Hasta La Ideas

Artist Emmanuelle Moureaux used over 100,000 paper numbers cut-outs to create this multihued installation designed to visualise the passing of time.

On show at the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design in Toyama, Japan, the Colour of Time installation is part of a series of exhibitions that aim to explore the different functions of materials.

Having chosen paper as her main material, Moureaux began observing the relationship between the sensory element of colour-change, and the mathematical element of time.

To combine the two, the Tokyo-based artist opted to create an installation that would visualise the process of time passing.

“The installation superimposes these two elements to visualise and make one feel the flow of time,” explained the museum.

To achieve this, she made 120,000 paper numerical figures from zero to nine, as well as a colon symbol, which she then aligned to form a three-dimensional grid composed of 100 layers.

Each row of numbers denotes a time of day, from sunrise at 6.30am to sun fall at 7.49pm.

Different colours were also used to represent the time of day – resulting in a grid of colour that gets gradually darker to illustrate the transition from day to night.

“Through the tunnel, the sky is tinted with a beautiful gradation changing from pale to deep colours, flowing from time to time,” they said. 

“The installation makes one feel the subtle changes in [the] atmosphere through the whole body by travelling the colourful flow of time.”

A rectangular tunnel running through the middle of the installation has benches for visitors to sit down and be immersed in the work.

At the end of the tunnel is a chair titled Miss Blanche, designed by twentieth-century Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata.

“Miss Blanche is placed by the deputy director of Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art & Design, who is also curator of the exhibition, to create the axis to express a deep respect and admiration from Emmanuelle to Shiro Kuramata,” explained the museum. 

Colour of Time was on show between 16 November 2017 to 8 January 2018.

Having established her architecture and design practice in Tokyo in 2003, Moureux’s designs are characterised by their use of bright colours – for example, a rainbow-coloured cube facade and a multicoloured wedding dress inspired by snowflakes.

Photography is by Daisuke Shima.

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CES is full to the brim of awe-inspiring and excitable tech; it’s easy to lose sight of the lesser brands and the underdog products that get less attention. However, the feeling is most certainly mutual across all design articles and reporters of CES when I say my favorite product of the whole convention is My Special Aflac Duck – a robotic toy duck designed to help children diagnosed with cancer cope through their treatments.

This duck is no ordinary duck, accompanied by an array of RFID tags; this guy can relay the emotions of the child by having them place an emoji disc to the chest of the duck. Depending on the disc chosen, the duck will communicate the feeling with a positive or negative chirp/groan.

What’s truly remarkable is that My Special Aflac Duck comes with its own IV kit, allowing the child to administer meds to the duck, similar to that of chemotherapy, lessening the fear and anxiety around it.

When the duck is in IV mode, it’s head will vibrate and pulse in a heartbeat-like pattern – alleviating stress and focusing the child on a steady breathing pattern. On top of this, the duck’s fur can be removed and washed to ensure optimal cleanliness throughout hospital trips.

What’s really special about all of My Special Aflac Duck’s accessories, is the rocket ship. Using the accompanying app, the child can pick their happy place (whether it be the jungle, the sea, a rollercoaster) and once the rocket ship is placed against the duck’s chest, like the RFID disks, it will play a sound from this scene – transforming the hospital room into that special place within seconds.

As if it couldn’t get any better, it does. My Special Aflac Duck isn’t available in the shops, not now, not ever. Aflac plans to give My Special Aflac Duck for free to kids diagnosed with cancer across the US, with the hopes of getting this special guy to thousands of kids by the end of this year.

Designer: Aflac & Sproutel

Mexico City studio Comunal Taller de Arquitectura has completed a prototype for social housing in a mountain town, using a prefabricated bamboo frame that residents can use to replicate the structure in just seven days.

Comunal Taller de Arquitectura, which translates to Communal Architecture Workshop, completed the residence in Cuetzalan del Progreso – a town in the south-central state of Puebla – as an example of social housing that could be quickly and easily built across the region.

The studio previously designed a similar proposal for social housing in 2013 in a town named Tepetzintan, after it found a backlog in the provision of government funded housing. It worked with residents to develop an alternative self-build scheme that utilised local bamboo to make a modular and prefabricated frame, along with local wood and stone.

However in 2016, Mexico’s National Housing Commission reviewed its conditions for funding, and banned self-build projects that employed these materials and construction techniques.

With the first design unfeasible, the studio instead sourced its bamboo from the United States, and used it to create a similar frame and layout for the second house.

“Given this scenario, we decided to make a second housing exercise that avoid using local bamboo species as structural elements,” said the studio. “This second exercise preserves the modular and prefabricated building system based on panels made with bamboo oldhamii.”

The prefabricated bamboo structure that forms the 60-square-metre residence was assembled on site in under a week, with the help of locals to reduce costs. It is hoped that teams residents could learn to build replicas themselves.

The walls comprise bamboo panels coated with a local tissue known as ixtle, commonly used to make coffee sacks, and then mortar. These slot on top of breezeblock bases.

Exposed bamboo trusses and beams rest above the walls to form a mono-pitched roof, which is topped by an undulated, rough grey material. It overhangs at the front to cover two porches that face the nearby road.

Window shutters and doors inside the residence are also made of bamboo, while grey paving covers the floor both inside and outside.

Some of the walls feature red brick lattices that aid natural ventilation. The gaps also allow smoke from the fire in the kitchen to easily drift outside.

The traditional main communal area, where the local Nahuas people dry coffee and corn crops, forms the main space towards the front of the residence, with a pair of twin bedrooms set behind.

Comunal Taller de Arquitectura’s rural housing design was approved to receive federal subsidies, meaning that it could be rolled out in other areas of the state. But the team hopes the project will begin discussions that will enable local materials and methods to be used in future social housing.

“We will continue to seek the viability of the first exercise as we firmly believe that traditional building materials and constructive systems must be endorsed by public-housing policies in our country, and promote the autonomy of indigenous peoples, the value of vernacular architecture and conservation of intangible knowledge,” said the studio.

Affordable housing designs have also recently been proposed by James Law Cybertecture, which suggested building stackable micro homes using concrete pipes in Hong Kong, and Urban-Think Tank, which has developed low-cost housing for a South African slum.

Photography is by Onnis Luque.

Project credits:

Architects: Comunal: Taller de Arquitectura
Collaborators: Unión de Cooperativas Tosepan Titataniske

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This story is part three of MakerBot’s series of design studies, exploring iterative design and the relationship between designers and their tools.

So far we’ve explored form development with the bike saddle and reverse engineering with the drone rebuild—now it’s time to push into something a bit more futuristic.

Footwear design is Footwear design is a deceptively complex category that has much more in common with automotive design than it does with most fashion disciplines. There’s ergonomics, mechanics, loads of different material properties, and on top of all of that—aesthetics. that has much more in common with automotive design than it does with most fashion disciplines. There’s ergonomics, mechanics, loads of different material properties, and on top of all of that—aesthetics.

Not being trained a footwear designer myself, it’s an inspiring albeit daunting path, but that impending challenge is a good feeling and there’s no better way to learn than by doing.

1. Select Realistic Shoe Goals

I began this exercise by splitting the shoe geometry into its two components: the sole and the body. Each of these parts have their own anatomies with richly interrelated components, but I’m a shoe rookie and stand almost no chance at getting a shoe right on my first try. In the diagram below you can see how I started to define different planes on the body, but quickly got overwhelmed. Kudos to all of my footwear design counterparts that make this look so easy.

Instead of focusing on designing a game-changing shoe, I’m going to focus on just the sole to test parametric design tools and study exotic geometries.

You’ve probably seen the cross section of a running shoe sole; some of them are even transparent. They have a patterned honeycomb or lattice geometry that’s optimized for high impact resistance and low weight. This is a great opportunity to explore different parametric lattices that can be easily iterated on to change specific performance needs.

2. Create Parametric Lattices

This is Grasshopper, one of my favorite CAD tools. It’s a graphical algorithm editor that runs in Rhino and allows the user to create geometries with dynamic parameters in an intuitive drag-and-drop space.

Parametric tools are incredibly powerful when paired with a 3D printer. Once I have a geometry for different lattices defined, I can explore tons of different versions of the pattern in a short period. I export a sole with a wide pattern, a tightly grouped pattern, a thick and a thin pattern. With a single bounding geometry in place, there’s no limit to the number of variations I can create—he real constraint is how many I can print and evaluate in a short period.

3. Prepare the Soles for 3D Printing

There are a bunch of different 3D printing technologies out there. Each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, materials, tolerances, speeds, etc. Adidas rolled out a 3D printed shoe a while ago which may even validate using particular 3D printing technologies for cost-effective, short run manufacturing.

For early studies, we don’t need the springy high-tech plastics that will make up the final shoe, we just need speed, reliability, and accuracy. In this case, FDM or Fused Deposition Modeling is the ideal platform (and conveniently the least expensive), and my FDM printer, the MakerBot Replicator+, is a true workhorse for rapid prototyping.

I drag the first batch of iterations into MakerBot Print which will gives me a slicing preview to confirm the STLs are imported correctly. Once imported, I adjust the print settings and start with a sturdy .4mm layer height for the first iterations. Using wider layers at first means there are less possible failure points across the sole, but also a lower resolution or surface quality. Once I confirm .4mm works, I then test .3mm and eventually stick with .2mm—a layer height that offers the right balance between surface quality and structural integrity for this particular print.

4. Explore Applications for Lattices

The parametric geometries I set up could be modified to serve multiple purposes. After printing a variety of soles, I considered how a gradient that transitions from a tightly grouped lattice to a more loosely grouped one could distribute and direct force away from high impact zones. The more I tinkered with the parameters, the more the project felt like a previous concept I explored that went on to win a Red Dot Design Award, pictured below.

Parametric models are becoming increasingly important as the foundation for generative design techniques that incorporate huge data sets for things like material properties and force simulations. Imagine outlining the rough geometry for a sole and setting goals for heat or impact distribution, then sitting back while AI exhaustively explores every permutation of the design before selecting the best one for you. This is the very exciting (and very real) future of product design and additive manufacturing.

5. Revise and Reprint

With five unique variations, I decided to focus on the one that gave the best balance of aesthetics and functionality. There’s some stylized and functional lattice at the ball and heel of the sole, localized to the most relevant areas, but not so much that it begins to add visual noise or interfere with the overall shape and look of the shoe.

6. Print the Final sole and Experiment with Materials

Having MakerBot’s Experimental Extruder handy, I was also able to prototype the shoe’s body and sole in some different flexible plastics, adding an extra layer to my experience. I grabbed some community tested material profiles from the Thingiverse group for MakerBot Labs, then imported them into MakerBot Print and fired up a sole with a popular flexible material called NinjaFlex.

This exercise was a great way to experiment with parametric design in an unrestrictive way. Ultimately, these complex and uneven geometries prove to be a great source for concepts that can only be created with a 3D printer, helping designers push the boundaries of what products and technologies are possible in footwear design and other fields.

*****

MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based 3D printing company, pioneered the first connected desktop 3D printers and operates Thingiverse, the world’s largest 3D printing community and file library.

British designer Thomas Heatherwick suffers criticism for his latest project, a pair of New Towers with bulging windows, in this week’s comments update.

Battle the bulge: readers have suggested that Thomas Heatherwick should to go back to the drawing board, after his studio released renderings for two towers that will straddle the High Line, featuring similar windows to his recently completed MOCAA project in Cape Town.

“Take the worst thing about the Cape Town project and regurgitate it pointlessly over two entire buildings. When will he be stopped?” said JC.

The images seemed to offend Yethica: “It’s like someone blew bubbles in the windows of a postmodern tower. Gross.”

“That’s just lazy, Tom,” added Jon.

Stefon criticised the project for creating yet more high-end homes in the city: “Yay, more affordable housing!”

Cezary Marek added to that sentiment: “I wonder if, seeing this, Neave Brown would laugh or cry in despair.”

“At the end of the day, Heatherwick is a pop-architect that designs things that speak to people, regardless of how clumsy an academic might perceive his buildings to be. Most architects could use a lesson in how to be personable,” concluded Jacob Volanski.

One reader used a metaphor to express his resentment towards the design:

Is Thomas Heatherwick’s latest project too similar to previous designs? Have your say in our comments section ›

Unwanted visitor: readers were divided over president Donald Trump’s decision to not attend the opening of London’s new Kieran Timberlake-designed US Embassy, amid claims on Twitter that he prefers the former embassy, designed by Eero Saarinen.

West Van Man thought the US president might actually be afraid to visit: “Why in the free world would 45 want to go to the ribbon cutting for the new embassy if he knows he’ll get egged, mocked, jeered and his caricature cartooned every which way?”

“The US President has always been welcome in England. And President Trump is absolutely right about the location and fineness of the US embassy in Mayfair,” fired back Guest, loyally.

“Trump is a moron, can I get that clear before I say what I’m going to say? I sort of agree that it’s not exactly the best building in the world,” wrote a half-sure John McGrath.

The cancellation of the trip was good news for this reader:



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Preservation: news that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lockridge Medical Clinic in Whitefish has been demolished by its owner, despite efforts to protect the building, left readers dismayed this week.

Kay was angered by the developer’s decision: “He’s an immoral unethical extortionist. Such a depressing story. And to think it’s happened so close to Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th celebrations all over America.”

“I hope people boycott whatever this buffoon decides to put in its place,” fumed J.

But Fetish didn’t see what all the fuss was about: “What is special about this building except that it was designed by a famous architect?”

Guest had a poetic response: “Anywhere with a Frank Lloyd Wright building, no matter how forsaken or remote, is inherently somewhere.”

Whereas this reader kept his comment short, but to the point:



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Barack’s back: readers have also been discussing a set of images released by Barack and Michelle Obama, showing the upcoming Obama Presidential Center, which will be located on Jackson Park in Chicago’s South Side.

WYRIWYG was a fan of the toned-down design: “Thoughtful and reserved. Better than the Clinton and Bush libraries.”

But Davvvvid found it boring: “Where is the imagination? It all seems soulless, pragmatic, and calculated.”

“Much like Obama in his formative Chicago years, the project appears to seek to activate and give back more to the community, in civic spaces and parks,” stated Melon Design.

One reader made sure not to understate Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects‘ importance to the project:



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