At Wolff Olins London we are developing a series of LEARNSHOP sessions where we go out and explore an emerging technology, or bring experts in, or teach ourselves.
Last week, we tried rapid prototyping, courtesy of Chalk Studio Islington. We spent the week designing objects that would be useful to us in our daily lives at Regents Wharf. One was an innovation for the fabulous Honey Club, another was both a useful and aesthetic solution to ease our journey through our increasingly confidential work environments.
We were able to create, as a result of our design brainpower here, some beautiful and functional things that we hope to scale up and mass produce. But what we learnt along the way was just as rewarding.
Rapid Prototyping or 3D printing puts factory power in the hands of the individual. The technology itself does not seem so sophisticated. We printed off a non-electronic machine. It feels like a combination of knitting machine, photocopier and MRI scanning device. It will see your object design in negative space and then compose the form in plaster (in our case), or polymers, metal or chocolate – a wide variety of materials. Within the machine two flat beds sit proximate to each other. One moves over the other and over time, the object is built, micro-fine layer by micro-fine layer. From one of the beds of plaster dust, our beautiful object emerged as our expert, Mark, retrieved it, dusted it and hoovered it down. It was a joyful birthing process!
The brilliance of the technology is the idea behind it. Our modern age was so much about standardized processes and products, production line style. Rapid prototyping puts unlimited creative potential in our hands. It will allow us to create endlessly diverse and bespoke products, tweaked to our exact needs and living environments. But like all great technologies it is not it, itself, that is revolutionary (unless it starts to take on a life of its own…) - it is the uses that we put it to, the ideas that we materialise through it.
In this, it is setting us quite a challenge. 3D printing invites us to re-think our relationship with objects much as mass production did in the 50s. (And probably also with place, as we’ll able to produce anywhere, which could eventually put pay to our massive Asian outsourcing dependency.) We’ll need to be hugely creative to take the offer and meet its challenge.
But then again, it is not necessarily the case that 3D printing will wait for human intelligence to set the pace. The RepRap project at the University of Bath has been for some time producing 3D printers which manufacture the parts of other 3D printers – a impressive step towards self-replication. The bar is therefore set high. Should machines find such power and intelligence on their own, we may find ourselves falling behind in the creativity race.
For the meantime though, that appears to be some time away. Geniuses in various part of the world are putting 3D printing to monumental use- to open up access to tools and products in the developing world, to take airline manufacturing to the next highly bespoke level. And 3D printing, in conjunction with nanotechnology, is offering breakthroughs for our bodies- manufacturing skin cells and even organs for transplantation.
3D printing sets a new creative brief on an enormous scale.
The iPhone and many of its equivalents have generated a whole new perception of digital interaction. Finger-swiping and motion gesturing have greatly desensitized our understanding of these new technologies and enabled new purposes for mass digital interaction. The buck doesn’t stop there however—Mickey Mouse has just added a new angle to interactive technology.
Disney Research, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon and Tokyo University, just introduced a completely new method of digital interaction called Touché, which enables a wider gamut of information relay through touch. Touché works across all types of material, from existing touchscreens to more exotic items like doorknobs, your skin, and even water’s surface. See the video above for a richer explanation.
The understanding and range of these sorts of physical interactions will have huge implications and ripple effects. It will not only affect content structure and visual cues on your tablet, phone or Mp3 player, but also have a huge impact on our ability to decipher social understanding through body language and other parameters that our species has long taken for granted.
Touché works by sensing signals across a large range of frequencies — while the typical systems we know only pick up signal at a single frequency.According to Disney Research, this technology could soon enable embedding different commands for when a user pinches or grasps a hooked-up object.
In short, Disney has used zeros and ones to create a cross-platform game changing approach to people’s interactions with the objects in their lives.
The other day I sat in a brainstorm with a bunch of fellow graphic designers, discussing the future direction of an international business. Someone in the team made a flippant joke about the moment: Most of us had gone to art school, not business school.
As designers we sometimes worry about engaging in the “business side” of things. But today’s businesses are desperate to find experimental and creative solutions and designers are just the problem-solvers they need. We’ve been trained to take a brief, assess the problem, instinctively create different directions, analyse the positives and negatives, reject one, create another, see what works, see what doesn’t.
We can rapidly create visual concepts that test how products, communications, experiences and interfaces can work together. And we can test multiple directions. It allows businesses to take risks they couldn’t imagine, because they can see tangible possibilities. That, is business prototyping.
There’s an opportunity now as designers to get beneath the veneer of subjective aesthetics and establish design, and design thinking, at the heart of tomorrow’s businesses – an opportunity we should grab with both hands.
So, am I a graphic designer anymore?
Campbell Butler is a Senior Designer at Wolff Olins.
I just came across an interesting story that involves Dali creating the design of the Chupa Chups lollipop mark. Chupa Chups started off under the name “GOL,” imagining the candy as a soccer ball and the open mouth a net. The name then evolved to “Chupa Chups,” from the Spanish chupar, meaning “to suck.” The lollipop, invented in 1958 and the first candy ever to be sold on a stick, is a bona-fide design classic. What I didn’t know was that its famous daisy logo was sketched on a newspaper and designed by none other than Dali, who insisted that his design be placed on top of the lolly, rather than the side.
After discovering this bit of the story, it instantly changed my perception of Chupa Chups. Not only does it reiterates the huge importance of storytelling in creating brands, it makes you realise that the mark placement is an integral part of the brand and probably a game changer in its time. Not to forget that the association with Dali adds a lot to the table - think Campell’s and Andy Warhol!
Naturally, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining Dali trying it out, I bet it suited his mustache. Wow - could it be that Dali and I have shared a similar experience!
Whoa! In Camberley, UK 2,012 schoolchildren have formed a human London 2012 Olympic logo covering 1800 square meters on a sports field - setting the new world record for the Largest Human Olympic Logo, according to the World Records Academy: www.worldrecordsacademy.org/.
Apparently last year, 1,900 people, mostly children, broke the world record for the largest human Olympic rings.
I’ve been seduced by this sweet little meditation on sound, created by Soundcloud. It’s great to take a step back and consider some fundamental things about how we encounter the world around us.
Sound stimulus is so nuanced and so compelling (the hidden choir), how are brands using it to create richer experiences? Here are a couple of great examples found by Wolff Olins designer, Karl Sadler.
velosynth: velosynth is an open-source bicycle interaction synthesizer. It’s a small, hackable computer that augments the cycling experience by interpreting speed, acceleration, and other sensor data into useful audio feedback.
e-sound by Audi: Audi’s future e-tron models will cover long distances powered by practically silent electric motors. To ensure that pedestrians in urban settings will hear them, the brand has developed a synthetic solution: Audi e-sound.
After creating the corporate identity system for NBCUniversal in 2010, we set out to rebrand all four initiatives within the company’s Integrated Marketing group (Healthy at NBCU, Women at NBCU, Hispanics at NBCU and NBCU Green is Universal) to establish a consistent look and feel.
Dear to our heart was our work on NBCU Green is Universal (see the video up top), where the goal was to reinvigorate NBCU’s environmental initiative and let people know about their commitment to sustainability across their programming and inside their organization. The new graphics package debuted last November to be featured bi-annually during “Green Week” (which is in November) and “Earth Week” (which is right now!).
Inspired by woodblock printing and stamping, we created this graphics package to evoke a natural, handmade quality. The iconic NBC peacock feather is integrated into the logo as well as into a set of icons accompanying the brand identity.
The warmth and accessibility of the graphics encourages consumers to get involved in Green efforts using the resources available to them within their own communities.
The web has always been prime experimental space for trying out new designs and interactions, whether purely expressive or truly functional. We’ve come a long way from the days of Netscape, blinking links, Flash load bars and animated 3D GIFs (or have we?). Browsers have evolved to let the imaginations of developers and web designers run wild. Google’s Chrome browser led the charge with Chrome Experiments, like Rome and The Wilderness Downtown, by showcasing what new browsers are (and should be) capable of today.
Like web fonts and responsive web design, the simple act of scrolling has seen great advances over the past year. Geared scrolling has become a trendy new way to experience a webpage (we used it when we released our Game Changers report earlier this year). Similar to sideways parallax scrolling from the old school video games of yore, geared scrolling allows multiple layers of a webpage to move at different speeds, creating a rich sense of depth from two-dimensional elements.
Nike Better World is probably still the most widely recognized example of this, with Journey being their most recent addition to the project. Since then many others have explored specialized scrolling.
