Yesterday our first special edition Earth Pins were finished.
Hot off the presses they were presented by the Creative Industries Styria to Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net and craphound.com,
Steve Rogers: Responsible for User Experience in Europe-Middle East-Africa for Google…
David Sasaki, director for Rising Voices…
Andrea Goetzke of newthinking communications…
… and Styrias very own Finance Minister, Christian Buchmann…
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Andy: What was your motivation to create objects out of street maps? What inspired you?
John Briscella
John: In the past few years, I have been living in different cities around the world and started to have different emotions for each one. I am originally from Philadelphia, but was living mainly in Vienna, Austria, and my favorite city at the moment is Tokyo. One of my favorite things to do within a new city is to walk around without a map, try to get lost, and then if I make it back, chart out on a map the path I was going. Sometimes I miss alot about the city and sometimes I happen to find interesting areas, its all relative, but I try not to make the same path twice.
The clocks were an idea from these explorations, as well as some of my other projects, that begun to connect the formal aspects of the street network and their inherent qualities of the space.
Andy: How did you find Fluid Forms and how did things start?
John: While in Vienna, I happened to see the Fluid Forms Earth Bowl Design at a friend’s gallery shop. The concept was interesting and similar to my ideas about place. After taking a look at their complete works, I noticed I had similar works that might be interesting to them and sent them a email about my thoughts. Stephen wrote me back mentioning he had saw my Urban Gridded Notebook at the Kunsthaus in Graz, while looking for a gift. From then on, we were having discussions about collaborating on new products.
Andy: What was the best / hardest thing to do in this project?
Urban Grided Notebook
John: Working with Stephen is really cool. We have been talking about techniques and he is able to see where the potential is to develop into a Fluid Forms concept. The hardest part of the project is to find the correct associations between the objects, the street network, usability, and production method. Its a delicate mixture.
more about John on his blog
more about the Urban Grided Notebook
buy the Urban Grided Notebook on Walking-Things.com
After the success of our Earth product series we naturally learned a lot about what is emotionally important to people. Among other things people associate feelings and memories with places. I seemed natural to us to build upon the idea of the Earth series using street maps. We had to overcome a number of hurdles to accomplish the result you can see today.
Streets Clock in Maple Wood
Proprietary Data
The map interfaces most people are accustomed to using like those from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! use proprietary data. This means that we can’t create any derivative works from them. This is where the OpenStreetMap comes in. The OpenStreetMap is licensed under a Creative Commons license that enables us to take and remix the data. OpenStreetMap does not yet contain every street, building and point of interest but anyone can enter data into the system. Please consider entering some data from you local area. Find out how.
Streets Clock Design Interface
Non-Realtime Data Access
Due to the large amount of data in the OpenStreetMap we can not retrieve the data in real-time. The solution we came up with was to perform some image processing of the pre-rendered map images. We cut out certain aspects of the map based on their color. This enables visitors to our website to get a preview of how their clock will look in real-time.
Production Files
The laser cutter that cuts the final clock shape out of wood or acrylic glass needs a vector file. A vector file is defined by lines and curves whereas a bitmap file, like in the real-time preview, is defined by the colors of the files pixels. The vector file can be scaled but the bitmap file can not. Whilst the preview might look fine on the screen, it is not suitable for laser cutting at the scale of the clock. Each pixel would be visible and the curves would never be as smooth as with the vector files. When generating the vector file we also remove pieces of information that are not necessary such as street names, transport routes and administrative district borders. This creates a more iconographic image. In future we may look at offering the engraving of street names on the streets. At present this is not automated and can not be offered for one-off pieces. For large orders we can look at manual customization of the geometry and engraving. To produce the final production file a designer, either myself or Hannes, turns certain layers on or off to produce a result that reaches our aesthetic standards and contains the most relevant information in geometric form.
Complexity and Laser Speed
The more complex a form the longer it takes to cut out the clock. Our laser cutter is very fast and powerful and allows us to keep production of unique pieces down to an affordable price whilst producing a beautiful end result.
What is Next
It is too early for me to say what the future has in store for the Streets concept but give the amazing initial response you can be assured there are more products to come. Please send us you feedback, both good and bad, so that we can keep improving the Streets products and design interfaces to make them as simple and elegant as possible.
What? The last article was written back in October? Uff, we must have been pretty busy during the last few weeks…
Yes it’s quite obvious that our small team’s resources where occupied to push Fluid Forms further and further.
So what was going on the last weeks: Material tests, prototyping, creating a new design-your-own product, backend-improvements and an online jewelry design competition on Facebook.
But first things first!
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We played a lot around with different materials (metals, acrylic, wood) and production methods (photo etching, laser cutting, metal 3d-printing). And the outcome? Some very very secret prototypes 
and the Streets Clock which we launched a few days ago.
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You can design the Streets Clock yourself by entering the name of a city (perhaps downtown New York) and dragging it’s map to a preferred section.
The custom wall clock is the first Fluid Form we have co-developed with an external designer. John Briscella who we will introduce next time was doing a great job painfully collected the first metropolitan area data-sets…We think the outcome is an eclectic and stylish wall clock making a perfect present under everyone’s Christmas Tree!
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November also saw the 1. Fluid Forms Online Design Competition on Facebook. We invited 6 Designers from Graz to participate in a first instructive (Facebook can be a bit tricky…) yet pretty cool jewelry design competition.
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The Designers submitted 22 Designs of which 2 stand out:
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1. THE WINNER (46 votes): Tobias Schneider’s aka Famepix’ “Sound Wave II”:
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2. THE RUNNER UP (29 votes) – En Garde’s “iPod Sound Blaster”:
The winning design will be prepared now for the launch on fluid-forms.com. More t.b.a
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CONGRATS ONCE AGAIN TO THE WINNER, TOBIAS SCHNEIDER AND OUR COMMUNITY FOR SUPPORTING THE DESIGNERS WITH THEIR VOTES!
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milkorsugar, a platform that showcases everything you can customize and order online, has recently opened its doors. The Dutch website calls itself the web’s first Customization Portal which is in my opinion not to 100 % true. Just visit egoo.de to see what I mean. But anyway…
What I really like on milkorsugar is the short key fact description (i.e. delivery, price range) of each reviewed customization offer. And not to forget the obligatory community-product-rating.
I can’t wait to see the next features in action they announce on their website : comparison of products, visual shopping and pic upload of things customized by consumers.
My finding on milkorsugar today: Viesso – Online Furniture Configuration
The MCPC // 2009, the 5th World Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization is on now. We had been invited by the conference organization board to present Fluid Forms in Helsinki. But unfortunately we have been hyper-busy these days here in Austria and hence couldn’t make it to visit the MCPC…But none the less I will try to provide you with some MCPC content during the next week.
On the first day, Joseph Pine, the brilliant mass customization visionary, presented on the MCPC 2009 his ideas about the “Future of Mass Customization”.
He seas the future of user co-creation concentrated in 4 main threads:
(Read a detailed description of the 4 threads on Frank Piller’s Mass Customization Blog)
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1. From mass customization to continuous innovation:
Pine says that in order to build a sustainable mass customization business, mass customization has to be connected with user co-creation tools that continuously work on the solution space (or design space as we call it at Fluid Forms) of the mass customization offering.
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2.From markets of one to “one of markets”:
Mass Customization will not only focus on serving the needs of one single person (markets of one) but will also manage the bundeling (matching) of a single customer’s needs depending on different contexts (e.g. you traveling alone and you traveling with your family – different context, different personalized needs) -> “one of markets”
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3. From reality to virtual reality:
We will use virtual reality more often to personalize the self in a virtual world.
Does this mean we will see more (un)successful Second Lives?
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4.From Mass Customization of offerings to Mass Customization of management
Pine suggests to take the knowledge and tools of mass customization and introduce them into business management -> the mass customization of business management.
My personal opinion? I am not quite sure if there was really so much groundbreaking stuff to learn during the speech of Pine. Due to the fact that I wasn’t listening to the speech I don’t really have an idea what Pine exactly tries to say in Thread 2 and how the realization of Thread 4 will look like…so I am looking forward to learn more
Steve Klabnik, CTO of CloudFab was so kind providing the Fluid Forms community with a Beta-Access Code for their new marketplace for digital fabrication.
You want to make your 3d-models go real? Enter “fluidforms” at http://www.cloudfab.com/users/new and be among the first to get your Beta-Access to digital fabrication methods like SLA (Stereolithography), FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), and SLS (Selective Laser-Sintering) .
We proudly present the Customization of a customized product:
Thanks to Dick for sending us an image of his tinkerer dad’s “customized” Earth Bowl.
His dad displays it proudly to all his visitors…
It’s awesome to see how our customers modify their fluid forms and thus give them an even more personal touch and meaning.
And you? Feel free to send us your personal Fluid Forms hacks as well! We’d love to see and show your stuff!
With CloudFab another start-up enters the digital fabrication and desktop manufacturing scene. Compared to Shapeways – a community-platform mainly for tinkerer (free shipping, minimum order is $25,-), CloudFab seems to target the professional market (according to Ponoko minimum order is $100,-). They want to connect maker and buyer of various 3D-printing and digital fabrication technologies. However, without a beta-access there’s not much to see at the moment. (Hey guys, won’t you send me a beta-code)
I really like the answer to the question “What is CloudFab?” though! “We’re clearing the fog from the digital fabrication market.” I would really appriciate that.
thanks to Ponoko and Solidsmack
Back from a hectic week at the ARS Electronica where we held a intimate creative coding workshop with a few invited guests.
It was hard work and I didn’t get to see as much of the ARS as I had in previous years, but it was great working with the workshop participants.
More will follow regarding the workshop, but following are a few projects I liked at the ARS.
CONNECT – feedback-driven sculpture from Andreas Muxel on Vimeo.
Nemo Observatorium by Lawrence Malstaf
The physical value of sound by Yuri Suzuki
The Idea of a Tree by mischer’traxler
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