Tokujin Yoshioka‘s PANE chair is made of a sheet of plastic fibers rolled into a cardboard tube and baked in an oven to retain its shape. It was the fruit of a three-year design process in which he aimed to invent a completely new chair unlike any other. He named it after the Italian word […]
Category Archives: fabrication
under the catwalk
I received this slide show purporting to document labor conditions in an Indian shoe manufacturer for a brand called Catwalk – although it’s hard for me to confirm any of this information. If you know about it, let me know, otherwise these are still pictures of people at work producing remarkably polished products in slave-like […]
Also posted in fashion, possessed products, supply chain
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carving cartoons
CraftVillageUK is a web portal for a community of soapstone carvers in Kenya designed to allow them to sell their intricate carvings directly to consumers worldwide. According to their website, the carvers earn four times as much per sculpture by selling through the web, and their earnings represent a significant increase in quality of life. […]
Also posted in 3d, art, conviviality, futurecraft, marketing, supply chain, traceability
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approximate chairs
These stereolithography models represent iterations of chairs generated voxel-by-voxel using a genetic algorithm seeking to ‘evolve’ a chair by random mutations judged for fitness in terms of chair-ness. Which means that instead of designing a chair like normal designers, EZCT Architecture & Design Research designed an organism made of little cubes that was virtually bred […]
Also posted in 3d, furniture, futurecraft, product design
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generating flat-pack furniture
I’ve covered Kram/Weisshar‘s Breeding Tables before, and they’re now available for sale at Moroso. I was finally able to see them up close – including process documentation and parts splayed out – at the Pompidou center a couple of weeks ago. To recap, the tables are generated using a genetic algorithm; its parts are cut […]
Also posted in 2d, 3d, furniture, livingbreathing, product design
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diy camera
The Miroslav Tichy exhibit at the Pompidou Center shows a unique kind of outsider art: voyeuristic photographs shot by the Soviet artist using exclusively hand-made cameras pieced together from trash and household odds-and-ends to take complex if imperfect tele-photo and otherwise surprise visions of human nature. You can see all of his hand-made cameras and […]
Also posted in art, customization, free & open, futurecraft, product design
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black tin
Glory is at it again with this amazing report on how tin metal is largely mined and exported against the law. Since the 18th Century tin has been mined and exported from the Indonesian island of Bangka, named after the word “wangka” meaning “tin.” Mining expanded until the 1990s when it was banned by the […]
Also posted in conviviality, environment, materials, possessed products, supply chain, traceability
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designers = form-givers
The IDSA provides a suite of readings on ecodesign, including this 2003 survey on the ecological performance of electronic products (pdf), in which a survey of product designers sought to reveal the mechanisms for indluencing sustainable design in consumer electronics. This bar chart struck my eye because it represents exactly what needs to change in […]
Also posted in energy, environment, marketing, materials, possessed products, product design, supply chain
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