ISSUE 002 WINTER 2014
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
M E S H
MESH is a publication that aims to critique the three-dimensional form, who makes it, and why they make it. We strive to erase the walls between mediums and focus on the ideas rather than the end object.
M E S H
THE FOURTH DIMENSION ISSUE 002 WINTER 2014
In issue 002, MESH explores the fourth dimension: responsive architecture, 4D printing, kinetic design, and many other innovative attempts at connecting with the idea of movement and transition as valid design aesthetics. Any physical design that moves throughout space is explored in the following pages.
winter 2014
Director Cassie Stepanek Creative Director Troi Caple Copy Editor Raine Eliza Special thanks to: Mary Roberts Without you we would be lost. Thanks for keeping us on track.
Information MESH Magazine is a quarterly design publication founded in 2013 in Savannah, GA. The magazine is on the web at www.meshmagazine.co and on Facebook. Submissions MESH considers submissions of unique design projects year round. Please email us at info.meshmagazine@gmail.com with project details.
contents issue 002
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an introduction from the director
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living, breathing wall behnaz farahi
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luminarium stefano pertegato
015 airyLight annelie berner
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4D printed garments kinematics
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a conversation with ben hopson
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kinetic furniture robert van embricos
027 walking shelter sibling
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accordian shelves alma vander molen
An INtroduction From
For our second issue, we wanted to touch on an area of design that was loud -- even flamboyant. We feel that movement plays a huge role in society and yet seems to be overlooked. Our world is moving towards adaptable design. The emergence of 4D printing will completely rework the way everyday objects are manufactured. This advancement will change the way in which designers think, ideate and fabricate their ideas. Technological advancement is not the only thing that will shift our ways of conceptualization: necessity will as well. With the impending doom of depleted natural resources designers will have to create objects that last longer, work in closed loop systems and adapt more easily to changing environments.
analyze relationships between people and experiences in a different way than those that only study ergonomics. Ben Hopson poetically refers to “the aestheric design of physical movement� in his interview on page 21. As designers we must think in movement, sketch in movement and fabricate in movement. As human beings we are constantly moving and changing. The objects that surround us should, too. The following pages show architects, furniture designers, industrial designers, service designers and others that have successfully transferred into this realm of thinking, and in doing so making their projects richer and more complete.
Service designers seem to have a better grasp on the design of movement than other design groups because they
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The Living, Breathing Wall Benhaz Farahi
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photography by benhaz farahi
The installation consists of ʻskinʼ (Spandex), ʻbonesʼ (aluminum strands), and ʻmusclesʼ (shape memory alloy springs) augmented with a ʻbrainʼ (Arduino micro-controller, and Kinect).
How might we imagine a space that can develop an understanding of its users through their sounds and movements and respond accordingly? This installation is an attempt to address these questions through the design of an interactive kinetic wall. One of the main contributions of this work is to explore how a physical environment can change its shape in response to the speech recognition of users. The central focus is the relationship between materials, form and interactive systems of control. It is an attempt to explore how simple elements in our surroundings can change their physical configuration as we interact with them.
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LUMINARIUM photography stefano pertegato renderings infographics words
a dynamic lighting system for contemporary environments
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Luminarium is a dynamic lighting system that draws inspiration from the latest studies about the biologic effects of lighting, specifically in the context of modern living environments. Extended exposure to artificial lighting caused by modern lifestyles has deep consequences for our biological clocks which are naturally trained by evolution to adapt to its surroundings following the dynamic effects of daylight. The daylight component reflected by the atmosphere generates variations in wavelength emission throughout the day as the sun changes its position in the sky. Those variations synchronize the secretion of melatonin, the hormone controlling the sleep/wake cycle. At the same time, natural daylight provides resetting cues: constant, extended stimuli in the background like the slow play of light and shadows during the day. These resetting cues bring restorative benefits
from directed attention fatigue, reducing cognitive stress and improving concentration performances. Luminarium performs a 12-hour lighting cycle in which an indirect emission (reflected by the ceiling and obtained mixing three different t2 fluorescent lamps) changes color temperature throughout the day. A warm and relaxing morning light (3000째K) slowly becomes cold until reaching the peak of 6000째K in the beginning of the afternoon, turning warm again to mark the natural sunset. As color temperature changes, a dynamic LED spotlight describes a subtle movement in the environment, a light halo describing imperceptible changes in the surroundings. The exposed gears transmit and slow down the motion of a stepper motor, while reminiscent of the intricate delicacy of early clockworks and the dynamism of kinetic art.
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Circadian sensitivity to short wavelength light Production of melatonin by the pineal gland is inhibited by light to the retina Biologic effects of the circadian rhythm Natural daylight color temperature chart
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morning light 4000째K
afternoon light 6000째K
late afternoon light 3800째K
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AiryLight A thesis at tisch itp annelie Berner
AiryLight's visualization encourages curiosity about air quality as a broader environmental issue. AiryLight's light passes through a moving lens that gives varying size and clarity to the projected light pattern; the smallest, simplest light patterns represent the best air quality, focused patterns represent the midway between good and unhealthy, and the haziest patterns represent the worst air quality. At the end of each month, each air quality reading plays back through the light, showing the change in values of that past month in a few minutes' light show.
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Air Quality = 25: A simple, small light pattern. Things are good, nothing out of the usual.
1st state
Air Quality = 58: More defined, focused patterns represent the midway between good and unhealthy.
2nd state Air Quality = 80: Large, complex pattern. We are nearing unhealthy air quality, the historical maximum is 100. While AiryLight's pattern represents an abstract view of the data, the etched gears that control the overhead movement display more detailed information. Tiny changes in particulate matter outside are mapped to the subtle changes in the form of the light pattern.
3rd state
from The perspective of C: In your opinion how important is the
K: Yes. Yes, we are a center for the
relationship between new media and physical design?
recently possible. Thatʼs a way that we describe it. It very much is about making things, and physicality, but the technology behind that also plays a big factor.
K: Well they are both a part of the maker culture, you know, people making things. Digital is no longer confined to the screen. Itʼs interfaces now, both on and off screen in terms of the object. There is a little bit of industrial design, graphic design, UX design, all of these components wrapped up into one. Various projects link one or more of these elements differently. But almost all of the work that we see coming out of ITP has different elements of those three things.
C: Definitely. That reminds me of one of
the tag lines for ITP, “an engineer school for artists and an art school for engineers.”
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professor katherine dillon
C: Absolutely. So we are featuring your student Annelieʼs project. Her project consists of a lamp that visually displays real time air quality through light patterns. Iʼm interested in how you go about guiding the students. Take Annelie for example, she ultimately designed a lamp. Does she go from initially wanting to solve the problem of displaying air quality or does she start with designing a technologically advanced lamp, the physical object?
K: I think Annelieʼs project in particular,
she was one of my thesis students, started with an idea of how one could create physical objects that communicate meaningful information at a personal scale. She was very interested in this idea of creating physical data visualizations. She didn始t want to do a lamp. The idea of a lamp sort of evolved from this initial concept, how light is a metaphor for air quality: light for air, and then air quality and quality of light together.
C: Absolutely. So she works off of an exploration of a concept rather than starting with this idea of creating something physical.
C: What would you say is the most important tool for designers? Whether that be a mental or a physical tool.
K: I think the best tool for designers is to think about design as a way to tell stories. I find that to be the most successful approach. That they really have a story to tell and then kind of figure out what the best tool is to tell that story. Sometimes that始s traditional graphics design and sometimes, like in Annelies始s case, The best way to tell the story about air quality was to make it personal in the format of a lamp. For me it始s about storytelling.
K: Ya, ya absolutely.
photography by annelie brenner 018
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“maybe movement is a whole perspective and way of looking at the world”
ben hopson C: Tell me your own definition of what kinetic design is?
B:
Sure. My definition for kinetic design would be the aesthetic design of physical movement.
C: Okay. B: So that kind of sets it apart from just the mechanical design of physical movement which is more about engineering. Kinetic design is really focused on the aesthetic quality of how objects can open and close and change shape.
C: Right. I was looking through that article you wrote for Core77 and you talked about how the vocabulary for kinetic design needs to change. People need to be able to talk about it, but it is hard to talk about objects that move because I feel like designers only think in static concepts and words. How do you see people starting to develop that vernacular so that they can talk to each other about it?
B: Ya you know, if a designer wants to describe things that move, he or she needs to be able to talk about them. I think the best way to start going about the vocabulary is… you know there isn’t a
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book out there of which I’m aware. People need to just kind of jump in, ya know, and start making up their own vocabulary. Hopefully if this kind of idea gets enough interest and people start talking about this, those people will start to interact with each other and those vocabularies will begin to form and interact with each other. I don’t know if it makes sense to go ahead and lay out a dogma. “If you do this you have to use these words”.
C: Oh no. I think that would alienate people.
B: Ya, I think it’s going to need to be a little bit more organic than that. But, the first thing is just for designers to start talking about this and to just try and describe different movements and to go from there.
C: I agree. When you are designing, except for maybe automotive design, the concept of how the object moves doesn’t really come into play. Say you are designing a broom and a dust collector. The general way that the pan and the broom interact is that the pan clasps to the shaft of the broom stick, You take it off and put it on the ground with your opposite handThen you have that awkward motion of having to bend down and sweep from the bottom of the broom
with the other. But you don’t have as much control of the broom when you hold it further down. So then you need two people and it just becomes this annoying task.
B: Ya, absolutely. C: I’m curious how you came into this industry because you aren’t just a part of design culture, but creating an industry of your own.
B: Well I hope you’re right, we’ll see in 20 years. But for now I don’t think I would say I’m starting an industry, I’m trying at least to start a conversation about looking at design from this perspective. And you know maybe it will build enough interest in both the academic community and in the business world. If companies start finding the interest, I think it could become a whole discipline. So anyway, I got started in it because my background is in sculpture and I did sculpture as an undergrad student. Then I went to work for a puppet company where I was helping carve huge monsters and celebrities and animals out of foam. I then went on to Pratt to study Industrial Design, and for my thesis at Pratt I was spending this whole year on a direction of doing different things. One student designed a kayake from the ground up, one
student designed dishware. I really didn’t know what I wanted to design. So I started looking back at things that I had been designing back at Pratt and for this puppet company and for the fine arts, and it all moved. The only thing that all of these objects had in common was some sort of mechanical movement within. If I was designing a garden tool, there was some mechanical component to the garden tool. If I was making some sculpture for a gallery show, it was a kinetic sculpture. I never really looked at my body of work like that but I thought, hey, maybe movement is a whole perspective and way of looking at the world, at the design all over. So I started investigating and went from there.
C: I see. That’s kind of a natural way you came into this.
B: Ya it felt natural, and then I was like, ya no one is looking at design movement, no one is doing that.
C: Do you think that design is harder to imagine while in motion? I don’t think that
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many designers think that way. Do you think it could be potentionally hard for a designer to start having to think that way?
can sketch better than other people. There's a spectrum.
B: Um, I don’t know. I feel like as kinetic
think of this static thing that doesn't move, but you are giving life to these things. Where do you start to research or pull inspiration for concept development? Do you start from scratch? Do you try to improve existing tools? How does that go?
creatures ourselves, we have pretty good instincts and a visual understanding and a spatial understanding of movement already. You know a lot about a person by the way that they walk. For example, you can tell if they are old or young or crippled or happy. We are reading a lot of clues into movement already. We sort of inately have a set of tools for the way that we look at movement, the same way that we do with form or color. It should be grouped as another category of design.
C: Ya, totally. I agree.
You brought up my next question. Do you think that there are a specific set of tools that a designer needs to study this? Whether that is watching somebody walk, a tool of the mind, or if there is a physical tool like Solidworks Motion Studies. Is there anything that you would recommend to practice this way of thinking?
B: No. I think that the same tools and skills that we use to develop form are what we use to apply in designing movement. Your hands. I think physical sketching tools are: paper, pencil, exacto knife, tape, glue, wire, etc. These are more helpful in designing kinetic tools than CAD software. Just as I believe these tools are more beneficial in developing form than CAD software. In terms of mental and personal ability, there will be people who have a greater ability of figuring out what the specific mechanics of an object are going to be. There will be people who have a greater mechanical aptitude, but just like there are people who mesh mag
C: Right. When you think of an object you
B: It kind of depends on the project. I've had things where I work on a project where I'm trying to improve a specific thing. For example there is a hand tool, and I am trying to figure out how I can use movement to improve that tool. I will sketch in various ways and look around at other tools. Then I've done projects where I'm creating designs from scratch, without any particular direction in mind. That's a lot about sketching. My favorite way to sketch is to have a big pile of stuff: pieces of scrap paper, scraps of foam core, straws, wire, etc.
C: That's the most enjoyable way. B: Definitely. I prefer to work that way where I can move very quickly between different ideas. I like to be able to tear off a piece if it's not working, reattach another part and trim off another if it's wrong. I like it to be very fast and fluid, like drawing in 3D.
C:. Ya, drawing within space. A new way to sketch.
B: A quick and natural way to sketch. C: Absolutely. Thanks for allowing me to pick your brain and for being so open with information.
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You know a lot about a person by the way that they walk. For example, you can tell if they are old or young or crippled or happy. We are reading a lot of clues into movement already. We sort of inately have a set of tools for the way that we look at movement, the same way that we do with form or color.
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Robert van Embricqs
robert van embricqs
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The Rising Chair emphasizes the natural shape an object can make by transforming itself. Every piece of the chair has its own task to succeed in this transformation. It’s very easy to gather a huge collection of different chairs -- throughout the years there's been a staggering abundance of them in the design world in every shape and size. But to what degree are the objects we create capable of dictating their own design? Is it even possible for an object to 'tell' for which form its best suited? And if so, how will the end result change?
The Rising Table ignores the cliched notion that a table is little more than a flat surface that is held up by four separate legs. The result is a surprising mixture of fluid design that blends the multifaceted tabletop with the latticework of wooden beams that function as the center of the construct. From there, the table sprouts four wooden beams that hold up the entire body. The Rising Table is made from a single piece of wood.
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The Walking Shelter stakes claim at the idea of personal space within our highly urbanized and overpopulated environments. This body-encapsulating portable structure establishes temporary personal space using a tent like, multi-function structure and is a recent creation from SIBLING’s multidisciplinary design initiative based in Melbourne. SIBLING plays with the idea of acquired space through a man-made tent space that emerges from a webbed pack stored around the wearer’s shoes. The fabric takes form as the wearer fits the seams of the material along their arms and legs and can be easily stored as the wearer moves from location to location across an urban landscape. This shelter can also be worn in a variety of ways through it’s pragmatic design to protect the owner from rain or sun. Its uses are incredibly utilitarian but also provide
viable options for urban travel and temporary living: two ideas that link The Walking Shelter to the ‘What if’ side of functionality. Urban sustainability projects in the emerging world of service-oriented design usually border a thin line between overdesigned conceptual projects we see online and local, small-scale projects that have trouble gaining traction within our communities. One corresponding element throughout SIBLING’s projects is their attention to the human impact on their designs. Without a human form to design for and to build around, the idea of self-sustainability is irrelevant. By questioning the “What if’s?” of the project’s usability, The Walking Shelter successfully employs every element of it’s convertible design to achieve a realistic objective: reclaiming space in the insensitive urban environment.
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Personal space is constantly overwritten within the rapidly-changing atmosphere of our urban environments. For individuals who rely on public spaces as their temporary homes, the idea of claiming a personal space is unrealistic. SIBLING counteracts that idea by encouraging wearers to define their own personal space through The Walking Shelter’s tent-based materials. Although the project is no longer running, The Walking Shelter was designed to sustain ready-made production for a temporary living environments for normally-excluded members of the urban community. If the SIBLING project were to be executed on a large scale, their ideas about sustainability might aid in bridging the gap between government-funded city initiatives and fledgling design projects in our communities. The responsibility of
providing shelter can be placed in the shoes of the wearer, which expands the idea of urban environments as a community -- as something wearers can call their own. SIBLING has managed to decommodify the idea of shelter, reconnecting city dwellers to their fundamental right for personal space within our ever-expanding and highly dynamic metropolitan environments. Because this project ran as a one-off prototype created for an auction to support a local art organization Little Seeds Big Trees, it hasn’t been pursued further since the sale. But civically-oriented SIBLING still supports a range of current projects e xploring the creation of temporary space and the affecting factors within those developed spaces. To check out more of their work, click here.
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design
sibling nation
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Raine Blunk
photography
Tin & Ed
alma vander molen
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accordion shelves
Using an adjustable aluminum structure with fabric slings, the user can unlock and expand the structure through wide slings for clothing, bedding, shoe storage, etc. or contract the structure creating narrow slings that can store slim items like books.
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Director Cassie Stepanek Creative Director Troi Caple Copy Editor Raine Eliza Special thanks to: Mary Roberts Without you we would be lost. Thanks for keeping us on track.
www.meshmagazine.co