Michael Morris and Jeff Lowenstein are among the scholars studying the benefits and dangers of e-mail and other computer-based interactions. Despite this, they still managed to get into a shouting match resulting from an email miscommunication. To read more about the peculiarities of email communication visit www.csmonitor.com
via csmonitor.com
Founding a new firm such as Fluidforms requires a great deal of time and effort. This makes time a very rare personal good and I don’t want spend it on mundane tasks such as shopping. I prefer to spend my time with friends, on relaxing or enjoying the things I already bought.
When ever I notice that I’m going to need new clothes or goods I start to cringe. The soles of my new sneakers cracked open after only two days, a new t-shirt had tiny holes I had not seen in the shop, and the external hard disk-drive and the memory-stick, I recently bought, did not work at all. Perhaps I should go for used stuff, since I know that it has at least managed to work for a while. I don’t want to spend my time to going to shops, looking for something i like, buy it, driving back home, going mad because it doesn’t work or is of poor quality, driving back to the store, waiting until it’s exchanged or repaired and driving back home again.
I guess the use of cheap production in second world countries and the blind running for money are the reasons for my “double the time is one shopping trip” experiences. We pay significantly more for our European production but we can rest easily that the quality is top-notch and we are not stealing time from our customers that they would otherwise spend with their family and friends.
Copenhagen was the place to be on the 20th of April 2006.
The Innovation Lab organised a conference about the topic of customer made products and had some great speakers from different companies, talking about their positive experiences and obstacles they faced when they introduced customer made products. They provided a live stream and now offer the recorded speeches (Internet Explorer only).
One group of the speakers where the easy going guys from skinnycorp.com who are responsible for threadless.com, where user can upload their t-shirt design and the whole community votes which design is going to be produced. People who bought a shirt, of course want to be seen in it. By uploading a picture of themselves wearing the shirt and sending the link to friends the community becomes bigger and bigger automatically.
It is commonly believed that an ant colony is run by a central figure, the queen. In reality the queen is little more than a reproduction machine. According to different estimates of different species, ants have between 200 and 10,000 neurons in there brains. Our brains contain around 100 billion. No ant in the colony is capable of learning and relaying knowledge to others yet the colony does appear to learn. How is it that ants manage to find the shortest path to food sources.
Ants communicate with one another through the use of pheromones. When an ant is on the search for food it communicates this by dropping a “looking for food” pheromone (in black) whilst following the trail left by ants who have already found food (in green). If an ant, that is looking for food, finds food, it changes its message and begins dropping a “found food” pheromone. The ants looking for home, look where those looking for food are coming from, and vice-versa.
The important part of this process is the feedback loop provided as soon an ant looking for food meets an ant who has found food. The ants leaving the nest can follow this trail to the food source and strengthen the path back home. The more ants that leave the nest, on the path to the food, the stronger the path back home gets.
In the industry 3D-printing refers to the Z-Corp or similar technologies. However, I often use the term 3D-printing when I try to explain these manufacturing methods in laypersons terms to people, who are not familiar with these technologies.
As with a “normal” printer what you send in as a data file, comes out in physical form. However, instead of a two dimensional sheet, you get a three dimensional object. Most people are able to understand that. But when I start to talk about laser beams or ultraviolet illumination its too much and they become disinterested.
The layperson does not care about selective laser sintering, stereo lithography, fused deposition modeling laminated object manufacturing, selective laser melting and so on. They want to get an easy to understand explanation and 3D-print is perfect terminology for this. Anyway, fluid forms are enabled by all these technologies.
FLUIDFORMS 3D-printed lampshade TWIST (Selective Laser Sintering)
Most of us are familiar with Pythagoras’s prized Theorem…
a2 + b2 = c2
Some poor souls amoung you might even remember having to learn a long winded proof starting along the lines of “Let a be equal to blah and b equal blah…”
Here is an ancient Chinese proof without words.
It may not be imidiatly obvious but if you look at the image below, you can see that the squares within the left square must have the same area as the square with the right square. The area of the square with sides “a” plus the area of the square with sides “b” equals the area of the square with sides “c”.
This is where working visually in mathematics instead of with cryptic letters and symbols can have great cognitave advantages.
Your might have noticed the similarity in the patterns of our DRIFT Series and the CASSIUS lampshade. This is no coincidence. For a number of years we have been fascinated by the patterns that emerge through the combination of layers and curves seen often in Rapid-Prototyping. In fact we have even discussed increasing the layer thickness with 3D-Printing machine producers.
“Thicker layers? Nobody wants thicker layers, they all want thinner layers!”
This is because most people are still Rapid-Prototyping, where the layers are sanded away to create a smooth perfect looking model. We are Rapid-Manufacturing and wish to use its inherent qualities.
In our DRIFT series we are using 5mm thick layers of different kinds of wood to create the characteristic pattern. The products are made with subtractive production, more precisely CNC Milling, in which a lot of work is required to get rid of the path of the milling bit.
We would love to be able to apply this effect to a greater extent in rapid manufacturing. Not only would we have an addition element, with which to design, but the production costs would also be cheaper due to the increase production speed.
A number of months ago I read an article in the German economics magazine “Brand Eins” called “Schlaue Menge” (Intelligent Quantity). It detailed examples in which the average of educated guesses were better than as much a 98 percent of the individual guesses. It detailed examples from the American sociologist, Kate Gordans, guessing the relative weight of a number of different objects to the US-Navy’s method by which they found a lost submarine.
In the New York Times last week was another example from Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds systems for the US-Navy. They have created an Ideas Exchange. Like in stock exchanges the ideas gain backing from employees and rise to the top with increasing support. With the same principle also implemented by google Amazon Alexa and others, the average of the masses prove to be more accurate than any one member. This not only enables ideas to rise from place where they would not otherwise get a chance, it also provides a wonderful democratic valuations system. This takes pressure off management and provides them with support in risky decisions. In one case the management was sceptical in realising one product idea coming out of the exchange, but it now accounts for 30% of sales.
If you stay up late tomorrow night you can see something “interesting” on your clocks…
01:02:03 on 04/05/06
Due to the fact that the Americans write their month in a slightly less logical position they have already seen this a month ago.
VIA ROT
Today we generally accept the we were not designed, but evolved to become what we are today.
The theory of evolution does not explain how organisms got to the stage at which they were capable of evolving, but whether God, chance or something entirely different was responsible for our initial design, it was not in the form we take today. We are the result of an evolving algorithm run over millions of iterations.
Designers tend to be either out to change the world, become Gods or both. If we truly wish to become design Gods, we should consider designing like Gods. Stop designing the final iteration of a product and start thinking about the seed that evolves into the product.
Start with…
for(float v=-PI/2; v<=PI/2+inc; v+=inc){
for(float u=0; u<=TWO_PI+inc; u+=inc){
}
}
and see how far you come.
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