Industrial Design

[Lucia-]

Those salt and pepper shakers are really cute
I also love Tord Boontje's lamps. Midsummerlight and the Garland lamp - they're so beautiful.
And the ghost lamp is nice too

 

[.francesca]

Organic/industrial sculpture design

i'm not sure where this should go, so please move it if it seems in the wrong place!

my friend showed me this website tonight, and i'm totally blown away by how amazing this work is. it's sculpture made from plastics, resins, polyesters and metals. it's organic and natural and amazing. i'll let the artist speak for herself:

As a sculptor, my work has centered on exploring the juncture between art and science: a place where the imagined meets the real - or the conscious meets the subconscious. I am particularly interested in creating imaginary hybrids - ambiguous new versions or mutations of the "natural" that are both unpredictable and unsettling. This ambiguity of form, gives rise to conflicted feelings of curiosity and alarm by highlighting the duality of nature's allure and potential threat, and allows me to explore our inherent distrust of the unknown, our perceptions of mutability, and our perceived vulnerability in the face of genetic experimentation.
My most recent work has evolved through experiments with a thermoplastic product originally developed by the medical industry for orthopaedic applications. This material is light, strong, and versatile and allows me to work directly to hand-form multiple elements that combine to form large-scale installations. This series harnesses light and shadow to create dreamlike environments of other-worldly forms, while referencing deep-sea flora, microscopic cellular organisms, and the sustaining system of veins, nerves, vessels, and roots that support life. I am currently in the process of augmenting these environments by incorporating sprung steel wire to give added sculptural form and definition to each element. The latest addition to the Hanging Garden series - a floating carpet of hybrid forms that hang just above the viewer's head - aims to create a sensation of being submerged and elicit a physical and psychological response from the viewer.

from www.mariannelovink.com

 

[luxmode]

very beautiful, francesca i'd love to have the hanging garden series for my apartment...

 

[softgrey]

we need a section for 'art' and architecture and industrial design!!!...

nice stuff francesca...
thanks for sharing...

 

[Spacemiu]

Very nice

I've always thought we need a art section...

 

[travolta]

thanks for this thread!

I especially love this description

This series harnesses light and shadow to create dreamlike environments of other-worldly forms, while referencing deep-sea flora, microscopic cellular organisms, and the sustaining system of veins, nerves, vessels, and roots that support life.

have you checked out these guys before? it reminds me of them...

Leopold + Rudolf Blaschka

they produced beautifully detailed glass models of exotic plants and bizarre sea creatures for natural history museums and aquaria all over the world.

http://www.thefashionspot.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26244&page=3&highlight=favorite+sculptor


http://www.designmuseum.org/design/index.php?id=21


the description also reminds me of biomimicry : the science of studying nature and then imitating the mechanisms or the design to human problems.

http://www.biomimicry.net/intro.html


btw. you MUST read Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas. it is a incredibly poetic inspiring book. here is a the description on the back, just to win you over ...

elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, lewis thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependance of all things. extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wonderous world of hidden relaitonships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays topcis such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine.

also, i would suggest the book Design For the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change.

 

[softgrey]

i wanna go live under the sea...
so lovely...

 

[travolta]

i like these

 

[travolta]

more Leopold + Rudolf Blaschka

Leopold and Rudolf began the process of creating their replicas by making highly detailed drawings: many of which are now archived in the Rakow Library at the Corning Museum of Glass in the US. Their techniques and equipment were fairly basic. Each exquisitely intricate model was made by fusing or gluing clear and coloured pieces of glass using a combination of glass blowing and lamp working. Tentacles and gills were attatched on fine copper wires and, where necessary, paper and wax were used too.

The Blaschkas were equally meticulous in the way their approach to decoration. The translucence of jellyfish was replicated by using finely speckled layers of pigment usually on the underside of the glass. Thicker coats of paint, sometimes mixed with powdered glass, were used to depict thicker skin or textured surfaces. Although they both worked on every apsect of their replicas, Leopold tended to prefer working with the larger pieces of glass and to concentrate on assemby; while Rudolf enjoyed the fine details of intricate work and did more of the painting and decoration.

http://www.designmuseum.org/design/index.php?id=21

www.abdn.ac.uk/zoohons/ models/model11.shtml

www.pangalactictrading.com/ Jellyfish/index2.html

 

[travolta]

i think this also relates to designing w/ natural processes built in... very zen


Entropy, as anyone who read chapter seven of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time will know, is the scientific principle stating that all systems become increasingly chaotic with time. In other words, it describes nature’s abhorrence of uniformity.
In design, entropy can be used as an umbrella term to describe the increasing number of practitioners exploring ways of introducing chaos, decay and error into their work.

Swedish outfit Front allow hamsters to nibble their wallpaper and encourage boa constrictors to make indentations into their clay coat pegs. Joris Laarman is experimenting with moulds that quickly wear out, meaning the ceramic vases within them become increasingly degraded. Tom Dixon has produced coffee cups from natural fibre wear down with washing.

This trend can be seen as a deliberate reaction against the modernist pursuit of timelessness and perfection, and the absolute precision of digital design and mass production. Already, computer-based designers such as Future Factories are experimenting with digital entropy, developing algorithms that lead to a degree of unpredictability in the final (computer-manufactured) object.

http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/021/influential_5.htm


this is a dream thread. it allows me to 'nerd' it up

 

[travolta]

btw. i interpret organic as also including sustainable design

The Terra grass armchair by Nucleo, a cutting-edge design company out of Italy, is easily one of the most unusual seats you'll have in your entire house. Set up the cardboard pieces, fill with dirt and grass seeds, wait a couple weeks, and voila: furniture and landscaping all in one. It's a hot seller at hip furnishings store Fitzsu on Melrose Avenue, especially during warmer months when outdoor bashes are aplenty. $115, fitzsu.com

ron arad

'grown' in a tank by computer-controlled laser beams. The process, irreproducible by any other means, is invisible and gives the impression that the object is actually manifesting before one's eyes. The result is a series of objects (such as labyrinthine spiral vases and stalagmite-like bowls) so strange it seems to have fallen straight from Mars. Arad explains, "The more mathematical and scientific that object becomes, the more artificial it becomes–incredibly–the more organic it becomes."

http://www.sputnik-inc.com/press/surface01.html <--- super awesome website

 

[travolta]

LED lights ... based off leaves

The Economist has just published a story on biomimetics. I have waxed poetically for some time now on biomimicry, and it is always nice to have my views supported in non-treehugger circles. The article points out some excellent examples of how Biology has found elegant solutions to engineering problems. Like the sea sponge whose skeleton is made up of silica, and part of it is surprisingly similar to optical fibers.


tord boontje
http://www.tordboontje.com/inflorescence1.html

Inflorescence

Inflorescence is a project in progress. This is an experiment to see how the computer can be used to randomly draw flower patterns. These drawings can than be made physical by using other digital processes. For example with a computer controlled embroidery machine or digital printing or 3 dimensional by stereo lithography

 

[fourboltmain]

I dig this, it's almost like another art nouveau style. I think organic designs are missing from design today. Everything's so based off of ergodynamics, and it looks stale. Keep it up peeps!

 

[travolta]

hey, fourboltmain, nice to see ya up at this hour. i think the blob soft ergonomic design became stale a little more than a couple years ago. ever since then there has been an emphasis on sustainable design, and the aesthetic being inspired by nature. the good thing is it is here to stay, because ecological design is not a passing fad.

 

[travolta]

tord boontje's LED chandelier

http://www.mossonline.com/product-exec/product_id/39110/category_id/399

this is only tyvek, but this aesthetic is pretty popular now. it would be interesting if this incorporated LED lights...


fernando and humberto campana

this chair represents an organic aesthetic...these guys were a lot w/ acquiring felt/ wood materials and creating functional objects by a sort of recycling method. it could be viewed as a form of sustainable design.

 

[travolta]

again, this is a more craft aesthetic. i interpret it as organic looking : an aesthetic of natural disorder w/ the irregularities found in nature ... also it's really rad!

tord boontje <--- the man!

fabric flowers, organza, ribbons etc....

 

[luxmode]

^is that boontje? also, thanks for the detail pics of his LED chandelier...wow!

i like these

gorgeous

 

[travolta]

yep. you can find more awesome stuff at mossonline.com

 

[.francesca]

thanks so much travolta! i love the stuff you posted, and i love tord boontje's stuff...that flowery lamp is amazing. i really should have gotten one when i had the chance...

i'm really so taken with the organic-ness of this work...it's obviously made out of industrial materials, like plastics, metals..but i love how well it seems to flow in spite of that.

thanks everyone!

 

[Cypresses]

amazing student work

Contact: Kimiko Ryokai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, 617-354-7976, [email protected]

Credit: Kimiko Ryokai and Stefan Marti , Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The I/O Brush is a unique technology-based graphics tool that works like a digital eyedropper to allow people to take the color, texture and movement of any physical object and to immediately draw with that attribute. The I/O Brush looks like a simple wooden paintbrush but is actually imbedded with a small video camera that contains lights and touch sensors that translates an object into "ink" bringing users endless creativity. "Experimentation with embedded technology is not so experimental any more! Physical computing applications that can do things that were only imaginable in science fiction are now applications that truly enhance the user experience. Through those explorations in combinations of the programming and the physical design, new, more useful experiences are born. This computer interface (not a keyboard or even a mouse) combines the traditional materials of the artist with the latest image-grabbing technology, all rolled into a digital paint box-the sum is greater than the parts. The output allows everyone to "paint" with all kinds of images." -Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA, President, Springtime-USA

from idsa.org