started Visual Complexity, data viz blogs were just a handful. Today there are dozens of them. Kryder‘s Law draws from Moore’s law and declares that magnetic disk areal storage density doubles every 18 months. In 2001, iPod storage capacity was 5 GB, in 2007 it was 160 GB.
A second key factor for the development of data viz is Open Databases. Data has never been so widely available at minimal cost (not to say free).
See Swivel and IBM’s Many Eyes.
A third factor is online social networks.
Not as tools for mapping relationship between people but as instruments which help disclosing patterns within the abundance of shared content. Examples: uncovering music affinities like TuneGlue does; discovering how humans categorize information del.icio.us-like; human curiosity.
Over his three years observing dataviz, Lima spotted a number of trends: mapping blogosphere relationships, visualizing del.icio.us tags, terrorism, air routes, gps data, etc.
Next spoke Santiago Ortiz who started by presenting the spectacular website that Bestiario has put online a few days ago. The website gets a third dimension as you can “twist” and manipulate it in order to see its full length. The nicest feature is the navigation: you can browse Bestiario’s projects anti-chronologically of course but also according to the number of hours they spent working on the projects, by keywords, combination or exclusion of keywords, etc.
Founded 2 years ago, Bestiario is a small Barcelona/Lisbon-based company with a very impressive portfolio. Combining art and science (Ortiz is also a mathematician) they design interactive information spaces which follow their own moto: ‘making the complex comprehensible.’
It wasn’t the first time that i got to be impressed by Bestiario’s work and Ortiz’ thoughts on dataviz. One of Bestiario’s project was exhibited recently at LABoral as part of the Emergentes exhibition which closed a few days ago. The imaginary biological universe Mitozoos encodes and creates virtual organisms called “mitozoos” which interact among themselves. You can watch their life in a 3D environment that simulates birth, existence of a genetic code, the quest for food, energy dissipation, reproduction and death. Each variable and parameter of the model has a graphical representation.
Mitozoos
One of Bestiario’s latest projects was developed together with Irma Vila and JL de Vicente. The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space is an interactive representation of the services that use our electromagnetic radiospectrum, ranging from 10Khz “radio navigation” to 100Ghz “inter-satellite communication”. The activities which unfolds throughout the spectrum (e.g. mobile, satellite, wireless internet, broadcasting) are sorted by electromagnetic frequency. What totally won me over was the features showing the artistic interventions that are commenting on and/or taking place in the spectrum.
City Distances illuminates the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The main idea is to compare the number of pages on internet where the two cities appear one close to the other, with the number of pages they appear isolated. This proportion indicates some kind of intensity of relation between the cities. The “google proximity” is then divided by its geographical distance. The result indicates the strength of the relation in spite of the real distance, a kind of informational distance between cities.
Finally, Aaron Koblin took the stage to present his own work. Crap! this guy is so talented it’s scary. Aaron studiedDesign and Media Art with Casey Reas at UCLA and used processing a lot in his projects which not only represent huge amounts of data, but are also producing data to raise questions about a series of issues.
Narrative made sense for cultures based on tradition and a small amount of information circulating in a culture – it was a way to make sense of this information and to tie it together (for instance, Greek mythology). Database can be thought of as a new cultural form in a society where a subject deals with huge amounts of information, which constantly keep changing, said Lev Manovich whom Aaron quoted to further ask the audience:
If the database is the new narrative, then what is the role of visualization?
A first answer is that visualization help us understand what it means to have dozens of thousands of planes flying above North America every day. Video demonstrating how Flight Patterns does exactly that:
Data from the U.S. Federal aviation administration is used to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density.
The Sheep Market is one of my favourite projects ever. The very Petit Prince work manages to be critical and poetical at the same time. Thousands of workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk webservice were paid two cents to “draw a sheep facing to the left.” Their sheep drawings were collected over a period of 40 days, selected and printed on stamps. You can also head to the project website and spend the evening counting the animals.
Video showing Aaron Koblin explaining The Sheep Market:
Aside from his purely artistic works, Aaron also works for Yahoo and collaborate on research project. For example, he developed the visualizations for the New York Talk Exchange, a project by the Senseable City Lab at MIT.
Based on a principle similar to The Sheep Market, Ten Thousand Cents has thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of of a $100 bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The project, which has been developed in collaboration with Takashi Kawashima, explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.
Video of Ten Thousand Cents:
The panel ended with JL de Vicente reminding the audience of the Visualizar workshops he periodically organized at Medialab Prado in Madrid. A new call for project proposals will be launched later this year.
Food has to be the most essential good that most people will surely buy. Food is among the basic necessities that most people need but it still remains that their benefits will be considered by people as well.
Food is at the top of the heap of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs of man. People need them to survive but they are also particular on what they eat. To ensure that people are not conned into something that will not provide them any good when it comes to digesting, it would be best to make sure that potential markets know what they are bargaining for.
Besides, healthy eating is an obvious practice today and people want to know if what they will be eating is bad or good for their overall health.
Government ministers today welcomed new television food advertising guidelines, saying they were a step forward in tackling New Zealand’s obesity problem.
The New Zealand Television Broadcasters’ council has launched a new Children’s Food Classification system as part of the guidelines for television adverts.
First off I’d like to apologize for the size of the image, but I think in this case it’s worth it.
A little over two years ago, a small group of chilean design students decided to generate an online space that allowed design students from all its branches and schools to share their projects and create contact and collaboration networks that led to improve and enhance the national design scene. That website was Diseño Emergente (Emerging Design).
Now, with an insanely powerful base of monthly visitors and projects, Diseño Emergente is, without a doubt, the space where chilean (and slowly more latinamerican) design students converge and share, debate and display their ideas.
By chance of life, I had the pleasure of being one of the first few members of this community and for a while I was part of their staff, with whom to this day I keep a very close relationship.
This is why seeing progress like the one I’ll refer to is trully a reason for pride and satisfaction, knowing that in Chile there are people who dare to take the plunge, to go against the odds, and do it right, with love for what they do and the seriousness and responsability it deserves.
The reason for this slightly long post is to tell you about the release of Diseño Emergente 2.0,. A total review of the website’s interface and functions was made directly from the input of its own users and not just what the staff thought was right.
Even if you’re not a spanish-speaking person, I encourgae you to take a look at the portfolios section, I’m sure you’ll find a few things that’ll blow your mind.
For someone like me, who’s passionate about design, programming and interaction, this website really is a luxury. A whole bunch of new features that speed up your reading time, enhance relationships between users and also enhance the participation of 3rd party users from chilean student design.
So I’m just leaving the invitation open for you to check out the all new Diseño Emergente, ’cause even with its many haters, it’s impossible to deny its real cultural and design weight in chilean society.
My biggest congratulations, and deepest respect to the staff that daily tries to take chilean design to the next level. People like these are the ones that count.
The Pint Series is a project created by Matthew Barton, consisting of different series of printed postcards made by designers from all over the world.
These series go from 3 to 5 images each, they’re 6″x4″, and the price is US$20 plus shipping.
The nice part about this is that you can send your own series, anf it gets chosen, they send you a printed copy for free, and a set of 100 limited editions get put up for sale. Also you get US$500 plus a donation made on your behalf for US$250 to the As Green As It Gets foundation.
TPS: What does the name of the series mean? DQ: The series is called “Sensuality Seriesâ€. The idea behind it was to portray female sensuality as a variable thing. Women can be sensual in very different states and here I tried to show three of them: Cute, Elegant and Hard.
TPS: What inspired the series? DQ: Women. I think women are an infinite source of inspiration.
TPS: What are you currently doing in terms of client work? DQ: I’m doing some t-shirts for a company from Thailand and setting up a few websites for some companies back in my country.
TPS: What do you want to do in the design industry? DQ: I’d really like to work as an art director someday. But also I’d like to try out as much stuff as I can. I’m really into print these days and I’m trying to sort of leave the digital-only world.
Nothing like seeing your work printed out nicely.
TPS: What other personal project have you got going on? DQ: I’m doing several collab works with different designers from all over. Setting up a project for chilean designers, but it’s still in early stages, so can’t tell you much about that, but be on the lookout.
TPS: Who are your influences? DQ: I’m always kinda “on the spot†with this question, ’cause the influence list for me is huge.
Just to name a few, but in no case the only ones: Alberto Seveso, Mike Orduña, Pete Harrison, Nelson Balaban, Radim Malinic, etc, etc.
Still, they’re in no way the only ones. the list is practically infinite. too many hot designers out there.
TPS: What programs did you use to make these? DQ: I used Photoshop CS2 on practically everything. Except for the fragments detaching from the girls, which I made in Cinema4D.
TPS: Are you available for Freelance inquires? DQ: I’m currently going to college, so intense freelance work gets pretty tricky. But still, I’m always up for new projects.
Just back from the OFFF festival which this year had the very good taste to move to Lisbon. Offf gathers designers, programmers, illustrators and visual artists whose creativity explores and fashions digital aesthetics and software language.
I’ll leave aside all the digital animation and pretty flash websites presentations and go straight to the keynote of the first evening which was performed more than given by web designer and artist Joshua Davis. I’ve always liked his works, they have something very girly in sharp contrast with his tattooed soft-punk image.
Davis likes Jackson Pollock, not so much for his paintings, more for his approach to gesture. Pollock regarded the process of its creation as art and not so much the final product. Like Pollack, Davis’ art is based on gestures, but he relies on technology to create. He designs programs which follow randomly what he draws. He sets the rules and the program takes from there, surprising the artist each time.
Davis never liked mathematics. He went to art school and had to teach himself math and programming. At art school he was mostly into painting and became obsessed with the idea of creating his own drawing tools and experimenting with his materials. He would put his paintings in the freezer but the outcome was disappointing: the paintings were cold, nothing else happened. More interesting things occurred when Davis baked his paintings in the oven: the varnish on top would dry faster than the oil of the painting. As a result the painting would shatter. But the lesson he learned was that he enjoyed the idea that he didn’t have total control over the final artwork.
According to Davis, computational design is divided in two clans: the purists and the hybrids. The purists are Ben Fry, Casey Reas, John Maeda, Golan Levin, etc. They only use code. The hybrid, like himself, Niko Stumpo, Geoff Lillemon and others blend the code with art works. The artwork is thrown into the swarm system and emerges as a series of art/design works which are all different from the other. The artists defines some parameters such as speed, rotation, indecision and the system maps the drawing according to these lines.
He was commisioned by BMW a series of limited edition prints that would “capture the essence” of the company‘ s Z4 Coup??. The artist translated a number of views of the coup?? and its components into an algorithm that served as the basis for prints. Davis also selected geographic notes and scales from a German school atlas to act as a symbol of mobility in the prints. Video documenting the process.
Despite his reliance on programs and codes, Davis still sees his work as being one of an artist: he creates the programs, sets the rules, chooses the colours to use, feeds the program with his own handmade drawings and ideas and at the end of the process he takes the role of the critics by selecting which of the pieces made by the program will be kept or deleted.
Kimono Blue, 2007
For example, to realize his Kimono series, he gathered the assets and forms found in his collection of books on Kimonos, drew them and fed them to the generative system.
He selected only 250 of the resulting drawings. His limited edition prints are all different from each other. But instead of numbering them 1/1, he numbers them 1/250, 2/250, etc. The reason for that is that what matters is the program, not the visual output.
Yellow Tiger
After some crazy hotel carpet stories Davis ran us through some of his latest works and exhibitions:
– His collaboration with Chuck Anderson for AMP Energy drink.
– The cover of the CD Yellow Tiger by Ming Dynasty,
– Solo exhibition at Maxalot Gallery in Barcelona.
Drawing outside the Maxalot gallery in Barcelona
– projection on a building facade for the 4th edition of the TodaysArt Festival in The Hague.
– Davis commented on Random Assistant which was exhibited at OFFF too. Random Assistant is a long stripe of lack and white prints accompanied by transparent watercolors and brushes for the public to colour the print.
As usual, Davis used a generative system to create the artwork, leaving the decision making of the compositions to the programs. This time though, one of the components of the system which governs the way the work is colored and painted was removed from the software. Instead, the public will fulfill this functionality by using the brushes and watercolors at their disposal. Davis did a first version of the project in Rovereto (Italy) for the festival Futuro Presente. The OFFF version was incredibly successful.
Random Assistant, OFFF, Lisbon, Day 1
Random Assistant, OFFF, Lisbon, Day 2
For Tropism in New York he worked on new organic forms to create a “super nature.” For the first time his generative graphics were turned into 3D-printed objects: a series of vases in porcelain.
Tropism vase, 2007
– To celebrate the launch of his first line of housewares (trash cans and pillows) at the Umbra Concept Store in Toronto, Davis used the Tropism Engine to generate huge panels (like he did at the OFFF Festival in New York.), he had them printed and pasted on the window of the shop.
The artist then listed his sources of inspiration: there’s Basquiat, Cy Twombly, the indeed awesome 18th century painter Ito Jakuchu, the Batu Cave in Malaysia, etc.
Davis ended the presentation with a list of (not very original) tips for the audience:
Look for what you don’t see in your immediate environment, you don’t have to fly to the other end of the globe to find some source of inspiration, make work for love, not for awards or acceptance, complacency is your enemy, find your own voice, if you are using someone else’s you run out of conversation pretty quickly. And work like hell.
For people who want to make the right moves in advertising, it would be only normal to find them cramming to find the right books on how to make advertising work to their advantage. Most people turn to the usual educational marketing and advertising books, but the difference really lies on a book that focuses mainly on advertising prowess.
Such is the highlight of this book simply called “The History of Advertisingâ€. Once you hear it, it may seem that it is a book made for a college student. But the real essence of any subject, advertising in this case, really lies on the focus of books that are available in the market today.
Divided into sections by decades, this book explores the legendary campaigns and brands of advertising’s modern history, with specific anecdotes and comments on the importance of every campaign. You will find the picture of the camel that originated the Camel pack, the first Coca Cola ad, and even how artworks by masters such as Picasso and Magritte have been used in advertising.
Absolut is bringing one of their print ads to life in the newest spot from TBWA, titled, “Dissection.” The original print ad featured an exploding glass that reveal the vodka within. In the spot, TBWA takes it to the next level with the Absolut bottle itself exploding in slow-mo and the liquid inside staying in the quintessential shape. According to AdWeek, the vodka was actually shot in slow frames and minimal (20% or less) was CGI animation. I enjoy the ending where the pieces assemble themselves back together for the end tagline, “In an Absolut World.” Check out the ad for yourself below… what do you think?
The good folks at Evasèe are always up to date dropping the new hot stuff on design, art and general trends; but this one is for sure one for the books: Cyberoptix.
Created by Bethany Shorb, this enterprise is dedicated to the always curious, atractive, yet unexplored market of ties, and it does it in a masterful way.
Make in fine silk with hand-made sikscreening processes, each one of these ties is an absolute statement of elegance, vanguard and style.
By far an attractive gift that out does and differs from the traditional market offer.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
