Danielle Maveal is a ‘jewellery artist’ who specialises in designing and hand making acrylic jewellery. The piece I was most impressed with was her abstract pendant that was sold on etsy. Sadly it’s no longer available but it was a very unique pendant necklace inspired by Danielle’s love of architecture and industrial design. She says “I really wanted to create an architectural piece that was still very simple, modern and organic. This flat frosted acrylic leaf has a little domed hot pink sill just outside its cut out window”. Danielle explains that “I just make pieces I want to wear and sometimes it’s a real hit, like the fake diamond.  Those designs that are a bit more personal – like my fascination with designer chairs, they don’t fly out of my hands.  But it’s worth it to see another chair lover be so excited to see something strange they love on a necklace.”

Adding hand made elements to your laser cut jewellery designs is a great way to break free of the restrictions of laser cutting and ensure your designs stand out from the crowd.

RedesignMe, a crowd sourcing website that gives consumers a platform for their problems and frustrations with daily used products, mentioned briefly in a previous Ponoko post.

Launched in October 2007 during the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, RedesignMe’s goal is to improve products by collectively rethinking how they are built, work, or function.

Registration on the site is free. Here’s how it works:
- Take a picture or make a movie of your struggles with a product
- Type what you don’t like or what you think is failing on the item
- Suggest a redesign or state what you would do differently
- Let the community comment on your suggested changes

According to the site, RedesignMe collects the best product improvements based on your input and communicates that back to the original product designers & producers. RedesignMe contacts the companies behind the products in question to show them the feedback and encourages them to reply directly to the users and eventually fix the problems. RedesignMe also encourages the companies to work more closely with their end-users by setting up RDM Challanges.

RDM Challenges are conceptual or design-driven challenges initiated by companies that want to involve their customers more closely into their product development process. RDM Challenges clearly describe a (design) problem and you, the Redesigner, are rewarded for your feedback through our RDM system. Basically you collect points (RDMs) which you can later convert into prizes in our Prize Vault (Coming Soon). Your feedback can be in form of a comment, sketch, set of pictures, mood-board, movie, prototype or total redesign.
Currently there is a challenge to redesign the Betavine Mobile platform and earn one of 3 iPods Nano for the most creative feedback. This can be in form of a well thought-out comment, wishlist, sketch, webdesign, or prototype

Interesting concept if the ‘prize’ matches the prosumer input…

With their flexible but resistant materials Tau children´s furniture/toys flat packed for kids..Anna Britz is Tau´s graphic designer and
Jörn Alexander Stelzner is the product designer

Tau children´s furniture are delivered as a single sheet. The individual elements are taken out of the face and plugged together. Only a few screws are needed to give extra hold and safety. The sled above is for children from 1 year, who like to be dragged through the snow.
The seesaw below is a fun playobject for the garden but also suitable for indoor use due to its anti-skid stoppers.

These stilts make little persons 40 cm taller.

With the barrow your child is able to train balance and coordination in a playful way or they can sit inside to be pushed by someone else. The barrow is suitable for kids from 2 years on.

All of these products are available from kids modern which has a great range of cool kids stuff to inspire your own Ponoko creation, like the Rocky Family from British design studio PearsonLloyd.

Rock on.

We’ve just added three new materials to the materials catalog. The three new entrants are:

Fluoro-Pink TINT:

Green TINT:

Yellow TINT:

I think pink is my favorite!

Afrigadget is a blog “dedicated to showcasing African ingenuity” that was recently named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2008, quite an accolade. And it is indeed good, bringing forth all manner of ingenious solutions to problems from generating power from playground toys to mobile phone access.

Its great to see a blog bringing together news on projects from around the globe with an emphasis on appropriate technology – so often sites in this area are either just concerned with ‘developed world’ solutions or ‘developing world’ solutions rather than having a more collaborative interest – there are numerous hacks in evidence that are easily as applicable to life in, say, Manchester as they are in Nairobi, not least Jim Chuchu’s ‘controllable, consistent white light‘ for photographers.

Jim’s thoughts on Afrigadget puts it:

It’s actually a very interesting blog, with lots of innovative DIY ideas by our fellow Africans. We’re not only about drought and AIDS, it seems.

Quite. This is what excites me about shareable designs using the web – you get such a wider base of experience and invention than designing within a bubble – when we’re all sharing our experiences, we can help solve each other’s problems, as that conundrum you’re battling with might already have been tackled ten times over in another corner of the globe. Hopefully this can lead to a more balanced world.via Core77.

Daniel A Becker’s Barcode Plantage appeals to me as a good example of exploiting digitalism and computing in order to generate art and design. Written in the highly accessible Processing scripting language (designed specifically for artists and designers), Barcode Plantage is a neat little program. It takes a barcode and processes it using certain algorithms to create a tree-like image unique to the code, complete with key info such as country of origin and manufacturer. The program also plays you a momentary melody also based on the barcode chosen (for me, the program only seemed to work with certain of the random barcodes provided, so keep trying if nothing happens).

I love the idea of taking already-computed processes and using them to drive another – hence applying digital terrains to CNC’d bowls, vector face profiles to 3D printed candlesticks or waveforms to laser cut jewellery (using Ponoko). Its as if one is handing over creative control to the machine – we design the system that it operates, but from there on, the conception and synthesis of the end product is out of our hands and given over to a completely digital process.

The barcode example is particularly exciting as barcodes are a peculiarly tangible by-product of the information age: surrounding us, packed full of machine code, yet simple bars of ink and non-ink – one could write them oneself. As a source code they excite me almost as much as the ZX Spectrum tapes! Another great use of barcodes I came across recently was the Beats from Barcodes project, using a barcode scanner as part of a multitracking drum machine to generate beats in the supermarket!

I’d like to see what laser cutting .eps files can be automatically generated from barcode data!
via Core77

Designed by German native Matthias Ries is Piegato, a single sheet steel rack shipped flat pack.

The laser cut and powder coated sheet steel is been delivered almost completely plain, which results in a simple and cost effective transportation.
The customer then bends out the required amount of shelves from the plain and mounts the hole rack with just two screws in a few minutes. Due to the enviromental friendly production, the freight size and the recyclability Piegato also holds a brilliant ecological balance.

• it’s only one piece!
• easily bend it by hand!
• just two screws needed!
• comes as a flat sheet
• high load capacity (up to 10kg per board)
• works as a magnetboard
• embossed serial number

Size:
100cm x 66cm x 2cm (HxWxD)
Board depth: 20cm

Weight:
approx. 8kg

or watch the video of assemblage.

Last week the 3rd year Industrial Design students at Victoria University presented the prototypes of the 3D printers they had designed. The challenge was to design and make a “green” 3D printer in 4 weeks with a limited budget. The students innovative thinking looked at ways to make use of waste material and repurpose it into new objects.

‘Stack’ used the waste paper from generated by a bank and a ’steampunk’ sewing machine to create layered forms based on an interpretation of the banks statistical data.

‘Nexus’ created forms by building up layers of bubbled gelatin. The results had some pretty amazing visual qualities.

And ‘Equinox’ focused the power of the sun to selectively dry layers of recycled paint to build up fluid forms.

This is the second year that 3D printers have been create by the VUW students, with the last years post here. It will be interesting to see what ideas they come up with next year.

Posted in Dan Emery, Design, Digital Manufacturing, Fabbers by danemery | 4 comments