Having caught a nasty cold this weekend and shivering in my “not-yet-heated” appartment, the following thought popped to my mind: Why is it that all radiators have to look so old-fashioned and boring? What about a stylish, custom-made heating that adds style (and not ugliness) to your living room??

Well, in today’s world of mass customization it didn’t take me very long to find one on the internet: the innovative and functional Puzzle radiator from Runtal includes plates to create different looks. According to daily mood and room style, you can replace the plates and create your own individual wall art.

Equipped with such a fun radiator and Fluid Forms’ newest lampshade CASSIUS, I’d be all prepared for those dark and chilly winter nights to come…

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Today I got a memo about a brand new book (I think the ink isn’t dry yet…) published:

“Marke Eigenbau” (German)

The subtitle “Der Aufstand der Massen gegen die Massenproduktion” (my free translation would be: The rebellion of the masses against mass production) grabbed my attention. I read the synopsis and was already hooked: the book describes (peppered with national and international examples) the rise of the economy of individual initiatives and self organisation.

 The two editors, Holm Friebe and Thomas Ramge, analyse the social background of the DIY (Do It Yourself) movement and the consequences for traditional business models. They describe a DIY world…

We at Fluid Forms are friends of printed knowledge. So this title will soon pimp our office library.

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I just got back from this years C.STEM where we exhibited CASSIUS and the EARTH Bowls. Check out the Flickr feed and the other exhibited projects.

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Today we introduced a new (at least for us) social networking service at Fluid Forms: Twitter

Twitter, a free webbased micro blogging service, can be compared with SMS on the mobile phone (To learn more about Twitter read this).

If you are among those folks who want to know first about new products, developments in individual design and desktop manufacturing or start/finish of upcoming competitions, Twitter might be of interest for you.

Indroducing new approaches always means experimenting. You can help us with your feedback to make Twitter a valuable service. We invite you to tell us about content you want to receive or you don’t like. Share your ideas about how to improve the quality of our tweets!

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Over the last 3 weeks we tested our Social Media Newsroom which we now run as a first version.

What is a Social Media Newsroom (SMNR)?
Our newsroom is our approach and an innovative tool to supply the modern needs of transparent communication.

Using advantages of up-to-date Web2.0 tools (rss, social bookmarking, blogs etc.)  we provide everyone interested in Fluid Forms with information.

Especially  journalists (online and offline) benefit from a SMNR:  More and more of them get sick of receiving tons of e-mails containing content they are not interested in every day. On our SMNR you can easily opt-in  by subscribing to the provided RSS-FEED  (what’s a RSS-Feed) to receive the latest news we publish. You will also find a lot of multimedia elements like photos or videos you can link directly to your own content and share with others.

Here are some of the main features of our newsroom:

• Receive most recent news via RSS-Feed (easy opting-in and opting-out)
• Search the whole newsroom archive
• Tag Cloud to find easily the most important and interesting content
• Technorati Tags: all our releases contain Technorati tags enabling you to compare our releases with other sources with only one mouseclick
• connection to important multimedia content on flickr, youtube etc.
• bookmark the content in many different ways (e.g. digg, del.icio.us) to share it with others

We hope you will visit our newsroom from time to time or subscribe to our service. If you think something is missing on our newsroom, please contact us and give us a hint!

To learn more about Social Media Newsrooms we recommend you to read this  (German) or this (English).

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By the way:
You like to be among the first reading about new products or upcoming competitions?
Subscribe to our newsletter! 

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The other day I read at Desktop Engineering Online that the Museum of Modern Art in New York City recently acquired four abstract artworks that were produced on a 3D printer. So this groundbreaking production method seems to be taking over museums as well!

When rummaging around the internet I found another fascinating design piece, which has been added to the MOMA‘s permanent collection: the One-Shot.MGX stool. This hip expanding chair was designed by the Parisian designer Patrick Jouin for Belgian Materialise and was featured at the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

Consisting of a single, non-assembled unit, the stool can be untwisted into its functional form by pushing lightly down the center handle.

Good news for anybody who wants to turn their living room into a museum: the stool is also for sale! Too bad my own monthly budget is already exhausted….

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Plushie is a project that aims to create a simple method for users to generate 3D-Models and export sewing patterns.

Absolut Quartet is a nice example of a design template. Composers have created musical templates which are completed with a users input, entered through their website. After entering the “seed melody” users can then watch as the musical robot plays the resulting piece and download the video.

levelHead is an augmented-reality spatial-memory game by the Barcelona based New Zealander Julian Oliver.

Image Fulgurator was the unanimous winner of the Prix Ars Electronica in the Interactive Art category. By detecting the flash as people take a photo, the Image Fulgurator can project an image onto the object that it is being pointed at and therein alter the photograph being taken.

I really liked the Structured Creature project because of how a relatively complex form is created through the simple idea of tightening the nylon holding it together.

Salat is a very relivant and provocative work dealing with the fears of muslem envasion in eurapean sociaty. Johannes Gees places “sound bombs” that sounded recordings of the Moslem “call for prayer/muezzin” from chirch towers. He also exhibited the fines and changes he recieved from the authorities that did not understand or appreciate his work.

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A few days ago Fluid Forms’ brandnew product CASSIUS was brought to the market. The concept is truly fascinating:  a punching bag peppered with sensors can be beaten into shape by boxing gloves. The homemade software Formatory then generates production data, out of which an exclusive and unique lampshade is finally created. This sounds all very fascinating, but I keep asking myself: how the hell do you come up with such an extraordinary concept??

The idea for CASSIUS emerged out of a desire to bring simplicity and fun back into the design process

explains Stephen Williams, Fluid Forms’ CTO, who is currently presenting CASSIUS at the ARS Electronica. Hannes Walter, Fluid Forms’ CEO, goes into more detail:

The idea came up on our way home after the ARS Electronica 2005. We were brewing coffee on a gas cooker on a motorway parking and let our imagination run wild. CASSIUS is a perfect example of the possibilities that Fluid Forms offers: the merging of the real with the virtual world. A real boxing match is converted into digital data, which – at the end – produces a haptic design object.

Well, for me CASSIUS seems like a magic metamorphosis in a perfect world: physical force is without violent intentions but rather transformed into a radiant light. Wow!

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I just came from a very interesting symposium regarding “A New Cultural Economy”; the main theme at this years ARS Electronica. Among the speakers was Joi Ito who spoke about Creative Commons, of which he is the CEO. The goal of Creative Commons is to allow people to take knowledge, information or creations, and combine them to create new works without licensing restrictions.

What I particularly enjoyed in his talk was how he explained the stigma of the word amateur. Something amateurish is often considered inferior to something professional. Professionals emerged due to the cost and risk associated with mass production in the industrial age. Now that the prosumer movement is gaining momentum and we are entering the Post-industrial or Automated Age, I hope that this most beautiful word, amateur, meaning in its French roots “lover of”, will regain the place it deserves in our language.

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Im currently at that the ARS Electronica, exhibiting our CASSIUS Project. Looking at what other artists are presenting, I stumbled upon Ten Thousand Cents. Using Amazons Mechanical Turk, the artists had thousand of people across 51 countries draw tiny pieces of a US$100 bill. Each person was paid 1 cent for creating their 1/10000^th of the bank note. Amazons Mechanical Turk makes reference to the 18^th century hoax in which a chess playing machine was presented; inside the machine however was a very small and very smart human chess player.

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