ben® Color Capture™ VS ColorSnap™

Paint companies Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams recently released color applications for the iPhone. So, which one is the best?

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Virtualizing the business of Interior Design.

Myself and several other design enthusiasts joined in the twitter campaign to raise awareness for Chicago’s NeoCon 2009 now in its 41st year. Driving the campaign is the Manhattan based start-up Designer Pages. Designer Pages has set out to bring the Interior Design industry into the world of Web 2.0 by creating a user-generated platform for sourcing and sharing the multitudes of products all over the world that are available to interior designers and architects. (Ponoko users can submit their designs too where they could be viewed and speced by thousands of interior designers and architects.) Their service allows designers to streamline their product catalogs, create virtual inspiration and presentation boards, and eventually to export all of this information to PDF in order to share with clients and coworkers.

The DP team has been networking with industry professionals to demonstrate the advantages of submitting their product lines to the site and digitizing their product catalogs.  They are also helping these companies become more familiar with social media tools like twitter. Anyone wearing a tweet printed black t-shirt can help exhibitors and attendees join the twitter conversation about NeoCon. As an incentive, they have been raffling off two red 8gig ipod nanos every day to twitter users including the #NeoCon09 hashtag. I was lucky enough to win the very first one. The twitter feed is broadcast live on five giant screens throughout the Merchandise Mart, so it’s a great way to draw attention to a particular product or booth.

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Innovative use of CNC ‘digital joints’.

Panels 02 & 03 by Paris based sebastien wierinck will be shown at salone Satellite with the 101pct Designed in Brussels selection. The interesting thing about this work that sets it apart from much of the flat pack furniture in the field is the use of CNC specific construction joints, rather than emulating standard joinery or basic slots.
As CNC cabinetry becomes more accessible we will see some otherwise impossible (or at least really really difficult) digital wood joints being shared on the web.
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By Algorithmic Artisans NERVOUS SYSTEM

Inspired by the complex forms of radiolarians (amoeboid protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons), where intricate pattern is integral to structure, these shapes derive from a simulation of spring meshes which form mirrored catenoid surfaces. Nervous System have created interactive software to morph, twist, and subdivide each design, transforming a simple mesh to a complex patterned structure.

The final design is built up layer by layer in durable nylon plastic using Selective Laser Sintering, a kind of 3D printing. These forms would be impossible to create by traditional manufacturing methods. The process imparts the pieces with a coral-like texture, while the slight flexibility of nylon and airy design.
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From render to reality in a mouse click (and possibly 1000 hours of hard work)


A recent post on the Shapeways community forum by a “junior member” has some amazing photos of the process of building a micro helicopter using parts printed using Shapeways 3D printing services.
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Pixelogic has just announced the new 3D Print Exporter plugin for ZBrush.

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Congratulations Daniel Reetz

Epilog Laser, Instructables and Ponoko are pleased to announce Daniel Reetz, Fargo, N.D., is the grand-prize winner in the Epilog Challenge. Reetz will receive a new Zing 16 Laser engraving/cutting system for his innovative and eco-friendly DIY High-Speed Book Scanner from Trash and Cheap Cameras. Reetz’s winning instructable was one of 478 entries in the Epilog Challenge.
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Detail of an ‘Oasis in a Corn Desert’ by Min|Day

The Lake Cabinet by Min|Day is the primary built feature in the master bedroom of a vacation house on a lake in rural Iowa. The Lake Cabinet challenges the modernist notion of the detail as the expression of a joint {between two or more elements}. The piece is essentially an 11’-4” x 6’-0” x 1’-6” storage cabinet lifted 12” above the floor. The architect studied the form of water ripples from several photographs of the lake. From these they developed a range of parameters for a computer animation of the behavior and interference of rippling water. The result is a massive cabinet with a surprisingly supple surface quality.
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The Smart Materials Kit is a sample collection of various powders, wires, and plastics with “smart” qualities. The kit comes with the book Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting by Syuzi Pakhchyan and published by CRAFT.

Material samples include:

• ¼ oz phosphorescent powder (make glow-in-the-dark ink for printing!)
• 10g of blue photochromatic powder (color-changing in different light)
• 10g of yellow photochromatic powder (color-changing in different light)
• 10g of thermochromatic powder (color-changing with temperature)
• 2 feet of shape memory wire; 5 crimp beads to control the wire
• 2 ounces of polymorph plastic (heat and mold as many times as you want)

We’ve mentioned a few designers on the blog that are using these kinds of materials.

• Josien Pieters uses thermochromatic inks in his dynamic wallpapers.
• Marie Ilse Bourlanges visually captures the movement of the body in her experimental fashion.
• Kathy Schicker uses photochromatic and phosphorescent techniques in transformative textiles.
• Nendo designed a “blooming” lamp with a shape-memory alloy.

The Smart Materials Kit is available with Fashioning Technology for $65 at the Maker Shed.

via Fashioning Tech

Or How To Steampunk

Those of you who read the previous post on the Ponoko Blog that showcased Cerrious Design’s rusty Steampunk USB drive may be curious as to how he achieved the effect. Dylan of Cerrious Design has been generous enough to share his technique.
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