I recently watched Stephanie Rothenberg speak about her project doublehappinessjeans, a Second Life sweatshop that produces designer denim by the underpaid labor of virtual avatars; producing the goods in both physical and digital form. The idea makes an intriguing point about the ideal of Personal Fabrication: that one day manufacturing of complex products will be […]
Category Archives: product design
digital sweat
Also posted in fabrication, fashion, futurecraft, marketing, possessed products, soft/glowing
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monolithic shoes
I couldn’t resist these Puma Injex shoes injection molded in one piece from non-PVC (presumably Polyurethane) foam rubber: they’re light and cushy and they appear to waste less material than typical shoes. In reality these are just attractive crocs, and they made me wonder whether they represent any benefit over traditional sneakers. They weigh about […]
Also posted in energy, fabrication, fashion, soft/glowing
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sound cards
Got some musical greeting cards from Hallmark – funny on the outside (above) and very pretty on the inside (below), no?
Posted in product design
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being wrong
Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles is a remarkable feat for a fashion company: a visualization of their products’ global supply chains on a map, along with videos of each step in the manufacturing process, and descriptions of each item in terms of distance traveled, CO2 emissions, waste generated and energy consumption. Not only is it impressive that […]
Also posted in blogogracy, fabrication, fashion, free & open, futurecraft, marketing, materials, open objects, supply chain, traceability, visualization
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tracking pills
By one estimate at least 15% of all drugs sold are counterfeit resulting in thousands of deaths. One reason Vardex Laser developed a technique to etch individual pills with 2-D bar codes in a process that takes “less than a millionth of a second” to mark a product in a process that is completely “clean […]
Also posted in 2d, futurecraft, possessed products, 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, fabrication, furniture, futurecraft
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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, fabrication, furniture, livingbreathing
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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, fabrication, free & open, futurecraft
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