We would like to thank all of these people who have helped to make the Streets Earrings project possible…

Bernhard Weber, Patrick Gregston, Jennifer Vu, Andy  Künz, Otmar Kühner, Katrin Mueller, Brian House, Kristine , Wilbrecht, Petra Grabowski, Jennifer DeMarrais, Julia, Geoff Scott, ahblocky, Susan Ator, Tim  O’Neill, Jaime Wolfe, michael ducker, Tanner Wheat, Bill, Michael Batz, Matt, Jean Briscella, rmok, Marie Wiese, ArtsGloucester, schellmax, Sébastien Deletaille, Laurel, Cheryl Dedes, Will Henderson, Anne-Marie Kovacs, hilary o’neil, Christine West, Emily, elly jonez, Jonas Juenger, Andrea Lombardoni, Helen Fullerton, Ben Hosken, Paulina Adamczyk, Wes Mcgee, Phil Voetsch, candy fischer, Yaffa, Amanda, Naomi Melati Bishop

These are the backers of our kickstarter project to create the first batch of Streets Earrings and this is a preview of what some of them look like. The black parts are what gets etched away.

If you were too late to get into the Kickstarter action, you can now order over the website. We are continuing with the batch order process so those of you familier with Fluid Forms will notice a small difference with the Earrings as opposed to the other Fluid Forms products.

Since producing a single piece would have an astronomical price attached to it, we are now pooling people together so that anyone can take part in the project. Once we have 50 orders to fill up a sheet we make all of them and send them off to you. If you are in a hurry you just have to gather your friends together and show them how to order their own pair. Ever been to a tupperware party? ;-)

If you are interested in selling the Streets Earrings and have your own website you can put the design interface(above) right on one of your own pages. Just checkout the Sell Fluid Forms section of the website. Every piece sold gains you a commission. If you want to sell earrings in a shop you can contact us for bulk prices.

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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!

Material Tests and prototyping:

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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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Streets Clock ~ Your Favorite City as a Personalized Wall Clock:

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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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Speaking of Co-Development: Fluid Forms Online Jewelry Design Competition:

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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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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

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We’ve been asked to organize a creative coding workshop during the Ars Electronica Festival. We have invited a good mixture of creative minds (Martin Fuchs, Adi Hofmeister, Stefan Kainbacher, Cedric Kiefer, Kristian Kwiecinski, Andreas Nicolas, Michal Piasecki, Frederico Weber) and are looking forward to all the ideas and projects which will pop up during the workshop. Together with these guys we try to come up with personalised products resulting from the marriage of geometry, code and data. The parametrically generated forms will be produced and tested using the FabLab production facilities. Everyday from 16:30h to 18:00h the workshop is open to everyone. We’ll do a short presentation about the workshop and show the current state of the projects. Please come along and talk to us about creative coding, generative design, digital production or whatever else is on your mind. Thuesday the 8th at 16:30h there’s the final presentation of the workshop results.

On Friday the 7th at 14:00h Eva Tucek will hold a public pesentation about wax-3D-printing for jewelry.

Beside this workshop Stephen and I will do a presentation about emotional interfaces for generative design. We would love to see you there as well.

If you can’t make it to the Ars Electronica Festival 2009 in Linz, we’ll keep you updated during the workshop on our blog, twitter, facebook and flickr.

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Dr. Vino shows us a rather simple but yet funny and “vivid” DIY project on the wine talk that goes down easy blog – the moss landscape in a bottle

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via dornob.com

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What can be more personally touching than turning your own thoughts, wishes emotions or even your body into fancy stuff you can wear on your person?

Imprecious.com answers this question with delicate silver charms you give your own touch (in the true sense of the word): They craft pieces of custom jewelry out of your own or your special one’s fingerprint.

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How does it work?

Order a necklace, earrings or a bracelet in their online shop. Within 7 days they’ll send you their Print Capture Kit. Use the kit to make a copy of your fingerprint (that reminds me somehow of that James Bond thing, where they copy a key by pressing it into a block of soap). Send the kit back to Imprecious and they craft your custom piece of jewelry which makes a absolutely individual gift.

Print Capture Kit

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Ok, in general, I really like the idea of creating cool stuff out of my body. But there are some concerns worth to talk about:

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1. Fingerprints and privacy

I spoke to @s_t_e_p_h_e_n about the issue and he told me that the big problem with fingerprint-to-product approaches is that people don’t like to give their fingerprints to strangers (He must know because back in 2005 he and @hanneswalter published their fingerprint sculpture project).

This is how Imprecious handles the privacy question:

Imprints will be kept on file for 1 year from initial order, just in case you want to order more pieces, maybe as a gift for someone else! But if you prefer, we will send the imprints back to you along with your jewelry… just let us know.

Reading this I do not really know what happens with my data. Therefore I would like to read some privacy policy or things like that…

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2. Shipping

That’s actually my personal concern. The process involves a lot of shipping. The ship has to leave the harbor at least 3 times…

Is there a simpler/cheaper/sustainable yet reliable (digital) way? I imagine there are smart people out there (who have played detective as a child) with the necessary knowledge…

Imprecious, as far as I could read on their webpage, is willing to find solutions:

As we grow we intend to do so with responsibility for our “footprint” and our community. We make the commitment to reduce, recycle and reuse wherever possible.

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What do you think?

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I have found some (worth to share with you) thoughts from Stephen (@s_t_e_p_h_e_n) hidden deep inside our (old) website:

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Cassius represents the direction in which we can steer our future. Cassius demonstrates that anyone can realize their ideas as physical objects.

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At present we have two hurdles.

• The first hurdle is that generative production machines do not yet enable us to produce anything we wish.
• The second hurdle is the difficulty of communicating an idea to a machine without first undergoing years of training. This second hurdle is addressed by Cassius.

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Before the industrial revolution we could go to a tradesman, a cabinet maker for example, and communicate our idea for a new table. These ideas would then be realized within boarders of our financial means and the skills of the tradesman. Upon the arrival of industrialized production we lost this freedom, to a large extent, in favor of prices that a larger portion of our population could afford.

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CASSIUS Punching Bag Design Interface from Fluidforms on Vimeo.

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In 1978 in “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” we heard with pleasure and hope of a machine that could create something that is “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”. The machine, called a Replicator termed originally in “Star Trek” could, at a push of a button, synthesize food. This could be seen as the second generation of such machines. The third generation was presented in “The Star of the Unborn”. It was not a machine but a human, known as “The Worker”, who could turn ideas into reality.

Unless we really like bad tea the first generation was not much use to us. The second generation required special skills to program it and represents a similar situation to that in which we find ourselves now. The third generation is where Fluid Forms is working towards. In the Fluid Forms’ vision, the job of “The Worker” is performed by a combination of “Design Interfaces” and generative production machines.

As does the tradesman, the Design Interfaces maintain the borders represented by the capabilities of the production machines and gives us feedback relating to the price. As “The Worker” interprets our ideas, so too does the Design Interface: through its ease-of-use, it communicates our ideas to the production machines.

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Today we really like to thank all customers who participated in our survey!

We hoped for a response rate of 10 %.

But more than 30 % of you spent your
precious time and answered our questions.
Wow!

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Some of the most important results of the survey:

1. you guys are brilliant

2. your mouse AND your keyboard form a perfect team to express your opinion

3. you confirmed that we are on the right way
(even if we are not always doing all things right)

We already work hard on your requests, hints and ideas. A lot of them will be fulfilled and implemented on our new website which we launch at the end of the month…

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By then you will also know if you are the winner of an Earth Bowl

Earth-Stripe Bowl

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Do you remember old school media?

In times of loads of Web-2.0-Best-of-Lists (for Blogs, Webpages,…) we offer something quite strange:

A list of brilliant books we read recently.

YES BOOKS! WE REALLY MEAN BOOKS! THESE BULKY THINGS MADE OUT OF REAL PAPER!

We figured out, that a good part of the ideas we develop, decisions we take and strategic moves we make can be somehow traced back to books we have read. The Internet environment is a great place to find fast and up-to-date information. It’s daily business to keep up with it. But the slow media has its place to.

Reading a book always allows us to take a birds-eye-view on our ideas, rethink our course, our decisions and our motivation.

Does reading a book gives you inspiration too? Then go ahead…

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3 valuable books Stephen (CTO) recommends:

Systemisches Design
(Cyrus Dominik Khazaeli)

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Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers
(Tom Igoe, Dan O’Sullivan)

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Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
(Bill Buxton)

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3 valuable books Hannes (CEO) recommends:

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society (Eric D. Beinhocker)

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Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design (Jessica Spencer/Publisher)

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Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication ( Neil Gershenfeld)

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3 valuable books Andy (CCO) recommends:

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
(Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff)

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Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
(Jeff Howe)

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The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly (David Meerman Scott)

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Bon Bon Kakku could become for fabrics what Threadless is for T-Shirts. The platform was launched recently, so I’m very courious to see how the community will pick it up the site. Besides the idea and way of communication, I really like the fresh and unusual webdesign.

via springwise.com

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