Craft

As her final project for Central Saint Martins, designer Olivia Lee created a series of limited edition designer dolls, literally. Each figurine takes the likeness of an iconic designer of our time, including Zaha Hadid, Karim Rashid, and Jaime Hayon. In Lee’s own words:

It came from the observation that increasingly today, designer personalities are quite literally become synonymous with the objects they design. In studying the visual characteristics and distinct personalities of the designers as well as their products, I wondered what would happen if I merge these two entities together. What would happen if the designer became a product? How would that differ from the designer being closely associated with the product?

via noticias arquitectura / dezeen

Possibly frustrated with rampant tourism around his ‘hood, Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck developed a device that manipulates photographs being taken by ‘vandalising’ the subject matter with light. Working much like a portable light projector, Bismarck’s “Image Fulgurator” is comprised of a regular camera, flash control and unit, sensor and a positive-developed picture slide of “graffiti”. The Image Fulgurator fires its own flash when it detects a photograph being taken nearby, flooding the area with a projected image invisible to the naked eye. It’s when the photos are being reviewed after the fact that the vandalism is noticed. Now we just need to get prepared for more paranormal activity reports.

Julius von Bismarck

[via Freshness Magazine]

CutUp are an anonymous collective of artists based in East London known for experimenting with urban environments. The group’s latest project entailed the removal of large billboards and bus stop posters, which were then cut up into small squares, and then reassembled in the original location using the source material to create entirely new images.

Check out some images from the groups studio and of their work here.

[via Scott Burnham]

Make Magazine has a special section in their Volume 11 issue about how to hack your expensive bike so that it’s not going to get pinched. Tips include choosing ugly colors like orange, using car wax as an undercoat to make the paint blister, or just adding a sprinkle of rust.

Core 77 comments that this activity might represent some sort of ‘Stealth Wealth’.

Make Magazine

HDR Architecture has created a temporary exhibition that explores sustainable housing alternatives and personal power generation. They’ve constructed a temporary living structure built entirely out of wooden shipping pallets. These pallets are found all over the world, making this a solution that could be easily duplicated. It’s also human powered. Visitors can ride a bike which generates 125-200 watts to run the LED lights inside the house. This experiment makes great use of a material that many times is thrown in the trash.

Jetson Green has the statistics:

It’s estimated that there are about 2 BILLION ordinary unit load pallets in circulation globally, and about two-thirds of these are only used once. It’s further estimated that U.S. companies throw away roughly 4 billion board feet of wood pallets every year. Pretty crazy, I know.

[via Jetson Green]

Grad schools are often incubators of innovation—it’s not rare for a final project to become a successful company or product. This year’s students at Central Saint Martins in London have turned out some very cool concepts, if the pics on Flickr are any indication. Unveiled last week at the CSM Product Design Degree Show, the projects range from octagonal chocolates to toile couches to x-ray vases.

One of our favorites was titled “please keep my secrets.” This “emotional printer” is designed to take ephemeral communications like SMS messages and make them keepsakes. The box receives text messages from, say, your boyfriend, via Bluetooth and prints them out on an antique scroll in a small hopechest of sorts. A swirled design appears on the top when you touch the panel cover and grows as a message prints.

We recently spoke with the designer, Mayuko Sakisaka, to find out more about the project:

What is your background?

I learned Japanese-style painting in university before I studied product design in London. I am certain that I could put my creativity and unique cultural perspective from this experience in product design.

What was your inspiration behind the project?

I keep the letters from my friend, family and boyfriend. I also keep memorable texts, but they are not as tangible or beautiful as the letter.

Letters offer a more poetic and romantic medium than emails or texts. I feel that this is the vanishing quality of the communication in the digital age. I initiated a task to design an electric devise to transfer the potential of this older communication tool to the text message. The fundamental concept is to see how a mobile message from a boyfriend can be kept as a physical object in more emotional way.

How many texts do you think you send in a day?

It depends… around 1-5 texts in a day.

Do you ever handwrite letters or cards? Do you save those that you receive?

Sometimes I do, when I want to convey a special feeling or personal sentiment. And of course I keep the letters that I receive.

Can interested consumers purchase the finished product?

Actually not yet. I am looking for the company to produce this product.

It’s a success story most of us only dream of: Think up a great idea, build a company fueled by nothing but passion and love of art and humanity, blink and suddenly you’re making millions, without compromising your ideals.

That, apparently, is what happened to the guys who started Threadless. An article in this month’s Inc. Magazine profiles Jake Nickell, college dropout and wildly successful co-founder of Threadless, who stumbled into the twenty-first century’s Utopian business model:

Nickell is at the vanguard of a new innovation model that is quietly reshaping a host of industries. Whether it’s called user innovation, crowdsourcing, or open source, it means drastically rethinking your relationship with your customers. “Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer,” says Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.”

Read more about Nickell and Threadless here.

Called a “brick and mortar version of Etsy“, Endossa is a collective store in Sao Paulo that sells products from upcoming designers. The shop rents out boxed sections which can be customized any way the sellers want, and Endossa doesn’t get a commission from the sales. They also provide inventory tracking software and list all the products on the shop website.

Endossa

[via Coolhunting]

When we were in SF a couple of months ago, we visited with Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail. One topic he brought up during our conversation is something that we’ve been thinking about - and seeing a lot of - ever since: open source innovation. We caught up with Chris to hear more of his thoughts on open source, DIY hardware, and the people and organizations leading the way in this brave (relatively) new world.

When we were last looking at your Longtail site, we noticed the link to your personal project - the DIY drones. One moment you’re developing economic theory, the next you’re hacking flying technology together. What got you into this? Is there a big community?

This started as something to do with the kids with Lego and toy planes, and then spiraled wildly out of control. Now it’s a global open source aerial robotics community. Big? No. But we get a couple thousand people to the site every day and around 150k page views a month. Super niche, but super focused—you either totally get it or you don’t have any interest at all. It’s the Long Tail of social networks!

Isn’t creating something that flies, kind of hard to do? How do you create parts like the circuit boards?

By and large, we don’t make planes—we just buy pre-made RC planes and do a “brain transplant”, adding onboard computers and sensors to make them autonomous. We create circuit boards using free PCB-design software and upload the files to Chinese fabs that send us back the finished boards in a week for the price of two cups of coffee. It’s AMAZING. Here’s more: [link].

What do you think the impact of open source technology could be?

We don’t yet know. It feels like open source software in the early 90s, before Linux, Firefox and the other killer apps that showed how powerful that model is. Is the Firefox of open source hardware going to emerge from Google’s Android phone? The Arduino processor project (which we’re contributing to)? Something like the OLPC? It’s too soon to say.

Who is inspiring you in this space right now?

I think that Tim O’Reilly and the crew at Make Magazine/Maker Faire/Makezine are leading the way with a great energy and a spirit of adventure. They’ve made open source/DIY hardware seem as cool and subversive as the punk movement of the early 80s. Soldering irons are the new electric guitars!

Thanks, Chris!