Here’s a thing. Appeldorn based artist, Ferry Staverman, has produced these wonderful paper sculptures from repeat shapes cut from various different kind of cardboard and paper.
The results are stunning and well worth a look. You can see more of them if you click the picture above, which will lead you to the website promoting the show where they were being displayed… We deal with paper everyday and sometimes you can forget just how easy it is to make something so great looking.
Filed under: Architecture, Design, innovation | Tags: Architecture, heatherwick, sit
Pretty much one of the most revered designers in the UK at the moment is Thomas Heatherwick. His work takes normal and accepted ideas, screws them up and throws them away before designing something simply wonderful.
Many of his works are based on simple fluid shapes which create an organic and flowing feel, but this one is a simple idea which looks like a giant rolled up, orange Hedgehog. This particular piece is a 2.4 metre cube which is machined from 15mm aluminium. It features 5000 thin spikes which serve as windows capped with orange acrylic. The entire structure stands on these self same spikes, each of which radiates from the exact centre of the structure. This means one single light source can be used to emit light from each of the spikes. It simply looks stunning, lit up or not.
Everybody loves Heatherwick studio. Their works for the Harvey Nichols window, over 10 years ago, was award winning for a reason and most every project since is worthy of our awe. The best advice is not to take our word for it, but to go to the Heatherwick studio website, by clicking the picture above. Have a look at the “sitooterie” then browse around the rest of the work, making sure you have a look at the rolling bridge in the Paddington Basin. Simply stunning.
Filed under: Design, car, innovation | Tags: Beamer, BMW, car, flexible, GINA, innovation
OK, when we were kids, cars of the future were different, right? We had visions in our minds about vehicles which went underwater, fired laser beams from the headlights and could shape-shift. (well the cars in my mind did anyway.)
Recently, BMW unveiled it’s GINA Concept car, which as the picture shows, is covered with a flexible skin which animates and folds as the frame under the car moves. Imagine switching the headlights on and the skin opening to reveal the lights, like a human eye revealing the iris. When the doors open the skins wrinkles around the frame and creates many a beautiful shape. Then the bonnet opens, the skin slides apart like a divers wet suit.
There have been many detractors from this piece of true design over the last few weeks, but they are forgetting this is a prototype to show what the future holds. If designers didn’t try things and show what is possible, we would never dream and other innovators would never be inspired.
Everybody says, well done BMW for thinking outside the normal bounds of car body manufacture. Well done for opening our eyes to the possibilities of the future, and most of all well done for doing something designers are guilty of in all fields… not looking at and developing materials which are not the usual way to solve a problem.
Click the image above to hear Chris Bangle (Design Director at BMW) talk about the GINA project and see the innovation in action. Thanks, Chris, for starting to make me remember what cars should be like in the future.
