Co.Design

Amazing, Hyperreal Renderings Of Candyland Dreamscapes

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:31:37 +0000

We tend to think of renderings as tools that help us depict realness: We wait with dogged patience for hours (or days) as our computers grind through a single image, tweaking textures and lighting until the hard drive spits out a passable representation of life.

Toronto artist Alex McLeod is interested in doing just the opposite. He uses rendering software to depict photoreal dreamscapes, rich with strange detail and eye-popping color.

McLeod’s images are tough to generalize. He works almost exclusively in landscape format, composing stylized versions of the natural world using Cinema 4D, Sculptmaster, and an iPad app called Forge. Many of his images reference 19th century Romanticist landscape painting, but in a visual language native to video games and graphic novels. In a series he showed at Pulse NY last year, Super Nintendo clouds hang over stylized mountains, crystals, farmlands, and ambiguously urban scenes.

But the strangeness of McLeod’s work has less to do with the scenography than the rendering style. The hyperreal images force us to “question if we are we looking at something in real space or a flat plane,” McLeod told me. We accept digital renderings as reality every day--that ad on the subway or that weird medication commercial--and McLeod exploits our collective suspension of disbelief.

More recently, McLeod says he became interested in how patterns affect form. A new series, on view this month at Montreal’s Three Points Gallery, blankets entire landscapes in a single pattern. “The work was inspired by those ‘Magic Eye' books where you had to cross your eyes to see an image (one which was created in a 3-D program),” says McLeod. “It’s self-referential.”

Forgotten Legends is on view until June 23rd.

Not Your Dad’s La-Z-Boy: An Armchair Made Only From Leather Strips

Fri, 11 May 2012 21:35:47 +0000

For the last several years, Nendo has been obsessively reducing the chair down to its most minimal form, using the least amount of material necessary, combined with innovative technology, to support a user’s weight. In 2009, the Japanese studio introduced the incredibly lithe Cord chair, consisting of a hyperthin steel frame covered in a maple skin. That was followed in 2010 by the 21,400 MM--a piece of furniture composed of thin black wires that looks more like an abstract charcoal drawing than a place to rest your rump. Most recently, Nendo followed up its less-is-more theme with Sen chair, armchair composed almost entirely of fine strips of leather.

A concept design for Poltrona Frau, the project explores the idea of creating a comfy seat without yards of upholstery or gobs of padding. The studio suggests that the pieces of leather could be fortified with aluminum or carbon fiber, so the fine material wouldn’t snap under weight stress. Just as boxy televisions have been replaced by flat LCD screens and incandescent bulbs are being phased out by LEDs, Nendo suggests that it’s possible to employ natural materials such as leather more efficiently. Although not in production yet, Sen could even be used outdoors. And the aesthetic is as far removed from a La-Z-Boy as you can get.

A Tablecloth Woven With The Name Of Everyone In Amsterdam

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:44:20 +0000

May 4th is Remembrance Day in the Netherlands, when those who lost their lives in WWII and subsequent battles fought in the name of keeping peace are honored with a universal two minutes of silence. Liberation Day, which follows on the 5th and marks the country’s independence from German forces in 1945, is a festive celebration commemorated with concerts, parties, and, this year, a massive meal in Amsterdam’s Dam Square. The National Committee of May 4 & 5 invited Dutch design star Maarten Baas to create something to help promote the concept of a citywide supper; 780.559 is a 60-meter-long cotton tablecloth--with “a little bit of glitter thread”--named for the number of residents in Amsterdam. A closer look reveals the unbelievable ingenuity of the project; the names of each of those 780,559 residents is woven into the material.

“It’s symbolic,” Baas says of the epic textile. After coming up with the concept, it was a feat of engineering by fellow Dutchman Bertjan Pot that allowed his idea to be fully realized. Intrigued by the concept that he could control and program every single thread, Pot devised Font of the Loom, an incredibly tiny typeface that can be "written" into the warp and weft of fabric made on a computer-controlled Jacquard loom. Check out the machine in action below:

Those who weren’t among the “guests, representatives, ambassadors and organizers” invited to kick off the custom by breaking bread in Dam Square were still encouraged to indulge. “The idea is that everybody will organize their own meal--to eat with friends, neighbors, family, colleagues, and more--and this will become a new tradition to be held every year,” Baas explains to Co.Design. Commemorative handkerchiefs were also produced, to be bought and used as small-scale keepsakes.

Restaurants all over town also participated by offering their own unique “freedom” menus. “You can imagine this is very interesting,” Baas says. “What would the difference be between a freedom meal from a Chinese restaurant, a French, an Argentinean or a Indian restaurant? Everybody has another background, which gives a wide interpretation of freedom.” This variety manages to perfectly sum up the spirit of 780.559 itself, as a celebration of the people of all nationalities, from all over the world, who live and thrive in the Netherlands’ capital city.

780.559's new home will be in the Amsterdam Museum to serve as a beautiful reminder that, in the end, we’re all cut from the same cloth.

MoMA Brings Mexican Design Talent To The U.S.

Fri, 11 May 2012 20:30:52 +0000

The Museum of Modern Art recently announced its 10th product collection in its limited-edition Destination series. This year’s focus: Mexico, a country not readily equated with its design tradition. But the curators have compiled a heap of objects from burgeoning talents who display a flair for combining traditional craft with newfangled technology.

"We are so impressed by the depth of talent among Mexico’s emerging designers," says Kathy Thornton-Bias, president of MoMA’s retail division. "Not only are we seeing innovative products crafted from unique materials, we are also inspired by these designers’ passion for creating new, contemporary visions of classic Mexican themes." Those nouveau-traditional visions take the form of a pre-Columbian-style pitcher executed in polyester resin and an everyday grocery bag re-imagined as a ceramic fruit bowl.

Also evident among the designers is a sensitivity to social and environmental concerns. Many of the items are made from local, recycled, and organic materials utilizing production methods that minimize waste. And some are produced with collectives aiming to create employment opportunities in small, rural villages and support the teaching of traditional crafts to a new generation.

The products are available for purchase through June. Check out our favorites in the above slideshow; go here view the full collection.

A Chandelier Made From Hundreds Of Styrofoam Cups, And Nothing More

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:56:16 +0000

It’s tough to find anything virtuous about the lowly Styrofoam cup apart from the fact that it won’t burn your fingers when filled with piping-hot drinks. Not only is it an environmental scourge; it has the distinct ability to make perfectly good coffee taste like swill. But Paul Cocksedge has managed to redeem the “disposable” cup that never actually goes away, by upcycling it into a multifaceted chandelier that looks more at home in a chi-chi restaurant than a PTA meeting.

Cocksedge originally conceived Styrene in 2002 as his graduation project at the Royal College of Art and recently decided to re-issue the piece in celebration of his first decade as a professional designer. The spherical shade is an array of hundreds of heat-shrunk cups, broken up by small gaps in between that allow light to dapple on surrounding surfaces.

The 20-inch-diameter Styrene comes with a 20W fluorescent bulb and may be purchased for approximately $800 from Cocksedge’s freshly launched online shop (larger sizes are available upon request). That may seem spendy for a fixture, but you also never have to worry about it degrading.

The Week That Was: “Childhood Is Cannibals And Psychotic Vomiting In Your Mouth!”

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:00:44 +0000

Remembering The Creative Legacy Of Maurice Sendak, In His Own Words. "People say, 'Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!' As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotic vomiting in your mouth! I say, 'You are in touch, lady--you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish … That is your childhood self!'"--Maurice Sendak.

Infographic: North Carolina’s Gay Marriage Ban Seems Downright Predictable. The U.K. Guardian's excellent infographic shows wild variation in gay rights between states. Yet more proof that Obama’s gay marriage announcement was utter baloney.

Dieter Rams On Good Design As A Key Business Advantage. "Striving for good design is of social importance, as it means, amongst other things, absolutely avoiding waste."--Dieter Rams.

How Lousy Cockpit Design Crashed An Airbus, Killing 228 People. That settles it. We’re never flying again. NEVER.

What The Red Baron Can Teach You About Hiring Creative Talent. "The Red Baron was an unconventional officer. He didn’t ask pilots to repaint their planes. He didn’t expect them to fly as he did."--Sense Worldwide’s Brian Millar.

Bing Unveils Redesign, Aimed At Cracking Social-Network Searching. Move over, Google?

The Real-Life Instagram Camera Is So Crazy That It Just Might Work. "What the Socialmatic lacks in sensibility is more than made up for in Urban Outfitters semi-ironic stocking stuffer chic."

Explore The Galaxy Using The Actual “Minority Report” Interface. “I couldn’t make much sense of the charts and graphs that were in [NASA’s report], so I made the first visualization to answer some questions for myself: What do 1,300 planets look like? How do these planets compare to Earth and the other planets in our solar system?”--Jer Thorp, who codesigned the UI with John Underkoffler.

It Exists! MIT Creates Tech For Moving Files Across Devices With A Swipe. We follow up on last week’s post about a clever UI Idea for dragging files from your phone to your computer.

A Crowdsourced Chair, Built Using Data From Thousands Of Butts. That’s the kind of chair we can get behind. Zing-a-ling!

Camper’s New Shoe Store Visualizes The Act Of Walking

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:05:22 +0000

The funky Spanish shoemaker Camper has opened a new shop in Lyon, France, that’s inspired by the very thing for which its shoes are made: walking.

Rotterdam-based designers Studio Makkink & Bey drew on the work of E. Muybridge, the pioneering 19th-century photographer of human and animal locomotion, to render walking movements as thin red lines across the shop’s white floors, walls, ceiling, and stairs.

It’s a fun, graphic look. Red being Camper’s signature color, it also conveys a subtle branding message: It suggests that in Camper’s shoes, even something as mundane as schlepping around on your own two feet can feel unsurpassingly cool. As the designers say: “These lines form a red blueprint, a Camper model world of walking.”

[Photos: Sanchez y Montoro]

Photographer Recreates Tornados In His Studio, For Your Viewing Pleasure

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:30:57 +0000

British photographer Ryan Hopkinson has always been fascinated by tornadoes. “This got me thinking about ways of taking weather elements out of context and bringing them within a controlled environment and ultimately into my own work,” he says. And since you can’t exactly grab a tornado by the hand and drag it into the studio, he decided to make his own.

That’s right. These oddly delicate shots of one of the most destructive weapons in Mother Nature’s arsenal are not Photoshop jobs. They depict real, live tornadoes, manufactured in Hopkinson’s studio using wind and psychedelically colored smoke, then captured on camera for your viewing pleasure.

“They’re created using a large industrial extraction fan rigged from the roof, the blades’ rotation helps create a vortex, the smoke then gets lifted and caught up in the vortex,” he tells us in an email. Which sounds simple enough. Except that any slight change in the studio’s winds enervates the vortex, breaking it down into an amorphous plume. “The surface area needs to be large for the tornado to form,” Hopkinson says. “There also has to be a low roof to control the air flow.” After lots of trial and error, Hopkinson managed to generate 20 twisters, each about 4 feet tall and “all with their own personalities and weight.”

All of which made for some extraordinary photography, yes, yes. But what we, loyal children of Hollywood that we are, want to know is this: Did any of the tornadoes work too well? “The tornadoes aren’t very powerful,” he assures us, “so there’s no worries of getting taken away.” Bummer. We bet whatever is on the other side of Hopkinson’s tornadoes is leaps and bounds trippier than Oz.

[Images courtesy of Ryan Hopkinson; h/t It’s Nice That]

Beautiful Images Of Earth, Taken From A Satellite 450 Miles Up

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:41:13 +0000

When NASA first started putting things into space, it was with the express intent of finding out more about the planets and stars that surround us. It wasn’t until the mid '70s that NASA decided to start studying our own planetary mass, launching a satellite program they called Landsat on July 23, 1972. Landsat, explained the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, would help America “inventory and manage the earth’s resources.”

There have been six other Landsat satellites since then (each one is designed to last around four years in orbit), capturing the changing face of the earth as it’s scarred by pollution, deforestation, development, and obviously, the passage of time. Right now we’re on number seven, a sophisticated earth-observing instrument that sends almost 600 images back to earth every day, supplying Google Earth and other programs with its imagery.

What’s really cool about Landsat, though, is that anyone can pay the USGS to access the data the satellite collects. The caveat is the $600 subscription fee, which may be chump change for Google, but not so for individuals with a penchant for earth watching.

Luckily, USGS anticipated public interest (and lucrative retail potential) in the stunning imagery picked up by Landsat. The Survey holds an annual Earth as Art exhibition that displays the most incredible images of the year at the National Library of Congress in D.C. There’s also an online store that sells posters of the images, each labeled with the words, “Satellite scene chosen for aesthetic interest rather than for scientific interpretation.” Some of the images depict natural phenomena, while others call attention to the ever-increasing havoc humans wreak upon the earth.

Virgin’s Glitzy New Bar Only Makes Sense At 30,000 Feet

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:15:43 +0000

On Virgin, I’ve appreciated my fair share of soothing purple lighting and touch-screen drink ordering. But for my next cocktail in the sky, I really want to visit their first-class cabin. In a design collaboration of Virgin Atlantic and VW+BS, first-class passengers from NYC to London will have the opportunity to walk not onto a plane, but into a glowing, spacious bar situated right inside the door, fitted like a Tetris piece against passengers’ seats.

“Air travel used to be exciting and rare and we wanted to bring some of that excitement back,” VW+BS’s Ian Macready tells Co.Design. ”We were very much influenced by the rise of the pop up bar and the new speakeasy. We wanted to create a space that created a different dynamic for the passenger rather than just the straightforward bar shape. It should be a part of the aircraft that encourages interaction, that blurs slightly the boundary between the crew and the passenger, and that allows for places to stand, to sit, to lean and to perch.”

The atmosphere is meant to focus on the “immaterial” in which every surface reflects light like a JJ Abrams film, from the polished aluminum stools to the space’s champagne lacquered finish. It’s a mix of plastic, stone, and metal--all punctuated by color-changing LEDs to set the mood--combining to create an ethereal bar experience that might only make sense at 30,000 feet.

Top view of the bar.

“The futuristic aesthetic was very much influenced by aviation,” writes Macready. “The way the project evolved was a very specific response to being up in the sky and does not necessarily work elsewhere, except possibly on a high-speed train or at the top of a new skyscraper. The language doesn’t have context to anything else on the ground.”

But the design isn’t just an opulent statement of aviation aesthetics; it’s a glitzy red herring for the entire clinical, safety-regulated flight experience. Few will even realize that the bar serves two lives, storing ice buckets, spirits, and stemware for entertainment, but also revealing oxygen kits and wheelchair storage for safety and comfort.

Indeed, what’s most impressive about Virgin’s new bar isn’t that it fits on a plane; it’s that it might not fit anywhere else.

Infographic: In 80 Years, We Lost 93% Of Variety In Our Food Seeds

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:01:14 +0000

Seeds are tricky things. On one hand, we have the whole Omnivore’s Dilemma argument, that industrialized and genetically engineered food is probably bad. And on the other, we have strains of vegetables that can grow four times as much produce on the same plot of land as their heirloom counterparts--a successful, man-dictated genetics that we’ve actually been fueling for millennia. After all, we wouldn’t have the heirloom seeds of today if our grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather hadn’t saved the seeds from the sweetest watermelons or the most drought-resistant cantaloupes.

I don’t know that any of us can honestly assess the repercussions of our actions, but I do know one thing: This National Geographic infographic by John Tomanio is staggering. Using the metaphor of a tree, it charts the loss of U.S. seed variety from 1903 to 1983. And what you see is that we’ve lost about 93% of our unique seed strands behind some of the most popular produce. (Clever details: Where the root system should be strong, Tomanio has rendered a tree that looks like it could tip right out of the ground.)

In 1903, we had almost 500 varieties of lettuce. By 1983, we had just 36. Radishes, peas, and beets have fared no better. In fact, the most steadfast of the crops has been the tomato, which, probably due to the popularity of strange and tasty heirloom varieties, only lost about 80% of its seed diversity. It’s a shame to lose so many intricacies of nature’s tastiest gifts. But more worryingly, monocultures strip the land of nutrients: Where you once had self-sustaining harvest cycles, you get farm land denuded of nutrients that then needs copious chemical fertilizers to grow more food. And the crops themselves become vulnerable to plant diseases.

Still, a lot has changed in the public consciousness since 1983. Farmers markets aren’t just for hippies anymore--they’re lifestyle statements for everyone from young foodies to soccer moms. And as long as this trend stays alive, so too will many of the heirloom seed strands we have remaining.

[Image: NixPhotography/Shutterstock]