From the creator of the Sheep Market,  Aaron Koblin has produced a new crowdsourced product, this one being entitled Ten Thousand Cents.   Once again using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as his digital labor market. 

Aaron crafted a custom drawing tool, that allowed thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another to paint a tiny section of the U.S bill without knowing that their effort was part of  an overall design piece.  Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk  and their work was then aggregated and show as a composite video piece of all 10,000 pieces being drawn simultaneously (shown below). The total labor cost to create the digital bill, $100.

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

If you are interested in seeing what the latest in Prefab housing technology is offering.  This video by Scribe Media gives a glimpse into 5 of the structures featured at MOMA’s exhibition: Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.

The video features short interviews with some of the architects and the Chief Curator of Architecture & Design Barry Bergdol.  I think the project that can have the most impact is the Your House out of MIT.  From their project site:

"a prefabricated structure of plywood assembled solely with muscle and mallets, without any nails or screws or glue.

Led by Professor Larry Sass in the Department of Architecture, the project combines CAD technology with computer-controlled machinery to build a whole house from computer models and pre-cut plywood sheets with no drawings or paper documents.

The designer creates a 3-D computer model, flattens the objects to a horizontal position in CAD, then sends each component for cutting. Each component is manufactured with tab or slot for easy assembly and joinery is so precise that all parts stay together by friction alone."

Via

Hektor is a portable Spray-paint Output Device for laptop computers created by designer Jürg Lehni and engineer Uli Franke.

"Hektor’s light and fragile installation consists only of two motors, toothed belts and a can holder that handles regular spray cans. The can is moved along drawing paths just as the human hand or old plotters would.

Hektor was created with a certain attitude towards design and the use of tools. Intuition played an important role in the search for a new output device that goes beyond the limitations of today’s clean computer, screen and vector-graphic based design and conveys the abstract geometries contained in these graphics in a different way than normal printers do.

The aim was to make a statement about design by providing a new tool to other designers and artists to experiment with, a tool with an inherently particular and distinctive aesthetic."

You can get more project details/videos/photos at Hektor’s site.

From the design studio Public Works comes the adaptable Mobile Porch, I especially enjoyed them using it as a means to activate a local micro economy.

Mobile Porch
a mobile mini-architecture designed for roaming the public sphere. It is an urban toy used to engage on a one to one level with the users and governing bodies of public sites. The observations and experiences collected during on-site residencies are a valuable source of information in regard to the state and potential of everyday situations and future policies/strategies. Mobile Porch was developed for the North Kensington Amenity Trust to roam its public domain. Everyone was invited to use it, to shape it, to mould it, and to temporarily own it.

A Swedish design studio founded in 2003 by 4 women, they continue to create objects ranging from benches that look hard but are actually soft, creating physical objects from free hand sketches and more.  Visit their site and I guarantee you will find something to fall in love with.
+Interview by Archinect

Changing Cupboard

We have let the small characteristics within one object become the essence of the new product.

We were interested in looking at the relationship between the new designed objects and old existing objects. What differentiates objects from one another within a category - were does the found object end and when is the product redesigned? Recognition is part of the in understanding of a product; design is influenced by and built upon already existing objects and ideas.

Sketch Furniture

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; Using this file, a laser solidifies liquid plastic, layer by layer, resulting in a physical prototype of the original sketch.

The reasonably priced ($175) Bendant Lamp designed for  MIO by Jamie Salm:

The size of the lamp, shape of the cuts and flat packaging are a result of material and manufacturing efficiencies, making it a good  example of eco-centric design. . In addition, the lamp welcomes the user as a co-designer allowing the owner to assemble the light into whatever form they would like. 

Jonathan Harris is one of the most innovative designers working in the field of data visualization and data mining.  He seems to have a good pulse on how people are using technology and combines that with a unique visual style. 

I have listed a few of his latest works below, if your interested in hearing more about his work check out his webpage or watch him present at the TED conference.

I want you to want me


I Want You To Want Me chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, gathering new data from a variety of online dating sites every few hours.  The system searches these sites for certain phrases, which it then collects and stores in a database.  These phrases, taken out of context, provide partial glimpses into people’s private lives.  Simultaneously, the system forms an evolving zeitgeist of dating, tracking the most popular first dates, turn-ons, desires, self-descriptions and interests.

The Whale Hunt

"I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat."

We Feel FIne:

"We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on."

Taking the general notion of a public square, Wilkinson created a 36′ tall artificial tree whose roots emerge and extend throughout the plaza as benches.  Driven by a criteria of a central meeting point, shade and to visually communicate with the surrounding buildings and structure, This project seems to be successful at creating a new and dynamic space using the vocabulary and icons of more traditional design concepts.

Mass customization meets genetic makeup:

Embossed is a vase a project by artist Kris Lovett whose form derives from the contours of the users fingerprint topographically FDM printed using rapid prototyping technology.

It also reminds me of the DNA print project.

An interesting take on architecture as icons:

"Façade becomes image – image becomes façade. Suddenly the possibilities multiplied. We might have been hired to build a building, but now we could pretend to plant trees! We used a strong, simple image of a bamboo grove stenciled in white onto the glass façade, and painted the back wall bright green. By day, the graphic becomes a striking and simple form of sun-shading; by night green light dapples over the intersection – a luminous bamboo plantation in the heart of the metropolis."

See more of the building details Here.