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The Evolution of the Designer

We live in a sped-up world in which technological advances occur faster and faster. We can’t imagine, for instance, living in our homes and working in our offices without products that were lab experiments only five years ago. Often, it has been technological innovation that has served as the catalyst for these changes. For example, will the 3D printer – the cost of which has plummeted in only a decade – move from the lab and the factory into our homes and offices in the near future? How could seemingly small changes like this actually have a big impact on society, socially, economically and culturally?

Technology has bestowed a greater responsibility on the designer by radically altering his role. Design will not only be about creating products that are a result of innovation, but envisioning future scenarios and communicating these clearly to the public, suggesting new production processes and testing the manifold uses of new technologies. The designer is now in a position to tell factories which tools should be made and/or designed in order to make products, becoming as much researchers, scientists and engineers as “designers.” In this way, they must begin to use technology as a tool with which to expand what we perceive as “normal” and constantly re-create our quotidian world.

The Evolution of the Desinger (pdf)

Source and More: Bits ‘n Pieces

Gestural Interfaces are the Future

In the recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace there is a scene in which M, Bond and other agents share information and briefings around a multitouch table. Just three or four years ago this would have seemed as sci-fi as the now infamous scene in Minority Report, but this time it felt like MI6 was almost behind the curve.

From the work of Jeff Han to Apple’s iPhone, Nintendo’s Wii and slew of larger multitouch interfaces such as Microsoft’s Surface and MultiTouch’s Cell, the era of gestural interfaces is here. Physical and screen-based interfaces have collapsed into each other and both industrial and interaction designers have a whole new set of issues to grapple with.

Dan Saffer’s latest book, Designing Gestural Interfaces maps out this new frontier. The positive side is that there are a range of exciting new interaction and product possibilities. The negative side is a potentially confusing mess of gestures, each specific to a brand or, worse, owned by one of them through irresponsible patent usage.

Source; Core 77

Designing Gestural Interfaces

If you want to get started in new era of interaction design, this is the reference you need. Touch screens on mobile devices and ATMs let us manipulate things onscreen with our but there’s been no central source of information about gestural interface technology - until now. Designing Gestural Interfaces provides you with essential information about kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns: all you need to know to augment your existing skills in ‘traditional’ websites, software, or physical products. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, this book helps you: learn the process of designing gestural interfaces, from documentation to prototyping to communicating to the audience what the product does; get an overview of technologies surrounding touch screens and interactive environments; examine current patterns and trends in touchscreen and gestural design; learn about the techniques used by practicing designers and developers today; see how other designers have solved interface challenges in the past; and, look at future trends in this rapidly evolving field. Only half a dozen years ago, the gestural interfaces introduced in the film Minority Report were science fiction. Now, because of technological, social, and market forces, we see similar interfaces deployed everywhere. Designing Gestural Interfaces will help you enter this new world of possibilities. 

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc. (3 Dec 2008)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 0596518390
• ISBN-13: 978-0596518394

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PediaPress: Printed Books from Wiki Content

PediaPress.com is an online service that lets you create customized books from wiki content. Simply add any articles you like into a Collection, and then click to order them as a paperback book. Covers, a table of contents, a detailed index and a list of figures are generated automatically, and the books are printed and shipped within 2–15 business days. Combine the advantages of up-to-date and in-depth knowledge with the convenience of printed books. Books are typeset and printed on demand based on your personal selection. You get your unique book and support the Wikimedia Foundation. Discover books created by other users in catalog. Contribute and share yours, too!

Source: Wikipress

• 3D Computer Graphics by Wikipedians
• Order via Pediapress

Design by Web: Everyone an Alessi

In the world of digital design and fabrication there is an interresting development going on. One that has to do with the democratisation of the design and the fabrication process: It is becomming an every body thing -a mass and popular culture thing. Marx would have loved it: the means of design and production back in the hands of the workers at last.

This development is simular to earlier movements as Painting by Number in the 1950s and the famous Bob Ross painting courses on TV in the 1980s. Now at the beginning of the 21 century a third movement is on its way. One that has to do with the democatisation of design and fabrication. So every body is becomming a desinger and a producer by the Web.

But in order to be so the tools must be verry simpel as you can see at the webtools of mass customization websites and webtools that offer you the posibility to design your own product followed by ordering a 3D print or lasercutted version bij post. This must be the case because most people are not educated as designers and engineers. So the tools must be almost stupid and give the user not to much design freedom. See Ponoko, Shapeways, Studio Ludens, Spore, some Mass Customization etc. The “but” is however that, what we see in the end, is a whole new range of smart creative tools that out smart creative people. 

Some Earlier Sentiments

The new Leisure

The decade of the 1950s was one of prosperity. Rising incomes and shorter workweeks gave Americans more leisure and more money to spend. Business was happy to supply this market with leisure-time products-from television sets to barbecue grills to paint-by-number kits. A new mass culture based on consumerism took shape. Writing in Life magazine in the late 1950s, cultural critic Russell Lynes set out to describe the popular pastimes of the new leisure. He observed that the usual markers of class-education, wealth, and breeding-no longer applied. The one thing that mattered was something that everyone had. That something, Lynes explained, was free time. In postwar America, class had become a matter of how one spent his or her free time.

Source: American History

Paint by Number

The simulation of creative experience was a key selling point for paint by number. In this trade-show demonstration, the exhibitor emphasized the point with this believe it or not notice: The lady painting this picture is not a painter. Among its harshest critics, the hobby seemed less a simulation than a violation of art, an attack on the last vestige of personal expression in an increasingly impersonal consumer society.

Paint by number (or painting by numbers) describes kits having a board on which light blue lines indicate areas to paint, each area having a number and a corresponding numbered paint to use. The kits were invented in 1950 by Dan Robbins who was employed by the Palmer Paint Company. The owner, Max S. Kline, asked Robbins for an idea for how to sell more paint. Robbins remembered being taught in high school that Leonardo da Vinci gave his assistants canvasses with numbered sections to paint. From this Robbins developed the kits.

In 1951 Palmer Paint introduced the Craft Master brand of paint-by-number kits. In three years they sold over 12 million kits. This popularity spawned many other companies produce their own versions of paint by number kits. The Craft Master paint-kit box tops proclaimed, Every man a Rembrandt.

Source: Wikipedia

The Joy of Painting 

As millions around the world discovered in the 1980s, you too can learn to paint realistic landscapes in only a short time even if you have never painted before. The Bob Ross Wet-on-Wet Technique leads you, step-by-step, into the wonderful world of art. Find great and almost instant satisfaction in this expressive method of painting.

The public arguably knows Ross best as the host of the public television series The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1995 and still appears in reruns in many broadcast areas. During each half-hour segment, Ross would instruct viewers in the art of oil painting using a quick-study technique that kept colors to a minimum and broke paintings down into simple steps that anyone could follow.

Ross later founded his own successful line of art supplies and how-to books, and also offered painting classes taught by instructors trained in the Bob Ross method. In a 1990 interview, Ross mentioned that all his programs were donated free of charge to the Public Broadcastig Station (PBS) and that his earnings came instead from sales of his 20 books and 100 videotapes (the total to that date), as well as profits from some 150 Bob Ross-trained teachers and a line of art materials sold through a national supplier.

Source: Wikipedia and Bob Ross

FreeFormFab Tilburg tijdelijk naar pand uitgeverij Zwijsen

De voormalige uitgeverij Zwijsen in Tilburg wordt voor een periode van ongeveer anderhalf jaar gratis ter beschikking gesteld aan Stichting Ateliers. De bedrijven die zich bij Stichting Ateliers gemeld hebben vormen een boeiende mix van creatief ondernemerschap op het gebied van 2D, 3D, AV, muziek, keramiek, meubeldesign, restauratie, glas-in-lood, interieurdesign, goudsmid, webshop en fooddesign.

Daarnaast krijgen twee andere initiatieven ruimte in de uitgeverij: Starterslift creatief, dat zich richt op startende ondernemers en de werkplaats FreeFormFab, een kleinschalige digitale ontwerp- en productiewerkplaats die ook gaat fungeren als FabLab. Aldus de gemeente Tilburg.

Zie ook Spoorzone

Kwartiermaker FreeFormFab aan de slag

John Krijger van het Tilburgse Bureau RTE is door het bestuur van Stichting FreeFormFab aangesteld als kwartiermaker. Belangrijkste klus voor hem is het ontwikkelen van een realistisch businessplan en een bijbehorend inhoudelijk programma voor FreeFormFab. Komende tijd zal hij daarom met een groot aantal stakeholders uit de wereld van het (creatief) ondernemen, het onderwijs en de overheid gesprekken voeren en een aantal expert meetings organiseren. 

Uiteindelijk moet dit leiden tot de realisatie van twee centra voor digital ontwerpen en produceren om te beginnen op Stijp S in Eindhoven en in het Veemarktkwartier in Tilburg en een mobiel FabLab. De gemeente Eindhoven en Tilburg hebben de financiering van de kwartiermaker op zich genomen.

Contact: John Krijger
Mob +31(0)622950583

Graphic 12: Customise This

In its 12th issue, Graphic sets out to explore the current craze for customization -from recent trends in customized trainers, clothes and readymades to the latest series of Penguin Classics with blank covers allowing readers to draw, paint, design, sew, spray, scribble, sticker, cut, rip, glue-back-together or whatever they feel like doing to their own covers.   

This trend is more than just a reaction against mass-market blandness and corporate stiffness. It is also a welcome resurgence of individualism, craft and independence as well as a celebration of improvisation and creative freedom.

For this issue, the Graphic editors asked creatives from around the world to come up with toys, t-shirts, CD covers, skateboards, baseball caps, books, magazines, jeans, jumpers, slippers, pyjamas, cars, chairs, mugs, notebooks, postcards, plates, lampshades, mini-skirts, Russian dolls -you name it- and then customize them.

• ISBN: 978-90-6369-179-0
• Editor(s):Marc Valli & Richard Brereton
• Design: Matt Willey and Zoe Bather
• Notes: Graphic 12 contains 8 special pages with stuff that readers can customize themselves
• Format: paperback
• Dimensions: 28 x 22 cm
• Pages: 198

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Thingiverse: The Place to share Things

Thingiverse is a place to share digital designs with the world. Some kind of Flickr for things. Just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer, digital fabrication will share the same path. Infact, it is already happening: laser cutters, cnc machines, 3D printers, and even automated paper cutters are all getting cheaper by the day. These machines are useful for a huge variety of things, but you need to supply them with a digital design in order to get anything useful out of them. 

Source: Thingiverse

Ponoko Prime: Manufactoring as a Service (MaaS)

The next part of our (Ponoko’s) evolution we’re launching a new innovation that we’ve named Designmake Prime - an online subscription service to design, make and market your product ideas like never before.

With Prime, we see a world where you can subscribe at a fixed monthly rate to make (and market) the creations of your dreams. It gives users a range of new services not offered by our original Designmake Free service. More

Frozen: Sound as Space

Dankzij digitalisering zijn beeld en geluid met elkaar verbonden op een manier die voorheen ondenkbaar was. Frozen presenteert audiokunst, prints en sculpturen als zelfstandige, maar onderling verbonden kunstwerken.

Frozen is gerealiseerd in samenwerking met de Noorse kunstenaar en curator Marius Watz, die is gespecialiseerd in het gebruik van generatieve systemen voor creatieve uitingen als print, animatie en sculptuur. Naast een bijdrage van Watz zijn er audiosculpturen te zien van Andreas Nicolas Fischer (DE) & Benjamin Maus (DE), Leander Herzog (CH) en Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan (UK). De audiosculptuur van Marius Watz is gebaseerd op Oslo Rain Manifesto van muzikant Alexander Rishaug. De andere sculpturen zijn gebaseerd op Reflection van Freiband, een project van de Nederlandse muzikant Frans de Waard. De geprinte stills zijn van Marius Watz en Leander Herzog. 

Frozen werd eerder gepresenteerd tijdens het 5 Days Off Festival 2008 in Amsterdam. Frozen is nu weer te zien van 17 november tot 10 december in de Concrete Image aan de Store Spuistraat 250 in Amsterdam.

• Concrete
• 5Daysoff
• Generator.x
• Pictures Flickr

          

(Marius Watz: Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto). Rapid prototyping object based on FFT data from the song Oslo Rain Manifesto by Alexander Rishaug - Image by Marius Watz.)

Bron: TAG

Oproep: Samen RepRap machines bouwen

Protospace in Utrecht start vanaf maandag 10 november met een groep die gezamelijk RepRap machines gaat bouwen. Zin om mee te doen? Mail dan even naar Erik de Bruijn of naar Siert van Protospace. Wel uiterlijk maandag 10 november even laten weten. En ook hier geldt hoe meer zielen hoe meer vreugd.

Nationale ZZP infodagen 2008

Hoewel er zeer veel informatie te vinden is over ondernemen organiseert de eigenwijze vakorganisatie ZZP (Zelfstandigen Zonder Personeel) Nederland zelf een vakbeurs op 15 en 16 november. Volgens ZZP Nederland is de behoefte aan duidelijke informatie zo groot dat men heeft besloten om een ZZP Beurs te organiseren voor ZZP’ers en zij die dat willen worden. Inmiddels is de belangstelling zeer groot en verwacht men 5.000 tot 10.000 bezoekers op de beurs die wordt gehouden in het Schiphol A4 Hotel. 

ZZP Nederland is enkele jaren geleden gestart om de collectieve zorgverzekering voor ZZP’ers te kunnen aanbieden. Inmiddels zit de belangenbehartiger voor ZZP’ers in een zeer opmerkelijke stroomversnelling. 4.000 ZZP’ers hebben zich aangesloten en iedere maand komen daar 450 nieuwe bij. 

Noodzaak voorlichting

Er is kennelijk nog veel onduidelijkheid in de ondernemerswereld. Kan ik een bedrijf starten vanuit een uitkering? Welke rechtsvorm moet ik kiezen? Wat is een VAR en heb ik er een nodig? Arbeidsongeschikt en dan? Hoe zit het met belastingen? Ben ik juridisch aansprakelijk? Waartegen moet ik mij verzekeren en hoe doe ik dat voordelig? Administratie en bankzaken, hoe regel ik dat? Allemaal vragen die spelen bij zelfstandigen zonder personeel (ZZP’ers) en startende ondernemers. Tijdens de Nationale ZZP Infodagen wordt dit uitgelegd. Deze beurs, bestaande uit ca 25 stands en veel workshops wordt georganiseerd door ZZP Nederland met medewerking van de overheid en ondersteund door onder meer Menzis, Nationale Nederlanden en ABN AMRO.

Locatie, route en tijden

Hotel Schiphol A4 is gelegen aan de oostzijde van de snelweg A4 op 5 minuten rijden van de luchthaven Schiphol, op 10 minuten van Amsterdam en op 20 minuten van Den Haag. Er is voldoende parkeerruimte. Het exacte adres is Rijksweg A4 Nr.3, 2132 MA Hoofddorp. Openingstijden: Zaterdag 15 november 2008 van 10 tot 18 uur, op zondag van 10 tot 17 uur.

Kortingkaart downloaden

Voor leden van ZZP Nederland is de beurs gratis te bezoeken. Voor niet-leden wordt middels een kortingkaart een kleine entree gevraagd die direct wordt terugbetaald indien men besluit om lid te worden.

Bron: ZZP Nederland

Embedded House

Embedded systemen zijn overal om ons heen en maken deel uit van ons dagelijks leven. Of je nu in je auto stapt, met je GSM belt of achter je computer werkt. Embedded systemen vormen een van de sleuteltechnologieën van de toekomst en is onontbeerlijk in een kennisintensieve industriële economie. De mogelijkheden van embedded systemen zijn ongekend, al zijn ze nog te onbekend bij het Midden- en Kleinbedrijf. Daarom is Embedded House opgericht.

Embedded House slaat een brug tussen de kennis over embedded sytemen en bedrijven voor wie de toepassing van die kennis voor de toekomst van wezenlijk belang. Embedded House brengt vraag en kennis samen en bevordert toepassingen van nieuw ontwikkelde kennis, door het organiseren van bijeenkomsten, cursussen, adviezen en projecten voor het MKB.

Bron: Embedded House

Database Mass Customization

As mass customization and configurators are becoming common currency worldwide, our configurator database is evolving rapidly. With the number of entries now exceeding 40,000 and still growing, cyLEDGE decided to make it available to everyone. As this resource continues to expand, we’ll always have an open ear for your suggestions. 

Confuguration database is the world’s biggest configurator database, featuring over 500 web-based configurators. The full version of the database covers 85 attributes per configurator, of which some are available online. Scientific users are granted free access to the offline database (42,500 entries) upon request.

Source: Confuguration database

Land Prints: 3D Models of your Favorite Places

Now you can create custom 3D models of your favorite places. Through the magic of 3D printing, personalized replicas of vacation spots, journeys and natural wonders are just a few clicks away. 

LandPrints are three-dimensional models of the Earth’s surface. They’re 4-6 inches wide and made of a porcelain-like material. 3D printing turns three-dimensional computer images into three-dimensional objects.

Source: Landprint