Samples of work by Karen Marie Hasling, B.Sc.Eng Textile technology, M.Sc.Eng Design&Innovation. Preliminary results of the project ‘Green’ bio composites for ceiling and wall elements. Presented as part of a seminar on design potentials in polyester with the Digital Crafting Network.
Mercedes Benz Advanced Design "Exploring lightweight forms to play with strength, perspective, and transparency, the results resemble polygons, honeycombs (all sharing one central perspective point), string art, and woven chaos."
A bit of aggressive product design but how awesome are these concept cars. Be interesting to see how much can be applied to the real thing.
I often look to architecture and furniture for inspiration and Patricia Urquiola is a Spanish designer who's products I really love. Fusing touches of craft and exactly the right amount of texture and detail to be interesting but not fussy, I've previously picked out many of her designs without realising but only just discovered the website bonluxat.com which makes it really easy to see all of them in one place. I especially enjoy her chairs..
Last friday I attended the Kingston MA Fashion Futures show "Body Laboratory", a new course led by Nancy Tilbury who has worked with a number of companies including Philips on research-led design work fusing fashion and technology to explore new product concepts. Unfortunately I missed the static exhibition there so have been trying to find out more about the students display of work and stumbled on this video detailing digital draping and print manipulation. I've always been partial to a good print, especially one engineered for a specific product (as Jonathan Saunders first collections did or McQueen has done fantastically in recent years) and had never thought about using projection to do so, but what a great idea. It's also exciting to see a fashion course happening in a university with such a diversity of fields - from architecture to product design and engineering and I'm sure there will be exciting things to come from this course in the future.
Researching for a new project I'm doing I discovered the work of Marilene Oliver, an artist and researcher exploring the relationship between the newly developing digital environment and representation of the body: "The virtual world created by the computer is one that provides no place for the physical body. As communications technology and the use of the Internet is becoming an integral part of our lives, the absence of the physical in the virtual space is destined to provoke changes in the physical body and in our relationship to it in the real world. My work centres around this relationship, seeking to explore and create ways of intimately representing the physical body."
Although the underlying motivations for the work are quite conceptual and really interesting, the physical pieces she produces use technology to produce really beautiful installation type displays, all focussing around depictions of the human form, and often using MRI scanning to produce sculptures which appear in slices. I really like this idea of collections of different things, or slices which on their own would mean nothing, but when pieced together create an interesting image or creation. I also think it would be really interesting to see how products could be developed around some of the ideas and technology here.
Currently developing quite a complicated wedge sole unit design for one of my prototypes I've been thinking about ways I can explain the concept behind it quickly, visually and in an interesting way, since my drawings tend to be a bit sketchy. I've wanted to do a video for quite a while but not knowing anything really about making videos I may well be being slightly overambitious here. I did however find this video by Bonsajo (via Notcot) which is interesting in that whilst it's quite fun and graphicy, it uses music and CAD files and I can see something along these lines working well as an explanation of my product -maybe combined with something a little more conceptual like the bubble video I wrote about previously. Better start learning about video production now then...
I'm always on the look out for ways to improve my drawing and presenting my designs and have been sifting through coroflot portfolio's recently to compare my sketching (not for the faint hearted). Junior ASJ caught my eye for some amazingly realisting renderings. Time to step up the rhino!
Shoe Kitchen is my place for inspiration, design dilly dallying & began as part of a journal for my final year footwear collection at (Cordwainers) London College of Fashion.
info@helenfurber.com
Alexander Mcqueen SS10
