8 | Cool, Weird Halloween Costumes You Can Pull Out Of A Printer. Need a last-minute Halloween costume? Print yourself out one of these beautiful papercraft masks. Designed by Steven Wintercroft, a mask maker who specializes in selling his designs online, these masks are downloadable as PDF templates, which can be easily printed out and assembled at home with some scissors and glue. The masks are charmingly low-poly, almost as if they were plucked from the head of a particularly tasteful Second Life avatar, circa 2006. There are a lot of options, too. If you're a gamer with a spare letterman jacket around, here's a great last moment costume idea you can put together in a flash using these masks: go as Jacket, the animal mask-wearing psychopath assassin from the amazing 2012 arcade game, Hotline Miami. Download Wintercroft's wonderful mask designs here. Openstructures at istanbul design biennial 2012.
Oct 16, 2012 openstructures at istanbul design biennial ‘waterboiler filter’ by unfold the emergence of open source design and software systems over the past years has allowed individuals to be more involved in the development of products and networks. this has enabled us to move towards a less rigid means of manufacturing with emphasis on collaborative production and processes through the use of various tools. this was the underlying topic addressed in the ‘adhocracy’ exhibition curated by joseph grima at the 2012 istanbul design biennial which brought together international projects that touched upon the social and technological revolutions of recent years and their influence on the creative process. as part of the show, openstructures (OS) presented their construction system where ‘everyone designs for everyone’.
Filter detail image © designboom ‘waterboiler’ by jesse howard and thomas lommée a look at the OS design components used to make the water boiler OS blocbox module. Self-Assembly Lab. Is the collaborative work of designers Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado. 2 | See The "Mini Lisa," A Famous Painting At A Molecular Scale. Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new version of the Mona Lisa. It’s pretty darn close to the original, except for one thing: Theirs is only 30 microns long, about one-third the width of a human hair. This "Mini Lisa" was fashioned with an atomic force microscope using a process called ThermoChemical NanoLithography. With TCNL, each pixel of the image was "painted" by creating a nanoscale chemical reaction--by using heat to create molecules.
The more heat, the greater number of molecules. Scientists are hoping this research in TCNL technology will help expand the possibilities for nanomanufacturing, as well as nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, and bioengineering. Michael Hansmeyer: Building unimaginable shapes. Audi Envisions A Future Of Laser Brakes and OLED Trim.
Lights are some of the most fundamental safety technology on cars. They allow us to drive at night. They signal the people behind us that we’re braking. But could we do better? Could we leverage lasers and LEDs to signal more information than “my headlights are on” and “STOP!” Audi thinks so. The German car maker has released a series of new car light concepts that look straight out of Hollywood. Another rear-end concept is what Audi calls the Swarm. With Audi’s final concept, OLED paneling, it’s probably harder to make an argument for practicality. See more here. [Hat tip: designboom]
A Company Still Living The Dream Of American Manufacturing. Amuneal’s reputation is good enough that on occasion, a client will call up with no idea who they are, as one from Kenneth Cole did recently. “I don’t know whom I’m calling,” he explained to Adam Kamens, the company’s CEO. “I’m new, and I have a note from the person I replaced that just says, ‘You have to call Adam.’” They call because Amuneal is one of the few companies that can coax an architect’s or designer’s or artist’s fever-dream into reality. For Barney’s, the company built a horse out of hundreds of coat hangers, and a 50-foot steel ceiling fixture that looks like a spider web.
For Calvin Klein, a fleet of cast-resin mannequin silhouettes that hang from the ceiling like ghosts. And recently for Ted Baker’s new 5th Avenue flagship, they built a three-story staircase covered in brass inlays that looks invented by Doc Brown during Back to the Future III. Amuneal, in other words, makes the environments that power our high-end retail capitalism.
Saving The Family Business. Filabot makes 3D printing “ink” out of your plastic recyclables. There’s another reason 3D printing may one day become a mainstream product: It can help you save the planet. A funded Kickstarter project for the Filabot, spotted by the Singularity Hub, delivers on that promise by recycling plastics from your home into the material needed for 3D-printed objects. Not only does it offer reuse value for plastics — the “ink” used by 3D printers — but it can save money as well. If you’re not familiar with 3D printing, here’s a quick primer to help you understand what it is and why the Filabot sounds appealing. Unlike traditional printers that lay out ink on paper in a 2D plane, 3D printers create physical objects. They do this by heating up and extruding small layers of plastic atop one another. That’s where the Filabot comes in. I’d expect the Filabot’s price around $500 based on the Kickstarter pledge levels, but there are no details yet on exactly how much you’ll be able to purchase one for.
SketchChair by Diatom Studio. Cool Hunting Video Presents: Zai. This Nifty Machine Makes Furniture Using Thread Instead Of Screws. During Anton Alvarez’s first year at college, the Swedish-Chilean designer set out on a self-directed period of trial, error, and documentation he dubbed 120x120--120 days of creative research coupled with 120 photographs that followed his progress. “When I started, I didn’t have any goal or plan,” he tells Co.Design.
The result is a log of iterative concepts revolving around how to join pieces together, showing the unique evolution of an individual’s ideas. In the end, the momentum was overwhelming, and Alvarez wanted a way to keep his flow going. “The decision to make the thread-wrapping machine was to enable me to continue but in a different way--the tool was like something that sums all the experiments together.” The nifty contraption securely joins component parts without the use of hardware. After testing out an initial hand-held version, he developed a larger second model, which he then adjusted to the current incarnation, and it’s a pretty remarkable feat of engineering.
Faux-Artisanal Popcorn, Popped One Kernel At A Time. Cool Hunting Video Presents: Genspace. C-Fabriek production lines curated by Itay Ohaly and Thomas Vailly. Dutch Design Week: twenty-five designers set up their own production lines inside a former textile factory in the Netherlands last week, making furniture, lighting, clothes, shoes, food, paper and more with the help of visitors. Above: The Invisible Line by Francesco Zorzi, using heated tools to make monochrome drawings on thermal paper.
Curators and initiators of the C-Fabriek project Itay Ohaly and Thomas Vailly invited designers to create their own production lines, machines, tools and products for what they call "the New Factory. " Above: CONSUMER LABORatory by Joong Han Lee and Thomaz Bondioli, involving customers in the customisation and production of jewellery. Each installation is a combination of studio, factory and shop where consumers can watch and collaborate on the manufacture of their goods. Above: Printing Lab – An adventure in Graphic Design & Manual Printing by Olivia de Gouveia, an open printmaking workspace where participants print their own image of a factory.
Pixel Vases Landscape by Julian F. Bond. Photo © Pasquale Palmieri Guest article by Maria Passarivaki Mainly inspired by his fascination of mixing the handmade with industrial design, British designer Julian F. Bond’s exquisite pixel vases and lights all created by the same casting machine, will be featured from May until September in an exhibition entitled Pixel Vases Landscape at the Italian Swing Gallery in Benevento (26 May – 15 September 2012).
Julian F. Bond’s homeware brings a fresh eye to design; kitchen vases fashioned with pixels. His vessels redeem little squares of digital pixels onto crafts rather than on screen. The current pixel casting machine is the second version of the original cast machine. As part of the exhibition, a series of vessels made exclusively for the Swing Gallery will also be shown in colours fading from blue to white to grey. Sources: Julian F. Höweler + Yoon Architecture wins Audi Urban Future Award 2012. News: American studio Höweler + Yoon Architecture has won the Audi Urban Future Award 2012 with a concept to combine individual and public transport in the region between Boston and Washington nicknamed BosWash (+ slideshow). As one of four firms invited by automotive company Audi to explore how cities will function in the future, the architects have imagined a controlled transport infrastructure that stretches across the BosWash region to connect the suburbs with the cities, serving a population of 53 million people.
Eric Höweler and J. Meejin Yoon explain how the suburbs were constructed around the "outdated" American Dream of "the single-family home, with a front lawn and two-car garage. " They describe how within the "infrastructural leftovers of this now outdated dream" lies a possibility to create "alternate paths, different trajectories or new cultural dreams".
Höweler + Yoon Architecture are the second recipients of the Audi Urban Future Award, following German architect J. Cool Hunting Rough Cut: Drawing Machine. Improvisation Machine for rotational moulding by Annika Frye. Istanbul Design Biennial 2012: German designer Annika Frye incorporated a cordless drill in the rotational moulding machine she built for making one-off items using a process that would normally result in an identical series (+ movie).
The Improvisation Machine was designed by Frye as a way to incorporate spontaneity and unpredictability into the process of serial production. "It was difficult to 'design' something improvised," Frye told Dezeen. "Improvisation can't be repeated or planned – and therefore I can only try to design somehow the framework in which improvisation will eventually happen. " The spontaneity comes from never using the same mould twice. To begin the process, Frye makes a plastic mould from a flat sheet by adapting a net based on tessellated octagons. The mould is then suspended in the frame by strips of fabric tape, filled with wet polymer plaster and sealed before the drill is switched on. After hardening, the objects are sanded outside and varnished inside. Faceture by Phil Cuttance.
London designer Phil Cuttance has built a machine to cast faceted vases that are unique every time. The Faceture series is made of water-based resin, rotated inside a folded mould as it hardens. The mould can be altered before each casting by pushing and pulling parts of the folded plastic net inwards and outwards. Royal College of Art graduate Julian Bond developed a similar process in 2010 by pushing plaster rods back and forth to continuously alter the cast form.
See his work here. Other projects by Cuttance on Dezeen include vases made by welding plastic offcuts together and coat hooks made from toy animals. Images are by Petr Krejčí and Phil Cuttance. Here's some more information from Cuttance: FACETURE vases The FACETURE series consists of handmade faceted vessels, light-shades and table. The FACETURE process First the mould of the object is hand-made by scoring and cutting a sheet of 0.5mm plastic sheet. Each vase is handmade, unique, and numbered on the base. Available in two sizes: Those Who Make.