Now that the dust has settled from Lendwerbel, here are some impressions of our public breakfast, “Permalend Breakfast”. Permalend Breakfast is an event, part of Lendwirbel, in which people grab some tables and chairs and enjoy breakfast in a public space. We chose “The Square With No Name” opposite the Fluid Forms studio. Dining with Hannes and I were Christoph Steinbauer, Kristof and the Mail Man.

The charmingly weird Karin of Lupi Spuma poped by to have her photo taken with the work of one of her favorite graffiti artist.

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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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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

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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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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!

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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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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!

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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

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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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