Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Music Project: artist Isobel Knowles used cut-out paper shapes to create the animated underwater scenes of dancing swimmers and fish in this music video for Australian singer Sally Seltmann’s single Catch Of The Day.

Knowles used stop-motion animation to give movement to the paper shapes, shooting each element separately and building up the synchronised compositions digitally.

“The animations are shot frame by frame using a camera and a light box,” Knowles told Dezeen. “I shot most of the elements separately and then composited them, changed colours and added effects digitally, layering up each scene from small parts.”

Without a brief from Seltmann, Knowles was free to create her own interpretation of the track, which is the second single taken from the singer’s forthcoming album Hey Daydreamer.

“The music is quite rich sonically, but still quite simple and pop,” Knowles said. “I wanted to reflect this richness and playfulness with the visuals.”

“The cascading harps at the beginning of the song just instantly made me think of underwater scenes from movies and cartoons, so I followed my initial reactions.”

The post Paper fish dance to the beat in Isobel Knowles’
music video for singer Sally Seltmann appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: scientists are combining non-living chemicals to create materials with the properties of living organisms, says the creator of a self-repairing shoe made from protocells.

Protocells, as the chemical cocktails are known, are made by mixing basic non-living molecules in lab conditions. These then combine to create substances that exhibit some of the characteristics of living cells: the ability to metabolise food, to move and to reproduce.

In this movie Dezeen filmed at the Wearable Futures conference in December, designer and materials researcher Shamees Aden explains how “scientists are now mixing together groups of chemicals [to make] them behave like living cells. They are able to reconfigure, they are able to adapt to light, pressure and heat.”

The synthetic production of living materials is so far limited to basic applications – modifying the behaviour of oil droplets in a water solution, for example – but Aden has developed a proposal that uses protocells to make self-regenerating soles for a pair of running shoes.

The Amoeba running shoes designed by Aden use protocells’ capabilities of responding to pressure, and inflates or deflates according to the texture of ground the wearer is running on to provide more or less cushioning.

Photocells, which have a limited life span, would be replenished after each run, explains Aden. “Your shoe box would be a vessel which would hold the [protocell] liquid inside. You could buy your protocell liquid and it would be dyed any colour you like and you would pour that in and as the shoe is rejuvenated the colours would emerge.”

The speculative project is the result of a collaboration with chemist Dr Michael Hanczyc of the Institute of Physics and Chemistry and the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) in Denmark, who has worked extensively on protocells.

“At this point it is a speculative design project but it is grounded in real science and it could be in production by 2050,” says Aden.

This is the third movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.

In the first movie, designer of Dita von Teese’s 3D-printed gown Francis Bitonti explained how advances in design software mean “materials are becoming media”. In the second, Suzanne Lee explained how she makes clothes “grown using bacteria.”

The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Synthetic materials can
“behave like living cells” appeared first on Dezeen.

Stockholm 2014: this movie by Swedish brand Massproductions shows how designer Chris Martin’s modular sofa system can be arranged to fit any room.

The Anyway Sofa System by Chris Martin features elements with concave and convex bends of both 30 and 90 degrees, creating flexible arrangements that can fit into awkward spaces.

“I saw a need for a sofa that closely related to the space it found itself in,” said Martin. “The Anyway Sofa complements interior spaces, almost to the point where it becomes part of the architecture.”

The upholstered seating can be ordered with a high or low back and modules include the option to add armrests on either end.

Legs are available in a range of wood and metal finishes. Massproductions exhibited the seating at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair, which took place last week.

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zigzags around corners appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: new technologies mean the design process is becoming akin to “creating a Hollywood film,” says designer Francis Bitonti, who created a seamless 3D-printed dress for burlesque dancer Dita von Teese.

Speaking about the development of the dress at the Wearable Futures conference in London in December, Bitonti says that developments in computer-based design and 3D printing mean that designers are no longer limited by their knowledge of materials.

“The separation between what you can simulate and what you can physically model is gone”, claims Bitonti, founder of New York luxury fashion studio Francis Bitonti Studio.

Von Teese premiered the 3D-printed dress designed by Bitonti and designer Michael Schmidt at the Ace Hotel in New York in March last year and it became one of the most talked-about fashion stories of the year.

“One of the things we’ve been noticing is that materials are becoming media. I’m not operating on materials, I’m operating on animations, I’m operating on video, I’m operating on pixels and polygons. [The design process] is a lot closer to creating a hollywood film than it is making an aluminium cylinder,” says Bitonti.

Possibilities are now limited by the designer’s imagination rather than material constraints, Bitonti says. “What I’m finding every day is that I can make anything I can draw. And I can make something behave any way I can imagine it behaving. The gap closes every day.”

Prior to launching Francis Bitonti Studio, Bitonti trained as an architect. He says this background proved useful when designing the figure-hugging dress for the American model and burlesque dancer Dita von Teese.

“I found that developing a second skin for the body wasn’t really that much different from thinking about a building facade. It’s about breaking up shapes in pretty much the same way,” he says.

The seamless dress, which he developed last year, was made out of 3000 unique moving parts made using selective laser sintering (SLS), where material is built up in layers from plastic powder fused together with a laser.

The two-day Wearable Futures conference explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.

Bitonti is not the only designer exploring the fashion possibilities of 3D-printing.

Last year fashion designer Iris van Herpen and shoe designer Rem D Koolhaas collaborated to create 3D-printed shoes that look like tree roots and creative director of 3D Systems Janne Kyttanen designed a range of 3D-printed shoes for women that can be made at home overnight to be worn the next day.

The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Advances in design software mean
“materials are becoming media” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: Suzanne Lee of BioCouture explains how she makes clothes that are “grown using bacteria” in this movie filmed at the Wearable Futures conference in London in December.

“There’s a whole spectrum of organisms that can grow material,” says Lee, who founded BioCouture to explore how organisms like bacteria, yeast, fungi and algae could be harnessed to produce fabrics.

Lee showed the Wearable Futures audience a range of jackets and shoes made from bio-materials produced by bacteria in a vat of liquid to produce bacterial cellulose – a material that has similar properties to leather.

“The recipe that I’ve been exploring to grow a piece of clothing is using a symbiotic mix of yeast and bacteria,” she said. “It’s a fermentation method that grows you bacterial cellulose. It’s kind of like a vegetable leather if you like.”

She adds: “What attracts me to it is that it’s compostable. It’s not just biodegradable, it’s compostable. So you could throw it away like you would your vegetable peelings.”

BioCouture is a London-based design consultancy that is pioneering the use of bio-materials for the fashion, sportswear and luxury sectors.

Lee is a former senior research fellow at the School of Fashion & Textiles at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, and author of the 2007 book Fashioning The Future: tomorrow’s wardrobe, which was the first publication to explore how technology could transform fashion.

“Through an engagement with biology I’m really excited about how we can think about organisms like microbes as the factories of the future,” says Lee. “What most people know BioCouture for is a series of garments that were grown using bacteria. So the fibres, the material itself and the formation of the garment has been done by a microbe rather than a plant.”

In future, Lee believes that clothing materials themselves could be living organisms that could work symbiotically with the body to nourish it and even monitor it for signs of disease.

“What we have right now are living organisms making us materials, but then the organism is killed and the material just exists like any other,” she says.

“But I can imagine that we will eventually move towards the material itself being living while it’s on you, and having a direct relationship to your whole body in this happy micro-biome environment and perhaps diagnosing and treating, nourishing in some way the body surface so becoming part of your wellbeing.”

The two-day Wearable Futures conference explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.

The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post Microbes are “the factories of the future” appeared first on Dezeen.