Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was one of the most influential and provocative designers of his generation. His clothing challenged the generic and conventional parameters of fashion to express culture, politics, identity. McQueen saw beyond clothing design physical constraints its ideological and conceptual possibilities, addressing questions related to race, gender, religion, sexuality and environment. During AA School Paris Spring 2012, McQueen’s evolutionary design will act as prompts for embryos’ naissance within the [Fashion+Architecture] body of work.

Within a framework of 10 days-germination, AA school Paris participants will take part of a collective embryo-genesis engaging McQueen’s DNA and legacy onto a novel and crucial debate about fashion in the Post-McQueen Era.
Featuring the most iconic and radical designs of his prolific career, AA embryos will grow and develop a self-intelligent état d’âme informed by a set of social, contextual, operational and performative parameters, such as: mass production driven by advanced capitalism; temperature variations in the globe, clothes’ adaptability in urban milieus, among other.

Post-McQueen Embryos seeks to eradicate the non-responsiveness within clothing design by reviewing Alexander McQueen’s alienated proportions, aiming at busting fashion design out of its commercial destination. Intended to become a design research laboratory, AA School Paris ultimate target is to keep growing the potential for meshing both disciplines [Fashion+Architecture] onto a digital/ physical cross-over studio helping to reaffirm AA School Paris research material.

The Paris Experience
Discussions, debates and lectures will take place on site with expertise on a day to day basis. By placing fashion designers at the centre of the process, the workshop seeks to challenge much more than just clothing design. At the core of Spring 2012 our solely goal is of consolidating the AA emerging discipline: bodily-architecture.
The AA Paris Fashion School will take in an exclusive insightful retrospective at the Exhibition ‘MARC JACOBS- LOUIS VUITTON’, to be held at the Les Arts Décoratifs- AA Paris Headquarters.
Post Mc-Queen Embryos is strengthened by a large network of Parisian Patronage, from industrial, publishing and collaborative links, taking the form of sponsoring inputs to the course.
The workshop is open to current architecture and design students, PhD candidates and young professionals. All applicants should submit a CV and portfolio to Jorge Ayala at info@ayarchitecture.com

Links:
Website: http://aaschoolparis.tumblr.com/
AA School Microsite: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/Paris-part2
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/AA-School-Paris/175947042439516

Applications Link:

https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/ONLINEAPPLICATION/visitingApplication.php?schoolID=68

Faculty:
Jorge Ayala, Director and Founder at [Ay]Architects
Isaïe Bloch, Collaborator Designer at Iris Van Herpen
Riyad Joucka, AA MA Emergent Techonogies Graduate
Santosh Kumar, Architect, Hernan Diaz Alonso Studio EXCESSIVE, Die Angewandte University, Vienna
Kibwe Tavares, Director and Founder at FACTORYFIFTEEN
and more.

Cocoon Lamp by Voxel Studio

For some time the terms “generative manufacturing”, “rapid prototyping”, “stereolithography” or simply “3D printing” are no longer solely known by experts. At the latest through the designs by Assa Ashuach for MGX Design or Karim Pashid for Freedom of Creation the process engineering is well known.
The digital drafting process through CAD systems offers unimagined possibilities. The seemingly absolutely geometrical free creation marks the beginning of a new era of design.
Objet geometries takes it up to another level. Through the polyjet technologie they gain the possibility to print an object with more than only one material. This way the designer can variegate the object’s color and physical character (hard, flexible, transparent, soft etc.) as needed.
Inspired by Nery Oxman`s „the Beast“, who impressively demonstrates the possibilities of the technology.
The result was supposed to be a solely digital planned and automatic manufactured product on the basis of polyjet technology. With the friendly support by objet geometries it was possible to realize this project. (http://www.objet.com)

A cocoon is a shell, which larvae of varies insects, particularly caterpillars, are building for their metamorphosis. The caterpillars use for this a liquid which is pressed out from their spinneret and hardens in the air quickly.
The conceptual idea comes from this parallel to the PolyJet technology, at which a liquid photopolymer is applied out of nozzles and hardens through UV-light.
The adaption of the construction and the clean design of a cocoon lead to the emergence of the inner element. Its geometry is formed by spun threads, which wind protectingly around the light source.
The white and hard material „VeroWhite“ is perfectly suited for this construction, because it provides the required rigidity and disseminates, through its reflective surface, the light further into the space.
A dark layer „TangoBlackPlus“, which is applied to the surfaces of the side of the lamellae, provides the desired color contrast and protects the surface. At its lower end a special fitting is formed, to which the holding element can be connected to.
This way the cocoon can be connected to the mounting element.
This organic form proceeds in swings around the cocoon enclosing it. Being printed out of “DigitalMaterial” of the PolyJet matrix technology, based on the mixture of “VeroWhite” and “TangoBlackPlus” materials, results in a gray, neither completely stiff nor completely flexible construction
arose.
Additionally, very soft, linear elements follow the surface and assure protection, skid resistance, and a comfortable haptic, when applied around the luminaire.
This can be turned, laid or hung up in different positions. The optical appearance or the desired effect can be defined by the user.
The design should have the potential, arising from the PolyJet production process, to exhibit geometrically on the one hand, but also to display the different properties of the material combination in terms of rigidity, reflexion and feel of the surface.

Flight Assembled Architecture is the first installation built entirely by flying robots. Designed as an architectural structure on the scale of a “vertical village” of 600 meters, Assembled Architecture Flight tests a new paradigm of design and manufacturing, through a physical process of automated dynamic training. This project builds on the simultaneous use of multiple mobile agents. Considered as tools for adaptive production, these flying robots are programmed to interact and to capture, transport and assemble the modules to build architectural structures. They synthesize and the pragmatism of Gramazio & Kohler Architecture and visionary approach to Raffaello D’Andrea in engineering dynamics. The FRAC Centre supports this new project, which will ad up to its collection devoted to experimental architecture. This collaborative project will be exposed in the FRAC Centre in Orléans.

Dodecaudion is a spatial audiovisual controller based on such technologies as infrared distance sensors, arduino, bluetooth, processing and osc , developed by panGenerator one of the main ideas behind the project according to its designers ‘was to explore a new interface that stands as an alternative to traditional controllers (like knobs and buttons) that simply don’t provide much room for performers’ gestural expression.’

DODECAUDION is right now on its Alpha stage but should be ready for production in following months and will be available via HEDOCO online shop.

Dodecaudion is totally opensourced project licensed by an MIT license – source code & Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA) – form design, PCB layout & everything else.

You can find all the open source code source code, CAD documentation and PCB schematics on github

The madMeshMaker is a generative surface modeling environment created by Golan Levin’s Interactive Art and Computational Design course at Carnegie Mellon University, and has the intention to be an intuitive and fun introduction to fabrication with computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) table routers. CNC routers have become a staple of institutions related to digital design and manufacturing for their ability to rapidly fabricate models, furniture, interior systems, and other prototypical assemblages. However, because of the inherent 3D-modeling knowledge needed to both virtually and physically design, the machinery still remains an ‘advanced topic’ in academic curriculum. The madMeshMaker dissolves this notion, allowing any novice to digital technologies to easily create a virtual model embedded with the information necessary to communicate with a CNC router.

The application is intended to be distributed to freshmen architecture/design/art students, allowing them to rapidly explore and experiment with integrated digital design/fabrication technologies. With the madMeshMaker lowering the barriers-of-use, students are able to experiment more freely with the limits of what the fabrication technology can and cannot do … getting them to explore a surface through various materials, toolpaths, toolbit profiles, etc. By incorporating the application as a pedagogical tool in the beginning stages of their formal education, the goal of the madMeshMaker is to enable future designers to push beyond the conventional uses of the technology, and cultivate novel methods of design and production.

You can download the application from HERE

Two people stand in front of the screen, are captured by the camera and turned into paper cut-out versions of themselves. The images are then swapped, so that you each take control of the other. The aesthetic is of a low polygon 90?s video game. Music plays and prompts you to act out to the audience and each other.

Two players of different height, such as father and son, see a reversal of scale. The youngest magically becomes big, and the adult shrinks to the proportions of the child.

Commissioned by Barbican Creative Learning for the Barbican Weekender Festival 2011,

Some Technical Details
-XBox Kinect camera
-openFrameworks
-OpenNI for the full body skeletal tracking

Body Swap from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

A Manifesto for Postindustrial Design
by Jamer Hunt

Mass production, as we know it, will soon be extinct. So say goodbye to heavy metals, huge warehouses, and durable goods. And say hello to the bearable lightness of living networks, metabolism, and code.

A new kind of design practice is emerging against the background of our own shifting cultural landscape. Information and code have become the basis for understanding life, and the old, mechanistic models—drawn in part from the Industrial Revolution—have fallen away. Code (genetic and digital) has emerged as the reality common to all things material and immaterial. Code levels difference, uniting things as surface variations that are built upon different, deeper combinations of code. Sacred oppositions such as human and machine, mind and computer, matter and information, real and virtual, and natural and artificial no longer seem so absolute in our dreamworld of transgenic species, prosthetic intelligence, augmented reality, and DNA computers. And what makes code so revolutionary is that it has no essential form. It can be changed at will. Cut, paste, remove, save, find, replace, blend, insert, save as. Life is a file to be manipulated with Photoshop ease and flexibility. And you can always move back in time. Just undo it.

In this primordial ooze of mutating code, the industrial mode of production is just a rotting old carcass, decomposing but still taking up space. Originally, as a professional practice, industrial design was built upon a sturdy foundation of manufacturing cycles, business needs, tooling costs, central distribution networks, planned obsolescence, and seemingly abundant natural and synthetic resources. These conditions, simply put, are no longer relevant. We operate within a technological, economic, and cultural infrastructure that has long moved on from its industrial base. Industrial culture needs to be obsolete not because it is evil, immoral, profligate, toxic, or gluttonous (though it is many of those things), but because it no longer reflects the facts on the ground. It can no longer keep up in a world of light speed and versioning. Its byproducts are too slow, too permanent, and take up too much space. Ironically, industrial design, the engine of planned obsolescence, is now obsolete. For where we used to produce durable goods—which weren’t really that durable after all, except in our landfills—we will now circulate code, capacity, and connections.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we live in an information and service economy, not a manufacturing economy. We see the impact of these changes not only in the ravage and rot of former industrial cities but also in the rhizomatic boom in edge-city development and sprawl (where more than three-quarters of all office space currently exists). But just acknowledging that we live in a service and information-based economy doesn’t capture the peculiar characteristics of postindustrial culture. Postindustrial design is a qualitatively different way of designing in this new culture. Three things are propelling this revolution: distributed intelligence, computer-aided design and manufacture, and ecological realities. The result is that designers will no longer dictate form from the system’s center and then foist their wares upon a passive marketplace. Instead, more and more design will be a code and a set of parameters. That code will then be let loose in an electronic ecosystem so that it can be manipulated, changed, improved, hacked, and produced in multiple variations in myriad places.

These new processes of design are more biological than mechanical. They are flexible, adaptable, sustainable, and self-organizing. The “design” will gain energy and vitality through this distribution and circulation, just as genes do. Code, too, has its own characteristics, traits, patterns, and needs. It has metabolism. It survives through modified loops of input, stimulation, feedback, circulation, and change. Sprawling networks of data that are ubiquitous, immediate, and infinite will amplify and distribute that code. In this way, code becomes dynamic; it is alive to its environment. The old order of vertical integration and of centers and peripheries is giving way to flux and code, mutability and drift. Out with hard goods. In with soft wares.

Incubating within this new design mode are different dynamics of market research, design, manufacture, distribution, and ownership. We saw it first in information technologies, but it is now seeping into the product design world as well. This model is closer to the open-source mode of software creation than to the romantic, genius-in-a-tower version. How does this matrix of connectedness and code-shifting change our understanding of a design process? It affects every aspect of every step of the process. We are not simply upgrading the familiar. Postindustrial design is as different from the artisanal mode of production that it supplanted. No longer will companies rely upon imprecise statistical models and historical projections to determine the quantity and qualities of the things they make. There is too much wasted motion in even the most precise and efficient of these production models. While economies of scale and task specialization created unimaginable abundance, the industrial manufacturing process is beset with a top-down, top-heavy, centralization distribution system. It is inherently bloated, conservative, and risk-averse.

Two precedents from outside industrial design illustrate this evolution clearly. Netscape used to sell its Web browser. That made sense, since it developed the technology, wrote the code, burned the discs, distributed the packages in trucks to stores, and cleared a margin of profit by the end. But the company fast discovered that the best way to stay competitive was to give away the product for free. Linux emerged because a connected group of interests coalesced into an idea that took form only through the participation of multiple creators. While Linus Torvald gets credited with the initial genesis, the current versions of Linux bear little trace of his handiwork. He and others established guidelines for its evolution and let it loose on its native network. Even more remarkable, no one really owns it. It comes with a constitution of sorts, but that is it. Private companies can “sell” it, but all they really sell is support and documentation. They must make the operating system itself available for free. So this is the Linux story: No one entity created it; no one owns it; there is an infinite variety of possible versions; it is rapidly evolving; it has no final state. And it is challenging Windows. Who could have focus-tested Linux? Because its source code is open and free to all, there is barely even one static thing called Linux. Compare its birth process to the love-it-or-leave-it, straining and grunting, cloak-and-dagger ploys of its competitors, and you being to see the daring lightness of its promise.

While there is not one single product that embodies this new process completely, we can look to a range of phenomena that, like Linux, carry the future code within their genetic makeup. The examples that follow all turn conventional development processes inside out, shaking out waste, stasis, inertia, and a lot of rust.

Front Design
Front Design, from Sweden, explores the boundaries between natural and artificial processes of product development, creating strange and wonderful hybrids that erase the designer’s hand in the creation of a final form (See I.D., September/October 2004, p. 57). Front’s attic Animals project leaves design to the whims of a variety of common animal species: rodents chew/design Rat Wallpaper’s holey pattern; a housefly’s path around a light bulb—digitally traced—forms the structure for a lamp shade. The group simply sets up the process and lets nature take its course. In its Design By projects, it cedes control to accidental processes and perturbations. The objects in the Scanner series result from capture errors as a 3-D scanner misreads an original object and then a 3-D printer compounds the misreading in a cloned, by dysmorphic, reinterpretation. At the intersection of biological randomness and technological freakishness, Front subverts design authorship. Form mutates, emerging polymorphously from processes gone out of control.

Interface Carpet
Interface Carpet has taken at face value the unglamorous fact that we are a service-based economy and used that to redefine its business, its mission, its environmental impact, and its product. The company no longer sells carpet; it offers the service of floor coverage. The product vanishes. Waste, too, is gone from the system. Interface has closed the loop on its production cycle, meaning that it uses fewer resources, takes back everything it possibly can, traffics in long-term relationships instead of depreciating products, and feeds off the waste it produces. Like an organism, its metabolism is optimized to balance input and output and to produce nothing that cannot be consumed by someone or something else. Interface designs for disassembly and operates by the principle that waste is a waste. It also challenges the assumption that we are inherently acquisitive and proprietary and careless. In the end, who really wants to own flooring—or a heating system, a fax machine, a refrigerator, an air-conditioner—only to throw it away five to ten years down the road? Interface, and other companies (like Electrolux and even Ford), is watching the commodity model of product development vanish in its rearview mirror. Its product-as-service model assumes you want to have regular, optimal performance and don’t care much about owning the thing itself. It is closer to leasing than owning. What the company banks on, in the end, is that what it provides will last and satisfy. Interface is selling a relationship, not a product unit. What it sells can shape-shift, evolve, fold back into its production cycle, and return again as brand-new. Like nature, this living system model relies upon connection, input, feedback, and dynamic response. Sure, there will always bee some stuff that people will want to own for its full lifespan (underwear comes to mind), but down the road it will be more luxurious to be free from stuff—and lightweight, mobile, aware, and connected—than to be making monthly pilgrimages to the local U-Store-It facility.

Open/Future
Two exciting experiments in product development—Ronen Kadushin’s Open Design and FutureFactories’ Tuber and Tuber9 lights—operate on the premise that the next phase of design will be open and distributed. Like good source code, each designer crafts a robust CAD file, then releases it into an electronic medium for adaptation, modification, hacking, and further evolution. The designer creates a template or platform for design possibilities, but the final form is now in the hands of the consumer. The key to this process is that computer-aided and robotic manufacturing systems are allowing almost infinite variate in any production run. Mass-producing singularities was an oxymoron; it is no longer. Nor is the designer or manufacturer constrained by conventional hefty costs of idle product inventory, retail overhead, seasonal change, constant retooling, and on down the line. Combine the flexibility of design-on-demand with the advances (and likely democratization) of stereolithography and 3-D printing, and suddenly desktop product design is a freaky reality, not a sci-fi fantasy.

These projects illuminate strikingly different approaches. Postindustrial design is not even one thing yet, but multiple, heterogeneous strains that are destabilizing the industrial mode of production. Between them, one can glimpse four characteristics in common, and from that, the outlines of something starkly new.

Formless
Which Tuber9 light will design magazines profile for their award galleries? Who knows? There is no one archetype that represents the product totally. We don’t even have the capacity—or the visual language—to create a totalized vision of this kind of product line. Products will shape-shift internally to the point that we can only celebrate the system of their creation, not the thing itself. The idea of creating brand-identity through product family resemblance, with all the top-down control that that implies, is antiquated. The product as a singularity, an immutable object, will cease to exert its charms. We will no longer design things that cannot be changed at will, by whomever, by any point in the process. Design will evolve from a process of turning natural resources into static shapes into one of distributing codes to be constantly rematerialized.

Free
It is not that the products of postindustrial design will cost nothing, but that they will be “let loose” on networks to find and optimize their potential. They are at the pull of the consumer, not the push of heavy industry. The outputs will be right-sized by the very fact that they will not be created as one-size-fits-all, but customized to the user’s idiosyncrasies. Software, soft tooling, robotic manufacturing, and smart databases will draw participation and variation into the old, clandestine fabrication process. Animated by the intelligence of thriving networks of collaborative possibility, designs will also get optimized in the infinitely iterative process of their distributed creation.

Metabolic
The stunning promise of postindustrial design is that it can leave a lighter, more vaporous footprint. Look at the poisoned landscapes of Philadelphia and Detroit and you can see the true cost of industrial production. Fatuous and fat, it belched out standardized goods and invisible pollution, producing mass conformity, hyperconsumption, and a disposable society. We can no longer afford that hypocrisy and blindness. We still need stuff, but postindustrial design has the advantage of hindsight, working in the shadow of industrial design’s legacy. Design and production that are sentient, aware, adaptive, and able to live off their own or others’ waste will not only be powerfully efficient, they will be environmentally, culturally, and fiscally sustainable. They will smartly adapt their input and output and thrive within the local—and global—bounds of their ecology.

Decentralized
The tools are in your hands, if you want them. This will not be true of all products, but imagine the possibility of creating design solutions appropriate to you or your family neighborhood, or tribe. One size doesn’t fit all, and not all design intelligence resides in the center. Distributing the power to create is a plan than nature has used with spectacular success. Staggering flexibility and adaptability comes from distributing capacity out from the center. So new kinds of products, companies, and brands—labile, fluid, and protean—will challenge the hegemony of the global superbrands. And who wants a transnational, focus-tested, homogeneous megacorporation to design their stuff anyway?

Postindustrial design embodies the potential to create and produce differently, and not to repeat the mistakes we didn’t always know we were making. The role of business and the designer in this context will be to enable possibility, provide vision, and set parameters to optimize the system. That means that designers will be working with new and unfamiliar tools in strange and unlikely places. The industrial colossus is not going to collapse right away. It has provided functional, safe, beautiful, and even sublime things. But the model is extinct. Evolutions and mutations are mostly breeding outside industrial design for now—in fashion, architecture, engineering, software, the Web—but their seeds are implanting themselves in the cracks of the industrial foundation. And with that, new species of products will soon emerge.

Like the reciprocating back and forth of a good conversation, the table is made up of a field of delicate wooden fins that vary to-and-fro in relation to each other and interlock to form an intricate lattice that appears most transparent in the vicinity of the person sitting diagonally opposite the viewer and increasingly opaque elsewhere. While the variation of the transparency of the table leads to a more engaging interaction, it is also intended to produce a piece of furniture that actively contributes to the atmosphere of the space it is placed within by creating complex patterns of light and shadow.

The table is designed from individual components that are precisely machined on computer controlled routers, which are then hand assembled by skilled craftsmen. The table is made from solid walnut with an iron free glass top.
Project Details:
Production: January 2011
PROTOTYPE MANUFACTURER: Metropolitan Works
DESIGNER: NEX – Alan Dempsey, Paul Loh, Michal Piasecki
COLLABORATORS: Engineering consultation: Buro Happold

Although this blog specially focuses on digital projects and initiatives ,in this occasion I´ll maks an exception to show you the generative design work of Conditional Design a group of designers (Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters)  who work creating generative design pieces using analog tools,  they create interesting pattern drawings and installations by setting algorithms and constraints that are interpreted by a person or a group of persons instead of a computer.

They also are working on a cool manifesto that you can check below or on their site.

Tape on Floor 4 from Conditional Design on Vimeo.

Drop Fringe Garland Red Green Blue from Conditional Design on Vimeo.

Conditional Design
A manifesto for artists and designers

Through the influence of the media and technology on our world, our lives are increasingly characterized by speed and constant change. We live in a dynamic, data-driven society that is continually sparking new forms of human interaction and social contexts. Instead of romanticizing the past, we want to adapt our way of working to coincide with these developments, and we want our work to reflect the here and now. We want to embrace the complexity of this landscape, deliver insight into it and show both its beauty and its shortcomings.
Our work focuses on processes rather than products: things that adapt to their environment, emphasize change and show difference.

Instead of operating under the terms of Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Media Art or Sound Design, we want to introduce Conditional Design as a term that refers to our approach rather than our chosen media. We conduct our activities using the methods of philosophers, engineers, inventors and mystics.

Process
The process is the product.
The most important aspects of a process are time, medications without a prescription relationship and change.
The process produces formations rather than forms.
We search for unexpected but correlative, emergent patterns.
Even though a process has the appearance of objectivity, we realize the fact that it stems from subjective intentions.

Logic
Logic is our tool.
Logic is our method for accentuating the ungraspable.
A clear and logical setting emphasizes that which does not seem to fit within it.
We use logic to design the conditions through which the process can take place.
Design conditions using intelligible rules.
Avoid arbitrary randomness.
Difference should have a reason.
Use rules as constraints.
Constraints sharpen the perspective on the process and stimulate play within the limitations.

Input
The input is our material.
Input engages logic and activates and influences the process.
Input should come from our external and complex environment: nature, society and its human interactions.

Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters

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 order prescription drugs online 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.