The new Weave Magazine No. 7 just came out some days ago. We did not only make the lasercut cover for this issue like mentioned in an earlier »Making of« blogpost, but also wrote a 6 page article about different digital fabrication technologies and products using them. We took a closer look at the status quo in rapid prototyping, in particular 3d printers like the RepRap and the Makerbot but also talked to people who build their own personal fabricators like Ilan Moyer who built Multifab, a multipurpose fabbing machine with changeable heads for printing, cutting, milling and even writing. René Bohne, head of the FabLab Aachen at the RWTH Aachen University, told us about the FabLab Charter and what it means to run a FabLab and create your own personalized products. We also showcase some remarkable products from different well known programmers and designers and their fabbing products like Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg from »Nervous System« or mos-architects who build the »JTG Lilly« with the help of George Michael Brower. A lot more artists and projects using digital fabrication techniques can be found on the corresponding linklist at weave.de.

Digital Fabrication linklist
»Making Of« Flickr Set

We finally finished our installation for the »Deutscher Zukunftspreis« exhibition at the »Deutsches Museum« in Munich. More details about the »Balance« installation and further vimeo and flickr links can be found on the project page.

»Balance« project details

MetaDesign Berlin hosts a series of lectures under the name »TypoMeta«. Julia will talk about Generative Art and the “Generative Gestaltung” Book.

Thursday, October 07, 2010
5:00pm – 6:00pm
MetaDesign AG,
Conference Hall
Leibnizstraße 65,
10629 Berlin-Charlottenburg

If you want to apply, please write an email to
meta@metadesign.de

While working on the next Weave article about digital fabrication, 3d printers, lasercutters and a lot of generated products using these technologies, Weave magazine asked us if we would like to create the cover for the next issue as well. Sure we wanted to, and there was no question that we are going to use some fabbing techniques to do so. Inspired by Makerbot, the DIY 3D Printer, we took some of the CupCake CNC Chassis Designs that are available for download at ponoko.com and used them as basis for our custom designed object.

With the help of Martin Bauer from »lasern«, who just moved into his new workspace in a beautiful loft in Berlin-Kreuzberg, we cut the 3-layered design object out of turquoise colored acrylic glass. Finally Tom Ziora, a friend of ours and a great photographer, spent some more hours at the photographic studio to get the best shoot for the final cover. Big thanks to everybody who helped us creating the cover and stay tuned for some pictures of the final object and the cover that will be released September 20th.

Update: we just uploaded some more images of the making of and the final object to Flickr.

»Making Of« Flickr Set

Our friends from envis precisely are hosting a new conference called decode in Munich this October. The decode conference is about design and code and combines their creative and techological aspects in one event. Speakers like the two media artists Tilman Reiff & Volker Morawe, both part of the artist collective //////////fur//// , the guys behind the fantastic painstation, or Moritz Stefaner, who will talk about the »Aesthetic of Information«, will tell us about their work and some ongoing projects.

Mario Klingemann aka quasimondo will show beautiful things made out of code and Massimo Banzi, one of the founders of arduino will talk about their open-source electronics prototyping platform. Not to forget to mention, Benedikt and Hartmut will talk about »Generative Gestaltung«, the same talk Julia and Hartmut already held at the Typo Conference in Berlin this year. Ticket sale will start end of August on their website.

Decoded Conference Website
Decoded Trailer

Yeah! Generative Gestaltung won the red dot award!

With more than 12,000 submissions from more than 60 countries, the international »red dot design award« is the largest and most renowned design competition in the world. It is divided into the »red dot award: product design«, the »red dot award: communication design« and the »red dot award: design concept.« The award-winning products are put before an international public in the red dot design museum and we are happy that »Generative Gestaltung« is now a part of it.

red dot design award

After being awarded with the silver nail in the category of literature by ADC Germany, »Generative Gestaltung« is now nominated for the ADC Europe (ADC*E) Awards. Amongst several thousand submissions from 16 countries only 200 projects were nominated along with »Generative Gestaltung«, for one of this year’s 23 golden trophies. The italian Agency JWT Italy won this year’s Grand Prix for their project »AYSWU – INTEGRATED«. Interestingly 13 out of the 23 golden award winners 13 are from Germany.

When we started to work on our website, we came to the point where we had to decide which color to use to highlight links and active categories. As our corporate design intends not to use a specific color to stay as flexible as possible on one hand, it was on the other hand hard to pick one to be used on our website. So it was obvious that we would use some kind of generative approach to generate different colors. As picking random colors is apparently uninspired, we thought about using some user data like the IP address, the version of the browser or the operating system to generate colors, that would in this case relate to the user itself. Another idea was to make use of some publicly available APIs like the Yahoo weather API or Googles finance API for example. But as there is still no onformative share on the stock market, it didn’t make much sense to use these kind of data sources as we wanted to keep it somehow personal and related to us.

So what we did instead was to install a webcam at our office and use a custom written software to take pictures triggered by some motion detection algorithm whenever any kind of object is put in front of the camera. From these pictures we extracted different kinds of colors. We worked on different approaches to get a perfect color with every picture taken. Calculating the average color didn’t work as it mostly results in some grey/brownish color. We used the fantastic colorUtils from Karsten Schmidts toxiclibs that offers different approaches to generate color palettes and sort them according to various criteria. We also sorted the colors by frequency of occurrence but realized, that it tends to be a color with low saturation, that doesn’t make a good link color. So we focused to get the color from a small area in the center of the image and added the option to adjust the brightness and saturation to finally get some good results.

Now as we got the final color we had to create a new css file and upload it to our web server. We used a slightly edited version of seltars »Post to web« Library to upload not only the changed css file but also the used source image to add it to our gallery, where we keep all the previous colors and images we´ve taken. We are currently working on an iPhone app to change the colors not only at our office but wherever we are by using the inbuilt camera. By the way, todays color is #FFCC00                , if you want to see the rest, check out the gallery

Previous Colors of the Day