Core77/BusinessWeek Design Firm Directory

BMW's Shape-Shifting Fabric Car

More on last week's Bimmer philo essay, Wired has a great article on BMW's GINA Light Visionary Model concept car. The body is made from a seamless polyurethane-coated Lycra fabric stretched over a moveable aluminum frame allowing the owner to change the car's shape. Purely conceptual, there is no intention of this technology ever going into production.

Chris Bangle, head of design for BMW, says GINA allowed his team to "challenge existing principles and conventional processes."
"It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production," company officials said in unveiling the car Tuesday. "Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions."

GINA (Geometry and functions In 'N' Adaptions) has been in development for six years, the working model is built on a Z8 chassis and has four panels which take about two hours to put on.

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New Gallery up at Core77: New York Design Week 2008

The pit-stop between Milan and Art Basel, New York Design Week 2008 (May 17-20) presented a hearty collection of the best the Design World has to offer.

>> view gallery

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MIT Digital Water Pavilion makes a splash in Spain

An MIT-designed building with walls made entirely of water was unveiled last Thursday at the opening of the Zaragoza World Expo in Spain.

The Digital Water Pavilion [...] is the first of its kind and illustrates the potential of digital architecture to create spaces that dynamically adjust to people and conditions.

"The design for the water pavilion grew out of a central challenge: How to make fluid, reconfigurable architecture?" said [Turin born] Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory. "Our building aims to stand as a possible answer to this endeavor."

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FLARE - Kinetic Ambient Reflection Membrane (Huh? Just watch the video!)

On interactive skins, Mr. Bangle might be pretty hot with the GINA concept (see earlier post) but Berlin's WHITEvoid people can be credited likewise for their latest facade system.

"FLARE is a modular system to create a dynamic hull for facades or any building or wall surface. Acting like a living skin, it allows a building to express, communicate and interact with its environment."

The system consists of a number of tilting metal flake bodies which reflect light and are act like pixels. Last month, the first prototype was presented at the NEXT art & technology exhibition in Arhus, Denmark. See FLARE (+ video) yourself!

thanks paula paula!

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Independence Day.jpg

Independence Day's money shot. The end of the world, or just the beginning?

Life and the Big Screen: Media, Design, and the Apocalypse, by William Bostwick

For weeks, Iron Man has had the design world convulsing with what can only be called a grand maul geek-out. The lead character, Tony Stark, represents the tech-happy dad in all of us. A billionaire industrialist/master engineer, he builds a powered exoskeleton and becomes the technologically advanced superhero and all-around bad-ass, Iron Man. The cars, the girls, the computers: he's like Inspector Gadget in a mid-life crisis.

But the future hasn't always been so pretty. Let's rewind, way back, to 1996, when high-tech gadgetry wasn't a blessing, but a curse, when the blue glow of Stark's mechanical heart heralded nothing less than the end of the world. I'm talking about Independence Day.

Here, Jeff Goldblum's computer scientist is a straight-up nerd and the world's armies use old-school Morse code to coordinate their attacks. The blue light that pours out of the alien spaceships is deadly and depressing, like the TV glow from suburban windows. Independence Day didn't come up with this idea—here's Jack Kerouac almost 50 years earlier describing the lone poet in a wasteland world: "I see him in future years stalking along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch." Will Smith's Capt. Steven Hiller sees that switch flipped on, full blast, and watches the White House go up in electric flames.

>> read on

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Bill Buxton is a Really Nice Guy.

And we're only mentioning the fact because many Core readers are aware of Bill's other qualities: smart, creative, experienced, and well-versed in the culture of effective innovation. Buxton impressed a hundred or so designers and marketers at the Portland World Trade Center last night with a 90 minute talk based on his latest book Sketching User Experiences, and managed to be engaging, witty, and really nice the whole time. Even after: post-talk pints at a brew pub around the corner found him enthusiastically discussing finer points with attendees for a good two hours after.

The talk, sponsored by local chapters of Siggraph, CHIFOO and ACM, essentially summarized his arguments from the book: that framing the question of what to design is as important as getting the design right; that "sketching," in its broadest sense, is crucial to this process; and that engendering a corporate culture that encourages these actions, and the acquisition of skills for creating and reading sketches is crucial, especially given the degree to which technology is affecting the lives of average citizens who aren't interested in becoming technologists.

It'd be too much to re-hash the entire presentation -- that's what the book is for, and it's an excellent read -- but here are a few choice quotes:

"Early in computing, technological problems predominated, and were solved by technologists. In the beginning, the users were the designers. The architecture of computing is essentially unchanged since the days they were refrigerator-sized. What's changed is, these technologies are affecting all of our lives."

On the growing attention the business world is giving to "design thinking": "There was even an article on it in this month's Harvard Business Review. I read it...and...didn't recognize much of anything in it."

On the need for sketches and concepts to be plentiful and disposable: "Hardly any of your ideas are going to end up in the product. If it's a good product."

On multi-disciplinary design teams: "The age of the Renaissance individual is long over, but not of the Renaissance team."

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One Cubic Meter of Storage by Arik Levy

Arik Levy's got a thing for cubes. First it was Baccarat, now it's Miami. The Rove Gallery presented Levy's Cubic Meter storage system at Design Miami show in Basel this year. A seven-in-one module, the system can be configured to create endless amounts of storage solutions. An edition of 5 Aluminum Cubes are available to the first lucky billionaires who can afford 'em. For the rest of us, there's also clear oak wood and blackened oak wood (each editions of 12).
Catch 'em while you can.

via dezeen

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Fractal Table

The Fractal Table debuted at the Materialise.MGX exhibition at Zona Tortona in Milan earlier this year. Developed by Platform Wertel Oberfell together with Matthias Bär, the table can only be produced with rapid prototyping to make the treelike stems that grow into smaller branches until they get very dense at the top. While it may not be the easiest table for cleaning food off after a Euro Cup session, it is an interesting exploration of rapid prototyping and it's limits.

via mocoloco

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DIY Vinyl Toy Speakers

Checkout instructables guide to customizing Kid Robot's Munny doll into a sweet pair of speakers. According to creator fungus amungus who posted the hack, the dolls didn't require any extra weight in the bottom to keep them balanced. We'd love to up-the-anti and see one with a subwoofer.

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Nike Mercurial Vapor SL

Nike have released the first soccer boot with a molded carbon fiber upper, seven layers of carbon composite material are interwoven with TPU and polyurethane. It took three years to develop this version of the Vapor, the new upper design eliminates the lasting board putting the foot closer to the ground for better performance.

via uncrate

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Product Designers Market, London

The Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London is packed with Graduate Art and Design Summer shows. We caught glimpses from cor-e-spondant Victoria Kirk who was on-hand to grab some snaps. Looks like, beyond the plethora of over-designed chaises, the Product Designers Market, produced by Middlesex University students, stole the show. Featuring work like Adam Amos' knock-down furniture (that's right, he uses magnets instead of blots n' screws!), the market was a welcome combination of smart engineering and flawless design. Check out more here.

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Postcards from Brazil: Nódesign

Taking out a Gold award for their Maxdoor at IDEA/Brasil, Nódesign are one of the freshest agencies to emerge from Brazil in recent years. Commissioned to reinvent the 'door' for a luxury loft development, the interactive solution combines a number of playful and practical features including, video capabilities, a touch-sensor lock eliminating the need for keys, built-in secure mailbox and the red dots are actually configured to display a life size apartment number.

We've seen some exciting motion graphics come out of Brazil in the last 2 years, and Industrial Designer's should take note of Nódesign's video above to showcase their project. If you can ride out the loading time on their flash-intensive website, it's worth downloading the PDF case-studies which are a great example of graphic rich presentations that tell the back story behind their work.

Founded in 2001, Nódesign are based in São Paulo where they specialize in consumer products, furniture, packaging, design research and user interface design.

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Power walking

This just in from the Times UK: British engineers have built a generator powered by footsteps. Bury the contraption under the floor of a building and it turns tiny pressure changes into usable energy (this guy's good for a couple of watts). They say the crowds in the London Underground's Victoria Station alone could power 6,500 light bulbs.

The idea is that the built environment is a living, breathing, moving thing. We can get energy from waves and wind, why not sidewalks? Here's a taste:

David Webb, a structural engineer at the consultant Scott Wilson, which is in discussions with Network Rail and with retail firms to install the devices, said: "It's just picking up on the fact that all structures move a bit. This technology says, okay, we can do something useful with that energy."
In addition to floors, the technology could also be installed beneath railway lines and on road bridges to exploit the energy of passing trains and vehicles.

But I think they're forgetting an untapped energy mother lode: dance floors. I mean, isn't it obvious where the inspiration for a light-generating sidewalk came from?

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Sustainability contributes to bottom line

Cost reductions and brand image benefits accruing from investing in sustainability initiatives and reporting these to consumers are beginning to pay off for consumer product goods manufacturers, according to a new study (pdf) conducted for the Grocery Manufacturers Association by PricewaterhouseCoopers.