Hasta La Ideas

Feature: as Facebook buys virtual reality headset maker Oculus and Sony reveals its own VR device, Dezeen explores what the resurgence of this old school technology means for designers.

Oculus VR was already big before Facebook bought the virtual reality headset maker for $2 billion. A resurrection of dead technology from the 1990s, Oculus Rift had previously been branded as a gaming device, but with Facebook’s acquisition VR’s progression into the digital world in general has been accelerated.

“Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a call to Facebook’s investors, while his announcement post painted a picture of the world donning headsets to watch tennis, study in classrooms and consult with doctors.

Facebook sees Oculus Rift as a chance to profoundly transform communication, and to the gaming industry it’s a generational leap in electronic entertainment. But there’s more to virtual reality. It’s as much a creative tool for designers and architects, as it is a new medium for designers to explore, and a close and personal way of experiencing the creations of others.

And good god it’s difficult to explain why to anyone who hasn’t tried modern virtual reality devices. Rewinding to the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco just last week, Sony neatly illustrated this fact in its reveal of its own prototype virtual reality gaming headset, Project Morpheus.

Sony’s president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, called the peculiarly powerful effect of being sensorily immersed in virtual reality “presence”, acknowledging just how hard it is to relate its effect of “being there”. Seeing it formatted in double vision on YouTube doesn’t cut it at all.

Outwardly you look dorky, with a bulky headset strapped to your head, swinging it around to see things that aren’t really there. But inwardly the experience is remarkable, your virtual gaze mapped exactly and immediately to your real one. The ability to crane around obstacles, lean close to study objects or track an enemy starfighter as it loops over your cockpit is enveloping. And it clearly has further application than games.

At its Morpheus announcement, Sony saw it complementing Google’s ongoing 3D interiors mapping project Indoor Maps, which allows you to sample hotels and shops before you visit. Indeed, Oculus Rift has already been used for a sort of viral tourism from its earliest demos, taking users on a visit to Tuscany, Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, and the EUseum, a virtual gallery that presents high resolution paintings to study.

It therefore isn’t much of a leap to seeing it being used as an architectural visualisation tool, something that both architects and technologists have actually been exploring since virtual reality’s advent. Importing from CAD into 3D game engines like Unity is relatively easy, allowing companies like Arch Virtual to spring up to offer walkthroughs of prospective projects along with environments for military training, medical simulations and advertising.

Instead of the all too familiar glossy render, with virtual reality you get to examine the details: the weight of a wall, the expanse of a void, the shifting sightline as you freely move across an aperture. Clients can experience their commission before they sign instead of just pore over abstract plans.

There are applications in product design, too. Ford uses virtual reality to sample new car designs, allowing the chance to inspect an interior from the perspective of the driver or passengers. Ford argues that it allows the company to assess designs far earlier in the process than before, from material finishes to colour schemes, in different light conditions and environments.

As well as sampling designed objects and spaces, virtual reality also has an application in creating them, whether in CAD or ZBrush, breaking beyond the perceptive confines of 2D displays. As an idea of how easy the new generation of virtual reality software and hardware makes manipulation of objects in 3D space, there’s MakeVR. It uses wireless motion controllers similar to those popularised by Nintendo for its Wii console to make interaction seamless. Shorn of the complex menus found in a lot of design software, virtual reality helps to democratise 3D design – in terms of skills and knowledge if not financially. Spool the 3D models out to a 3D printer and production is further pressed into the hands of the many.

On the other hand, it’s possible to use 3D sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect to map fully textured environments or objects for use in virtual reality. Through a confluence of breaking technologies, 3D as a medium for creatives to work in has become a reality.

There are many hurdles ahead. A major one is that virtual reality in its current iteration is insular, highjacking your senses and removing you from the real world. Whether you’re in a living room or a studio, you don’t get to share glances with those around you. Moreover, wearing a headset for extended periods is less than comfortable and has a tendency to make people fall over. Aside from its weight (which isn’t exactly heavy but it’s an unaccustomed bulk), nausea and dizziness can result from a lag between head movement and seeing the result, how quickly the screen refreshes and the speed at which things are moving in the virtual space.

But still, Facebook’s just bet $2 billion on virtual reality, a discarded tech from the mid 1990s, finally making a comeback. We’ve experienced enough Hollywood visualisations of a computer-vision based future, and increasingly the confines of the 2D – and even 3D – TV screen are becoming suffocating, failing to express the richness of the virtual things and places that creatives are making. Virtual reality might be yesterday’s future, but that isn’t making it feel any less fresh.

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to change the world of design appeared first on Dezeen.

German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic has created a series of futuristic scenarios as part of the largest solo exhibition of his work at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (+ movie).

Grcic worked closely with curators at the Vitra Design Museum to create a series of installations that depict environments for future living based on his personal vision of design’s role in modern society.

“We consider Konstantin Grcic to be one of the most influential designers of our time – his approach and his aesthetic is probably the most advanced and radical,” Vitra Design Museum director Mateo Kries told Dezeen.

“He is at the peak of his career, but still he has never staged an exhibition that conveys the visual world, the themes and the narratives that inspire him. These were some of the reasons why we decided to work with him on a large solo exhibition,” Kries added.

The installations include a fictional home interior, design studio and urban environment featuring several of Grcis’s iconic designs, such as the Mayday lamp for Flos and Chair One for Magis.

The first of the installations, called Life Space, resembles a typical home featuring everyday objects including some of Grcic’s own designs, which are arranged on a raised platform.

The Work Space section presents some of Grcic’s products and prototypes on a long table in front of a wall clad in artificial rock that create the feel of a futuristic subterranean workshop.

A projection on the opposite wall displays scenes from a typical work day at Grcic’s Munich studio, including CAD models being manipulated, a 3D printer in action, and everyday objects or prototypes being inspected.

The third area, called Public Space, features a huge panoramic collage depicting aspects of contemporary urban and rural society alongside imagined futuristic architecture.

A chain-link fence separating the image from the rest of the space is intended to create the feeling of a safe environment in which visitors are encouraged to interact with examples of Grcic’s furniture.

The final section, Object Space, features a museum-style vitrine displaying a range of Grcic’s products alongside inspirational objects he has collected over the years.

In a video interview with the exhibition’s curators, Grcic spoke about the changes he has witnessed in the design industry throughout his career, including evolving attitudes towards mass production.

“Industry, meaning standardisation churning out many of the same products for everyone, is an old concept,” the designer suggested. “The beauty is that industry now produces diversity, variety and is able to customise a project but still on an industrial scale.”

He added that his own products are not always immediately accessible but that he believes design’s role is to produce challenging and divisive objects.

“I sometimes hear that it takes time for my products to be understood or liked,” he claimed. “I think it’s quite good or necessary for products to challenge an opinion because we don’t want to live in a bubble where everything is beautiful or comfortable. The power of an object that makes you think is something that I want to explore.”

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama is on show at the Vitra Design Museum until 14 September 2014. It was co-produced by the Z33 House for contemporary art in Hasselt, Belgium, where it will be presented early next year.

Photography is by Mark Niedermann, courtesy of the Vitra Design Museum.

Here’s some more information from the Vitra Design Museum:

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama
22.03.2014 – 14.09.2014
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

Konstantin Grcic is one of the most influential designers of our time. Serious and functional, unwieldy and occasionally disconcerting, his works combine an indus- trial aesthetic with experimental, artistic elements. Many of Grcic’s creations, such as Chair One (2004) or the Mayday lamp (1999), are widely acclaimed as design classics. With »Konstantin Grcic – Panorama«, the Vitra Design Museum is now presenting the largest solo exhibition on Grcic and his work to date.

Specifically for this exhibition, Grcic has developed several large-scale installations rendering his personal visions for life in the future: a home interior, a design studio and an urban environment. These spaces stage fictional scenarios confronting the viewer with the designer’s inspirations, chal- lenges and questions, as well as placing Grcic’s works in a greater social context. The highlight of these presentations is a 30-metre long panorama that depicts an architectural landscape of the future.

A fourth area of the exhibition takes a focused look at Grcic’s daily work. This section presents many of his finished objects, but also prototypes, drawings and background information along with artefacts that have inspired Grcic – from an old teapot and an early Apple computer to works by Marcel Duchamp, Gerrit Rietveld and Enzo Mari. In the shift of perspectives between larger and smaller scales, the exhibition demonstrates how design is more than mere problem solving for Grcic, but a highly complex process that integrates coincidences, ruptures, chance discoveries and a profound engagement with the visual culture of our time.

Konstantin Grcic (b. 1965) was initially influenced by the minimalist designs of Jasper Morrison under whom he began his career in the late 1980s. Soon he developed his own distinctive stylistic idiom and has become a driving force of formal and technical innovation within the international design scene. Today, Grcic works for many leading design companies, including Authentics, Flos, Magis, Vitra, ClassiCon, Plank, Krups and Muji. With his widely published designs, he often develops surprising solutions that avoid cliché and derive their radical aesthetic from Grcic’s intensive investigations of materials, technologies and production processes.

With Panorama, Grcic enters new territory. Never before has he so fundamentally reflected on his own work and so thoroughly disclosed his own understanding of design in general. The exhibition is based on an extensive analysis of current technological shifts, innovations and upheavals in contemporary design. It was developed over three years of close collaboration between Grcic, the Vitra Design Museum and Z33 –House for contemporary art in Hasselt, Belgium. The result is a striking presentation of narrative and visual intensity, situated on the cusp between present and future, reality and fiction.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 320-page catalogue that comprises a catalogue raisonné of Grcic’s work as well as essays by such authors as s Richard Sennett, Peter Sloterdijk, Paola Antonelli, Mario Carpo and others. In conjunction with the exhibition, Vitra Design Museum will organize a
wide-ranging event programme.

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama is an exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum and Z33 – House for contemporary art, Hasselt (Belgium). W.I.R.E. – Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise at ETH Zurich was a major scientific collaborator. The exhibition will be shown at Z33 from 01.02. to 24.05.2015. Further exhibition venues will be announced in due course.

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at Vitra Design Museum solo show appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch designers including Piet Hein Eek and Roderick Vos are brought together with workshops for makers with disabilities in a new initiative called Social Label (+ slideshow).

The Social Label scheme was created by designers Petra Janssen of Studio Boot and Simone Kramer of C-mone, plus Geert van Kempen of healthcare organisation Amarant.

The initiative links up with existing workshops that provide activities and jobs to makers with mental disabilities, psychiatric problems or addictions, and enables them to produce and sell pieces by well-known designers.

“By making, presenting and selling these meaningful products we create new possibilities for those who have difficulties to participate in society and in the labour market,” Janssen told Dezeen. “That’s what we call socio-economics.”

The first collection, called Hoot, was created in a collaboration with Piet Hein Eek and Woodworks, a woodworking shop in Tilburg Noord that teaches people with disabilities how to make furniture.

The result is a range of furniture made from chunky sections of scrap wood, painted in four shades of grey that were selected by Eek. The pieces include a dining table and bench, a cabinet with sliding doors, a console and a lectern.

“The idea is that it is not only occupational therapy but hopefully a structured way to raise funds with the products that I created, but only for a good cause,” said Piet Hein Eek.

The second product line is a vase, pairing Roderick Vos with Artenzo, a centre for visual arts that works with people who have mental disabilities. The collaboration produces hand-made earthenware pots turned in a variety of shapes by Oswin, an autistic artist.

Each is topped with an identical plastic crown designed by Vos, so although every pot is unique the circumference of the top needs to be the same.

The aim of the Social Label project is to connect healthcare providers, social enterprises and local businesses to create solutions that bring communities closer together. It is also bringing paid work to groups who traditionally found entering the workforce difficult.

The benefits of the project work for the designer too, as the team explained. “The designer enlarges his or her portfolio with a special cooperation, moving a value-based approach centre stage to address human dignity, slow design, attention and time.”

Designs by painter Marc Mulders, product designer Dick van Hoff and visual artist Sigrid Calon are also in the pipeline, and Janssen expects there will be three new collaborations each year.

Photography is by Rene van der Hulst

Here’s some information about Social Label:

Social Label

Why ‘Social Label’?

To discover and develop the individual qualities are important policy themes for the government and institutes in health. Art and culture are able to contribute. Creating something of special value, creating products that matter, products that are valued for their functional and aesthetic value is important to all of us, especially to people with a distance to the labour market. That’s what we call: ‘Socio economics’.

Our world is changing rapidly. In our own environment, lets say The Netherlands, you can’t miss the signals given by the government. Budget cuts, decentralisation to local or regional government, accompanied by decreased budgets. Of course: people are not waiting for something to happen. The Dutch initiate new opportunities. One of them is really new and can be found in Brabant: Social Label.

What is ‘Social Label’?

Social Label is a new concept for work and daily activities for people with a ‘distance to the labour market’. Art and care are combined in this initiative in order to create new product lines. In each of the lines the social welfare workers will have an exclusive bond with a renowned designer. These products will be produced, presented and sold by workers in different social workforce centres.

The designer enlarges his or her portfolio with a very special cooperation, moving a value based approach centre stage addressing human dignity, slow design, attention and time. Social Label is an initiative of Amarant Group, Studio Boot and C-mone (Articipate!). They explicitly invite others to contribute and cooperate in order to bridge the gap of some of us to the labour market.

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disadvantaged makers for Social Label initiative appeared first on Dezeen.

Chris Dyson Architects has added a soot-washed brick extension with a curved wall to a Georgian terraced house and former nunnery in east London (+ slideshow).

London-based Chris Dyson Architects was asked to replace an old two-storey extension, creating a new family living space that would be more in-keeping with the traditional nineteenth-century style of the property located at Wapping Pierhead.

“The curved end of the extension was inspired by the banks of the Thames elevation that rises on either side of the property and has curved bay windows overlooking the river,” Chris Dyson told Dezeen.

“It was an interesting local vernacular that we wanted to include and the curved extension bookends the environment well,” he said.

The architects worked with London bricklaying company Beckwith Tuckpointing to ensure the brickwork remained authentic. Locally sourced Coleridge yellow bricks were stained using an eighteenth-century soot-wash technique and an old penny was rolled between the brick joints, leaving an indent in the mortar.

“The use of brick helped to achieve a balance between the contemporary and the original period style of the house,” said Dyson.

Slate copings protect the gauged brick arches and bronze casements that have been added to the windows, helping to distinguish between the old and new.

An original listed dock wall offers privacy for a sheltered garden, while the curved wall at the back of the extension completes the terrace.

The garden offers another route into the basement and ground floor level of the extension, where a minimal dining room, library and kitchen offer living space for the family.

Built by British architect Daniel Asher Alexander in 1810, the Grade II listed building formerly housed a dock authority officer, before being repurposed as a nunnery in the 1940s.

Many of the period features have been restored, including the original staircase, architraves, floorboards and fireplace surrounds.

“The original property was very run down and hadn’t had much spent on it. This meant much of the house was preserved and we were able to bring back many of the period features,” Dyson explained.

Upstairs, the master bedroom and bathroom continue with the Georgian style, with pastel green panels concealing extra storage space and a large antique-style bathtub.

A rainwater-harvesting system and improved insulation have also been added to make the property more environmentally friendly.

Chris Dyson Architects recently won the AJ Small Projects Award for its extension of Wapping Pierhead. The award celebrates architectural projects built with a budget of less than £250,000.

Photography is by Peter Landers and Georgina Mann.

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completes a Georgian terrace in London appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: water becomes the main character in this black and white music video created by director Albert Sala for John Matthias’s Spreadsheet Blues.

Having never worked with water before, Albert Sala was interested in the different effects he could create to help evoke a sense of melancholy and tenderness he found in Matthias‘s music.

Sala was recruited by Matthias’s record label Village Green to develop the proposal for the video.

“As I listened to the first notes of the song, I sank into a nocturnal and rainy atmosphere, and saw raindrops falling on a lake,”  Sala told Dezeen.

“Following this train of thought, I started to work with the idea that the main character in this video should be water. I was interested by the possible effects we could achieve with its movement and light changes,” he said.

Each object from the fallout of an accident, which takes place off-screen, appears on the surface of the water, some emerging from underneath in slow motion and some falling from above to create a series of hypnotic scenes.

To help control this effect, Sala created a series of platforms for each item to stand on within a cube filled with water.

“It is a visual metaphor in which our character has an accident, causing the realisation that the things that surrounded him in life weren’t as important as he once thought,” said Sala.

“The visual idea of the project was to evoke a sense of melancholy and tenderness, states our character goes through, with the help of elegant and poetic imagery.”

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Albert Sala’s music video for John Matthias appeared first on Dezeen.