(Slide 1) | A Living Sculpture That Mimics Your Body Movements In Light. A choreographer, an interaction designer, and a composer walk into a bar … That’s the basic premise behind a series of collaborations commissioned by Made, an interdisciplinary workspace and gallery in Berlin. Made is in the business of bringing together brilliant people from wildly disparate professions to create art. When I visited Made last year, a robotics engineer and a violinist had just finished building a robot that sculpted wax vases based on sound waves; in 2010 Made invited Talib Kweli to narrate a "typographic ballet.
" Fast forward to 6:42 to see the installation at work. On a cool evening last week, Berliners gathered in Made’s Alexanderplatz headquarters to watch the premiere of their latest commission, a “living sculpture” called Future Self by choreographer Wayne McGregor, media art collective rAndom International, and award-winning composer Max Richter. “A piece like this is like doing an experiment at school, you know?” (Slide 7) | Astonishing Tribal Portraiture, Taken Using Western Eyes. Namsa Leuba is a young photographer who grew up in Switzerland with a European father and a Guinean mother.
As a student, she studied the rituals and cosmology of her mother’s native country, and received a grant to visit Guinea-Conakry in her final year at the University of Art and Design Lausanne. In early 2011, Leuba spent three months living and working in a village that had been founded by her great-grandfather. Ya Kala Ben is the award-winning thesis Leuba shot during those months. Leuba says that her fieldwork was a chance for her to discover her origins, and she knew she wanted to explore the traditional spirituality of Guinean tribes. In Guinean cosmology, says Leuba, ritual statuettes are used symbolically to represent “modesty, luck, fecundity or a channel for exorcism.”
Working with members of her mother’s community, Leuba staged portraits where humans play the parts of the traditional statuettes. There’s (obviously) a complicated colonial subtext to Ya Kala Ben. (Slide 1) | An Artist All Grown Up Who Sticks To Paper, Glue, And Scissors. It’s a youngster’s rite of passage to awkwardly wield a pair of safety scissors, snip into a sheet of construction paper, swipe a glue stick across the scraps, and see the whole masterpiece stuck up on the fridge at home. Artist Michael Velliquette has taken the basic skill of cut-and-paste to a whole new level with his incredibly intricate paper sculptures.
Ripon College in Wisconsin hosted his most recent solo exhibition, which showcased a survey of his work over the past seven years. “The title of the show--One From Many From One--was about the expansion and contraction of an artist’s process, the evolution of a body of work over a lifetime,” he tells Co.Design. “It was a chance to see the various ways technical, formal, and conceptual threads have woven together during a period of intense personal and creative growth.” Purchase Velliquette’s monograph Lairs of the Unconscious here. Google's Photo Tours Suggest A Crowdsourced, 3-D World Map. Remember how ridiculous Google Street View was the first time you heard about it? One company--an Internet company no less! --was sending cars on every road in the U.S. (and then the world) to build a seamless map of images, a first-person view of what it would look like to be almost anywhere. Of course, there are places where cars can’t go, like into St.
Mark’s Basilica or through the Trevi Fountain. To provide views of these landmarks--what the company calls Photo Tours--Google has turned to crowdsourcing. They’re actually digging through public, geotagged photos on Panoramio and Picasa, snagging shots from various user perspectives and constructing spinning, morphing 3-D tours based upon the images. “We use state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to organize and position all the photos in 3-D. The result is the view of a place from the hive mind, a collective map created from our inner auteurs. On one hand, we could judge that human tendency as unoriginal. Except underwater. (Slide 1) | Meet Wendy, A Partyscape That Cleans The Air. When Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner got a phone call saying their design had won MoMA’s annual Young Architects Program (a competition to build an outdoor partyscape for its PS1 location in Queens), they had the same reaction almost every architect feels after winning a major competition: “Now how do we build it?”
Hollwich and Kushner, principals of New York architecture office HWKN, had proposed the most ambitious structure in the 13-year history of MoMA’s program. Their design called for a massive framework of scaffolding to support 1,555 square yards of a high-tech fabric coated in a chemical solution of Titania Nanoparticles, which neutralize airborne toxins. Their goal was to get as much of the pollution-scrubbing fabric onto the site as possible, so after a protracted research phase they settled on a surface-area-maximizing starburst shape. The arms of the structure would conceal fans, a DJ booth, and water cannons to cool the partiers in PS1’s courtyard. What The Red Baron Can Teach You About Hiring Creative Talent. During World War I, German fighter pilots found themselves heavily outnumbered above the skies of France and Flanders. So, in June 1917, their high command did something radical.
They combined several squadrons, each of which had planes of a distinctive color. They put them under the command of their most successful pilot, whose brightly colored plane had made him famous: Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. Von Richthofen was an unconventional officer. Scandalously for a German, he wasn’t interested in conformity. He was interested in effectiveness. Von Richtofen’s band of aces tore into the Allied air forces all that summer and into the beginning of the next year. Why we need more flying circuses and fewer squadrons. A couple of years ago, IBM did a survey of 1,500 top CEOs around the world. So now all over the world there are EVPs and SVPs trying to get their teams to think differently. For a start, they tend to recruit in their own likenesses. Of course, the world needs Squadrons. (Slide 1) | Explore The Galaxy Using The Actual "Minority Report" Interface. NASA’s Kepler mission is doing what we may one day call NASA’s most important project.
It’s searching for habitable planets--second Earths--that our grandchildren’s grandchildren may call home, or that could contain life as we know it. So far, NASA’s spotted about 2,300 of these exoplanets, including 48 that appear to be in a sweet spot distance away from the sun. So what do they look like? Two gurus--data artist Jer Thorp and John Underkoffler, the designer who created the interfaces in Minority Report--have produced a UI that lets you find out, using the pinch and zoom brilliance of Underkoffler’s most famous work.
The project began when Thorp discovered NASA’s first paper. “It was really fascinating, but I couldn’t make much sense of the charts and graphs that were in it, so I made the first visualization to answer some questions for myself: What do 1,300 planets look like? How do these planets compare to Earth and the other planets in our solar system?” (Slide 1) | Millennials Don't Think Like Their Parents. How Do You Design For Them? During this year’s Super Bowl, Chevy introduced their new Sonic by making it skydive, flip, and bungee jump to the theme of We Are Young. To say they were making a run at the youth market would be an understatement. But what is this new youth market, other than young?
You can call us hipsters. You can call us entitled. You can call us whiners or you can call us spoiled. You can call us millennials, too, but what’s that supposed to mean? Chevy just calls us people ages 16 to 30, and by that count, there are 80 million of us in the U.S. alone right now that represent $1 trillion in buying power. The Sonic Superbowl ad “As you imagine, that’s a pretty big age range,” admits John McFarland. “The components of being young are pretty timeless. The more you consider McFarland’s take on generational identity, the more his arguments begin to make sense. Chevy’s current youth strategy has been to release a line of more affordable cars that includes the Spark, Cruze, and Sonic. (Slide 1) | A Dynamic Data Viz Of Bike Use In A 24-Hour Period.
A Nightlight That Teaches Kids To Love Solar Power. Victor Vetterlein has always been interested in sustainability. The Philadelphia native is well known for his recyclable lighting, which ranges from biodegradable bamboo chandeliers to egg-crate office lamps. But when he became a father earlier this year, he found his perspective as a designer had changed. “I began to think about how design could be used to teach children,” says Vetterlein, who grew up in a family of engineers and designers. Remembering how his early exposure to their ideas had shaped his interest in architecture, he set out to design an everyday object that could engage kids with ideas about sustainability.
Vetterlein recently unveiled the finished product: Free Power, a lamp that’s a learning tool and light in one. Vetterlein, like any good teacher, knows that kids learn by doing. Exciting children about the conversion of solar radiation into electricity is no small feat. [Images courtesy of Victor Vetterlein; h/t Truvie] (Slide 1) | Artist Hacks 5 Life Support Machines, So They All Keep Each Other Alive. You’re looking at the ultimate human life-support system--a menu of contraptions needed to stay alive no matter how your body betrays you. Heart failing? You’re covered. Lost kidney function? Here’s a dialysis machine to the rescue.
There’s just one thing missing: a human. The Immortal, by Israeli-born designer Revital Cohen, is a collection of life-support machines rigged to keep each other, not a person, alive. Tubes and electric cords connect to create a closed loop through a heart-lung machine, a dialysis machine, an infant incubator, a mechanical ventilator, and an intraoperative cell salvage apparatus (a sort of washing machine for your blood). Constructing this 21st-century Frankenstein’s monster was no small challenge. Then she had to make all the disparate computers talk to each other. You can probably guess the message here. Now for the really important question: Is The Immortal, well, immortal? Read more about Cohen’s work here. [Images courtesy of Revital Cohen] (Slide 1) | OMG This Exists: Inhalable Alcohol Gives An Instant Buzz. Humans have been inventing weird (and often unsavory) ways to get themselves embarrassingly drunk for centuries. But the makers of Wahh, a new inhalable alcohol mist, say their product is designed to do just the opposite.
Wahh is the invention of David Edwards, the Harvard professor whose inhalable caffeine and smokable chocolate have appeared on this site before. Edwards’s line of “breathable food sprays” (yum!) Called Quantum Sensations includes Aeroshot, a vaporizing caffeine inhaler that received over $8.5 million in venture funding earlier this year. About $26 will buy you a Wahh canister, which contains around 25 “puffs” of vaporized alcohol. The science behind the vaporizer is pretty simple. “Everyone has an occasional need of light-headedness, distraction, and another place,” says Starck, but we tend to use alcohol as a “social placebo.” According to their website, Wahh will appear in design stores in the U.S. sometime this summer.
Infographic: Surprise! Congress Has Almost No Independent Thinkers. We paint a pretty broad brush with our politics. Party affiliations that are so important that they appear on every election ballot right next to someone’s name meaning that the party is, in essence, just as important as the person. But could this really be true?
Are all politicians such partisan sheep? In a word, yes, at least according to this enlightening data visualization by Adrien Friggeri, who analyzed the Senate roll call votes from the first congress to today. Using voting patterns coupled with a social cohesion algorithm he’d built, Friggeri was able to create a political timeline. Click to zoom. Well, they sort of weave into two distinct tapestries--one for Democrats and one for Republicans--a distinction that Friggeri’s algorithm created from voting history data alone. In the 110th Congress, a group of 11 Republicans broke from their party in protest of the Bush administration.
It’s no surprise that Miller would be a worrisome datapoint without context. Plinko Game Creates Poetry Using Tweets From Fox News And NYT. Ever since magnetic poetry permeated dorm room refrigerators everywhere, wordsmithing has never been the same. The once eloquent haiku had been deconstructed into mix and match sentiments for the half-sober. Why I don’t know how Blurry, fleeting, brusque, blue, sweet Life was love Red Bull Now a team of NYU masters students, Inessah Selditz and Deqing Sun, has taken the idea of insta-poetry to its next logical steps: media satire and game shows. Called Plinko Poetry--a nod to the famous Price Is Right game--users drop a plastic disc down rows of pegs, and as the disc bounces down its unpredictable path, the disc determines a random sampling of words pulled from the latest Fox and New York Times tweets. The idea makes you smile. But it’s also a cutting commentary on our media. (Slide 1) | Wait. Why Is Nike Making Clothes For An Artist Who Skewers Branding?
Two weeks ago, New Yorkers rushed to their office windows to watch the space shuttle fly by the city on its way to retirement. While we were reminiscing about NASA’s better days, artist Tom Sachs was planning a four-week mission to Mars. From a launchpad on the Upper East Side. Beginning tomorrow, Sachs will launch SPACE PROGRAM: Mars, a detailed recreation of a 30-day shuttle mission to explore the red planet.
Two astronauts, supported by a team of 13, will act out every aspect of the mission, from electronics to waste management, on the floor of the Park Avenue Armory (check out Sachs’ Tumblr for progress shots of bottles of pee and a skateboarder being pulled by their Mars Rover). To go with the demonstration, Sachs and Nike have launched a capsule collection of clothing built for space travel. So, how does a guy like Sachs, who has lampooned capitalism for decades, come to work with the corporate brand? SPACE PROGRAM: Mars opens to the public tomorrow.
Big Bloom, A Magnifying Vase That Supersizes Your Flowers. Ever wished you could see what the bee sees? That’s how Dutch company The Cottage Industry introduces its newest product, Big Bloom, a vase that uses a fresnel lens to magnify the intricate details of flowers. Fresnel lenses were invented by French physician Augustin-Jean Fresnel in the 18th century to help steer ships safely into harbor with brighter lighthouse lanterns. Today, the super-lightweight lenses are all around us, in traffic lights, televisions, magnifying lenses, and overhead projectors. Big Bloom’s designer, Charlie Guda, had “something a little less prosaic” than stoplights in mind when he started experimenting with fresnel lenses in his Nijmegen design studio last year. After trying out different ways to utilize a handheld version of the fresnel, Big Bloom was born. Guda calls the vase “an homage to Monsieur Fresnel,” who probably would have appreciated his no-nonsense, lightweight approach.
You can buy a Big Bloom online here. 11 Brainy Artworks That Toy With Typography And The Limits Of Language. Watch: Vibrating Suit Teaches Gymnasts About Perfect Body Posture. MIT Creates Amazing UI From Levitating Orbs. Researchers Glean Deep UI Lessons From A Haptic Steering Wheel. An Insider's View On Instagram's True Value To Facebook. Here's Some Finger Paintings Made By An Adult. Former D&D Gaming Guru Ditches Dice, And Creates Magic Wand With Bluetooth. (Slide 1) | An LED Lamp That Pops Up From A Single Circuit Board. Vimeo Co-founder Starts DIY.org, An Online, Social Scrapbook For Kids. Dieter Rams On Good Design As A Key Business Advantage. Infographic: North Carolina’s Gay Marriage Ban Seems Downright Predictable. (Slide 1) | SoundCloud's Founder Creates An Album From Church Noises. (Slide 1) | Watches Inspired By The Glamour Of Classic Cars.
Kickstarter Rescues Startups That VCs Won't Touch, But Here's What's Missing. Windows 8 Schools Google Chrome In Building A Great User Experience. One Simple Fact - Steve Jobs Vision Of The World. What OCD Looks Like: Micro-Collages Made From Thousands Of Paper Bits. The 3 White Lies Behind Instagram's Lightning Speed. A Facebook Designer Remakes The Web, Without All The Noisy Words. How Companies Like Amazon Use Big Data To Make You Love Them. Weird But Genius: Feel Me App Turns Texting Into Touching. (Slide 3) | Photographer Goes Searching For Ghosts, Finds Awesome Smoke Bombs Instead. Watch: 40 Years Of Pentagram Work In 3 Minutes. Audio-Powered City Map Enables Geolocated Eavesdropping. This Gizmo Lets You Draw A UI On Paper, Then Turns It Into A Touch Screen. (Slide 1) | iPad App Retells Frankenstein, And Hints At The Future Of E-Books.
Infographic: In 80 Years, We Lost 93% Of Variety In Our Food Seeds. (Slide 1) | Camper’s New Shoe Store Visualizes The Act Of Walking. Readlists.com Is Like Mixtapes For E-Reading. Infographic: Sweet Jesus, The Patent War Has Gotten Crazy. Yahoo Announces Axis, A New Visual Paradigm In Web Search UI.