Regardless of whether those genius Mayans are correct and next week sees an apocalypse take place, it’s not a bad idea to make sure you and your loved ones are well prepared for any level of disaster. Here are 12 presents from the Cool Hunting Gift Guide that span…
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This weather-forecasting lamp creates an indoor cloud to warn of grey skies outside (+ movie).
The Nebula 12 by Swiss design studio Micasa LAB combines liquid nitrogen and hot water to create a billowing cloud of steam, which is kept in circulation around the lamp by vacuum suction.
The form the cloud takes and the colour of the lamp depend on the weather forecast for the next 48 hours.
A grey cloud appears on an overcast day, while a patch of low pressure is signalled by a red light seeping through the cloud. On sunny days the cloud disappears, leaving a warm yellow light, and at sunset the light turns warm orange.
The weather forecast is sent to the lamp via a WiFi connection with a Nokia Lumia 920 mobile phone –the only phone the lamp works with so far.
Micasa LAB is the design studio attached to Micasa, a German furniture and interiors brand.
Above: movie by Micasa LAB showing the Nebula 12 in operation
We’ve featured a few cloud-generating projects on Dezeen, including a house in Kuwait with a courtyard concealed by mist and a water feature in London that erupts in misty clouds.
See all our stories about weather »
Here’s some more information from the designers:
The Nebula 12 is a concept developed by Micasa LAB, Zürich. Using meterological data from MetOff, the Nebula forms to represent outside weather: wake up to a flooding yellow light on a sunny day, or below a real cloud on that overcast winter morning. The cloud involves some peculiar techniques, liquid nitrogen, WiFi, and high power vacuum suction.
In the standard mode, Nebula 12 predicts the weather for the next 48 hours. A threatening low-pressure area is announced by a red cloud, and sunshine is shown in yellow. At the same time, the user can adjust the settings and define the source of information themselves. And the best is: regardless of how dark the cloud is, Nebula 12 never brings rain. At least, not within one’s own four walls.
The light but stable creation can be used in many ways: Nebula 12 can, like a natural cloud, change in colour and brightness and thus can be used as a variable source of light for romantic evening meals, when doing homework, when reading or just chatting.
The cloud is easily connected by WIFI to your Nokia Lumia 920.
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by Micasa LAB appeared first on Dezeen.
Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.
The installation, titled Windswept, consists of 612 rotating aluminium weather vanes mounted on an outside wall.
As gusts of wind hit the wall, the aluminium blades spin not as one but independently, indicating the localised flow of the wind and the way it interacts with the building.
“Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon,” said Sowers. “Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.”
“I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena,” he added.
We’ve featured a number of kinetic installations on Dezeen recently, including an undulating web that ripples like the surface of water and a gallery that lets visitors play in the rain without getting wet.
See all our stories about installations »
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Photographs are by Bruce Damonte.
Windswept is a wind-driven kinetic facade that transforms a blank wall into an observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between wind and environment.
Windswept consists of 612 freely rotating wind direction indicators mounted parallel to the wall creating an architectural scale instrument for observing the complex interaction between wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon. Wind gusts, rippling and swirling through the sculpture, visually reveal the complex and ever-changing ways the wind interacts with the building and the environment.
I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena. The Randall site, like many in San Francisco, is characterised to a great extent by its relationship to the wind. Climatically, onshore winds bring warm weather from the central valley while offshore wind bring us our famous San Francisco chilly weather.
Windswept seeks to transform a mundane and uninspired architectural façade (the blank wall of the theatre) into a large scale aesthetic/scientific instrument, to reveal information about the interaction between the site and the wind. Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon. Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.
Windswept is 20′ high x 35′ long. It is installed on an 1940s board-formed concrete building. The whole piece sits off the wall to allow an equal volume of air to enter a ventilation intake mounted in the middle of the existing wall. The wind arrows are made of brake-formed anodised aluminium. The arrow axles are mounted to a standard metal architectural panel wall system consisting of 25 panels. The panels have holes punched in a 12″ x 12″ grid pattern, into which the installation contractor secured rivet nuts to accept the stainless steel axles. Once the panels were installed the arrow assemblies were threaded into the rivet nuts.
Artist: Charles Sowers Studios, LLC
Project: Windswept
Location: Randal Museum, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA
Size: 35’ length / 20’ height
Client: San Francisco Arts Commission/Randall Museum
Contractor: Rocket Science
Engineer: Hom-Pisano Engineers
Project Completion: 11/19/2010
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Charles Sowers appeared first on Dezeen.
As our readers may have noticed from our limited publishing schedule this week, CH HQ has been pulled out of commission by massive power outages in the wake of superstorm Sandy. While our core team has emerged unscathed save for some extended power outage inconveniences, several thousands of people along…
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Visitors can play in the rain without getting wet in this installation by interactive designers rAndom International at the Barbican in London (+ slideshow).
Located in The Curve gallery, Rain Room is a perpetual rain shower which lets visitors feel the moisture in the air and hear the sound of rain while remaining untouched by drops of water.
Cameras installed around the room detect human movements and send instructions to the rain drops to continually move away from visitors.
The water drips through a grid in the floor where it is treated before being sent back up to the ceiling to fall again.
Formed in 2005 by former Royal College of Art students Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood, rAndom International has created a number of installations involving audience participation.
“Rain Room is the first time that we’ve extended the level of our experimentation to the huge public space that is The Curve at the Barbican,” rAndom International told Dezeen.
“Our other work has performed on a more intimate scale in terms of size and engagement, but what’s common to most of our projects is that they extract interesting behaviour from the viewers,” they added.
Their proposal to create a rain shower inside the gallery didn’t faze the curators. “The curatorial team around Jane Alison has not blinked once in view of the actual implications of realising the Rain Room at The Curve – a never-done-before project featuring thousands of litres of water above a BBC recording studio and right next to a theatre and concert hall in a public art gallery.”
The designers have also collaborated again with British choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose Random Dance company will perform short ‘interventions’ in the Rain Room to a score by Max Richter on selected Sundays during the exhibition.
“Working with Wayne and Random Dance has always been very rewarding, as his perspective seems to complement our way of working extremely well,” said the designers. Earlier this year Dezeen featured their collaboration for the Future Self project at MADE in Berlin, in which a lighting installation mapped and replicated human movement.
Rain Room isn’t the first weather-related art installation to appear on Dezeen – we’ve also featured a moving cloud of raindrops in a Singapore airport and an LED sign in a London park displaying yesterday’s weather.
See all our stories about weather »
See all our stories about art »
See all our stories about the Barbican »
Photographs are by Felix Clay.
Here’s the full press release from the Barbican:
Rain Room by rAndom International at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London
Admission Free
4 October 2012 – 3 March 2013
The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England. Rain Room has been made possible through the generous support of the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art.
Known for their distinctive approach to digital-based contemporary art, rAndom International’s experimental artworks come alive through audience interaction. Their largest and most ambitious installation yet, Rain Room is a 100 square metre field of falling water for visitors to walk through and experience how it might feel to control the rain. On entering The Curve the visitor hears the sound of water and feels moisture in the air before discovering the thousands of falling droplets that respond to their presence and movement. Rain Room opens in The Curve on 4 October 2012.
Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said: The Curve has previously played host to guitar-playing finches, a World War II bunker and a digital bowling alley. rAndom International have created a new work every bit as audacious and compelling – Rain Room surpasses all our expectations.
At the cutting edge of digital technology, Rain Room is a carefully choreographed downpour – a monumental installation that encourages people to become performers on an unexpected stage, while creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. The work also invites us to explore what role science, technology and human ingenuity might play in stabilising our environment by rehearsing the possibilities of human adaptation.
rAndom International said: Rain Room is the latest in a series of projects that specifically explore the behaviour of the viewer and viewers: pushing people outside their comfort zones, extracting their base auto-responses and playing with intuition. Observing how these unpredictable outcomes will manifest themselves, and the experimentation with this world of often barely perceptible behaviour and its simulation is our main driving force.
Finding a common purpose as students at the Royal College of Art, rAndom International was founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood. Today the studio is based in Chelsea – with an outpost in Berlin – and includes a growing team of diverse talent. With an ethos of experimentation into human behaviour and interaction, they employ new technologies in radical, often unexpected ways to create work which also draws on op art, kinetics and post-minimalism.
rAndom International have gained international recognition, inspiring audiences from broad multidisciplinary interests. A breakthrough work of 2008, Audience, marked rAndom’s first installation with audience participation. Motorised mirrors disconcertingly respond to human activity in their midst in inquisitive, synchronised movements, with the viewer becoming both active agent and subject of the piece. Swarm, a light work of 2010, emulates the behaviour of birds in flight: the sound created by the presence of visitors causes the abundant individual light sources to respond in swarm-like formations. With Future Self, a new commission by MADE Berlin in 2012, the studio explores the direct interaction of the viewer with the full body image of the self, represented in light in three-dimensions.
Other notable commissions include Reflex, a large scale light installation that inhabited the windows of London’s Wellcome Trust for one year, and the studio’s scenography for Wayne McGregor’s production, FAR, presently on world tour. rAndom International’s kinetically responsive sculpture Fly was premiered at the last Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, while intelligent light installation Swarm Study / III is on display permanently at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
rAndom International are represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London and Paris. An overview of their work, Before the Rain, is on show in Paris 8 September – 21 December 2012. Prior to this they have exhibited at Tate Studio at Tate Modern, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich and Museum of Modern Art, New York. They have won a number of awards including Designer of the Future 2010, Prix Ars Electronica – Honourable Mention, CR – Creative Futures Award, Wallpaper* Award and were listed in the Observer’s Top Ten Creative Talent in the UK. Earlier works form part of the permanent collections at the Frankel Foundation for Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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at the Barbican appeared first on Dezeen.
Gorgeous weather with Hollr’s new iPhone app
Mobile development house
Hollr follows up last year’s
GO HD, a GPS-based app that lets users explore a new dimension of their neighborhood in real time by posting pictures and videos of their daily activities while neighbors do the same. This month the company distinguishes itself yet again with Solar, a simple and visually appealing weather app that turns checking the forecast into a surprisingly enjoyable experience. In the onslaught of recent apps designed to reveal the climate’s intentions for the day, Solar outranks its competitors by shying away from complex interfaces and confusing vector polygons and instead chooses to make high design a priority by sticking to the basics.
The rain-or-shine experience begins by selecting a city of origin, and Solar lets you view the weather for up to four destinations simultaneously with an intuitive double tap or pinch—a winning feature for travelers. The true genius behind the app’s design reveals itself once you hone in on a single location, with a home screen that displays on the time, date, weather condition (rainy, sunny, partly cloudy) and temperature in the upper lefthand corner while a beautiful, hyper-sensorial colorscape fills the background in gradient hues that reflect the time of day. When applicable, an understated animation will fill the display with soft raindrops, dewy fog or snowflakes, but Hollr’s take on this now-standard weather app feature doesn’t go over the top.
Solar’s most winning element comes in the form of its 24-hour forecast: scrolling up prompts the appearance of a simple clock in the screen’s upper righthand corner, its hands advancing through the day as your finger moves northward. The time, date and weather update in corresponding real time as the hours flash by and the aurora-like background undergoes a series of dazzling changes in color combinations. The effect is pleasantly subtle, giving you a more artistic vision of what the day has in store. In the other direction, swiping down brings a three-day forecast into view at the top of the screen, while swiping left-to-right allows you to sift between chosen cities.
Hollr’s newest creation wins out with its minimalist design and unwillingness to burden users with unnecessary information. Though the app doesn’t delve into the technical information required by a sailor or mountain climber, it emerges as the perfect digital addition to any city dweller’s cadre of innovative, simplified applications.
Solar is available for 99¢ in the
iTunes App Store.
The Weather Yesterday est une installation réussie du studio Troika. Cette création permet en effet de montrer la température et la météo précise du jour précédent. Située dans le Hoxton Square jusqu’au 9 septembre, l’objet composé de LED est une commande de RIBA pour le London Festival of Architecture.
Following a recent spell of weather-related projects, we’ve compiled a new Pinterest board featuring all the sun, rain, snow and fog from the pages of Dezeen. Over 21,000 people now follow us on Pinterest – join them here.
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German design collective ART+COM have installed over a thousand rising and falling metal raindrops in Singapore’s Changi Airport (+ movie).
Kinetic Rain was commissioned as a calming centrepiece for the airport’s departure hall.
Suspended by steel wires, the raindrops are computer-controlled to move up and down in choreographed patterns.
The dancing installation is in two parts, each comprising 608 copper-covered aluminium raindrops.
We’ve featured a few designs inspired by meteorology recently, including a light installation that displays yesterday’s weather and a poster celebrating London’s rainy summer, which is available at the Dezeen Super Store in Covent Garden.
Photographs are by ART+COM.
Here’s some more from ART+COM:
In the course of refurbishment works ART+COM was commissioned by Changi Airport Group, Singapore, to create a signature art installation for the Departure Check-in hall of Terminal 1. The sculpture aims to be a source of identity for its location, and provides a moment for passengers to contemplate and reflect despite the busy travelling atmosphere.
Kinetic Rain is composed of two parts, each consisting of 608 rain droplets made of lightweight aluminum covered with copper. Suspended from thin steel ropes above the two opposing escalators, each droplet is moved precisely by a computer-controlled motor hidden in the hall’s ceiling. The entire installation spans an area of more than 75 square metres and spreads over 7.3 metres in height.
Kinetic Rain follows a 15-minute computationally designed choreography where the two parts move together in unison, sometimes mirroring, sometimes complementing, and sometimes responding to each other. In addition, several spotlight sources mounted below the installation create a play of shadows on the terminal’s ceiling as they illuminate the movement of the rain droplets. German media technology firm MKT did the mechatronic implementation of Kinetic Rain.
Client: Changi Airport Group, Singapore
Number of droplets: 1216
Number of motors: 1216
Material of droplet: aluminum covered with copper
Weight of droplet: 180 grams
Weight of overall installation: 2.4 tons
Droplets travel distance from ceiling to lowest point: 7.3 metres
Size: Each part covers 9.80 x 4 metres
Project duration: 20 months, from August 2010 till April 2012
Technology used: Custom industrial mechanical engineering parts and custom code, combined with a lot of creativity
About ART+COM
ART+COM was founded in 1988 in Berlin by a group of artists, designers and developers who were sparked by the belief that the computer was more than a tool. Back then they realised the technology’s potential to become a universal communication medium. The group set out to practically explore its artistic, scientific and technological aspects and to put these aspects to use. Their spectrum of works ranges from artistic and design projects through to technological innovations and inventions, which have as a whole pioneered media-based spatial communication design and art in the last 25 years.
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by ART+COM appeared first on Dezeen.
London design studio Troika have been poking fun at the British obsession with the weather with their lighting installation in an east London park.
The LED lights on the five-metre-high installation change throughout the day to depict conditions from the same time the previous day, so passers-by can see whether the weather is better or worse.
Classic forecasting icons show whether it was sunny, rainy or cloudy, and a numerical display shows the temperature.
Custom-made software and a wireless connection enable weather data to be updated automatically.
The installation opened in east London’s Hoxton Square last weekend as part of the London Festival of Architecture, and it will remain there until 9th September 2012.
During the festival, the square was also home to a handful of cloud-like parasols designed by London-based architectural practice Harry Dobbs Design.
Photographs are by Troika.
See all our stories about weather »
See all our stories about Troika »
Here’s some more information from Troika and the London Festival of Architecture:
The Weather Yesterday takes our obsession with progress ad absurdum by sardonically changing our focus from ‘forecast’ to the ‘past’. The five metre-high sculpture celebrates the weather as a predominant topic of discussion in British culture while offering a spin on the urgency with which we are using our mobile devices, forecasting and interactive technology.
The London Festival of Architecture (23 June – 8 July 2012) with its theme of ‘The Playful City’ brings architects and communities together across the capital.
RIBA London is partnering with the London Borough of Hackney and consulting engineers Ramboll to transform Hoxton Square with the ‘Weather – It’s Raining or Not’ installation by architect Harry Dobbs, including ‘The Weather Yesterday’ by creative practice Troika.
An interactive light installation, ‘The Weather Yesterday’ will playfully highlight Britain’s obsession with the weather, with the square set to feature a collection of parasol-shaped structures around a central five-metre-tall visual creation displaying the previous day’s weather conditions using classic forecasting iconography.
Parasol-shaped structures from architects Harry Dobbs, playfully dotted around the square, offer social meeting places for rest, play and discovery under their cloudy canopies. Chameleon-like, they will respond to the visitor, at one moment creating a cosy space protected from the elements, or next opening up to support the wider shared experience of the square.
Exhibition on display 7 July – 9 Sept 2012
Hoxton Square
London
The Weather Yesterday
LEDs, aluminium, custom electronics
2,20 m (H) x 2,20 m (W) x 10 cm (D)
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by Troika appeared first on Dezeen.
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