MosaikoLab is a project that still doesn’t have a specific purpose. Maybe it will never have one. But in the meanwhile, it has changed its face twice already.

Now it becomes more Lab than ever – I used the logo to experiment with some materials and the lasercut.

I really like the combination of cardboard and masking tape, it gives a feeling of provisory, or patch. Some months ago, making the biz cards, I accidentally cut a piece of tape with the lasercut that was meant to hold the card sheet, and it looked amazing. It creates a nice effect just leaving the fill of the typeface with tape.

This is synthetic felt, which smells really bad when burned but looks great both cut or rastered (crispy lowered surface):

The finish with lycra is sharp, with slightly burned edges that prevent fraying:

And I’m in love with corrugated cardboard. It’s really cheap (or free!), with imperfections and with multiple possibilities of changing the aspect. By rastering corrugated cardboard with the appropriate power is possible to remove only the top layer, creating visual effects with the cavities. Also it creates nice a shadow effect with oblique light.

Of course I used acrylic also! :)

And thin plywood. The dark letters are rastered,with burnt wood smell included :)

And acetate usually used as light filters:

MosaikoLab takes shape!

More pictures here.

Lately I’ve been questioning all the small interactions that we deal with everyday, these that are so deeply-rooted in our daily routine that we don’t question whether it’s a good design or not. Sometimes we have the perception that if it’s been there for a long time, it should be good. We have created standards that help us not to think about the interaction itself, but focus on what we want, and the result. However, as we deal with these interactions many times each day, their design has a big impact in our lives. It’s part of the designers’ role to analise how appropriate are these interactions in our days.

I wanted to dedicate a short video to these small interactions.

The same thinking could be applied to everyday objects.

A knife today has exactly the same shape (and sometimes same materials) than thousands of years ago. It’s a standard – we know how to use it, we know what is it for. But it was conceived in another context: different lifestyle, design and manufacture processes, needs, etc. When it’s time to redesign these objects? Is it too late because they are already standards? How much have they already shaped our behavior and lifestyle?

A month ago we made a small documentary around the role of the designer today, and tomorrow. We interviewed Simona Maschi (head of the Interaction Design Programme and co-founder of CIID), Vinay Venkatraman (co-founder of CIID), Peder Burgaard (Business Development Manager at TDC) and Iago Noguer Storgaard (Senior Consultant at ReD Associates) – four visions on the present and future of the design.

The documentary is being exhibited at Danish Design Center within the exhibition 10+ Design Forecast.

Designers have an enormous responsibility to shoulder and this goes way beyond the use of materials and aesthetic pleasure. Stepping back from the final ‘product’, we also need to think about the big picture.

The growing desire for individuals to customise and democratise products, systems and services plays a part in how the role of the designer slots in to a larger ecosystem.

Designers have the power to change the way people live their everyday lives. Business strategy, technology, communication and societal demands are just some of the aspects today’s designers need to take in to consideration.

The designer of today is the designer of tomorrow.

The first week of May I attended LIFT10, this year with “Connected People” as a main topic. I was invited to exhibit Linyl (a project developed together with Benoit Espinola, Shruti Ramiah and Natalia Echevarría at CIID) in Démo:Mode, an exhibition organised by HEAD Genève within Lift Experience. It was interesting to see the different approaches, design methods and finishings of the pieces depending on the origin (mainly RCA and Head Genève).

Linyl arrived Wednesday morning, coinciding with the inauguration of the event. It had been stucked on the customs for 4 days. Finally, despite the difficulty of calibrate the color sensor because the light conditions, the piece was settled up and demonstrated to Lift attendants as they came into the exhibition.

I got really good feedback from people. Some people wanted the piece for their home, some other commented the obvious relation with the VJ world, and a woman told me that she’d try to do something similar for her restaurant. “ingenieux“, “simple” or “beautiful” were common adjectives that people use to describe the piece.

Although I couldn’t attend all the talks I wanted to attend, the experience of these three days in LIFT10 was highly interesting. I’d highlight Russell Davies, Neil Rimer or Aubrey de Grey.

When I learn a lot of things in a short period of time I feel a strange sensation (which I love), like shivering – I felt it several times during some talks or the workshop Hacking Venture Capital, Fred Destin from Atlas Venture. The VC world is quite new for me, but I’ve been interested lately. I’m far from understand it properly, but this workshop was the best starting point I could have.

The workshop was divided in two parts: “Pitching and getting through the deal selection process” and “Negotiating the venture investment”. It was a hands-on workshop, with good discussions around the pitches and negotiations that groups of attendants were asked to do. People were quite into the topic, so I was mostly listening to them. In my group of 4 for example, they were 3 VC and me. I really liked the way they were dealing, sharp, to the point.

Some of the quotes I captured from the workshop:

“You need a pitch for your business – it’s not only for a VC but for selling or recruiting as well”

“The pitch should be able to be summarized in the back of a business card”

“The “price per share” is what matters, not the value or the % you sell”

“Don’t rely on anyone, is your job to know the rules of the game”

“Don’t over pitch, let the VJ feel curious about your story”

“The price of the company is a discovery process, don’t say a percentage or how much the company worth at the beginning”

“Nobody reads a business plan. Nobody reads the executive summary. Nobody signs an NDA. Don’t lose your time on them.”

“Repeat your high concept pitch (3 words) a lot, VC will remember you for this and your first impression”

“It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s how you say it. Practise!”

“Tell a story, talk about why you needed it, what people say about it.”

“Sell yourself and your team more than your company”

LIFT10 is a good place to extend a network both in business and design fields. People is open to meet each other, discuss and keep in touch. The program also enables and fosters this communication between the attendants, with numerous coffee breaks, cocktails, a fondue night and a proper closure. See you in LIFT11!

More pictures about the Lift Conference here.

If you’re interested in an Interaction Design course, I’d definitely recommend to apply for Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design 2010-2011 programme. So far, it has been the most amazing creative and academic experience, with students from all over the world, with the best lecturers in the field. And for the next year, even a better course is being cooked. The deadline is May 3rd. Here the open letter from Alie Rose, head of communication.

Dear All -

In parallel with the launch of our new website, we are very pleased to announce the opening of the application process for our next generation of students.

As an education concerned with the broad potential of design and technology, the CIID Interaction Design Programme is looking for a wide diversity of students. We plan to have a class of 25 people and welcome applicants from all over the world with educational backgrounds in varying disciplines. You should be curious and creative, enthusiastic about design and have the desire to study in a cross-disciplinary environment. Whether you’re currently studying or working, you should be interested in the connections between education and interaction design practice.

To find out more about the application process and requirements please refer to the website:http://ciid.dk/education/admissions/ – there is a list of FAQs but if you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

The curriculum teaches students to apply technology to everyday life through the design of software, products and services. We believe in a hands-on and user-centered approach to interaction design. Students learn the programming and electronics skills needed to work with technology as a design medium. They conduct user-research and experience prototyping to provide real-world grounding to their concepts. Frequent work in multi-disciplinary teams encourages peer-to-peer learning and a diverse selection of visiting faculty exposes students to a range of expertise.

You can view documentation of the course and student projects here: http://ciid.dk/education/portfolio/.

Please feel free to distribute and post this information widely.

Kind regards,
Alie.

The project ±Pole will be exhibited in ThoughMade in Mälmo (Sweden) on May 14th.

±Pole was developed during the Computational Design course at CIID in one week and it had some rough finishes I wanted to improve for that exhibition. For example, the sandblasted glass was placed over a black fabric resulting an heterogeneous grey. In order to increase the contrast between the area where the tokens are active and non-active, I painted in black the frame of the glass. Also I found the logo (lasercut paper behind the glass) a bit distracting, so I sandblasted it on the glass to make it more subtle.

The pressure of the sand pulled up part of the masking vinyl, sandblasting an area next to the “p” foot that wasn’t supposed to be sandblasted. Quite difficult to fix… but as I commented in an old post (in catalan), I like errors.

Painting the backside:

And the result:

The result is quite impressive, sandblasted and painted glass looks great from the other side.

And a nice surprise: the mask used for painting (masking tape) got an amazing gradient, resulting in a beautiful texturized piece – an involuntary and unexpected piece of art, by Randomness.

A couple of weeks ago Elena found big sheets of thin plywood in her backyard. Backyards have been our main material supplier this year in Copenhagen. Using the lasercutter, dark-brown dye and brass I made some earrings. I also made a small box for them, lasercutting cardboard. Here some of them:

During the Wearable Computing and Tangible user Interface courses at CIID we had the opportunity to have some time to play with materials. No hi-tech tools are needed for exploring different techniques to modify these materials, but in CIID we have the chance to have amazing workshops. That helps.

“Give me an idea, a laser-cutter and a couple of days”. Certainly, laser-cutter has opened a new horizon in terms of material processing. It can cut, raster, edge, drill holes, burn, etc. It does it over wood, paper, fabric, metal, plastic, stone or whatever (link bread) comes to your mind. And it does it precisely and fast.

With fabric is possible to achieve different colors depending on the intensity of the laser and the raster pattern. The cut is precise and it doesn’t fray.

Cutting lines in lycra generates nice shapes when stretched.

All the pieces of the glove for Atmo project were laser-cut, even the foam. Then I used conductive thread to generate the contact points for lighting the embedded LED.

Foamboard is also a good material for prototyping. Using the laser-cutter is possible to generate curves by edging lines.

Also to build structures that can be covered by fabric.

Stick fabric to the foamboard using spray-glue before laser-cut or edge.

Edging the cardboard, getting a burned finish.

Also wood gets a nice texturized burned finish:

Acrylic has been the material for many projects. It’s easy to cut with a laser-cutter and bend with hot air without losing transparency. Raster provides a nice translucent finish. It’s rigidity and durability allows to build working prototypes really quick. Some pictures from the The Discreet Window project:

Also stones can be edged with the laser-cut, with a nice textured golden finish.

Apart from the laser-cut, we went to the workshops to play. The aspect of the cold steel can have beautiful colors by immersing it in salty water to rust it, or heating it with the grinder.

Or grinder the surface to create highlights in different directions.

Milling the wood to achieve a small thickness, an interesting solution to embed LED’s into the wood and see the light through when they are lighten up.

I spent an evening working with ceramics – it’s an amazing process. Shape the material with your hands, applying pressure carefully with your fingers and feel the piece evolve… using the wheel is fun. I need some teaching though, results were way different from the first idea.

Combining two materials to achieve a flexible structure. Afterwards I wanted to use glass instead of the balloon. Eric blew glass inside the structure, forming an amazing shape.

And magnets are cool!

Materials, tools and time are the ingredients to have fun exploring processes, some times with unexpected and pleasant surprises!

To prototype non-linear shapes or wearable objects that have to be adapted to a certain part of a body we used a technique that avoids spending hours in a 3D software. It eases the process since no modeling of the desired shape or part of the body is required.

Taking a balloon as the shape we wanted to reproduce, we went through the following steps:

1. Cover the balloon with tape

2. Cover it then with fabric (cotton is ok), making the appropriate cuts and using tape to follow the curves.

3. Draw a desired pattern which will be used for cutting the fabric. Shapes should be about 3-4 cm. wide maximum in order to get flat pieces. It’s useful to draw extra lines that cross the main shapes and label them in both sides, in order to align adjacent pieces afterwards.

4. Cut the fabric following the pattern. The resulting pieces can be used to reconstruct the balloon, sticking the pieces together of cutting these shapes out of another material.

In order to be more precise to cut the new fabric, I scanned the patterns and traced them using Illustrator. Then I cut them with the laser-cutter, ready to be sewed.

We used this technique to build the dock of the project Atmo. Some pictures of the process:

Linyl is the project I developed during the second week of Physical Computing, together with Shruti Ramiah, Benoit Espinola and Natalia Echevarría. Linyl is a light player that allows to create an ambience by playing discs of color created from photos or images of past experiences.

The brief was to choose an electronic object and create a new way to interact with it, “A New Soul for an Old Machine”. Natalia found two beautiful artifacts in her backyard. I spent a few minutes just playing with the knobs and switches of the tape recorder. Smooth, feeling of robustness and amazing sound. Click, clack, precise. In every movement you can feel a bunch of mechanical stuff moving inside. A complete interactive experience.

Regarding the vinyl player, amazing external design and even more amazing engineering inside. After taking out an old condenser that would probably cause an short-circuit, we plugged the player in and… surprise! It was working. After pressing ‘Start’ the arm started moving gently to the plate. The rotation speed can be manually fine-tuned using the strobe tuner.

Nostalgia and admiration are mixed while looking at these old machines…

We decided to use the vinyl player for the project, changing the functionality but keeping the ritual and the slowness of the process of playing music. But instead of music, it plays light.

One of our premises (and a challenge too) was to keep the player working. We introduced the color sensor through the arm, and the Arduino inside the player.

We build a set of eight RGB led’s with the correspondent board to be embedded in the lamp.

We laser-cutted a disc out of acrylic, engraving grooves on it. On the other hand we generated the discs extracting the main colors of the pictures.

The toughest work was to calibrate the sensor, since it’s extremely sensible to ambient light. We added a white led pointing to the disc to help the sensor read through the acrylic. The distance to the surface to be sensed was also an issue, having notable changes on the values with small variations of height.

Linyl was exhibited in DKDS during the final presentations. Bill Verplank virtually attended the presentation, asking questions and giving feedback through Skype. Mary Huang made an ‘Arduino Cake’ to celebrate the end of this exciting week.