CREATExCHANGE

Weekly finds from the 3D world

Rhino
RhinoCAM 2.0 now available in Beta
RhinoScript.org - a site for the free sharing of scripts for Rhino users
Gallery of Rhino models used in film and set design (check out the Gotham City dump truck from The Dark Knight)

General 3D CAD
Berkeley team develops interactive tool for exploding 3D views

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The Register reports that an astute Finn is offering a bastardized version of Google’s search engine that ignores sites served up by Google itself.

“Inspired by a recent New York Times piece that questioned whether the Mountain View search monopoly is morphing into a media company - which it is - Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo promptly unveiled Google minus Google. Key in the word “YouTube,” and the first result is Wikipedia.”

According to The Register, Google minus Google is built with the Google Custom Search Engine and “conveniently filters out domains such as YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, Knol, Orkut, and - most importantly - Jaiku. In other words, it removes Google’s conflict of interest.”

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When choosing a vehicle, women want design options that offer flexibility, allow them to connect to the outside world and offer more storage space.

These are some of the key findings from a study conducted by Johnson Controls in the United States and Europe, in response to the recent women-focused trends and market indicators highlighting the increasing buying power of women.

The company will utilize the data to inspire and drive industrial design and new product development that meets the evolving needs of women.

>> read press release

photo: Johnson Controls

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It kind of looks like something from Quake: The Shooter fire extinguisher concept fires CO2 bullets rather than foam, meaning you get to terminate the blaze with extreme prejudice. Only thing this baby’s missing is a bandolier for the bullets. Designed by Eunjung Kim, Yangwoo Kim & Junyi Heo.

via yanko design by way of dvice

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A bite-sized list of what’s happenin’ now:

designweek u.k.
U.K. Department of Health: Design Bugs Out

irish times
Renault takes a step backwards, introducing a new SUV

manila bulletin
The Philippines: Interior design students ‘hit’ the runway

india p.r. wire
India: City based Ticket design’s Ticket to success

dvice
Next hands-free input device: your tongue

c scout japan
Tiny island + urban tourists = experiments in cashless society

marketwatch
The Female Perspective on Cars: Study Investigating ‘What Women Want’ in Vehicle Interior Design

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The Third Line, one of the UAE’s most avant-garde art galleries, is bringing a multi-disciplinary exhibition titled Roads Were Open/Roads Were Closed starting September 6 to October 2, 2008, that explores conflict in the Middle East beyond the stereotyped propaganda and prejudice through artworks and a series of movies that will play at the gallery as well as Cine Star cinemas at Mall of the Emirates.

Roads Were Open / Roads Were Closed is an interdisciplinary exhibition which maps varying approaches and practices around the experience, perception and memory of conflict-related trauma. Works by Fouad Elkoury, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Tarek Al Ghoussein and Laila Shawa (whose ” Weapons of Mass Destruction” is featured above), will be featured along with a panel discussion with the artists, and a series of films shown over the duration of the exhibition

more after the jump

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From Wright student Paolo Soleri’s “arcology” (architecture + ecology) cities to Japan’s Mega-City Pyramid, from floating city concepts to Dubai’s proposed Ziggurat, have a look at some big thinking on alternate ways for metropolii and nature to co-exist.

via drb

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Apparently, now is a very bad time to visit the Bay Area:

via current

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Retrothing’s got a post up lamenting the death of the Automat, that low-hassle, tip-free dining experience of the past. But the Automat is still around, albeit in pockets: the Netherlands has got their FEBO chain, and NYC is home to Bamn on St. Mark’s.

Hit the jump for large pictures, and remember a time when your food wasn’t brought to you by a frustrated, Shakespeare-trained actor who despises you.

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Two from Reuben Miller:

You’ve all seen that wooden LED clock; now check out the Maple cell phone designed Hyun Jin Yoon and Eun Hak Lee. It took Silver at this year’s IDEA awards and we’re dying for it to go into production.

Those of you that watched Monday’s video of Japan’s Good Design Expo might have been wondering about the Segway-esque machine people are seen zipping around on. It’s the Winglet, Toyota’s answer to (or rip-off of?) Dean Kamen. Video:

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Anyone who’s ever taken a color theory class at an art school knows that you can create harmonies and tensions simply by juxtaposing specific hues. And all the nominees’ stylists employed this to full effect…

more after the jump

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Industrial Design Manager for Consumer Major Appliances
General Electric : Consumer & Industrial Appliances
Louisville, Kentucky

Generate new product features and appearance concepts that maintain product leadership position with specific focus on areas of visual brand character, perceived quality, usability, and relevant value-added features… Represent the end-user from development phase through production… Drive innovative productivity improvements to increase competitiveness…

» view

The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Imagine if you took today’s best graphic designers and set them to work producing not advertisements or marketing brochures, but propaganda to promote American values. Starting in the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression, that’s precisely what happened when the federal government tapped the nation’s unemployed commercial artists for the Works Progress Administration poster division. Working out of nearly 20 regional workshops, they designed posters to promote safety, good health, community involvement, and other social values.

Utne Reader has a slideshow of some of these posters and many rare ones reproduced in a new book by Ennis Carter- Posters for the People (Quirk Books, 2008). Here’s a snippet on Carter herself,

Carter, 42, was working as a young organizer for the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group in the late 1980s when she found herself, out of necessity, making her own posters for events and rallies. It was the age of Kinko’s, and Carter mastered the art of photocopy-style guerrilla poster-making. Along the way, she became captivated by the power of graphic design to communicate social messages and gradually shifted the focus of her work in that direction. In 1996 she founded Design for Social Impact, a low-cost graphic design agency for public interest organizations.

text and photocredit: UtneReader
image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

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Brooklyn-based product design outfit MAKE have a sideline project called CAKE which serves as an outlet to realize their self-initiated products. The latest addition to their collection is the octopi cup made from stoneware re-interpreting the classic mint julep cup.

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From the Coroflot portfolio of : Peter Castellucci ( Cranston, RI )

Featured Project : Garbage Lamp

When you’re done drinking, light up!

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Wired catches up with extreme x-ray photographer Nick Veasey who works with industrial x-ray machines typically used in art restoration, electronics and the military.

Working with high doses of radiation isn’t always easy. To minimize a patient’s radiation exposure, medical x-ray techs grab their blurry stills in a fraction of a second; Veasey needs to bombard his subjects with ionizing radiation for as long as 12 minutes to get crisp shots. So to capture human forms, Veasey works with either skeletons in rubber suits (normally used to train radiologists) or cadavers that have been donated to science. When a corpse becomes available, he has at most eight hours to pose and shoot before rigor mortis sets in.

Veasey’s book simply titled X-ray is due in October and he’s currently building a $200,000 studio with 35-inch-thick, lead-lined concrete walls which will let him see through almost anything.

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Having a quick-release strap on your messenger bag could be good if you’re a frequent brawler; and for the less violently-inclined, it’s just plain ol’ neat. Flickr user L. Marie, through comprehensive photo instructions, shows you how to mod yours here.

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A 30″ LCD; we all want one, but will it change your work habits? Kevin Kelly thinks so:

The first thing I noticed was that the number of times I printed out hard copies of documents went down. Before, I would print copies of diagrams, specifications, and other reference material so that I could easily refer to them while working. Now I have space on the screen to have these visible. I wouldn’t say I’ve made it all the way to the “paperless office,” but it’s gotten a lot closer.

Within a few days of using a large screen I began to experience a much more significant effect, though: when more of the things I needed to look at were already in view, the amount of time spent on visual context switches went down. Having more documents in view not only reduces the time consumed by the switch, but also the “recovery time” needed to remember what I was doing. A related time savings is that when a document I may need to switch to is visible, it takes less time to realize that I need it.

The display fills a lot more of my visual field - so much, in fact, that it took me a week or so to get used to how far away the left and right edges of the screen were. In the end, I found that this made it a little easier to concentrate (since my attention was less often directed toward wherever I’d been keeping the notes that wouldn’t fit on the screen).

I found that once I got used to the idea that most things could be expanded to a size that required no window scrolling, I began to “think big” about a lot of things: my spreadsheets got bigger, my diagrams got bigger - and more unexpectedly: the size of the kind of thing I thought I could handle got bigger; and because I was much less often having to chop things into smaller pieces so that they could fit, things got simpler.

Less paper consumption, easier to concentrate, bigger thinking? What’s not to like? Prices are dropping, too….

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Other than with graphics and modeling programs, is rare that a piece of software gets designed specifically with the needs of designers in mind, but UK-based ProofHQ looks to be bucking this trend a bit. The first online collaborative tool we know of made specifically for creative professionals, ProofHQ is essentially an elegant replacement for the endless stream of emails, YouSendIts and FTP transfers most of us use to review and approve design documents.

Much of the functionality of the application is pretty familiar: anyone who’s used Basecamp, Campfire, or even Google Apps will recognize the project-oriented sign-in system, and mark-up tools are reminiscent of Acrobat.

What sets it apart, though, are the details: multi-page files can be uploaded and reviewed; navigation and version tracking is clean and intuitive; file support includes several different image types, including native Photoshop); and specific views are maintained when switching through versions and pages, allowing easy comparison with minimum fuss. They’ve also gone out of their way to make it as flexible as possible, allowing ProofHQ documents to be embedded in websites, blogs and Basecamp sessions, and providing a Flickr-like drag-and-drop uploading client.

According to CEO Mat Wilkinson, support of additional file types is next on the agenda, including some 3D formats (eDrawings and Acrobat 3D, maybe?), saving us some huge headaches down the line.

Demo movies here.

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As someone who’s lived in no-shoes-allowed-in-the-house Asian environments, I love the idea of the bottom of your shoes being a cleaning element rather than a filth-attracting dirt magnet; at the same time I realize these $8.95 Slipper Genie Microfiber Cleaning Slippers are completely dorky. But I feel it’s a step in the right direction, no pun intended.

via as seen on tv

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You can put this on the shelf right beside your new state-side Muji CD player. Australian designer John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen (now based in San Francisco) offers up The Hidden Radio, a quiet little concept with some poetic ergonomics:

The product attempts to be silent both visually and functionally by having the cap in the downward position. By lifting up the cap the user proportionally increases the volume. The further the cap goes up the louder the sound gets. To tune the radio you simply rotate the cap and receive feedback of tuning quality via the LED on the front.

Learn more at hiddenradio.johnvdn.com.

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A bite-sized list of what’s happenin’ now:

spring fair
Design festival and mag tap 15 grad designers

jec composites
DIY Car

reliable plant
Manufacturing: Mistake-proofing product design

nyt tech
Turning Point for Touch Screens

marketwatch
New Website to Assist Die Casting Product Designers

the auto channel
AvtoVAZ at the Moscow International Automobile Salon

inside retailing
Finding The Trends Before They Affect You

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It’s hard to breathe new life into something as old and ubiquitous as Coke, which is not to say people aren’t trying. Five years ago Coca-Cola’s design chief David Butler was given the mandate “We need to do more with design. Go figure it out,” and since then he’s been discovering the difference between great ideas that will never make it and doable ideas that humbly solve existing problems. Read the full tale here.

via businessweek

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Sara Huston’s work nicely subverts our expectations about the behavior of objects–here, furniture–but still provides the function we look for in the end. Above is the Lifestyle Coffee Table (which she will customize to your favorite magazines), and below, the Expectation 5 cupboard, which, I suppose, is really a shelf…or a drawer. Well, you get the idea.

Here’s Sara in her own words:

I allow for signifiers of use, such as a door, shelf, or a drawer, with these elements becoming just enough information for the viewer/user to relate to. Through this denial I start to uncover ways furniture communicates and challenges viewers/users to question their expectations of something they are familiar with. The viewer/user then can begin to locate meaning because of this familiarity and start to make sense of the piece. It is important to me that my works challenge how people see art and design and the differences or similarities they have, they can begin looking at both in a new way.

See more of her work in her Coroflot portfolio or at sara-huston.com.

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Scientists are now building a new kind of robot capable of self-assembly and doing tasks too difficult or too dangerous for human beings.

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Gabe White of Small Surfaces blog points us to this slideshow of concept mobile phones emerging from an unusual partnership between Yamaha and KDDI.

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Product Designer Bags
Crumpler
Zurich, Switzerland

You will be expected to start off your Crumpler experience by an intensive 6 month work training in Vietnam, during which you will integrate into our Ho Chi Minh City team. Your job will be to develop and design new products for Crumpler’s various lines. Mainly bags, but maybe also some apparel, shoes
and other special projects.

» view

The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Since opening the doors at their new location last year, Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft has been falling over itself trying to become the design museum so many of the residents of this quietly design-obsessed town desperately want. Case in point, the upcoming ManufRactured show, opening this coming Thursday the 28th.

Curated by former ID Magazine editor Steven Skov Holt, among others, the show gathers together 16 artists and designers who’ve been doing curious things with repurposed materials over the past few years. Some recent high-profile projects will be on display, including Cat Chow’s zipper dress, Dominic Wilcox’s War Bowl, and at least one of Jason Rogenes’ fantastic styrofoam packing insert lanterns (example shown above); admission is free.

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Stuart Langfield recently completed these bumpers for MTV, perfect distraction if you’re looking to avoid working for another minute.

Credits:
Design & Direction - Stuart Langfield
Animation - Jennifer Mackie & Stuart Langfield
Sound Design - Andrew Langfield

via notcot

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The exhibition ‘From Now To Eternity‘ Plastic in design, aims to both celebrate and debate the ubiquitous use of plastic in design. 10 contemporary designers and design collectives were commissioned to rethink issues surrounding our growing mountains of discarded plastic.

Featuring: Committee, FAT, Hiroko Shiratori, Raw Edges, Rolf Sachs, Stuart Haygarth, Tom Price, Tomoko Azumi, Troika, WOKMedia.

From Now To Eternity
Sept. 19 - Oct. 19, 2008
Biscuit Building
10 Redchurch Street
London

Open
Wed-Fri: 2-6pm
Sat-Sun: 12-6pm

Photo: Lighting installation by Stuart Haygarth, LDF 2005

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