Design House, Tjep, collaborated with Droog for the Berlin Film Festival to come up with something that was both movie related and glamourous. Hence, the Champaign Popcorn.

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Tjep

Simon Goulet’s 9 minute long film OIO captures paint as it falls, to create a living moving painting. The film is a sublime orgy of colour and movement, and leaves an almost hallucinogenic after taste. Over 11 years, 540 litres of paint, 56 colours, 7000 metres of film, 33000 digitized images, 360 frames per second, a catapult, lots of friends, passion and patience results in new art form coined ‘cinepainting’.

Whilst to the untrained eye the film may resemble a diy disaster in the making, there is actually a highly technical method to the paint throwing.
First, paint is filmed as it passes, in flight, through a chosen frame of space, one jet of paint at a time. Then, in post-production, the shots can be combined in order to compose a painting, which fills the frame for a given period of time.

This post-production editing took Simon Goulet 4 years to complete, and resulted in a critically acclaimed work totting up 14 awards to date.

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OIO Films (video preview)

For their latest art installation, Design group Peel, laid out 10,000 small black plastic bowls filled with water under the Brooklyn Bridge to create a pixellated reflection of the sky and bridge.

The installation follows in their tradition of all that is repetitive and precise. Previous work includes screens made of strips of foam in Milan and 640 boxes again under a New York Bridge.

As part of their hundredth anniversary celebration, Arco asked 12 designers to give their vision of the future of furniture of which the most fascinating is Janneke Hooymans & Frank Tjepkema’s XXL Chair that embraces the super size aesthetics of western consumerism.

The project is currently presented in the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem from the 26th of June until the beginning of September 2005.

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Tjep
Arco 12

What’s the best material to use for waste accessories than waste itself. Designer Vincent Schertenleib and Sergio Streun of 366cm ’s new ashtray is made of used phone-cards while their waste basket is made of recycled paper.

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366cm

Architect Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues wanted to work on a project that functioned as architecture, sculpture and a “made-to-order”product, so when they got the opportunity to do an outdoor installation for Materials & Applications (M&A) in Los Angeles, they dipped in their collective creative gene pool and came up with the “Maximilian Shell”. A year in development, the installation takes its inspiration from the black hole and relies on the sun to create fractal light patterns on the ground while a tranquil subsonic drone from an integrated ambient sound installation by composer James Lumb rumbles below the feet of its visitors.

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Called the “Verv Lamp”, this retro space age lamp by Lance of Verv Design incorporates hand spun mirror aluminum, hand blown glass orbs, acrylic LEDs and is completely hand made. Price: $1200

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Verv Design

MIT Press has an interview with Eric von Hippel, the author of Democratizing Innovation on their site. The electronic edition is available free for download:

Why does innovation by users matter?

Innovation by users matters for two major reasons. First, users that innovate-both individual consumers and user firms-have been found to be “lead users.” That is, relative to other users in their populations they are ahead of the majority with respect to an important marketplace trend and expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to their leading-edge needs. (The correlations found between innovation by users and these lead user characteristics are highly significant, and the effect sizes found are also very large.) This means that the innovations users develop for themselves will be of interest to many users. Second, it has been found that users that innovate often freely reveal what they have developed. This means that other users-and manufacturers-are able to imitate what lead users have developed. The net result is that manufacturers often do produce innovations pioneered by lead users. Indeed, these innovations are a major feedstock for the new products that manufacturers produce and sell to the general marketplace.

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Fashion House Givenchy celebrated Fashion Designer, Ozwald Boateng’s arrival by commissioning an animation house to create a Kill Bill inspired animation. Ozwald Boatleg is best known for his use of both traditional and non-conventional methods to create his formal look.

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Ozwald Boateng Animated Video
Givenchy
Ozwald Boateng official website
BBC: Ozwald Boateng Profile
100 Greatest Black Briton: Ozwald Boateng