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:

.

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.

.

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

.

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!

.

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

.

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.

.

The Designers submitted 22 Designs of which 2 stand out:

.

1. THE WINNER (46 votes):  Tobias Schneider’s aka Famepix’ “Sound Wave II”:

.

.

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

.

CONGRATS ONCE AGAIN TO THE WINNER, TOBIAS SCHNEIDER AND OUR COMMUNITY FOR SUPPORTING THE DESIGNERS WITH THEIR VOTES!

Share on Facebook

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!

Share on Facebook

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

Share on Facebook

Hundreds of animals made out of white plastic gathered together in Linz yesterday afternoon. The animals are made from polyethylene boards and were cut out with a water-jet-cutter. Each creature was awakened to life by people from Linz during the last months, under guidance from the artist Roger Titley. This bizzare happening was the prelude  the of Visualized Cloud of Sounds 2009 in line with the Ars Electronica Festival 2009.

Hunderte weiße Kunststofftiere versammelten sich im Laufe des gestrigen Nachmittags in der Linzer Innenstadt. Die Kreaturen wurden aus Polyethylenplatten mit einem Wasserstrahlschneider ausgeschnitten.  Zum Leben erweckt wurden die Geschöpfe in den letzten Monaten durch die Bewohner von Linz  unter Anleitung der Künstler. Das bizzare Treiben unter Tags war der Auftakt zur Visualisierten Linzer Klangwolke 2009 im Rahmen des Ars Electronica Festivals 2009.

Share on Facebook

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.

Share on Facebook

We are happy to announce the launch of the EARTH BROOCH SILVER, the first customizable silver jewelry in our Earth product family!

.

.

Similar to our Earth Bowls, Tables and Lampshades you design your own silver brooch in three simple steps:

.

1. Select your desired location on our interactive map.

2. Adjust the pane to define the perfect view

3. Order your unique piece of silver jewelry

.

The custom brooch is 3d printed in wax an then silver (975 silver) casted and shipped within 2 weeks worldwide. Not bad!

Who will be woooooooing? Everyone looking for a really unique anniversary gift. And definitely the ones who receive it!

Great work Stephen and Hannes! Thanks to Karin Lernbeiß for the cool product pics!

Share on Facebook

Those, who have a decent sense for beauty, sophisticated design and humour in furnishing, should quickly get to know Taschide.  The two designers have their forge of ideas in German Offenbach. On the tracks of Ikea’s genius nomenclature, they baptize their  products also with curious names like Karl-Heinz or Christa.

With their creations, Sandra Tan und Johannes Schiebe tell stories about “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”, princesses, “Sleeping Beauty”, “The wishing table”  and sea urchins. They narrate tales of already forgotten imagination. They put colourful socks on tables, produce rocks  and wish you a goodnight holding a white candle.

Don’t you immediately feel demoted to the magical world of your childhood, in which people could still be devided into good and bad and every princess somehow found her prince rescuing her from her tower with a white horse? Well, then have a closer look on the fabulous world of Taschide and start to dream of design that still come straight from the heart.

The new clou are those sweet cushions, which are stuffed with special grain filling (“That’s the way I like it. uhu uhu”!) and covered in hand-knitted wool. Stylish and comfortable! Old-fashioned yet at the pulse of time. With one word: On the edge! But still: exactly this status allows them to be a must-have for everyone cultivated in cuddling. Also the rest of the sortiment is astonishingly handsome. Easily you get lost in a world, where little things avance to protagonists and details hold the whole construction. And at the end, the good ones will win!

Images by Taschide

Share on Facebook

Napster, Gnutella and Pirate Bay – brought product piracy to a level never reached before in history.

.

.

What’s the next step? What will be the future of sharing? F A B B I N G!!!

.

For me it seems that Corsair ships flagged with the Jolly Roger are spotted again at the horizon. This time we are not talking about famous pirate ships like the “Queen Anne’s Revenge” (Blackbeard’s ship). We are talking about modern pirate’s pretty manoeuvrable brigantines with more technocratic and less mystic-laden idioms like RepRap, Makerbot and fab@home etc. We are talking about desktop manufacturing bringing us step by step closer to a machine we only know from Star Trek – The Replicator. A machine that can produce almost everything (from spoons to penties) with the push of a button.

These days I have the impression that the Digital Manufacturing Revolution stays in the spotlight again. A light that’s also unveiling the dark side of 3d-printing, fabbing or whatever you call the shift from manufacturing goods in factories to create objects directly on your desktop:
.

DESIGN-PIRACY!

.

Fast Company sees a new economy rising without forgetting about design-piracy as a possible threat for professional design as soon as every real object becomes a print-out. Back in 2001, when Napster was on its climax, Marshall Burns & James Howison called the phenomena “Napster Fabbing“. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde posted a tweet today announcing that the future of sharing is here (referring to the RepRap project).

.

What is this design-piracy all about?

.
Imagine you can download any virtual object as a file that can be read by digital manufacturing machines such as laser cutters or 3d printers and created by the push of a button. Once again – you hit the button of your keyboard and a complex object, perhaps a Rolex (yes yes, I know, that’s quite far in the future, we are just at the stage of fabbing spoons and bowls…) is printed out by your desktop mashine? Awesome?!?

This part of the story works out pretty well: You can create your own products on your desktop, shipping costs go down to a minimum, local business can be strengthened…  But what if I start printing out copyright material (like the Rolex in the example). What if I download tons of illegal production files and print them out? Pretty scary for many of you huh?

Compare this imaginable (but not far away) scenario with what has happened in the music industry and you get an idea of the impact fabbing & co will have on whole businesses on a worldwide scale!

.

Will this scenario happen? DEFINATELY
Can we stop it? DEFINATELY NOT! (And that’s fine even if it can be painful as well, but the time is ready for the next step)

.

WILL YOU BE ON BOARD?

.

.

pic by Wikipedia

Share on Facebook

About two weeks ago I posted the article “Mass Customization WON’T Make it for a Mainstream Business Model“  in which I mentioned the reason why so many companies experimenting with “Create Your Own” products stuck or even fail.

I also noted that the ominous Design Space (or Solution Space as Frank Piller e.a. call it) can serve as a source for  Mass Customization’s “salvation”.

I additionally mentioned that we use Creative Coding (to be understood as a certain kind of programming based on mathematical rules) to define Design Spaces and thus enable our customers to easily create their own products.

.

.

Today I am introducing  Generative Design & Art, which are expressed best by Creative Coding and explained best by this quotes:

Generative Design allows to produce new designs automatically by the push of a button. A basic form, pattern, or object is automatically modified by an algorithm. The result: infinite random modifications of the starting solution (within a solution space set by the designer).
Frank Piller

Generative Design Processes is about the modeling of initial conditions of an object (its “genetics”) instead of modeling the final form.
@eloisapaola

Generative Art is a term given to work which stems from concentrating on the processes involved in producing an artwork, usually (although not strictly) automated by the use of a machine or computer, or by using mathematic or pragmatic instructions to define the rules by which such artworks are executed.
Adrian Ward

.

.

.

.

.

Next time I’ll show you some awesome Generative Design & Art in action!

Share on Facebook

The Earth Table Stripe by Fluid Forms is on the best track to be such a classic as the fairy tale by the brothers Grimm. As important as the individual way to tell a famous story like „the wishing table“ is the individual designing of this fancy piece of furniture. And it is so incredibly easy. Everyone, who is in the possession of a computer and a computer-mouse can create an unique piece of furniture almost all by himself. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy! But not only that you can change the very look of the table, also the size of it can be adjusted to your own personal needs. Everything goes: Quadratic, longish, quadratic, longish or why not try out quadratic?

The steps to design your own Earth Table are easy to describe: It all bases upon Google Maps. At first you have to search for a place on earth you consider worthy to be the place where you will be eating for the next 10 years (at least!) and then Fluid Forms will put this model into a real table. Only with the help of a cnc-miller. High quality laminated wooden blocks will bestow the right material to look at, 8 mm thick glass will be the right sphere to eat on while looking at the Yellow Stone National Park, the Whitsunday Islands or the heart of London. But before you can use your table the surface has to besanded, oiled and polished by hand by skilled Austrian craftsmen. Fluid Forms only wants the best for you, huh?

Dine in the middle of the Brasilian jungle, on the Sout African table mountain, in the midst of the Great Barrier Reef (greeting Nemo while eating fish fingers….!?), on the  Rocky Mountains or in London, Paris, New York or Moscow. With the Earth Table Stripe one has always the feeling to be on two places at a time. Here and at the place of your choice. Isn’t home where the heart is? Maybe you can also pick your tiny little hometown to be your table-to-be? Wouldn’t that be fun? (In my case that would be Nitscha-Feldgasse, Austria, if anyone out there is interested….)

Share on Facebook