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 Kinetic Pavillion project orients itself on the development of a new kind of pavilion that’s capable of acting upon changing weather conditions, human movement or human moods/mindsets. It’s shape has been made dependable of ecological choices and parameters extracted from the pavilion’s surroundings. Just like every other organism, this new prototype changes itself when parameters take on other values.
The scale model (90×120 cm) has been built starting from a rational grid, which allowed us to test the listed parameters.
1. Based upon weather data.
A different reaction pattern in cold and warm areas.
– In cold environments:The pavilion picks up solar alignment and tries to catch as many solar irradiation (heat gains) as possible. Places with higher irradiation levels result in a height-difference in the pavilion’s roof structure so it expands and attracts more heat.
– In warm environments:The pavilion takes on an aerodynamic shape and available winds cool down the pavilion. Places with high irradiation levels result in a change of the roof structure and create shadow spots.
2. Human movement
– Movement in space:This is also an architecture that reacts on movement. The roof structure reacts upon the dynamic movements of the people using the pavilion. It creates a dialogue between the user and the architecture and the perception of the space they find themselves in.
To illustrate this idea, we’re using an iPad to recreate human movements by touching and sliding over the screen. The finger’s coordinates are processed through OSCtouch to Grasshopper, which controls the height data of the pavilion.
– Body Movements:Webcams are able to process movement data into preset shape patterns of the pavilion. For example dancing people can trigger the pavilion to react upon the dynamic movements.
3. Human behaviour and interactions.
The pavilion is capable of filtering through twitter feeds and picking up trends. For example: when a certain number of pavilion users tweet ‘party’ or a synonym the pavilion starts moving actively. On the other hand when users tweet messages containing words like ‘tired’, ‘lazy’, ‘sleepy’, etc.. the pavilion starts moving in a swaying kind of way.

How it works:
1. Input: Ipad, Ecotect, Processing (sine function, webcam, twitterfeeds,…)
2. Process:
a) input parameters are sent through OSCTouch , gHowl, geco GH2Ecotect and UPD to Grasshopper.
b) Different kinds of data are translated into height coordinates.
c) These processed coordinates are sent through Firefly to an Arduino-board
3. Output:
a) Arduino controls 28 servos
b) Spur gears translate these coordinates into a vertical movement, controlling the roof structure.

For more information you can contact Elise or Yannick at their project website.

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd 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.

This post is specially for those who might be asking WTF is processing??.Here is a a lecture from its creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas given last year at the ART && CODE SYMPOSIUM were they explain the basics and structure of this development environment so you can give yourself and idea of what this is all about.

They also show some pretty good examples of how people is using it for creating generative art, interactive applications , animations , video games , sculptures , data visualizations , printing and all sorts of crazy fun stuff.

ART && CODE SYMPOSIUM: Processing, Ben Fry and Casey Reas from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

It´s nice to be able to contribute to this project here´s my little interview with some others I´ve found very interesting .To watch more visit the the Interviews section of Opensimsim

RODRIGO MEDINA GARCIA: OPEN SOURCE DESIGN from opensimsim.net on Vimeo.

BJARKE INGELS: OPEN SOURCE DESIGN from opensimsim.net on Vimeo.

ALVIN HUANG: OPEN SOURCE DESIGN from opensimsim.net on Vimeo.

Another great project by the  london based talented visual artist  . In this occasion bringing one his projects of 2009 an audiovisual installation commissioned by Evento and Lumin for the Bordeaux Art & Architecture Biennale.

About the Project

The term Strata defines a geological formation made of multiple layers of rock. Each one of these layers has its own individual characteristics and history, which combined produce beautiful and unique formations…
The Strata project consist in a series of films, prints and installations investigating improbable relationships between contemporary digital aesthetics and icons of classical art and architecture. Like in geological processes, layers belonging to different ages interact with one another producing new intriguing formations.

An order prescription drugs special image based triangulation software with 3D mesh output was made for this audiovisual by Mauritius Seeger. By finding and extracting interest points in photographic stills this tool generates an optimal delauney triangle mesh. Further by averaging the colour in each triangle this software can generate a pixelated image where the smallest unit of representation is a triangle. Software developed using processing.

Strata #3 – Excerpt from Quayola on Vimeo.

Strata #3 – Excerpt from Quayola on Vimeo.

Yancey Strickler one of the co-founders of kickstarter.com talks about how creative people through digital platforms like his can create their own economy conditions for founding their projects by leveraging the power of their social networks were the support for a project is rewarded with special incentives rather than promising an economic gain for fund a project that is often not intended to be a revenue generator.
This is a radical change from how is used to be in the past were economic founding  mostly came from people or institutions who only cared of economic return of investment and all that stuff that make almost every creative project impossible to make.

Let me know what you think of this kind of  found raising personally I think it´s awesome.

Dot Dot Dot “The Entrepreneurs,” Yancey Strickler from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

What is OSLOOM?
OSLOOM (short for OPEN SOURCE LOOM) is a project aimed at creating an open source electromechanical thread-controlled floor loom that will be computer controlled. A loom is a device used to weave fabric. The loom itself will be a Jacquard style loom. Jacquard looms allow for the individual control of each thread which in turn allows for photographic imagery to be woven. Jacquard looms like this exist commercially but they are very expensive (upwards of $30,000) which puts them out of reach for individuals and small educational facilities.

The OSLOOM could be produced way more economically than that and truly revolutionize what the studio weaver could accomplish. The idea of a DIY open source loom is one that not only artists could benefit from but many individuals and learning centers could gain a resource by building one of these looms as well.

OSLOOM would have an impact on (but not limited to) the following communities/sectors:

artists

online pharmacies #ff00ff;”> DIY/makers

studio weavers

educational

institutions (large and small)

textile designers

developing countries

I believe that in order for a loom such as OSLOOM to have the greatest amount of impact it would need to operate on an open source platform. Therefore the software to operate the loom will be GPL (General Public Licensed) and the hardware will be OHL (Open Hardware Licensed). This would allow other individuals or groups to create this loom or to further develop this loom in the form of a derivative loom.

This project is inspired by MIT’s FabLab concept and other open source hardware projects such as the RepRap and Fab@Home 3D rapid prototypers and the many DIY CNC projects available already.

OSLOOM.ORG
OSLOOM.org will be the main repository for the OSLOOM. Once research & development creates the first bug-free prototype OSLOOM the loom plans/documentation (hardware/software) would all be placed online on a wiki for easy access. The website will become a hub for the OSLOOM project but also for other types of DIY/OS looms that anyone can build. Potentially the website could also offer assembled looms as well as all-in-one kits for persons not interested in ordering all the parts individually. In addition, a google code page will be started for the software development.

Architects are not the exception given the great capacity of analysis and feedback it can offer for generative form finding and the ease of programming work environments that allows architects create their own software depending on the needs of an specific project, many architectural schools and leading architectural firms have started to include it as a tool for R&D.

So far the majority of the works I´ve seen still are experimental and conceptual initiatives as it always is when using new technologies , however i think as this tool becomes more popularized and more specific libraries like Anar (processing library for parametric modelling ) begin to appear, we will start seeing real built projects using processing as part of their design process like the Glorieta Juan Carlos Iby in Mula,Spain by Esc Studio where they developed a software for social participation in which the public could design it´s own proposal and send it to the authorities for its evaluation.
Here are some of the projects I have tracked down so far , If you find more let me know so we can add them here.

3d voronoi structure – solids from nils seifert on Vimeo.

1UP Design project , fabrication planing for the voronoi structure programmed in processing.

processing particles – relaxation form finding 2 from nils seifert on Vimeo.

Processing particles – relaxation form finding by Nils Seifert

Form finding experiment by dynamic relaxation in processing. The girder depth is calculated by the tension of the surface at each point.

Behavioral system from Krzysztof Gornicki on Vimeo.

Behavioral System from Krzysztof Gornicki

Behavioral analysis system written in Processing for the purpose of msc3 hyperbody studio at the tu delft.

Improvisation on a Digital Space from Enrique Ramos on Vimeo.

Improvisation on a Digital Space by Enrique Ramos

Code-generated space makes possible to define architectures whose configuration can be controlled by all sort of parameters such as pressure, sound and lighting levels. In this video, a performer interacts with the space through light sensors and resistors making it evolve with the music in real time.
This project has been developed with Processing, and Arduino, being the first used for the visualisations and the latter for the physical interface.

Mula – generative software from Enrique Ramos on Vimeo.

Mula Generative Software by Enrique Ramos

Custom software used to generate the “Glorieta de Juan Carlos I” in Mula (Spain), by esc-studio.
The software implements a Voronoi algorithm and allows the user to redefine the circulations and activity areas with a simple mouse drag.
This software will be used in a future public consultation, where the citizens will be able to create their own design proposals for the square within the parameters set by the architects.
For more information, visit esc-studio.com, or  spaceformwords.com

Digital Form Finding – Bat Wing by Kensuke Hotta

AA school Em-tech course work,’DIgital Form Finding’ built with processing (Refer from John Harding)