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
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!
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!
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.
We are happy to announce the launch of the EARTH BROOCH SILVER, the first customizable silver jewelry in our Earth product family!
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Similar to our Earth Bowls, Tables and Lampshades you design your own silver brooch in three simple steps:
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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
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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!
Now you could easily go on your own personal trip around the world. And it is really easy: Just enter your favourite bar around the corner, where they recently got Earth Lamps by Fluid Forms installed. The old walls were spiced up with these 3D-printed lamps out of Polyamide. Now you can call your fav bar TRENDY! Because you can not only see Graz from bird perspective, but also New York, Sydney, Tokyo and Paris gloom from the walls.
Only a dream? No! The creative guys, who work at Fluid Forms made it possible: You can change every place on earth to be a gleaming polyamide lamp framed in brushed aluminium. The ways of designing are seemingly endless. On their do-it-yourself-homepage one chooses his/her favourite place on mother earth and the journey begins. Later, the prominent relief is 3D printed in polyamide, mounted on a brushed aluminium frame and equipped with an energy saving ring bulb. Now something very special is born: A unique lamp, which was designed by YOU!
Of course, such way-out lamps do not only look good on the walls of your favourite bar, also in your own private living room they make a reeeally good figure. They will be an eye-catcher and point of fascination at the same time, because not many people have seen such an extraordinary construction before. (Sad, isn’t it? It is such a beauty!) You can then switch your favourite place on or off whenever you want. (fun!) But: Does it really help against itchy feet, who want to go someplace other? That’s a different pair of shoes. What we can be sure about is, that the Earth Lamp is a milestone of Mass Customization. Thank you, Fluid Forms
For decoding a QR Code (What the heck is a QR Code?) you just need three things:
1. A Java enabled mobile phone with a reasonable camera
2. A QR Code (like the ones lasered in the QR Code Belt Buckle)
3. A QR Code reader software (Kaywa Reader, Quickmark QR Reader, i-nigma, Beetagg,
(find even more readers on mobile-barcodes.com)
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And how does it work? Watch the video to learn more:
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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.
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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 PillerGenerative Design Processes is about the modeling of initial conditions of an object (its “genetics”) instead of modeling the final form.
@eloisapaolaGenerative 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.
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Next time I’ll show you some awesome Generative Design & Art in action!
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….)
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