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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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