Another interesting project from the guys of PROJECTiONE , myLight is a DIY lamp shade available for sale, I think this is a great example of how creative people can create their own business models and sell their own products skipping all intermediaries in the process an at the same time create more compelling products for customers .

My light is based in the Lightforms project. The profile curve of the shade is first generated in Rhinoceros and can be customized to any shape. A Grasshopper script interprets this curve, determines the number of components needed, and lays out each simple component with its necessary intersections. The “Teardrop” is their first model  available for sale but they have announced more will come in the future.

myLight from PROJECTiONE on Vimeo.

Project Description (from site)

myLight is a “Do It Yourself” luminaire intended to provide a user with a memorable experience and appreciation for design and fabrication. Made from durable mylar, myLight is hand assembled by the user following a video as a guide. The object becomes more than simply a store-bought lamp as the user is involved in its production and takes pride in its assembly. PROJECTiONE is focused on process in conjunction with final results. myLight shares this experience directly with users. The visual complexity of the laser cut system adds to its beauty while the simple method and repetition of assembly makes it easy and fun to build. We hope the process can be a shared experience for multiple users gathered around a single myLight.

For Use/Numen’s team  have been doing some interesting installations using nothing but transparent  packing tape to create some huge, self-supporting topologies  that visitors (specially the children ) can climb inside and explore. So far they have four installations documented at their  website.

I think the most interesting one  would be the one they made at Odeon , Vienna for the “Quer” symposium of interactivity , where the idea for the installation originates in a set design concept for a dance performance in which the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between the pillars . so the resulting shape is a (tape) recording of the choreography, which I think is a very good example to remember us all that interactive installations can also be done without any digital media at all.

Temholf / Berlin 10
-240 hours work (6 people, 4days)
-700 rolls of transparent self adhesive tape ( 38 km , 56 kg)
- 380 Euros
International Design Festival DMY
Berlin, Airport Tempelholf

Mikser / Belgrade 10
-300 hours work (6 people 5 days)
-1000 rolls of transparent self adhesive tape (50 km , 86kg)
-500 euros
Mikser Design Expo , Belgrade

Odeon / Viena 10
- Dance performance in wich the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between te pillars .
- 530 rolls of transparent self adhesive tape (35km , 45 kg )

Augmented Shadow is a project created by Joon Moon a programmer, designer who is exploring the realm of interaction, generative code and motion design on a basis of visual communication design. He is currently studying at MFA Design & Technology, Parsons, NY, USA were he submitted this project for his thesis you can check out more nice projects at the Parsons MFADT Thesis 2010.

Augmented Shadow_document from Joon Y Moon on Vimeo.

Concept (from website)
Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem.

This experiment brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow effect is an ‘interface metaphor.’ Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy.

(via @chrisoshea )

Among his collection of works I found two I liked the most the first one is called Daily Stack ,  I really need to get one of these organizing my work flow has become a bit difficult with so many distractions and activities to do and this seems to be a fun and effective way to solve this situation.

Daily Stack is a playful tool that helps you become more aware of your daily work-flow and time management. By creating a physical representation of your tasks, Daily Stack speaks subtly to your conscience and helps you manage your time through unobtrusive ambient feedback.
It consists of a base device and a collection of wooden bricks in different shapes and colours. The bricks represent different kinds of tasks and time-intervals. By adding a brick to the base you commit yourself to the task and time span that the selected brick represents. Daily Stack communicates with an desktop widget on your computer that enables you to keep track of your time and tasks in progress. It also enables you to browse through your past and and compare your days in a colourful informative pattern.

Daily Stack from Anders Højmose on Vimeo.

The other project would be Pong that Beat wich is a project made in collaboration with Sebastian Thielke and Jonas Maanson ,it is an interactive Pong table that when you play , the camera register where the ball is when it hits the table, and a new sound is added to that location. While playing the step sequencer is continuously running. In that way you create a beat while playing. If you drop the ball on the floor, you are game over.

PongThatBeat! from Sebastian Thielke on Vimeo.

About BreadedEscalope (from the site)
Sascha Mikel, Martin Schnabl and Michael Tatschl finished their education with a Masters degree in product & spatial design in London 2007.
After eight years in common design related education, they established a synergetic way of working and developed >breadedEscalope<, their studio.

bE creates socially sustaining artifacts and systems that raise questions and challenge  common meanings & general perceptions.
The outcome is poetic, functional and communicative, full of meaning and character.

“Objects or systems are never just aesthetic; we understand design to be more than beautification.  We create, to open versatile channels of experiencing environments, objects, or products. ”

The “statements”-their results of artistic product research, get manifested in small series, manufactured or commissioned by bE.
These approaches and experiments define the further treatment in applied work, regarding projects and services upon third parties.

bE is a fraction of the platform GOTO.
GOTO holds an international body of artists from various fields and professions and works as an extended network of creative resources.

Apart from doing very interesting projects using several technologies and digital fabrication tools , this guys are documenting their experiences and work methodologies, thing that I´m finding very useful , specially because I´m in a very similar position starting with my first partnerships and consultancy services.

I really recommend to visit their site and see what they´re up to.

First Manifesto from PROJECTiONE on Vimeo.

Thesis Proposal (extract from site)

PROJECTiONE defined

We do not intend to define specialists within our group. We are not a group of individuals that coexist to form a collaborative. While we have different backgrounds that affect our perspectives, we are not completely separate parts under the label of a whole. As Wiscombe explains, this has allowed for unpredictable and unforeseen results in the synthesis of our ideas and interests. However, unlike these clear definitions of collaboration and collective, our interests fluctuate between divergent and aligned. Our ideas, skills, and interests may differ, but they also overlap toward a common goal. We do not formulate individual ideas that the group supports, rather the group reformulates individual ideas to a point where the individual is indistinguishable from the group. This is our collective. This is PROJECTiONE.

Research

Our opportunities to work together in the past have focused on using digital and analog design and fabrication tools. To frame our position in this field, we contrast that experience against current theories and the critical positions of digital designers and fabricators. We have followed trends in digital theory and executed a series of interviews in New York City to understand what current designers and fabricators consider to be relevant to their practice. Our questions highlighted their perspective on the relationship between digital and analog tools and processes.

Analysis

Some groups we interviewed, such as Tietz-Baccon, find value in the relationships of digital and analog, often using CNC machinery to create jigs for crafted analog fabrication. They exhibit their craft through the use of all tools, recognizing that creativity and precision can still occur within the analog. Others, like Gramazio and Kohler at the ETH in Zurich are exploring this relationship in a different way. Though they are experimenting with a seven-axis robot, they have no intent of eliminating the human, remaining largely integrated into the process. [West Fest Pavilion in Switzerland] In this process, the robot picks up a piece of wood and places it on a table, where a student cuts it to a CNC-specified length with a miter saw. After cutting, the robot positions that same piece of wood in a specific place, while another student secures it with a nail gun. It is a mutually constructive machine-human relationship and an integrated use of this technology.

Similar to these groups, we completed a quick design/fabrication project entitled Projection that we used to analyze our internal methodologies and help define our position. Critical relationships existed throughout the project between the analog design (measurement of Cartesian coordinates) and the digital model (insertion of coordinates in digital space). This was made possible by our understanding of the required digital inputs that informed how we modeled and measured using analog tools. During fabrication, our analog techniques (steel cutting, and welding) informed the shape and information embedded in templates (laser-cut cardboard). These templates were designed to wrap around steel angles so that they could easily be held in place while marking and cutting, but also carried with them information regarding the steel pieces’ length and orientation. An interrogation of analog and digital space in this project allowed a unique and continuous transfer of information between the two.

This example highlights the thinking that is intrinsic to our process, relying on an intimate understanding of a variety of tools, both analog and digital. This knowledge can then be applied in developing innovative relationships (coordinate mapping, and laser-cutting templates). Unlike some of the designers and fabricators interviewed, we remain open to new uses of both analog and digital tools. We don’t place any undue importance on either new technologies or traditional means, and we rethink the relationships that exist between them.

PROJECTiONE´s position

Software and hardware should not just make designing or fabricating easier, streamlining the design process. They should not exist separate from the human. They should provide opportunities to change the way designers think. They should allow us to design differently; more precisely, more creatively, and with greater intent. This can be done through an interrogation of the tool’s purpose. Every tool has a purpose or material associated with it, but that purpose should be continually challenged. PROJECTiONE was created within this framework. We find design potential in the areas of overlap and creative use of analog and digital design and fabrication methods. In every project we intend to innovate. We develop new techniques. We rethink traditional techniques. We creatively force tools to do what they weren’t intended to do. Our ideas and methodologies are based on an interrogation of relationships between the individuals of PROJECTiONE and the tools of our craft. This concept is not unique to us, but its execution and results highlight our position in digital practice. PROJECTiONE resides in the space between digital and analog.

Project Description
An architecture “des humeurs”

Apparatuses for the architectural assemblages on transactional and structuring protocols :

- One aspect is comprised by computational, mathematical and machinist procedures designed to produce an urban structure following certain protocols of improbable and uncertain successive indeterminations, aggregations and layouts to rearticulate the link between the individual and the collective. The layout of the residential units and the structural trajectories are conceived and developed here as posterior to the morphologies that support social life and not as an a priori. These structures are calculated following simultaneously incremental and recursive structural optimization protocols whose principle result is the concurrently generated physicality and morphology of an architecture.

The “algorithm” developed by François Jouve differs from “directly calculated” structural methods such as calculating a load-bearing structure of a building after it is designed. In contrast, the “algorithm” allows the architectural form to emerge from the trajectories of the transmission of forces simultaneously with the calculation that generates them. The “algorithm” is based on (among other things) two mathematical strategies, one taken from the derivative initiated by the research of Hadamard and the other from of protocol of the representation of complex shapes by Cartesian meshing through level set.

The mathematical process of empirical optimization makes it possible for the architectural design to react and adapt to previously established constraints instead of the opposite.

- The other aspect is the collection of data regarding the chemical body, based on the

neurobiological emissions of each future owner. Until now the collection of information involved in the residential unit protocol has been exclusively based on visible and reductive data (surface area, number of rooms, access mode and party walls).

Instead, this experiment will be the occasion to interrogate an obscure area that could be called “the emission of desires” by the capture of these physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions, and to implement a chemistry of the humors of future purchasers, taken as inputs generating a diversity of habitable morphologies and the relationships between them.

The groundwork for this architecture of “humeurs” is a rereading of the contradictions inherent in the expression of these desires, both those that traverse public space through the ability to express a choice by means of language, on the surface of things, and those that are underlying and perhaps more disturbing but just as valid. By means of the latter we can appraise the body as a desiring machine with its own chemistry – dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by the body itself that are imperceptibly anterior to the consciousness these substances generate. Thus the making of architecture is inflected by another reality, another complexity, that of the acephalous body, the animal body.

An architecture of “humeurs” means breaking into language’s mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct misunderstandings. A station for collecting these signals is offered. It makes it possible to perceive these chemical variations and capture the changes in emotional state so that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the construction protocol.

Ross Lovegrove – Design Icons 2008

Design Icons 2008 – Ross Lovegrove from Design Museum on Vimeo.

Neri Oxman – On Designing Form

Neri Oxman: On Designing Form from PopTech on Vimeo.

William McDonough – Cradle to Cradle design

His video and art photography pieces are absolutely mind blowing and inspirational. He has an interesting approach to generative art creating amazing worlds from simple polygonal elements that grow in complexity as the time passes by, creating very colorful and hypnotic morphologies.Take a look at some of his work and have your say.

White Box from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.

AS ONE from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.

CONFINE(S) from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.