Hasta La Ideas

Gizmodo‘s Victoria Song recently attended Toy Fair, where she spotted something that would have blown my mind as a child: An Etch-a-Sketch that lets you draw arcs and circles, without having to “staircase” it.

Called the Etch a Sketch Revolution, it’s going to be coming out in July, some 60 years after the Etch a Sketch was first invented.

Photo: Raul Marrero (Gizmodo)

Like you, I was dying to know how this thing works. Luckily Song captured it in GIF:

Gif: Raul Marrero, Victoria Song (Gizmodo)

Radial knobs, very clever.

By the bye, the reported price is just ten bucks!

More than a few museums have been making their image archives freely downloadable. The Smithsonian has done them one better, posting both images and digital 3D scans that you can download as CAD files and do whatever you want with. “This includes images and data,” the Institution writes, “from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.” The total number of downloadables is nearly 3 million.

The portal for all of this is the Smithsonian Open Access website. If you’re interested specifically in the 3D content and CAD files, you’ll want to jump into their 3D Voyager section, where you can download scans of wonderfully random objects (a Morse-Vail telegraph key, the crew hatch of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, a letter opener from the Black Star Line), vehicles (the supersonic Bell X-1 test airplane, the Space Shuttle Discovery, the Wright Brothers’ Flyer from 1903, the complete Apollo 11), furniture, statues, objects, old package designs and more.

The level of detail you can access is nuts. As one example, check out the aforementioned Bell X-1, where you can download both the 3D model and extensive documentation of the cockpit:

Nuts, no? You’d simply never be able to see up close, and pore over, this level of detail if you were at the museums in person.

Check out more 3D stuff here, or go here for the full combo of 2D and 3D files available. And thank you Smithsonian!

La pratique photographique d’Eva Verbeeck repose sur la construction d’une relation sincère et transparente avec les modèles qu’elle photographie. De sa série America’s Girl, qui propose de nouvelles représentations sur l’adolescence aux États-Unis et sa série Looking for Water, qui documente la crise environnementale de l’Afrique de l’Est, Eva Verbeeck tisse du lien.

Quand la photographie est devenue votre médium pour examiner le monde ?

Je suis née en Belgique et j’ai grandi dans une petite ville du nom de Tessenderlo. Ma mère m’a offert ma toute première caméra à mes 12 ans. J’ai alors commencé à photographier ce que je voyais : ma famille, la nature et tout ce qui m’entourait en tant que jeune femme. Ma famille et moi avons toujours beaucoup voyagé. J’ai eu la chance de rencontrer des personnes et des cultures qui m’ont plongées dans cet amour de la narration visuelle. J’ai développé un profond intérêt pour la justice sociale, la youth culture et le militantisme. 

Pourquoi les problématiques sociales, politiques et environnementales prennent une place si particulière dans votre pratique photographique ? 

J’ai étudié les droits de l’homme et le droit international à Bruxelles. Puis, j’ai voyagé en Éthiopie et au Kenya pour documenter la crise environnementale en Afrique de l’Est. C’est lors de ces voyages que j’ai réalisé à quel point la photographie était un vrai bel outil pour le storytelling et que j’ai commencé le photoreportage. Ces dernières années, mon travail s’est concentré sur les problématiques environnementales, humaines, sur les questions liées aux genres et aux explorations des identités. 

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.” Cette citation de Mahatma Gandhi, gravée sur un bloc de bois que mon père m’a offert lorsque j’étais adolescente, m’accompagne toujours dans ma pratique quotidienne de la photographie.

Dans vos séries America’s Girl et Looking for Water, comment réussissez-vous à portraiturer vos  modèles au plus proche de leur réalité et de leur true-self ?

J’arrive à tirer des portraits authentiques parce que je crée un réseau de confiance entre les modèles et moi. Généralement, je planifie des photoshoots des semaines ou des mois à l’avance. Pour America’s Girl, où j’ai photographié des femmes entre 6 et 16 ans, j’ai parlé aux parents, aux écoles et aux clubs de sports à propos de mon travail. Le jour du photoshoot, je me présente, nous discutons et je leur pose des questions avant de les photographier. Nous passons du temps à parler d’eux, de leurs intérêts, de ce qu’ils aiment à propos d’eux et ce qu’ils ressentent dans cette période de transition qu’est l’adolescence. Puis, finalement j’installe ma caméra et je les laisse choisir la position dans laquelle ils sont le plus à l’aise. Dès qu’ils ont trouvé leur position, le plus gros du travail est fait. 

Quant à ma série Looking for Water, je tissais du lien avec les familles victimes du dérèglement climatique que je photographiais durant une période plus longue, un mois ou plus. Avec mon ami et traducteur Sumsum, nous les photographions et les interviewons au long de leur journée. Ce travail a été très différent culturellement et physiquement de tous mes autres projets. 

Designed to do for nature-inspired design what the Pantone Shade Card did for colors, the Nature of Form handbook captures and carefully documents as many as 1454 forms, patterns, and colors, all pulled from flora and fauna.

The book was created by a group of multidisciplinary designers to act as exhaustive reference material for biomimetic design. By breaking down a variety of natural examples by form, pattern/texture, and color, the handbook puts all the nature-based form inspiration you need at your very fingertips. Created to help designers and artists across multiple disciplines, the book painstakingly documents a variety of plants and animals, creating an easy-to-access database of their forms, patterns, and dominant colors. These examples could save you hours of research on Wikipedia or Pinterest (or any other place you go for research) by simply giving you a sort of Yellow-Pages of organic design. The book’s multiple examples come with images, forms, silhouettes, color values and palettes, and even physical attributes that help spark the imagination and get those creative juices flowing. Whether you’re an industrial or transportation designer looking for aesthetic cues, or a graphic designer looking for patterns, logo inspiration, or even color palettes, the Nature of Form puts a veritable encyclopedia of nature-inspired design in the palm of your hand.

Designed to be a go-to reference book, Nature of Form makes it easy to conceptualize, detail, and design effective and aesthetic products by tapping into the world’s largest design database… nature itself!

Designers: Bhagvanji Sonagra, Bhavin Dabhi & Sushmita Chava

Click Here to Buy Now: $25 $45 (44% off). Hurry, only 50 left!

Nature of Form – A Book for Innovation & Design Exploration

Nature of Form is the world’s first book on collection of organic elements from nature into forms, textures, and colors to inspire your design by nature.

Why this Product?

Do you ever find yourself brimming with adept solutions? Like, wonder where you could use that material? How they could’ve used a different font or color or stroke? How the perspective could be so out of proportion?

But also found yourself in a designer’s block when you really needed to get work done?

In design, there’s a process to derive aesthetics, called ‘Form Development’. It involves having to take inspirations from around and derive lines and curves from it. It’s all good but years and years of same practice has lead to the taming of many inspirations, especially form nature. The word ‘speed’ more of less takes our mind to cheetahs or other such obvious animals. So what happens when everyone starts getting inspired form more or less the same sources? When in actuality, a frigate bird or a sailfish is faster than a cheetah.

Luckily, the design process helps a great deal, but let’s address the Lego under our feet, the formidable task of generating aesthetics. Toss in a few curves? chamfers and fillets? Maybe angular trims? Get a cup of Nature? Take a stroll amongst the greens, wait for an inspiration to strike at the speed of light?

Inspiration may strike at the oddest of times at the oddest of places. What if we were to expand our horizon and look into the endless variety that nature presents us with?

What is the Product Exactly?

This book features an exclusive original collection of forms, textures & color, derived from nature. The forms are classified into characteristic attributes as well. They reckon nifty use of this data in the fields of Product Design, Graphic Design, Textile Design, Fashion Design, Transportation Design, Animation, Artistry, other Creative disciplines, & certainly, by an Inquisitive Individual.

They are building a system that looks at form development from a new perspective. This product is one, but many at the same time. It makes you wonder. Each reader can manifest their own meaning into it, giving us the possibility of numerous derivatives from one single book.

Inside the Book: A collection of extractions of Organic Elements from Nature into Forms, Textures, and Colors. Total: 1454 Entities, 432 forms + 231 Patterns +791 colors.

A Peek Inside the Book

The 192-page publication intends to inspire and teach designers how to use various natural metaphors in the Design. The use of the derived elements is up to the designers, whether they want to use them in various designs, ideation, sketching, drawing, 3d modeling, 3d patterns, or something entirely anew. The elements can be used in fields of furniture, lighting, product design, fashion, automotive, styling, architecture, typography, etc.

The book consists of 150 organic elements, classified into 10 categories:

– Flowers x 12
– Aquatic Animals x 16
– Vegetables x 20
– Land Animals x 13
– Non-Living x 12
– Insects x 18
– Leaves x 16
– Fruits x 19
– Birds x 15
– Trees & Plants x 9

How Does it Work & Applications?

The book is subjective to the context of its use. For example say, if you’re:

A product designer, you may use the forms and textures of the Starfish in creating a grip texture on your products.

A textile designer, you may find the naturally coupled color theme and the symmetrical forms of the Starfish to tessellate and create a spread.

A graphic designer, you may find the color schemes and the textures useful in producing good illustrations and compositions.

An automotive designer, you may use the attributes to find the power curves for your next automobile sketch.

A UI/ UX designer, you can use the color themes to contextually generate a more realistic web experience.

An Engineer/A Modeler, you can feed your creative end by converting the 3D textures into meshwork and derive stress and strength parameters.

It simply makes your process of inspiration hunt easier. The uniqueness of this product lies in the fact that it is one, but many at the same time. The reader can manifest his/ her/ their own meaning into it.

Illustration image #1(metaphor) of organic elements used in this book

Illustration image #2(Derived Forms) of organic elements used in this book

Illustration image #3(Textures/Pattern) of organic elements used in this book

Click Here to Buy Now: $25 $45 (44% off). Hurry, only 50 left!

Dezeen promotion: Construction is underway on an apartment building in Munich, Germany, designed by David Chipperfield for Euroboden.

British architect Chipperfield has re-interpreted Munich’s historic Stadtpalais, or “city palace”, with a free-standing building that will house a variety of apartments.

Set next to a historic park, and among the large 19th-century homes of the Kolbergerstrasse, the five-storey structure will be an understated contemporary addition to the neoclassical architecture on the street.

Its facade will be accented with varying textures of plaster, designed to add depth and rhythm, and bands of Danube limestone that will run horizontally under the windows.

“The house has to somehow present itself with some respect to the overall  civic idea of the city,” said Chipperfield in conversation with Euroboden founder Stefan Höglmaier.

“In my opinion such architecture has to be normal and special in a good way. At the same time, we should have high ambitions for normal.”

Instead of being split into two halves like some of the original Stadtpalais, a range of different apartment types and sizes will be available at the Euroboden building.

The development will have two three-storey apartments with their own gardens, as well as several one-storey apartments and two apartments in the roof.

“The question for our time increasingly is, what is luxury and what does it look like?”  said Chipperfield.

“It’s not enough just to use a lot of marble: It’s about the essential qualities of architecture. We rely on quiet materials and spatial generosity.”

Thanks to the carefully arranged floor plan, all of the apartments will have three different aspects and a central living room with an open fireplace.

French doors set flush to the walls will connect the rooms and open onto recessed balconies with views out over a park and the block’s private gardens.

David Chipperfield’s building for Euroboden is due to complete in 2021.

Images are by Darcstudio for Euroboden

Project credits:

Architects: David Chipperfield with Mark Randel
Landscape architects: Erica and Federico Ratti
Developer: Euroboden

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