Hasta La Ideas

The first batch of Mixees arrive from the printer. All images courtesy of MixeeMe.

Custom avatars have always been an addicting form of participatory making. From the famous Nintendo Miis to Mad Men Yourself and South Park Avatar Creator, avatar-making has proven to be a popular practice online time and time again.

But while we ourselves wander around a three dimensional wonderland, our avatars remain stuck in the second dimension. Even if, like Miis, they seem to be free, they can never quite leap from the screen and into our hands, at least not without considerable effort.

For all those avatars itching for entree into the real world, we now have MixeeMe, a new startup that allows you to create a cute, custom avatar of yourself, your friends, your nemeses or anyone else you know and get a real live 3D printed version in the mail a few days later. It’s the brainchild of designers Nancy Liang and Aaron Barnet, two Yale grads who wanted to make a dream into reality.

“When I was little had this idea that if you could become an action figure you’re successful, you made it in the world,” explained Liang in a Skype interview with Core77. “I sat down at Google Sketchup, figured out how to make circles and cubes and put them together. After 5 hours, I uploaded my character model to Shapeways, and found that it would be too expensive to print. The modeling process was a shit show, basically.”

Frustrated with the options for designing simple 3D objects, Liang took to the web and worked with Barnet to research and develop simple 3D tools. “I decided that only do I want to make action figures, I want to make it easy for others to make action figures of themselves or their friends,” she noted. After exploring the different options, they decided on a simple interface that let customers focus on creating, rather than the technical specifics.

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Product News: Slovakian designer Tomas Kral has created a collection of small silicone pots for Hong Hong design brand Praxis.

Called Flex, the pots make use of the material’s flexibility and have covers that are fixed at one side but flap up at the other. “Looking like small animals, the flexible lids can be opened easily and always close back, so the containers never stay opened where they are not in use,” says Kral.

Praxis produces silicone desktop products by a number of European designers including Alexander Taylor, Big-Game, Alexis Georgacopoulos and Tomàs Alonso. We featured bird-like silicone containers by Swedish designers TAF for Praxis back in May.

Tomas Kral has a studio in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he also teaches at ECAL. Other designs by Tomas Kral on Dezeen include his graduation project combining cork and glass, and a pencil case with teeth.

Photos are by Martin Haldimann.

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for Praxis appeared first on Dezeen.

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As an industrial designer, it’s gratifying to see something you worked on sitting on a store shelf or showroom floor. Conversely it’s depressing when a project you toiled over gets axed and never sees the light of day. But it is set designers who must experience the most mixed emotions of all: They will spend months creating props or environments that will definitely get made–but that will then be destroyed after filming, to make room in the studio for the next project.

One grand exception of this occurred not in Hollywood, but in Leavesden, England. Bear with us while we break this down:

The L.A.-based Thinkwell Group is an “experiential design firm” that designs, among other things, amusement parks. Towards the tail end of the filming of the Harry Potter series of movies, Warner Brothers tasked Thinkwell with creating a post-film-franchise attraction, to keep the money coming in after the series’ conclusion. Thinkwell headed out to Warner Brothers’ Leavesden Studios in the UK, where all of the Potter films were produced and where the sixth was then being shot, and made a startling discovery: The filmmakers had saved nearly everything. Props, sets, models, and elaborate constructions dating all the way back to the first film had been stored in a massive airplane hanger and spilled over into a further 200 shipping containers.

As one example, check out the sick “Snake Door” from movie #2, The Chamber of Secrets. I saw it years ago, and blithely dismissed it as CG, but it’s a working motorized prop:

Nutty, no? And while the video can give you the misimpression that the door is small, check out this photo showing the scale of it:

Another thing I’d seen in the movie and assumed was CG was the Hogwarts castle:

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