Designverb

Category: green

Handspring Puppet Co.: The genius puppetry behind War Horse

April 14, 2011

One of my favorite talks and demonstrations from this years TED2011 conference came Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, of Handspring Puppet Company

“Puppets always have to try to be alive,” says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena’s subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.

Entertainment Gathering (EG) 2010

April 7, 2011

I’m at the EG conference the rest of the week in beautiful Monterey CA. Let me know if ya have any must go to tips in Monterey, otherwise swing by to say hi though I’ll be indoors watching speakers and performances most of the time.

Bole Floor

April 2, 2011

These are beautiful, sustainable, optimizes entirety of wood, and very unique. I love how some of the curves follow the eyes of the wood and grain direction. Who knew you could get flooring like this!

“Bolefloor is the world’s first industrial-scale manufactured hardwood flooring with naturally curved lengths that follow a tree’s natural growth. Bolefloor takes its name from bole, the trunk of a tree.

Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.

Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.

Our process manages and tracks each board from its raw-lumber stage through final installation. And every board is cut using the finest in Homag woodworking machinery.

Several pictures from their gallery after the jump!

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BrickBox

March 25, 2011

This is very smart. I want some. High end materials, a shelf built from the boxes you transport then in, and you can customize them in a bunch of formats… this just might beat out my desire for the typical IKEA bookshelf though cost a bit more… It would be nice in different colors, or at least just the white portion… I dig the end grains showing.. black, green, and some vibrant colors would be nice!

“BrickBox is a modular bookcase composed of stackable boxes used to transport and store. Brilliant? I would say so!”
via swissmiss

Makedo

March 17, 2011

“makedo is a connector system that enables materials including cardboard, plastic and fabric to easily join together to form new objects or structures.”
Fun, I wish I had a set to build a big monster from all those cardboard boxes I have.

JR’s TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out

March 10, 2011

“JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out. Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.”

Pete Oyler: Rip + Tatter

February 9, 2011

Pete Oyler (RISD ’09) has a great project called Rip+Tatter which hammers down large corrugated honeycomb cardboard pieces to make for some great little chairs. I’m not sure how long they will last, but for $55 it’s pretty awesome. I wonder if there is an adult version?

Some pics from Petes site after the jump.

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Negative Space Billboard

February 5, 2011

What appears at first to be a flock of smart starling birds doing their thing around an invisible box between the US and Canadian border near Vancouver is actually a billboard sculpture by Lead Pencil Studio built from thousands of metal rods swarming a shape as if a billboard to draw attention to the living landscape behind.

“Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape… this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.”

This project reminds me a bit of the CityScape project though using several wooden 2×4’s with a mix of the ad free billboard law in Sao Paulo.

Multiple images by Ian Gill courtesy of Lead Pencil Studio, via fastcodesign, after the jump.

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