Article by Johanna Agerman
Filed under: News
October 2, 2009 • 1:15 pm 0
ICON Magazine, issue 075
August 23, 2009 • 1:07 pm 0
‘Design your own homeware online’ by Emma Wells, The Sunday Times
From The Sunday Times
August 23, 2009
Interiors: Design your own homeware online
Thanks to these tech-savvy designers, you’ll soon be able to create your own unique homewares using only a PC
see the full article at:
http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/interiors/article6804468.ece
Filed under: News
August 23, 2009 • 12:27 am 0
Nurturing the Inner Entrepreneur, Article by ALICE RAWSTHORN, International Herald Tribune The Global Edition of The New York Times
LONDON — Do you want to be a designer? I’m not talking about signing up for design school, but about having a say in the design of some of the things you use every day. You needn’t design them from scratch, though that could be an option; but you might like to choose the colors, or change their size and shape.
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Assa Ashuach Studio
The shape of a lemon squeezer can evolve with Digital Forming’s software.
Potters for Peace
The Ceramic Water Purifier, originally designed in 1981 by Fernando Mazariegos and distributed by Potters for Peace.
Digital Forming, a team of young designers and software developers in London, has devised a software program that will allow anyone to do just that with basic objects like bowls, vases, pens and lemon squeezers. You call up a digital model of the product on a computer, and tweak the colors, finish or form, just like a professional designer. There’s no risk of damaging it by doing something silly, because the original designer will have specified the degree to which it can be changed.
Once you have decided on the final design, the specifications will be sent to one of the new generation of rapid manufacturing machines, which will produce your one-of-a-kind object. Digital Forming’s software can be sampled at the “Create and Make” exhibition opening next week at the city’s Science Museum, and used for real in October, when the team’s Web site, www.ucodo.com, goes live. (Ucodo stands for User Co-Designed Object.)
Perhaps this sounds too much like hard work. You may prefer to leave design to the professionals, or cringe at the prospect of “co-designers” churning out wacky pens in the shape of mutant twigs and retro spaceships. But if it appeals, you could become part of the fast-expanding design phenomenon variously described as “design democracy,” “co-design” and “customization.”
There is nothing new, for the 99 percent of us who aren’t professional designers, in participating in the design process or personalizing the end-result. The super-rich have always been able to do it. (My favorite example is of the billionaire sheik who commissioned a designer du jour to create a six-wheeled “stretch” Aston Martin for him.) And the poor have had no choice but to design for themselves. As Emily Campbell, director of design at the Royal Society of Arts in London, points out: “Necessity remains the mother of invention in many countries.” Think of the ingenuity with which the Chinese convert ramshackle bicycles into makeshift trucks, and African farmers make new tools from old ones.
There is also a long tradition of “customization” in humanitarian design. Take the geodesic dome, the emergency shelter developed in the late 1940s by the maverick American designer Richard Buckminster Fuller. His domes have provided sorely needed shelter for hundreds of thousands of people, but were never designed as finished products. Instead, Fuller devised a blueprint for them to be built from whatever materials his “co-designers” could find: advanced plastics, discarded blankets, scraps of wood, whatever.
Humanitarian designers still do this. Rather than ship its ceramic water purifier to areas of Africa and Latin America where clean water is scarce, Potters for Peace, an American nonprofit organization, helps to set up local workshops to manufacture them. Similarly the Dutch designer Irene van Peer circulated the instructions to convert an empty plastic bottle into a portable handwashing device in South African townships, where there is too little water for people to wash their hands regularly as a defense against disease.
But developed economies have tended to follow the 20th-century industrial model of selling ready-made products whose design is pre-determined. At its best, this system has enabled millions of people to buy cheap, decent products. At its worst, it is bland, environmentally damaging and too inflexible to satisfy individual needs: from a preference for a particular color, to dealing with a disability.
These disadvantages increasingly outweigh the advantages of standardized design. This is partly because we’re so spoiled (most of us already own more stuff than we need or want) that we have become bored by it, and partly because uniformity seems less attractive. Think of the way we use the Internet, charting random routes rather than following prescribed paths, and how millions of people create their own virtual worlds in games like Second Life, The Sims and Spore. Think, too, of the thousands of D.I.Y. software developers who have designed programs — or “apps” — for Apple’s iPhone in the most successful exercise in design democracy since the geodesic dome.
We can now “co-design” real objects thanks to digital technology, which enables us to communicate directly with manufacturers to personalize aspects of their products. Fancy customizing the style and fit of Nike trainers? Choosing the colors of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses? Specifying the interior of a Fiat 500 car? Rapid manufacturing processes, like the one used by Digital Forming, will soon allow anyone to adjust the shape of objects — and not just to indulge stylistic whims but to make, say, a pen, easier to grip by someone with arthritic hands. There could be environmental benefits, too, as bespoke manufacturing erases the need for stock. But rapid manufacturing is expensive — Digital Forming’s prices will start at £15, or about $25, for a pen — and only applies to objects made of particular types of plastics and metal.
Eventually, it will become cheaper and more versatile, but there are other problems. Not everyone wants to “co-design,” including designers, many of whom have warned that it will replace the good work of trained professionals with a flood of nasty novelties. Professional paranoia apart, some nastiness seems inevitable, but does not diminish the benefits of making design more inclusive, both by addressing the needs of people with health issues, and unleashing latent creativity, as iPhone apps have done. The Royal Society of Arts is planning to run a series of projects to help both camps adapt to their changing roles as part of its Design & Society program.
The professional grumblers should also remember that “real designers” have produced plenty of nasty novelties of their own over the years, and (sadly) still do.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/fashion/17iht-DESIGN17.html?_r=2&ref=global-home
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August 23, 2009 • 12:22 am 0
ODO and CODO by Digital Forming article, Dezeen 09
Digital Forming is a new London-based company that will allow designers to create products on the internet that customers can customise online and then buy.
Launching at the Science Museum in London later this month, the company will initially offer a range of products including a lemon squeezer (above and below), a pen and a lamp, that customers can manipulate to create their own designs.
The initial range of objects, shown here, have been designed by London designer Assa Ashuach.
Digital Forming will offer two levels of service: ODO – Original Design Object, which allows designers to create new products; and CODO – Co Design Object, whereby designers’ creations can be personalised by a “co-designer” or customer.
“Our software has an ‘ODO side’, where a designer can prepare his design (at his studio or home) by setting constraints and ‘opening’ areas within the object geometry,” says Ashuach. “‘CODO side’ is the general public online interface, where users can open and personalize their selected objects.”
In October, the Digital Forming will launch a sister service called UCODO, offering a CODO service to consumers.
Digital Forming’s launch exhibition, Create and Make – Print in 3D, is at the Antenna Gallery, Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD from 25–27 August 2009. Hours: 11.00–13.00 and 14.00–16.00 (Free entry)
Here’s some more information from Digital Forming:
Digital Forming launches at the Science Museum, London
‘Create and Make – Print in 3D’ at the Antenna Gallery, Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD 25–27 August 2009 11.00–13.00 and 14.00–16.00 (Free Entry)
Digital forming is a new London based company set up to democratise the personalisation of everyday products. Established in November 2008 by four partners from the science, creative and business sectors, was awarded government funding in May 2009 to develop the vision of an online platform for the ‘Mass Customisation’ of personal designed objects.
This novel revolutionary design and production method allows for the local production of tailored 3D products with no need for molds or stocks and with a significant reduction in shipping, lowering products’ carbon footprint to a minimum.
Democratisation of Personal Objects
As customers gradually demand greater freedom of choice, designers and brands are faced with new challenges in product diversity, responding through innovative product assembly strategies, 2D interactive pattern modification and coloring of predefined shapes.
Digital forming novel technology offers the modification of products material behaviors, colour and form.
Digital Forming presents a software that allows users to view and personalise the products they are about to buy in a 3D online environment. An array of lifestyle consumer products can be rotated and spun within a virtual 3D space.
Imagine still that these products can be modified in real time – stretched, twisted, embossed, assembled – all with the simple movement of the mouse. Users can adjust form, choose colour and material, save designs in an online library, and purchase when ready for delivery within 2 weeks.
Digital Forming is aware that not everyone is the creative type. Hence, the software offers users the option of Co-Creating and Co-Designing products with professional product designers. By this, a user can ‘tweak’ existing designs to their personal taste within the constraints set by the original designer.
They will never be able to ruin the functionality of a pen, or the balance of a teapot – the software will simply not allow it.
Co Design
In October 09 we will launch our sister company; UCODO.com will introduce an online market place of designed objects for users to personalise and co-do…
Digtial Forming’s approach of Co-Design profoundly challenges the traditional roles of the designer and the user/consumer of a product,and is a revolutionary concept in the history of Design.
The technology that makes Mass Customisation a reality today, and is arguably set to create an Industrial Revolution of the Digital Age, is known as Rapid Manufacturing (‘RM’) or 3D Printing.
see full article at: http://www.dezeen.com/2009/08/21/odo-and-codo-by-digital-forming/
Filed under: News
