Nuvist's blobjects

Nuvist is a young architecture and design agency from Turkey that has been outputting some refreshing design work lately. They are clearly very much driven by their organic and dynamic design language, and are evolving well in mastering this language. I think it can all become a bit more refined and unique, but perhaps they are well on their way competing with other players such as Lovegrove, Karim and Zaha.

3D Printed lamp turns your room into a forest

The Danish duo HildenDiaz have created a very intricate and arguably beautiful structure for a 3D printed lampshade. Besides being an amazing work of digital craftsmanship, it's an interesting design because the shapes generate an immersive projection on the surrounding walls, making you feel as if you're in the middle of some dense forest. The lamp is not on sale yet, but the makers are currently trying to raise some crowdfunding.

3D Printing Wizardry

3D printing, 3D printing, 3D printing. It seems to be the magic word of the year, as it pops up more and more regularly in the tech, investment, and general news blogs. 3D printing startups are coming up like wild mushrooms too - I have joined the party as well.

3D printing is currently at the top of the so-called 'hype-cycle' and will soon reach the 'Trough of Disillusionment' where it is no longer used because it is cool, but the technology will truly have to prove itself in the real world. I am not talking about the professional market, as 3D printing has already proven itself to be an excellent method for early prototyping over the last 20 years. I am talking about 3D printed products that will have to enter and survive in the real world of consumers.

For this to happen, 3D printed items will need to beat products manufactured through other processes mainly in terms of the following factors:

1. Subjective appeal: aesthetics, carrying out a personal identity

2. Functional performance

3. Profitability

The most interesting application areas that have a chance are in my view the following:

• Toys. Subjective appeal is enormous since toys can be customized or designed by the end user himself. Also, toys can be easily expanded upon through the creation of all kinds of accessories. In a few years there will probably be an affordable and safe 3d printable material that comes close to the mechanical and aesthetic qualities of injection molded plastic, better than the currentday sintered powders or extruded filaments. Especially toys that have multiple moving components but do not require tight tolerances are interesting candidates for 3D printing, since it can integrate multiple components and in the future also multiple materials in a single print, which removes the assembly line. So also concerning functionality 3D printing could meet the standards. In terms of profitability, 3D printing is better suited for small objects that require less material and machine time. But it will still be a quite expensive technique for several years to come and therefore most interesting for items that already have a high price. The action figure industry is one likely to be taken over by 3D printing.
• Jewelry. For jewelry, 3D printing meets all three factors, as long as they are items without moving mechanisms. It will soon be possible to print all kinds of precious metals in all kinds of beautifully complex shapes, for a competitive price.

• Formfitting wearables. Unique benefits of 3D printing are that it can be produced on demand, and there is hardly any restriction in terms of geometry. An already successful example is hearing aids, of which thousands have been produced through 3D printing. Another example is high-performance shoes for athletes or people with disabilities, who can have their feet scanned and then have a shoe created to exactly fit them. Jake Evill recently introduced a concept for a lightweight and beautiful 3D printed arm cast, which would replace the old-fashioned and clunky plaster-based ones. This concept is too expensive to put into practice by hospitals, but could be done if patients are interested to pay, say $100 extra for a special and more breathable cast. Maybe then, friends and family could 'rent' a piece of the casting and make their own piece to fit into it with their own printer, with a name or message.

• Gift items. 3d Printing offers the unique feature of being able to personalize a gift item through 3d form, rather than 2D techniques such as engraving and cutting. The price of most of these items could be competitive if they are relatively small, and smartly designed to save material. Examples are figurines of people or pets with their name on it, 3d printed chocolates, and ceramic items such as mugs.

   

• Exclusive 'collector item' designs. There will always be a market for luxury, avant-garde items, where people pay $5000 for an exclusive 3d printed vase, table, or shoe. Designers following organic design philosophies can shine here, such as seen in the works of Freedom of Creation and Nervous System. In the fashion world Iris van Herpen is the straddling towards fully 3D printed clothing, and in the world of musicians there is Olaf Diegel who seems to be doing good business creating unique 3D printed guitar casings.

• Architecture. I very much believe in the idea of 3D printed dwellings such as put forward by prof. Behrokh Khoshnevis. They can be created in only a few days, and easily customized according to the wishes of the prospective owner.
  

  

• Electronics casings. As a product designer it is sort of a dream of mine that the evolution of products continues to follow biological evolution. As such, our current-day mostly crustacean-like objects with outer shells acting like exoskeletons will be supplemented by more intelligent and versatile objects that have internal skeletons and a sensitive, adaptive and interactive skin. 3D printing may play a part in that because it allows for lots of small interconnected parts, instead of one single shell. Before that happens though, casings will become adaptable in terms of ergonomic shape and decorative elements. It may only be profitable for smaller handheld devices such as shavers, electric toothbrushes and tablets.

• Spare parts. As 3D modeling is becoming a more and more ubiquitous skill and 12-year olds are already doing it (I started at 16), average consumers will start to recreate all kinds of items around them that may at some point need replacing, and are hard to come by. Of course intellectual property issues will create some resistance, but I think that in the end we will just end up with an enormous database of all kinds of 3D printable spare parts.

These are all exciting developments and show the potential scope of 3D printed applications. Even more exciting is that if we apply ideas from media theory to 3D printing, it may be likely that manufacturing based on 3D printing will be so different from current-day, mostly linear, production techniques, that it will radically change our technological lifeworld in a way almost impossible to predict. Where now we look at the technology and imagine objects we know to be constructed in that fashion, as I basically have done with this text, completely new types of objects and systems may arise that we could hardly have predicted beforehand. We can only keep our eyes and minds open so that ideas can come to us, and the developments accelerate.

And a final side note: 3d printing as an idea was not completely invented by Chuck Hull in the mid 1980's; also here science fiction was first! In a 1964 Superman comic, the hero creates 3D busts from 2D photographs as gift items for his friends:

Bomi Park's ethereal furniture

 Bomi Park is a designer from South Korea and has presented a series of furniture called 'Afterimage'. As objects, the pieces are made out of steel wire, but what really 'makes' the objects is the negative space in between the solid material. I think the designer has succeeded in showing how something material can be turned into something with immaterial qualities, and there it lines up well with some of Philippe Starck's (for example the Louis Ghost chair) and Tokujin Yoshioka's work.

Living flower pot

The 'Feedme' flower pot by Svetlana Mikhailova seems to be a living organism itself, in a symbiotic relationship with the plant it contains. It is made of a hydrogel, which allows it to change shape by absorbing water. The pot will be smooth when the soil is dry, and get spikier the more water you add to it. The pot can also retain water for a longer time than a conventional flower pot, so the material has not only an aesthetic and informative function, but also a direct physical function in that you don't have to water it very often.

The Spirit of Dutch Design

Here are some highlights from the always delighting Dutch Design Week for this year.

Many projects revolved around 'green' design thinking, and in general you could see a development towards introducing natural elements into our living spaces.



Philips Design took this philosophy to the next level in their new future probe 'The Microbial Home'. This home would minimize energy usage through biological processes. In their vision, methane gas can be gathered from human and vegetable waste, and biogas can be produced from other organic substances. Food should be kept alive and fresh inside the home by having it grow around structures attached to furniture. Bioluminescent bacteria provide moodlight, and waste is converted into edible mushrooms through special fungi that can digest plastics. Philips' proposal makes the living room look a bit like a science lab, but I think it's a good start towards true green living, on the physical plane.



The highlight of this design probe on an aesthetic level may well be the Urban beehive. It is basically a honey vending machine that incorporates the actual living bees. The bees enter the hive at one side of the device, and out comes the honey on the other side. Behind a transparent shell are several softly illuminated disks that the bees can use to build their hive, while being watched in admiration by their human customers.



Jeanine Kierkels, a master student Industrial Design at the university of Eindhoven, has taken the soothing aesthetics of natural growth and implemented this in a very specific human context: giving birth. She envisions an animation of a tree branch on the wall of the room where somebody would be giving birth. This animation is coupled to the occurance and length in time of each contraction, which makes the process interactive and personalized. In the end, the tree branch beautifully visualizes the event as a story to take home.



Another student created this lovely and intriguing accessoire. Embedded into it is a system that senses its wearer's physiological arousal. This value is then translated into the movement of scales on the sleeve, more or less like enhanced goosebumps. By externalizing our underlying physiology this way, then, people are invited to connect to each other on a deeper and more intimate level.




Floris Wubben directly translates the aesthetics of natural form into his designs by blending state-of-the-art technology with natural elements. This gives his products a very alive character.



We see a playful wink towards unification with nature in the work 'Digital Portraits.' One item is a shirt that incorporates the head of a wolf into the three-dimensional structure of its fabric.





Some interesting new ideas have also sparked up at the Design Academy. Within the theme of finding new ways to mass-manufacture objects, one student had an intriguing idea to blend human craftsmanship with the crude approach of the machine. He envisioned the human craftsman as being directly guided by a machine, for example through tools that are attached to robotic arms. This would enormously speed up manual work, while retaining a unique human touch. This may be a pioneering project into a future of cyborg production processes.



The supreme highlight of the Dutch design week is an art installation that is genius in its technical simplicity, and stunning in effect. It completely transcends the paradigm of our existence and our technology as material, it has the potential to bring about a peak experience that brings us beyond a perspectival existence of having one point of view, and approaches a unification with the cosmos (yes!). It is called Plane Scape, and is installed in the 5MM (five minutes museum). Watch the video here or go experience the installation yourself. And stay more than five minutes to let it work its way into your system and open your doors of perception.

Scripted products by Lionel Dean

Of course it's nothing new that rapid prototyping techniques are giving rise to wildly innovative three-dimensional shapes. It's also nothing new that these techniques are still quite slow and very expensive, so still not interesting enough for design for the masses. It is still interesting though to see what kind of form repertoires different designers are coming up with, within this radically enlarged scope of potential. Some designers keep it minimal and functionalistic, some try to create more elegant, abstract versions of nature, some develop a more edgy and sharp style, and others go a bit more extreme and create very organic, chaotic and often alien-looking shapes.

Lionel Dean, founder of the company FutureFactories, belongs to the latter category. He develops objects that seem to be taken directly out of the jungle of Pandora, that extraterrestrial realm in Avatar. His work is closer to bio-fantasy than biomimicry, as he seems to emphasize artistic freedom more so than functional constriction. A quite innovative aspect of his products is that he uses scripting to generate the forms, while only providing a fixed 'meta-design' to the computer. The designer here, as a blend of man and machine, creates completely unique products.

Organic aesthetics of movement

Yury Dovganyuk calls himself a 'motion designer', and part of his work is to capture organic, beautiful movements into either static or dynamic products. I wanted to briefly share his original and experimental work with you.

The image you see on top is a concept for a cup that seems like it's about to do a pirouette. Maybe it will soon be possible to produce this one in ceramic through a rapid manufacturing technique.

The following is a table concept that is organic in a way that makes the object seem interesting from all angles and elicit a great spatial experience.





My personal favorite in terms of aesthetics is a clock concept that augments the kinetics of the clock hands through rods that slide in and out of the clock and follow the hands. Moving all the rods with individual motors would make this an utterly expensive and energy consuming product. I wonder if it can work through powerful magnets integrated into a ring around the clock, and an ingenious way to reduce friction and sounds. Maybe Yuri can take this one a little further, and have a clock manufacturer pick it up. Watch the clock in action in the movie below.

A sofa that follows your body

Swiss designer Alexander Rehn has created the 'Cay Sofa', a piece of furniture that is definitely iconic for an age of increasing unpredictability and complexity. This sofa invites us to relax our bodies but remain in a state of active exploration and body awareness. It gets us out of our minds and into the world. It also gets us out of habitually taking on certain poses when we use furniture items, but instead has us open up and see what happens, while we enjoy the sensations of the current moment.

It's not perfect yet, but it's definitely a step towards a more free, open, and dynamic world of technology. Watch the video for a better impression:

Algorithms create complex columns

It looks as if these structures have been grown, not by humans, not even by nature, but by some entirely new kind of intelligence. However mostly ornamentation, it is clear that it is not just that but also a look into a future where the still quite crude mass-production methods of today will be replaced by machine processes that can produce almost infinitely complex and individualized pieces. The ancient-Greek-degrading creations you see here have been generated through computer algorithms and have been created out of thousands of laser-cut cardboard sheets.

From a purely visual point of view, the complexity in these columns remains so consistent and coherent that there seems to be an infinite variety while all parts within this variety are exactly in the right place. The form must be so fascinating because to really grasp it we have to manage to get into a state of pure perception, where the mind does not conceptualize forms as individual things located in space. The columns here can almost serve a psychedelic function by connecting us so viscerally that we can step beyond mind-processes. I await the day where, next to our microwave, we will all have our home-based fabbing station, and we start replacing today's sense-skipping objects by things like Hansmeyer's columns.

Cellular chair

(If I were a mouse, I would definitely make this into my mansion.)

Mathias Bengtsson had the idea of creating a chair based on the cellular structure of bone tissue. The result of his intensive work is the 'Cellular chair' that not only is very funky in appearance, but also interesting from a technical point of view. For each chair produced, the internal structure is devised by a piece of medical software that is usually used to simulate the regeneration of bone tissue.

This work definitely pertains to the 'trend' of creating products based on biological structures, as for example seen before in the 'bone chair' by Joris Laarman. I have termed this movement 'biological modernism' earlier, because 'good design' here seems to rely upon how well the product is in line with how biological processes would have created the product. For a product of today, the cellular chair is a beautiful example of what can emerge from this kind of thinking.
It is interesting that in this work we see that in the details, or just by not exactly following biological thinking, the designer has room to still give a product a certain appearance. Where many of these bio-inspired product look very futuristic, sleek, and a bit unapproachable, this chair has a funky social quality to it.

A next step would be to create a chair that dynamically adapts its structure according to the forces that it is subjected to. Biological structures such as bones and wood do this too in order to spend the least amount of energy and material on creating a good structure. A chair that does that too could for example have a base structure with extra reinforcement material that can flow along the underlying structure and solidify at the place where it is needed.

Avant-garde car concepts for Opel Vauxhall

Opel has recently launched a competition in order to explore a design strategy based on the idea of the car becoming a lounge. Keeping in mind the slogan ´Sculptural artistry meets German precision´, design students from all over the world set off to the forefront of automotive design to create their dream car. The results are fascinatingly diverse, in some cases radically advanced in terms of technology, in other cases in terms of form language.

Here are some of the top entries.



Victor Uribe envisioned a car that goes wild on technology integration, while still creating an integral design that fits the idea of a car as a lounge space perfectly. The car consists of a flowing form that floats above its spherical wheels using magnetic levitation technology. Next to that it has all kinds of intelligent features such as sensors, projectors, even a Kinect driving interaction possibility, that sometimes feel a little superfluous, and in some cases plain dangerous. Perhaps the strongest feature of this design is the interior that allows one person to be a seated driver, while two passengers can lay down flat on intelligent, shape-changing lounge surfaces.



Javier Albizu entered the contest with a concept that is based on a deformable exterior. It can for example open and close the air intake on the front in order to either cool its electric motors, or improve its aerodynamic properties. The smooth hull of the car is made of a high-tech skin-like material that incorporates solar energy collectors, graphene to conduct electricity, and magnets to change its shape. The deformation that occurs is a stretching and contracting of the hull over its entire length, quite analogous to the car being one large muscle. This property changes the length of the car, and can be convenient in switching from a city-cruise to the hasty highway.



A girl named Lina takes on the challenge in a very different, very feminine way. She brings the fresh breeze that I feel is so needed in the still largely technology-oriented, male-dominated industrial design industry. Through intuitive and free-flowing sketches Lina has reached a very promising start for a car of the future. Her aesthetics clearly have evolved through her process, which she has suffused with peace, calmth, and feeling. And the final result is very powerful in subconsciously putting us in a similar state of mind.



Pierin Giacomo might have created the most holistic design of the competition in terms of experience and look and feel of both exterior and interior. Stepping into his bio-inspired car must feel like becoming absorbed by a flower. I can see this having a very soothing effect on people.



A last concept to mention is 'Opel Dynamis' by Acatrinei Lucian Nicolae. This very radically futuristic vehicle has some interesting innovations, such as electroactive polymers to adjust seats, 'Buckypaper' as structural reinforcement in the hull, and a flexible LCD display that serves as a dashboard.

Iris van Herpen's new fashion: more beautiful, better, and uncut

Maybe somewhat in line with the notion of the design paradigm of 'biological modernism', take a look at Iris van Herpen's new creations. We know her from the intricate 3D printed garments she showed up with last year, but the new ones really 'nail' the design language, and give almost a spiritual feel to these three-dimensional structures.