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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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milkorsugar, a platform that showcases everything you can customize and order online, has recently opened its doors. The Dutch website calls itself the web’s first Customization Portal which is in my opinion not to 100 % true. Just visit egoo.de to see what I mean. But anyway…

What I really like on milkorsugar is the short key fact description (i.e. delivery, price range) of each reviewed customization offer. And not to forget the obligatory community-product-rating.

I can’t wait to see the next features in action they announce on their website : comparison of products, visual shopping and pic upload of things customized by consumers.

My finding on milkorsugar today: Viesso – Online Furniture Configuration

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

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

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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:
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DESIGN-PIRACY!

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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).

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What is this design-piracy all about?

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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!

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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)

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WILL YOU BE ON BOARD?

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pic by Wikipedia

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That’s new: Get your precious leather bags custom designed! A groundbreaking idea by German “Tanner + Tailor“. (Nomen est omen…) And the very best thing about it: The customers have the choice whether they want their new bag, laptop-bag or wallet rather in a classic or colourful and freaky design. However, still, leather has its price, hence don’t count on getting out of the deal under 100 Euros.

Nouveau chic: Finest leather in German top quality, and all that according to individual custom wishes and needs. Say bye bye to middlemen and distances, now that there’s online communication the dialogue between customer and provider gets more and more important. (Almost like in the old times when you went to your tailor and told him what bag you would like to have…). At Tanner + Tailer customer’s e-mails go straight through, directly in the heart of production. Hear ye! Well, well! Not half bad!

The principle does not vary very much from the systems of other mass customization companies. The customer chooses a type of bag, clicks on every components. Once she has chosen all types of leather she wants and the way she prefers the seam and the lining: voilá…the bag is finished. In almost no time the bag of her dreams will wait for her at her doorstep. I, for once, am a fan of fancy, individual bags as a current attendent. I can buy a perfectly normal bag pretty easy in a shop around the corner. But a customized bag of the brand “Katze” (yeah, you heard right…you can even add some golden or silver letters to your bag in order to BRAND it the way you prefer!)

P.S.: Dear Gentlemen. Dear Lords of Creation. If you managed to read until this point I really thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have earned a little hint: Buy such a bag! Buy a bag for your girlfriends, beloved, wives, daughters, grandmothers, cousins…trust me: they will be very grateful !

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Bye bye compromises! At least as far as the picking of the right (wedding-, engagement-) rings are concerned. Paragon Lake with its virtual display case has something in store for every budget, every taste and every occasion. They clearly want to disburden world’s male population of their hardest decision. „Every man in possession of a good fortune“ (thank you, Jane Austen) should now not only be in want of a wife but also be able to buy the proper ring for his beloved. (Designed by himself!)

Today, Paragon Lake’s customers consist of both, jewelers and private, individual customers. Only three years ago, in 2006, the founding fathers of Paragon Lake, Matt Lauzon and Jason Ruben were still students, when they explored personalization and other new ways that people shop and realized there was an opportunity to drastically improve the way fine jewelry is bought and sold. They were excited about this idea. (BTW: Who is not excited: Online you can bake your own bread, cook jam, design jewelry and box lampshades. Fantastic!) Their vision was to conquer the world with their jewelry. And truly: Today, three years later, Paragon Lake is a successful enterprise.

And how does the whole thing work? To ask your graceful beloved to be your bewedded wife you need 1 portion of bravery (essential), 1 string-quartet (optional) and 1 ring (the most important thing in the whole operation). How bad would it be, if the ring wasn’t meeting the high expectations of your lady-lover? In this case Paragon Lake has the solution prepared and is eager to help you. You can choose the ring you like and later change the details you want to. Colours, stones, gold, silver, bronze. Do it yourself! I promise- when you follow this instructions your next engagement will be a success!

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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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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 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

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

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