Design your own hat with an on-line design tool and choose your own knitting granny on Goldenhook. This concept is not (really) about design-your-own or about Mass Customization. It’s much more about the story behind the products – and probably even more important – about the story behind the knitting grannies.

Is personal fabrication from now on more about getting things made by the person we like and not so much about getting the things made exactly like we want them? Both sides are important I think. The functionality of physical goods could be perfect, if a machine produces all the things exactly like we need them. But at the same time it could be a boring world. Without carrying stories or personality, things aren’t really interesting for human beings.

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The way I got started with creative coding was by experimenting with the pixel as a material. Going down to the level of the pixel was made easy in Processing requiring only one line of code to set the colour of a pixel.

set(10,10,color(255, 100, 0));

This simplicity helped us on the way to the creative coding movement we are seeing now. Starting with a complex idea and trying to code it is a difficult was to learn programming. I would advise anyone looking to getting into creative code to start experimenting with the properties of pixels.

Below you can see the result of drawing lines without antialiasing.

Get to know the material.

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Ever dreamed about a slightly (or even completely) different body?  Do you want a new liver or do you need to substitute some inter-vertebral disks? Why don’t you start with – let’s say an ear. Can you imagine a plastic surgeon, using a Fluid Forms Online-Design-Tool redefining the contours of your ear, getting rapid prototyped afterwards with a 3D-tissue-printer. Or even order not just the clothes, but the body parts on myvirtualmodel. You think you can get the body of your dreams with genetic manipulation too? How about transferring the information about your (second or third) physical body to another galaxy to print it out over there? I heard rumours saying that beaming can be quite dangerous.

Yeah, I know – that’s all Sci-Fi and scary too (at the moment). Anyway, 3D-tissue printing is a fascinating technology, with many possible applications within medicine, not just plastic surgery. However, it will definitely take a few more decades and at least $1billion until we’ll get some functioning human organs.

via rapidtoday

see also envisionTEC

3D tissue printing of an human ear

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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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This weekend Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, celebrates the opening of Linz09 – European Capital of Culture. In the course of the preparations the famous Ars Electronica Center, home of the Ars Electronica – Festival for Art, Technology and Society, was closed for structural alteration works. Now the center has opened its doors to public again.  The new one-of-a-kind facility shows a fine collection of some of the world’s most exciting media art projects.

And guess what: Fluid Forms is part of the exhibition! Cassius, the custom lampshade you design yourself by giving blows to a punching bag, is one of the center pieces of the so called Fab Lab. The Fab Lab is a kind of laboratory for Rapid Prototyping technologies showing the arts and crafts of tomorrow. During 2009 a series of workshops will be hosted there to which we will contribute our knowledge and ideas together with other awesome projects like the ones from nervous system, Fab @ Home or Bathsheba Sculpture LLC.

We are excited to be part of Fab Lab and looking forward to pushing limits in fabbing!

Some impressions from the opening day:

Cassius, 5 minutes before press people were showing up

Design meets Robotics

Crowds at the opening ceremony of the Ars Electronica Center

Cassius facing martial arts moves – to fast for the camera

more impressions from the opening of the Ars Electronica Center.

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Adam Frank, an artist and product inventor, recently published LUMEN bloom, an oil light shadow projector. On his webpage he announces that bloom is the first object of a whole series of shadow projectors based on the popular etching technology. We are really looking forward to what’s coming next…

via MoCo Loco

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My lovely girlfriend Andrea and I are really excited because our first son Moritz joined us recently on earth. The first two week weren’t really easy, especially because of the lack of sleep. Meanwhile everything is fine again and I can get back to work at FLUID FORMS in a normal manner more or less. The growth of this little new life is such a wonder - for me the ultimate way of generative production.

Many thanks to the Josefidoods for the great survival gift!

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The concepts of co-creation, user/desktop manufacturing and fabbing are buzzing around massively (not only on the Internet) these days. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of praise to find in the articles, blog entries, interviews and comments on these issues. We thought it’s time to put together some positive as well as negative ideas, forecasts and visions about the future of the emerging business we are a very part of:

Co-Creation
A blog post treating the buzzword co-creation. What does it mean?
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In Crimes to Come
Interesting article written by Dr. Tom Easton  covering some negative impacts (illegal products, intellectual property and fraud) fabbing and similar technologies could have on society and economy.
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The Design Implications of Mass Customization
An article written by Tim Clayton covering the history and future of mass customization, who coined the term mass customization, different implications of mass customization (post-production-customization, adaptive customization etc), co-design, change in relationship between production and consumption and the emergence of the prosumer (already some years old, but still compelling).
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MoMoment: MoMo #4 – Joseph Pine II
A Video of a presentation held by well known author Joseph Pine II (1993 he published the award winning book: Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition) about customer experience, the experience economy and what customers really want ( summed up in his latest book: Authenticity).
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Stan Davis: The Future of Mass Customization
A short video interview with Stan Davis, the inventor of the term ‘Mass Customization’, talking about the future of mass customization.
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Configurator Database
Beside Stan Davis’ interview,  more video interviews with Frank Piller (MIT), Joseph Pine (see above), Ryan Chin (MIT), Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt), Christopher Colosi (SecondLife) and others can be found on Configurator Database. 
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Why 21st Century Manufacturers Can’t Ignore Mass Customization 
An essay from David J. Gardner. He contrasts mass production with mass customization and describes the transition from mass production to mass customization.
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Matt Sinclair: The Limits of Consumer Co-Design
Matt Sinclair, researching for his PhD in the UK, discusses the limits of consumer co-design.
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Trend Map 2008
Shows a  detailed trend map for 2008 (with the principle of subway/underground maps) including 3d-print on one bough.
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Detlef Schoder on the future of the newspaper, personalized printing, and how we can get our daily blog feed into the morning paper
Professor Detlef Schoder (well known researcher on mass customization and the idea of mass customized newspapers) interviewed by Frank Piller on the future of personalized newspaper.
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Marke Eigenbau. Der Aufstand der Massen gegen die Massenproduktion
A new book showcasing the rise of the economy of individual initiatives using a lot of national (German) and international examples.
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Gutenberg and the Democratization of 3D-Printing-Technology
Some thoughts on the impact of 3D-printing-technology I posted back in August.

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The other day I read at Desktop Engineering Online that the Museum of Modern Art in New York City recently acquired four abstract artworks that were produced on a 3D printer. So this groundbreaking production method seems to be taking over museums as well!

When rummaging around the internet I found another fascinating design piece, which has been added to the MOMA‘s permanent collection: the One-Shot.MGX stool. This hip expanding chair was designed by the Parisian designer Patrick Jouin for Belgian Materialise and was featured at the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

Consisting of a single, non-assembled unit, the stool can be untwisted into its functional form by pushing lightly down the center handle.

Good news for anybody who wants to turn their living room into a museum: the stool is also for sale! Too bad my own monthly budget is already exhausted….

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Could the democratization of 3-D printing technology be for prosumerism what the Gutenberg press was for literacy?

asks Brittaney Creamer on the wikinomics blog.

I think ‘YES BUT’ would be a good answer.

3-D printing technology is one niche of ‘User Manufacturing’. There is other computer controlled producing technology around having disruptive impact on traditional production methods (Gutenberg’s press was also only one possibility in the 15th century).

Production technology alone makes nobody happy. I don’t have a clue how to control such machines. Do you?  What makes me really happy and seems to be the real revolution is the merger of technology and services.

Having control over complex machines and production processes by easy-to-use software is cool. Getting not only control over production but as well distribution and marketing is wicked. The Long Tail (initially only applicable for digital goods like music) gets its real, three-dimensional shape now. Soon everybody will be able to produce and market individual, real objects.

Like Gutenberg (and others) sow the seeds for the democratization of knowledge industrial production is on its way too.

How long will it take us? I am not sure, but Gartner, a leading IT research firm gives an assumption.

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