Core77

photo by the-northshore

La Princess is the latest steampunky spectacle from the geniuses at La Machine and Artichoke - who created the Telectroscope earlier this year and produced The Sultan's Elephant with Royal de Luxe in 2006.

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15. It doesn't work

14. It doesn't work because you couldn't get a hold of a 220-to-110 volt converter/110-to-220 volt converter/PAL-to-NTSC/NTSC-to-PAL scan converter/serial-to-usb adapter/"dongle" of any sort..and the town you're in is simply not the kind of place that has/cares about such things

13. Your audience looks under/behind your table/pedestal/false wall/drop ceiling or follows wires to find out "where the camera is"

12. Someone either on their blog or across the room is prattling on about the shifting relations between producers and consumers..and mentions your project

11. Your audience "interacts" by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines

10. Your audience asks amongst themselves, "how does it work?"

9. The exhibition curators insist that you spend hours standing by your own wall text so that you can explain to attendees "how it works"

8. It's just like using your own normal, human, perfectly good eyeballs, only the resolution sucks and the colors are really lousy..plus the heat from the CPU fan is blowing on your forehead which makes you really uncomfortable and schvitz-y

7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, "Yeah..yeah, I could've done that too..c'mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It's so easy..."

6. Someone in your audience, maybe the same guy with the Crumpler bag and digital SLR excitedly says, "Oh, dude. That should totally be a Facebook app!"

5. It's called a "project" and not a "piece of art"

4. You saw the "project" years ago...and here it is again...now with multi-touch interaction and other fancy digital bells and Web 2.0-y whistles

3. Your audience cups their hands over various proturbances/orifices at or nearby your project attempting to confuse/interact with the camera/sensor/laser beam, even if it uses no such technology

2. There's a noticeable preponderance of smoothly shifting red, green and blue lighting effects

1. People wonder if it wasn't all really done in Photoshop, anyway

(original post)

Opening last week at the bigger-than-it-looks Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, ManufRactured is a first-of-its-kind exhibition of art and design projects from re-purposed manufactured materials. Familiar names like Marcel Wanders and Cat Chow are in attendance, along with some lesser known but mightily impressive works like Devorah Sperber's abstracted mosaics from thread spools and marker caps, and Regis Mayot's skeletonized plastic bottles. For those in Portland or visiting soon, it runs through January at the museum's new-ish space on NW 8th and Davis; Carl Alviani and photographer Kirill Shelayev have put together a short, beautiful gallery for the rest of you.

>>view gallery

A rich mix of speakers ranging from global design experts, entrepreneurs, and engineers to eco-chemists, artists and magicians (green ones, we hope) will take part in Greengaged -- the sustainable design hub of The London Design Festival.

Greengaged will explore a different theme in sustainable design each weekday of The London Design Festival, from the 15th to 23rd September, bringing together free debates, seminars, workshops, excursions and exhibitions at the Design Council in Covent Garden.

We love the names of the events:

Monday 15th September: Big Problems, Big Ideas
Tuesday 16th September: Gauging the Green
Wednesday 17th September: The power of Design
Thursday 18th September: Material Matters
Friday 19th September: Walk it, Talk it
Monday 22nd September: Tomorrow’s Designers
Tuesday 23rd September: Green for Go

Yup, those seem to be the issues. Full program and booking at www.greengaged.com. More info here.

Since 1995, around 300 participants from all over the world live and work for one week with renowned designers, architects and artists at the Domaine de Boisbuchet. Organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the courses of 25 designers run during the summer in an extensive park-like estate in the South of France. Tine Kromer shoots the event for Core77, with more photos in the coming weeks!

>> view gallery

"Bicycle" is the title of a 100-day event (Jun.22 - Oct.5) full of activities and lectures anchored by a central exhibition at the Designhuis in Eindhoven. The exhibition provides a great overview on the variety of two-wheelers designed for sports, transport, or just showing off! There are some 18 million bicycles in the Netherlands--check out some of the best ones here. Aart van Beezoyen's got your ride.

>> view gallery

Okay, these can be pricey, but if you find Wendell Castle a bit overwrought, check out Jolyon Yates' furniture designs, hand made in Northumberland. We asked Jolyon for a bit more info about the pieces, and then asked him if we could paste his comments right here.

I have been working in the car and the boat industries for many years as well as in University, teaching. The ODE chairs are kind of a reaction to loveless mass production--the rather lofty ideal emanating from the suspicion that when we mass-copy an object, the love that goes into designing such a piece is largely lost.

More photos and text after the jump.

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From under the heavy skirts of big-shot builders emerge an illustrious few who might actually surprise you with a cool building or two. New Practices New York 2008, an exhibition designed by WSDIA and Corey Yurkovich, will feature 6 of NYC's most notable emerging, innovative architecture firms that competed in this year's NPNY AIANY competition. Opening night is Friday, September 5th with the exhibit running until January 3rd, 2009.

New Practices New York 2008

On View at the Center for Architecture:
September 5, 2008 - January 3, 2009

Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY 10012

Elmer's Wood Glue, long a staple of wood shops here in the US (including the ones where we spent way too many of our ID school days and nights), is undergoing its first major packaging change in just about forever. The offset spout design, shown here next to the long-standing centered shape, makes laying down a long bead considerably easier and more precise, but posed a significant printing challenge. Enter Eastman Innovation Labs, whose Embrace resin films were able to shrink over the weird asymmetric shape, giving the bottles higher shelf visibility and more space to distinguish between types.

The Innovation Lab website offers an impressive assortment of other tricky materials, in this gallery, clearly aimed at the ID and packaging design set (they're also partially responsible for the POM Wonderful bottles that the branding community swooned over a couple years back). If you're planning to re-invent a wheel or glue bottle anytime soon, go take a look.

Weekly finds from the 3D world.

Inventor
Creating casting blanks using derived parts
Using Nested Reps (video podcast)

Pro/Engineer
Using the DimBound option to set tolerance limits

SketchUp
Integrated Environmental Solutions releases a free SketchUp plugin for performing energy analysis