Hasta La Ideas

German designer Philipp Weber’s glassblowing pipe with valves like a trumpet won the New Talents Award at DMY Berlin last week (+ movie).

Philipp Weber studied at Design Academy Eindhoven, where he became intrigued by the glassblowing process and the possibility of altering the outcome by adapting the blowing pipe.

He added a system of valves to the pipe so that Belgian glassblower Christophe Genard could influence the inner shape of the glass by opening and closing different air streams.

A video documenting the use of the new instrument focuses on the sounds and rhythms created as the glass is formed by blowing and manipulating it using a series of tools.

“The relation between the glassblower and his tool is very important, since it bridges his connection to the material,” says Weber. “What if I change the tool? Does it change the material? And what if design doesn’t start at the product but at the tool?”

The DMY International Design Festival Berlin is one of the stops on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour, and we’ll be publishing more stories and videos from the event in the next few days.

Last week a glass pendant with a tiny brass chandelier inside it was presented at ICFF in New York, while Norwegian designers StokkeAustad and Andreas Engesvik created a series of blown-glass trees for Stockholm Design Week earlier this year – see all stories about glass.

Here are some more details about the project:

In ‘Creation of a strange Symphony’ Philipp Weber portrays the performance of a glassblower using a new and unusual tool.

Pivotal to this work was Weber’s desire to discover the world of a glassblower. In Belgium he was able to watch glassblower Christophe Genard working with the hot material. The designer questioned himself, ‘How can I inspire his interest to work with me?’.

Genard’s most important tool, the blowing pipe, caught Weber’s attention. In the past 2000 years only minor alterations have been made to the 1.5m long steel pipe, with no effect to the material. ‘What would happen to the glass if the function of this tool radically changed? How would Christophe adapt to a new pipe?’.

And so, by manipulating the pipe, he took influence on the inner shaping of the glass.

Simultaneously to this process, Weber also sensed a strong rhythm and musicality in the way Genard was working on the glass. The pipe as a tool for glass production, appeared to be like a musical instrument to him.

He could not resist the idea to translate the mechanism of a trumpet into an application for blowing glass.

Together with an engineer and the knowledge from preceding experiments for a new tool, he worked on an ‘instrument’ – an allegoric bond of craft and music – inspiring Genard to ‘improvise’ the glass, to start a dialogue with the material.

Playing the valves, Genard would shape the glass from inside, activating different air streams. The transformation of the pipe into an instrument provoked a performance of glass making. A short-movie, several glass objects and the instrument itself communicate this dance with the fire.

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by Philipp Weber appeared first on Dezeen.

Clerkenwell Design Week 2013: designers including Patricia Urquiola, Ab Rogers and Jay Osgerby talk about their participation in Clerkenwell Design Week in the first of a series of movies we filmed during the event.

We spoke to designers at showrooms across the central London district, plus Farmiloe Building and House of Detention hub locations, which all make up Clerkenwell Design Week.

In the movie, Jay Osgerby of design duo Barber Osgerby explains why the area is suited to hosting the event: “[Clerkenwell] is where all the architects and designers are based, it’s the perfect environment to show new work to an audience who’s really interested in it.”

“It brings a level of energy to a fantastic central location,” adds designer Ab Rogers.

This fourth edition of the annual event saw the largest exhibitor and visitor numbers, though PearsonLloyd partner Tom Lloyd thinks it still retains a compact local atmosphere.

“I think Clerkenwell is maturing into a great design event,” he says. “I think its size is very nice, I think people like the intimacy.”

Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola discusses why she likes exhibiting in the British capital: “Being in London always means to be involved in the work we are doing, [promoting] a new product and meeting new people,” she tells us. “London always gives you something else.”

Also in the movie, Giles Miller talks about his target of reflected pixels installed in front of a medieval gate “to stamp Clerkenwell on the map”.

This year’s Clerkenwell Design Week took place from 21 to 23 May.

We will be publishing interviews with some of the key designers exhibiting at this year’s show in the coming weeks.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Octave by Junior Size, released by French record label Atelier du Sample . You can listen to more Junior Size tracks on Dezeen Music Project.

Photographs are by Jim Stephenson.

See all our coverage of Clerkenwell Design Week 2013 »
See more architecture and design movies by Dezeen »

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Week 2013 movie appeared first on Dezeen.

News: researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group have created a dome from silk fibres woven by a robotic arm, which was then finished by live silkworms (+ movie).

The project is intended to explore how digital and biological fabrication techniques can be combined to produce architectural structures.

The team programmed the robotic arm to imitate the way a silkworm deposits silk to build its cocoon. The arm then deposited a kilometre-long silk fibre across flat polygonal metal frames to create 26 panels. These panels were arranged to form a dome, which was suspended from the ceiling.

6500 live silkworms were then placed on the structure. As the caterpillars crawled over the dome, they deposited silk fibres and completed the structure.

The Silk Pavilion was designed and constructed at the MIT Media Lab as part of a research project to explore ways of overcoming the existing limitations of additive manufacturing at architectural scales.

Mediated Matter group director Neri Oxman believes that by studying natural processes such as the way silkworms build their cocoons, scientists can develop ways of “printing” architectural structures more efficiently than can be achieved by current 3D printing technologies.

“In traditional 3D printing the gantry-size poses an obvious limitation; it is defined by three axes and typically requires the use of support material, both of which are limiting for the designer who wishes to print in larger scales and achieve structural and material complexity,” Oxman told us earlier this year. “Once we place a 3D printing head on a robotic arm, we free up these limitations almost instantly.”

Oxman’s team attached tiny magnets to the heads of silkworms so they could motion-track their movements. They used this data to programme the robotic arm to deposit silk on the metal frames.

“We’ve managed to motion-track the silkworm’s movement as it is building its cocoon,” said Oxman. “Our aim was to translate the motion-capture data into a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm in order to study the biological structure in larger scales.”

Their research also showed that the worms were attracted to darker areas, so fibres were laid more sparsely on the sunnier south and east elevations of the dome.

See our story from March this year about the research behind the Silk Pavilion. Oxman’s digital fabrication work features in an article about 3D printing in architecture from our one-off publication Print Shift.

Other Dezeen stories about silk include this 2007 project by Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Elsbeth joy Nielsen, who used silkworms to weave flat silk panels, from which she made a scarf, lampshade and bath bag.

Last year, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley wove a golden cape from silk extracted from a million wild spiders.

See more pavilion design »
See more design from MIT »

Mediated Matter Group sent us the following information:

Silk Pavilion – Mediated Matter Group at MIT Media Lab

The Silk Pavilion explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales. The primary structure was created of 26 polygonal panels made of silk threads laid down by a CNC (Computer-Numerically Controlled) machine. Inspired by the silkworm’s ability to generate a 3D cocoon out of a single multi-property silk thread (1km in length), the overall geometry of the pavilion was created using an algorithm that assigns a single continuous thread across patches providing various degrees of density.

Overall density variation was informed by the silkworm itself deployed as a biological “printer” in the creation of a secondary structure. A swarm of 6,500 silkworms was positioned at the bottom rim of the scaffold spinning flat nonwoven silk patches as they locally reinforced the gaps across CNC-deposited silk fibers. Following their pupation stage the silkworms were removed. Resulting moths can produce 1.5 million eggs with the potential of constructing up to 250 additional pavilions.

Affected by spatial and environmental conditions including geometrical density as well as variation in natural light and heat, the silkworms were found to migrate to darker and denser areas. Desired light effects informed variations in material organisation across the surface area of the structure. A season-specific sun path diagram mapping solar trajectories in space dictated the location, size and density of apertures within the structure in order to lock-in rays of natural light entering the pavilion from South and East elevations. The central oculus is located against the East elevation and may be used as a sun-clock.

Parallel basic research explored the use of silkworms as entities that can “compute” material organization based on external performance criteria. Specifically, we explored the formation of non-woven fiber structures generated by the silkworms as a computational schema for determining shape and material optimisation of fiber-based surface structures.

Research and Design by the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with Prof. Fiorenzo Omenetto (TUFTS University) and Dr. James Weaver (WYSS Institute, Harvard University). Mediated Matter researchers include Markus Kayser, Jared Laucks, Carlos David Gonzalez Uribe, Jorge Duro-Royo and Neri Oxman (Director).

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to weave Silk Pavilion appeared first on Dezeen.

Visitors to the Afrofuture exhibition in Milan built light-up glasses from recycled materials at a workshop organised by Maker Faire Africa (+ movie).

The workshop was a taster for the larger two to three day events that Maker Faire Africa put on in African cities for local makers to exhibit and develop their designs for gadgets or products.

“The concept is that people come together to show their ad hoc inventions that they’ve made in their garages, basements or studios,” said Jennifer Wolfe of Maker Faire Africa, who organises the workshops.

“In Africa, the inventions tend to be focussed on items that solve immediate and fundamental needs – issues such as agriculture, health and electricity.”

At Afrofuture, a series of African-oriented design talks and activities, designer Cyrus Nganga from Nigeria helped visitors create their own versions of his C-Stunner glasses.

The decorative glasses are built from old spectacle frames and recycled wire, metal or other found materials.

Technology expert David Olaniyan was on hand to help integrate arduino microcontroller circuit boards with the designs so LEDs could be programmed to flash.

“We’re trying to bring together some of these emerging technologies with grass root strategies, which you need to couple togther in a place like Africa,” Wolfe told Dezeen.

Maker Faire is a global initiative that runs public workshops for designers to showcase their inventions and Maker Faire Africa has amassed a community of makers across the continent that have presented over 400 inventions.

Wolfe presented other projects championed by Maker Faire Africa during the event, including a generator than can produce six hours of electricity with one litre of urine and conductive woven textiles.

Maker Faire Africa has been running for five years and operates in Ghana, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria, and has introduced 3D printers to Cairo and Lagos as part of its programme.

The organisation aims to help designers market their products and find funding, as well as introduce them to technologies that could make their items more useful and consumer friendly.

The Afrofuture exhibition took place at the La Rinascente department store in Milan during the city’s design week last month and was curated by Beatrice Galilee.

Upcycling discarded materials in African design was one of the themes that emerged from our Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from Cape Town – watch Ravi Naidoo explain the movement in our movie.

See more architecture and design from Africa »
See all our coverage of Milan 2013 »

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at Afrofuture appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch graphics studio Experimental Jetset has redesigned the logo for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as a slender W that changes shape to respond to its setting (+ movie).

Experimental Jetset developed the graphic identity around the concept of a “responsive W” that forms both a symbol of the Whitney and a framework for accompanying text and images.

“We came up with the idea of the zig-zag line, with the zig-zag being a metaphor for a non-simplistic, more complicated (and thus more interesting) history of art,” say the designers.

“We think the line also represents a pulse, a beat – the heartbeat of New York, of the USA. It shows the Whitney as an institute that is breathing (in and out), an institute that is open and closed at the same time.”

The designers specified Neue Haas Grotesk – a redrawn version of a 1950s Swiss typeface – for any text positioned alongside the logo, while any images can be positioned underneath.

“We began to explore the possibilities of the W as a frame to put work in, or a stage to place work on,” they explain. “The lines [of the W] can be seen as borders, arrows, connections [or] columns.”

The new graphic identity replaces the Whitney’s thirteen-year-old logo, designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, and marks a period of change that will see the museum relocate to a new building by architect Renzo Piano, set to open in 2015.

Other logos designed in recent months include one for the estate of Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson and one for Nivea designed by Yves Béhar. See more graphic design on Dezeen.

Photography is by Jens Mortensen.

Read on more information from the Whitney:

As the Whitney approaches the opening of its new building in 2015, museum staff are taking stock of all aspects of programming and operations. While much of this work is happening behind the scenes, one very visible aspect of this focus is the Whitney’s graphic identity. While the museum has changed considerably in the thirteen years since it introduced the word mark designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, even more extensive institutional changes will come with the move downtown.

Two years ago, Museum staff began a thoughtful internal dialogue regarding the Whitney’s graphic identity and selected the design studio Experimental Jetset to develop an approach which embraces the spirit of the Museum while serving as a visual ambassador for our new building. The result is a distinctive and inventive graphic system that literally responds to art — a fundamental attribute of the Whitney since its founding in 1930. This dynamic identity, which the designers refer to as the “responsive ‘W'” also illustrates the Museum’s ever-changing nature. In the upcoming years it will provide an important point of continuity for members, visitors, and the public during the transition to the new space.

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by Experimental Jetset appeared first on Dezeen.