ecopolis

Official press release
September 24, 2008

Turn hand drawings into real life things with Ponoko’s Photomake
San Francisco, CA – World leader in product individualization Ponoko has today launched another world first. It’s a service called Photomake. You can use it to turn digital photos of hand drawings into real products simply by uploading them to the Ponoko website.

Ponoko has established itself as a place where you can shop online for one-of-a-kind goods direct from popular and upcoming designers, or design and make them yourself. The company is on a mission to make it super simple for anyone to make anything that is on their mind, at low cost.

Previously at Techcrunch40, Ponoko launched Designmake for designers to make things on demand – over 10,000 have signed up. Earlier this year, they also launched Ponoko ID for shoppers to request goods to be made just for them by these designers. Now with Photomake they’re inviting creative people who don’t know how to use design software to participate simply by sketching what they want on a piece of paper and uploading a photo of it to get it made.

Chief Strategy Officer, Derek Elley says Photomake is child’s play. “It’s great for crafters, makers and artists,” he says. “One of the cool things about Photomake is the quality of the result – it’s truly hand drawn. Because digital making is so very precise every tiny bump in the hand drawn creation is picked up and made for real. This gives a very natural and human feel to the things you make.”

All you need to get started with Photomake is a felt tip pen and piece of paper. Just draw what you want to make, take a photograph of it, upload this digital photo to the Ponoko website (no login required), get an instant online price to turn your drawing into the real thing, then click to make. Your product will be delivered to your door in days.

CEO Dave ten Have says Photomake is made possible by some very clever file conversion technology that is more accurate than anything that has come before it. “It is designed so that what you draw is what is made, without any touching up required in a design software program,” he says. “It is also 100% online, so you don’t need to own a design software program to use it.”

And for those who know how to use Microsoft Paint and popular photo editing software like Photoshop and GIMP, Photomake is the perfect tool to turn creations designed in these programs into real things too. This is because Photomake accepts common jpg, gif and png files.

Elley says that, as with Ponoko’s original Designmake service, designers can use the new service to make cash as well as make things for themselves. “When you make something with Photomake, you can keep it for yourself, give it as a gift or sell it online from your own free Ponoko e-commerce storefront. You can also sell or give away for free your design file templates too.”

So if you’re worried about the cost of Christmas shopping this season, Photomake may be the easiest and most affordable way to give the most personal of gifts – hand drawn and made by you.

http://www.ponoko.com/photomake

The Radiohead are very sensible to innnovation technology, after releasing ( but now it’s no more possible…) the last album called In Rainbow with an offer from their website, they’ve realised a new music video for Radiohead’s song “House Of Cards“, of which the images were generated without cameras or film, but with 3 different real-time 3D laser scanners that are normally used to capture geometrical terrains & objects.

And here you’ve the making of this video.

via Information Aesthetics

Design and the Elastic Mind, from February 24th till May 12th, is organizeed at the The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery of New York.
Here you can read the explanation text of the curators Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user’s interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Interview realized by Tagr.tv.

GeneratorX 2.0 Beyond the Screen at [DAM] Berlin from lambretta on Vimeo.

The Generator.x 2.0 event ended one month ago. Here a short video about.
While most of the works in the show literally did not exist the week before, there were a few pre-selected pieces by people like Jared Tarbell, Theverymany (Marc Fornes and Skylar Tibbits) and Commonwealth.

The city of Turin will host the fourth edition of the Piemonte Share Festival from 11th to 16th March 2008. The festival promises to be at the cutting edge of the vast cultural programme of events lined up for the city currently brandishing the title 2008 World Design Capital.
Steering us round this wonderful artistic adventure is Bruce Sterling, guest curator and chairman of the jury that has selected the work on show. Better known for his science fiction writing and inventor of the cyberpunk genre, he is currently a guest in Turin for six months, actively involved in raising the temperature in this ferment. He will also supply the public with regular personal rundowns on goings-on at the Piemonte Share Festival, which is set to become a year to remember.
Free entry.

The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addressed a need to reach beyond its own limits, drawing immateriality into the equation and threatening the real. Nowadays, society relates to technologies in a natural way by allowing the immaterial to become real. By exploring new, intelligent interaction between man and machine, this relationship has been completely integrated into everyday life. In the new millennium man and machine interact on the same level, shaping and changing the surrounding environment as they see fit. The Piemonte Share Festival is an international cultural event that probes the vast panorama of new technologies and investigates their applications in art and design.

Because of recent advances in digital fabrication technology, manufacturing is becoming a digital art and culture enterprise. The exciting advent of 3d printing, rapid prototyping, and rapid manufacturing is of profound importance to SHARE, for it bring the power to create physical objects to the techno-artist’s lab-bench, studio and atelier. It means that digital artists, whose work was once mostly virtual, can create in the actual.

SHARE has chosen the theme “Manufacturing” for its 2008 event for two compelling reasons. First, we want to demonstrate digital manufacturing to our core audience, who are very technically adept people, but not used to the idea that they can create real objects with CAD, fabricators and the Internet. The second reason is that Torino is the World Capital of Design 2008. Torino is a strong manufacturing center. SHARE is very international in its outlook and audience, but in 2008 this Torino festival should and will emphasize the fact that it is from Torino.

Front is a design group of four: Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren and Katja Sävström. They work as a group where all members are involved in the design process from initial discussions and ideas to final product. Their works are based on common discussions, exploring and investigations about different topics. And the final products often communicates a story to the observer about the design process, about conventions within the product field or about the material it is made of.

The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialise free hand sketches. They make it possible by using a unique method where two advanced techniques are combined.
Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.

The Swedish design group FRONT has been working in Japan since September. During this time they have developed and explored the technique they used in the making of Sketch Furniture which they showed in Art Basel Miami / Design 05 with Barry Friedman Gallery Ltd ( New York ). Front make design as a performance. During Tokyo Design week they will show the process of making Sketch Furniture and the final pieces of furniture at Tokyo Wonder Site 31 October – 5 November.

Generator.x in collaboration with Club Transmediale and [DAM] presents Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the screen, a workshop and exhibition about digital fabrication and generative systems.

Digital fabrication (also known as “fabbing”) represents the next step in the digital revolution. After years of virtualization, with machines and atoms being replaced by bits and software, we are coming full circle. Digital technologies like rapid prototyping, laser cutting and CNC milling now produce atoms from bits, eliminating many of the limitations of industrial production processes. Once prohibitively expensive, such technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, pointing to a future where mass customization and manufacturing-on-demand may be real alternatives to mass production.

For artists and designers working with generative systems, digital fabrication opens the door to a range of new expressions beyond the limits of virtual space. Parametric models apply computational strategies to the analysis and synthesis of space, producing structures and surfaces of great complexity. Through fabbing these forms may be rendered tangible, even tactile.

“Beyond the screen” explores these new types of spatial constructs in a hands-on workshop, bringing together artists and designers working with code-based strategies for producing physical form. The workshop will feature public presentations bringing the topics of the workshop to a broader audience, culminating in an exhibition of fabbing works at the [DAM] gallery. In a continuation of the Generator.x concert tour, “Beyond the Screen” will also include an evening of concerts, showing the use of generative systems in audiovisual performance.