Friday, September 07. 2012
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de Filip Visnjic
Created by Tauba Auerbach is the 8 x 8 x 8-inch hard-back book illustrating the RGB gradient in a page-by-page format. Using a digital offset print on paper with airbrushed cloth cover, the book shows the full gradient of blue axis offset. The special binding was co-designed by the artist herself in collaboration with Daniel E. Kelm, and were printed at Wide Awake Garage, an independent bookbinder, with help from Leah Hughes
Continue reading.... RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tauba Auerbach
Thursday, May 03. 2012
Via MIT Technology Review (blogs)
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What's to stop kids from pirating LEGO sets as readily as they pirate music?
Christopher Mims 04/02/2012
Let's assume for a minute that 3D printing becomes as good as its proponents say it will, and soon. We're talking high strength plastics, high resolution models, all at prices that the average consumer can afford.
LeoCAD, A library of over 4,000 LEGO bricks, already exists. It's distributed under a creative commons attribution license, so you can pretty much do what you want with it, as long as you give credit. Makers are already constructing custom LEGO pieces on their 3D printers. The existing model for creating LEGOs, in Denmark, is surprisingly labor-intensive.
Meanwhile, "out of print" LEGO sets are eye-openingly expensive. (Pretty much every Star Wars set from the movies that weren't awful is going for at least $300.)
It seems obvious that at the point where all these trend lines meet, there's a powerful incentive for tinkerers and teenagers to start downloading plans from the internet and simply making their own sets.
In this scenario, if physical objects made from single materials follow the same trajectory as other media that were physical until they became just bits, there will at first be resistance from toymakers, in the form of lawsuits. Collectors will be sued as a deterrent to other rogues, and websites for sharing designs shut down.
Meanwhile, an underground of Makers will continue to experiment. Amateurs will collaborate to create LEGO sets and other toys that no cadre of designers in Denmark could match. Some will go pro. Gradually, the industry will adapt.
I realize that some proponents of 3D printing envision this process eating pretty much all the manufacturing on the planet. There are good reasons that won't happen. But for certain industries that are uniquely susceptible to being disrupted by better versions of today's 3D printing technology, who knows? Perhaps the YouTube of the future deals in atoms, not bits.
Friday, March 23. 2012
Via Treehugger
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By Lloyd Alter
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The Free Universal Construction Kit is a wonderful idea, "a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys." It is not a set of physical objects, but instructions for a 3D printer. My first thought upon seeing it on every website from Kottke to Geekologie is that the patent lawyers will be on the case in seconds; In Canada, we have watched the endless battle between LEGO and Montreal's Mega Blok that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (LEGO lost).
It turns out that the designers of the Free Universal Construction Kit (I cannot use the acronym on this family website) were preoccupied with the issue as well. In fact, it seems to be one of the prime motivations of the design, " to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests."
In producing the Free Universal Construction Kit, we hope to demonstrate a model of reverse engineering as a civic activity: a creative process in which anyone can develop the necessary pieces to bridge the limitations presented by mass-produced commercial artifacts.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The designers describe the Free Universal Construction Kit is a sort VLC open source video player for hardware; a tool that disrupts the system, that lets anyone play with their toys any way they want instead of the way the toy manufacturers plan it.
Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.
The Free Universal Construction Kit from Adapterz on Vimeo.
The most important aspect of the Free Universal Construction Kit is what it portends for the future.
The Free Universal Construction Kit is simply one “toy” illustration of a coming grassroots revolution, in which everyday people can—with desktop tools—overcome arbitrary restrictions in mass-manufactured physical culture. The burgeoning possibility of freely shared downloadable adapters has significant implications for industries where the attempt to create “technological lock-in” is a common business practice.
No wonder that the first people they thank in their credits, after their families, are their lawyers. More at Free Art and Technology.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
Personal comment:
A very interesting approach for opensource projects: to bridge the gap and position themselves between branded (and/or proprietary) products.
Thursday, February 23. 2012
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While the subject of online piracy is certainly nothing new, the recent protests against SOPA and the federal raid on Megaupload have thrust the issue into mainstream media. More than ever, people are discussing the controversial topic while content creators scramble to find a way to try to either shut down or punish sites and individuals that take part in the practice. Despite these efforts, online piracy continues to be a thorn in Big Media’s side. With the digital media arena all but conquered by piracy, the infamous site The Pirate Bay (TPB) has begun looking to the next frontier to be explored and exploited. According to a post on its blog, TPB has declared that physical objects named “physibles” are the next area to be traded and shared across global digital smuggling routes.
TPB defines a physible as “data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” Namely, items that can be created using 3D scanning and printing technologies, both of which have become much cheaper for you to actually own in your home. At CES this year, MakerBot Industries introduced its latest model which is capable of printing objects in two colors and costs under $2,000. With the price of such devices continuing to drop, 3D printing is going to be part of everyday life in the near future. Where piracy is going to come in is the exchange of the files (3D models) necessary to create these objects.
A 3D printer is essentially a “CAD-CAM” process. You use a computer-aided design (CAD) program to design a physical object that you want made, and then feed it into a computer-aided machining (CAM) device for creation. The biggest difference is that traditional CAM setups, the process is about milling an existing piece of metal, drilling holes and using water jets to carve the piece into the desired configuration. In 3D printing you use extrusion to actually create what is illustrated in the CAD file. Those CAD files are the physibles that TPB is talking about, since they are digital they are going to be as easily transferred as an MP3 or movie is right now.
It isn’t too far outside the realm of possibility that once 3D printing becomes a part of everyday life, companies will begin to sell the CAD files and the rights to be able to print proprietary items. If the technology continues to advance at the same rate, in 10 or 20 years you might be printing a new pair of Nikes for your child’s basketball game right in your home (kind of like the 3D printed sneakers pictured above). Instead of going to the mall and paying $120 for a physical pair of shoes in a retail outlet, you will pay Nike directly on the internet and receive the file necessary to direct your printer to create the sneakers. Of course, companies will do their level best to create DRM on these objects so that you can’t freely just print pair after pair of shoes, but like all digital media it will be broken be enterprising individuals.
TPB has already created a physibles category on its site, allowing you to download plans to be able to print out such things as the famous Pirate Bay Ship and a 1970 Chevy hot rod. For now it’s going to be filled with user-created content, but in the future you can count on it being stocked with plans for DRM-protected objects.
Tuesday, February 21. 2012
Via Booketing
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L’association Austria Solar (regroupant des entreprises du secteur photovoltaïque), a demandé à l’agence Allemande, Service Plan de s’occuper de la création de leur rapport annuel. Ce sont les graphistes Matthäus Frost et Mathias Nösel qui ont travaillé sur ce projet pour le moins originale. Ils ont utilisé une encre spéciale qui permet l’apparition du contenu lorsque les pages réagissent avec les rayons du soleil. Plutôt astucieux ! Là où c’est fort, c’est que même dans une pièce éclairée, il ne se passe rien, c’est vraiment uniquement grâce à la lumière naturelle que le contenu se révèle.
Vous remarquerez donc une mise en page épurée, avec des infographies en trois couleurs. Afin de mieux vous rendre compte du résultat, vous pourrez découvrir à la suite, photos et vidéo. N’oublions pas de mentionner également le bon boulot de l’imprimeur, Mory & Meier.
Et pour finir, la vidéo qui montre la « transformation » en direct :
Personal comment:
Is this a basic phosphorescent ink (like there are also thermal inks that reacts to special temperatures) or a special one that seems to react only to the sun's light wavelength? In any case, it would be interesting to have colors/texts/patterns that appears only under very specific conditions (a very precise wavelength or temperature or when some particles are detected in the air). A low-fi "media facade" so to say.
Monday, February 13. 2012
Via MIT Technology Review (blog)
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Before you dismiss it as a fad, consider the evolution of 2-D printing.
By Tim Maly
The Miehle P.P. & Mfg. Co. 1905 printing press. Credit: Public Domain / Wikipedia.
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I'd like to sneak up on the question of 3-D printing by way of boring old 2-D printing.
Typography used to be heavy industry. The companies that make typefaces are still called foundries because there was a time when letters were made of metal. When you got enough of them together to reliably set a whole book or whatever, you had a serious amount of hardware on your hands. Fonts were forged. Picking a new one was a large capital investment. Today, fonts are a thing that you pick from a drop-down menu and printers are things in your home that can render just about any typeface you can imagine.
We went from massive metal fonts and centralized presses to the current desktop regime by degrees. In the early days of desktop printing, we had the dot-matrix. The deal was simple: "We give you one crappy font and you need specialized paper but you can do this at home". It wasn’t useful for much, but it was useful for some things, and used frequently enough that it was worth developing improvements.
Today, it's reasonable for most people to have a pile of paper and a printer that cost them next to nothing and for businesses to have stockrooms laden with the raw material of documents. Print shops have had to stay a step ahead, selling convenience, their ability to print nicer things on bigger formats, or the economics of scale.
I want you to bear this in mind, when you consider Chris Mims' argument that the idea that 3-D printing will be a mature technology "on any reasonable time scale" is absurd.
Chris is right that 3-D printing as it stands isn't a replacement for the contemporary industrial supply chain. It's clearly a transitional technology. The materials suck. The resolution is terrible. The objects are fragile. You can't recycle the stuff.
Maybe early home 3-D printers use only plastic and can only make objects that fall within certain performance restrictions. Maybe it starts out as, like, jewelry, the latest model toys, and parts for Jay Leno's car. But there's no way that lasts. People are already working on the problem. They are working especially hard on the materials problem.
At the same time, it's not hard to imagine a convergence from the other direction. Some materials and formats will fall out of favor because they are hard to make rapidly. Think of how most documents are 8.5×11 (or A4) these days. It's just not worth the hassle of wrangling dozens of paper formats.
It's also important not to confuse 3-D printing & desktop-class fabrication. These aren't the same thing. There is more to desktop manufacturing than 3-D printers. A well-appointed contemporary maker workshop has working CNC mills, lathes, and laser cutters. A well-appointed design studio has the tools to make and finish prototypes that look very nice indeed. Aside from the 3-D printer, none of these tools are terribly science-fictional; they're well-established technologies that happen to be getting cheaper from year to year.
Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working. There comes a point where making new things isn't a capital investment but simply a marginal one. Fab shops are already popping up, just like print shops did.
Copyright Technology Review 2012.
Wednesday, November 23. 2011
Whilst we are pretty much all aware of the implications of 3-D printing as a process of making any arbitrary object at the push of a button, it is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.
Designers at IDEO have teamed up with scientists at the Lim Lab at the University of California, San Francisco to envision a “provocation” (that’s designer-ese for thought experiment) in which they explore the possibilities of exploiting known properties of microorganisms to literally “grow” the products we use every day.
What is particularly interesting about these future scenarios is where we once thought about computer systems that evolve through immense network of both physical and conceptual parameters, where one influence the other as in the case of Nervous System’s process of “growing objects”, the process of printing may eventually evolve into processes of actual physical growing. These two systems, of digital creation and of the biological one may eventually merge, creating an ecology of both digital and physical networks that communicate and feed of one another.
“One day if we understand how to program [living organisms,] we can encode things beyond software–we could encode materiality” says Carey. “That’s already happening in nature, but we have no idea how to do that ourselves.”
Time to move away from mimicry?
Read more on Fast Company >Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods
More on this topic at syntheticaesthetics.org
Friday, November 18. 2011
Via @chrstphggnrd
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A curious project and fake old book about the future that Christophe Guignard pointed out to me. Designed as an exhibition project by designer/photographer Cameron Baxter.
Thursday, April 07. 2011
Via MIT Technology Review
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A novel approach to design and construction could save materials and energy, and create unusually beautiful structures.
By Kevin Bullis
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Model maker: Neri Oxman works on “Cartesian Wax: Prototype for a Responsive Skin,” a model that is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Credit: Mikey Siegel |
In conventional construction, workers piece together buildings from mass-produced, prefabricated bricks, I-beams, concrete columns, plates of glass and so on. Neri Oxman, an architect and a professor at MIT's Media Lab, intends to print them instead—essentially using concrete, polymers, and other materials in the place of ink. Oxman is developing a new way of designing buildings to take advantage of the flexibility that printing can provide. If she's successful, her approach could lead to designs that are impossible with today's construction methods.
Existing 3-D printers, also called rapid prototyping machines, build structures layer by layer. So far these machines have been used mainly to make detailed plastic models based on computer designs. But as such printers improve and become capable of using more durable materials, including metals, they've become a potentially interesting way to make working products.
Oxman is working to extend the capabilities of these machines—making it possible to change the elasticity of a polymer or the porosity of concrete as it's printed, for example—and mounting print heads on flexible robot arms that have greater freedom of movement than current printers.
She's also drawing inspiration from nature to develop new design strategies that take advantage of these capabilities. For example, the density of wood in a palm tree trunk varies, depending on the load it must support. The densest wood is on the outside, where bending stress is the greatest, while the center is porous and weighs less. Oxman estimates that making concrete columns this way—with low-density porous concrete in the center—could reduce the amount of concrete needed by more than 10 percent, a significant savings on the scale of a construction project.
Oxman is developing software to realize her design strategy. She inputs data about physical stresses on a structure, as well as design constraints such as size, overall shape, and the need to let in light into certain areas of a building. Based on this information, the software applies algorithms to specify how the material properties need to change throughout a structure. Then she prints out small models based on these specifications.
The early results of her work are so beautiful and intriguing that they've been featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Science in Boston. One example, which she calls Beast, is a chair whose design is based on the shape of a human body (her own) and the predicted distribution of pressure on the chair. The resulting 3-D model features a complex network of cells and branching structures that are soft where needed to relieve pressure and stiff where needed for support.
The work is at an early stage, but the new approach to construction and design suggests many new possibilities. A load-bearing wall could be printed in elaborate patterns that correspond to the stresses it will experience from the load it supports from wind or earthquakes, for instance.
The pattern could also account for the need to allow light into a building. Some areas would have strong, dense concrete, but in areas of low stress, the concrete could be extremely porous and light, serving only as a barrier to the elements while saving material and reducing the weight of the structure. In these non-load bearing areas, it could also be possible to print concrete that's so porous that light can penetrate, or to mix the concrete gradually with transparent materials. Such designs could save energy by increasing the amount of daylight inside a building and reducing the need for artificial lighting. Eventually, it may be possible to print efficient insulation and ventilation at the same time. The structure can be complex, since it costs no more to print elaborate patterns than simple ones.
Other researchers are developing technology to print walls and other large structures. Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, has built a system that can deposit concrete walls without the need for forms to contain the concrete. Oxman's work would take this another step, adding the ability to vary the properties of the concrete, and eventually work with multiple materials.
The first applications of Oxman's approach will likely to be on a relatively small scale, in consumer products and medical devices. She's used her principles to design and print wrist braces for carpal tunnel syndrome. They're customized based on the pain that a particular patient experiences. The approach could also improve the performance of prosthetics.
Oxman, 35, is developing her techniques in partnership with a range of specialists, such as Craig Carter, a professor of materials science at MIT. While he says her approach faces challenges in controlling the properties of materials, he's impressed with her ideas: "There's no doubt that the results are strikingly beautiful."
Copyright Technology Review 2011.
Wednesday, March 16. 2011
Via TreeHugger
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Image: Gear Diary
The Digital Migration Continues to Change the Face of Consumption
A new study from the Ponyter Institute reveals that by the end of 2010, more people were reading their news online than in traditional newspapers. 34% said they read news online, while 31% read the paper. A noted shift in advertising revenues supported the same claim -- more money went to online sources than to daily dead tree editions, too. This story serves to highlig...
Read the full story on TreeHugger
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