Sebastian Campion of Guerilla Innovation interviews Dutch Artist, Theo Jansen for Artificial. Theo has been creating wind -powered animals made of plastic tubes for the last 15 years that move with the wind and transform into seemingly organic creatures:

“You have been developing the beach animals for about 15 years. How has the project evolved over the years?

The first beach animal I created didn’t have very strong joints. It couldn’t even walk or stand, but one night I had a vision about the principle of its feet. So, based on the simple PCV tubes that I still use, I built a computer model and tried to calculate the best way to create a walking movement. This process went on for some months, day and night before I found the right proportion between the lengths of the tubes. The philosophical ideas were not really there from the beginning, but they have grown more complete with the years. It’s not important just to make things, but also to reflect about them.

Did real animals or organisms inspire you?
I didn’t try to imitate animals. I just wanted to make something new. Afterwards, it turned out that real animals already used the same principle so when people look at the beach animals they often recognize the movement of an animal. But it wasn’t my intention. “

Read the rest of the interview here.

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Artificial : Theo Jansen

Being born in a city that celebrates shopping, Dubai born Indian artist Raj needed a break. “My exposure to Art and Design had always been from a commercial angle”, explains Raj,” so the Omkara project was a way for me to break away express myself.”

We nodded with sympathy and decided to be polite:

Sensory: So Raj, what’s the Omkara’s journey?

Raj: The Omkara was an attempt to produce an ‘improvised installation art piece’ that attained meaning and personality as time progressed. On a very philosophical level, it is very much like life where one grows up to becomes who he is because of both foreseen and unforeseen circumstances imposed upon him.

Sensory: Yes but it’s a car..

Raj: The word Omkara actually comes from the Holy Hindu bible BHAGWAD GITA and means – ’ the vehicle to cross the ocean of life ’ Crossing this ocean is the journey one must undertake in a lifetime and henceforth encounter the three basic elements of mortality – creation, preservation and destruction.

Sensory: So the car is the metaphor and it would go through the three basic elements of mortality?

Raj: Exactly.

Sensory: On your website, you’ve said that Omkara is far from over and that you had planned on driving it from the United Arab Emirates to India. Is that part of the destruction and preservation phase? And how’s it coming along?

Raj: It’s not coming along at all… I’ve been very caught up trying to earn money for bread at the moment…. but the Omkara will be revived someday and it will set off on another journey soon. A journey not so extravagant maybe – but possibly unique enough to lower a few windows and invite a few honks!

Sensory: How’s the reaction been so far?

Raj: 60% awe, 25% scepticism, 10% ridicule, 4.5% vindication and 0.5% publicity. While some made fun of the entire project and thought that I was perhaps ‘trying too hard’ to make a point, many others were fascinated by the very scale and process undertaken to complete the project and the mythological concept embedded within. However, it was exceptionally hard to find a media outlet/gallery to exhibit the piece in this country as ‘the Omkara’ was considered a piece too controversial for an islamic country.

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Centfils is where your electric cords go to party – a funky family of extension cords that lets you to turn your cords from an eyesore to an eye catching display. Currently only a prototype, Centfils (play on cent fils, french for “hundred cords”, and sans fils, which means “wireless”) is designed by David L’Hote and Felicien Bergere (collectively known as HotChoz) and received a honorable mention in the 2004 Dupont De Nemours imagineering competition.

We asked Hot Choz a few Qs about their project:

Sensory: I wanted to ask you how close you were into securing investment for your product?

HotChoz: We have an interesting contact in Scandinavia, the only one that sounds serious so far.

But launching electrical products is a pain in the butt (Security Norms and Electrical Standards) It is going to be long.

Sensory: Is this your first experience trying to launch a product?

HotChoz: As a freelance, yes.

Sensory: What sort of products have you worked on before?

HotChoz: DIY, Home improvement and Garden stuff too.

Sensory: Whats the difference doing it freelance this time?

Hot Choz: No money.

Sensory: Do people approach you differently as a freelance?

Hot Choz: In Europe, if you are a company designing products, you sound serious. Otherwise you will be called an Inventor. You know, weird people working in their garage.

As a freelance, you may design (expensive) furniture, vases, deco-thing, but convincing industrials that one or two people can imagine smart mass production objects is another story.

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Hot Choz

Nick isn’t Normal. Normal lives with his wife and two kids in a quiet suburb in Florida. On the other hand, cross a behaviourial psychologist and a sculptor and you’ll get Nick Rodrigues.

Bump into him on the streets, and chances are if he hasn’t honked at you yet, he’s probably busy on the phone in his portable phone booth (Video 1, Video 2) . All in the name of art, he says, so we picked him off the streets and brought him in for questioning:

Sensory: What sort of reactions have you gotten? Has anyone ever given you any nasty looks?

Nick: I really wasn’t paying attention. I was on the phone. No, I’m just kidding, people absolutely loved the cell phone booth except for those who were on the phone; They hardly notice it. On the other hand, people hated the Automotive Armor – The horn can be really loud and annoying.

Sensory: Tell us a bit more about your background and this project. What are you really upto?

Nick:Well, I’m a pretty normal guy so I deal with the same stuff you do. To put it simply, I think the way people interact with one another can be really annoying. So I make sculpture that talks about it.

The piece “Automotive Armour” for example is a way to look at behaviour patterns towards each other in the car verus in person. What if we could act the same way on foot as we do in the car? Cut off old ladies, honk the horn when theirs a green light and of course yell anything you want from the protection of your car.

Sensory: What about the Portable Phone Booth?

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Ask Kaden Harris what he does for a living and he will tell you that he builds antiques from a parallel universe, and when he says antiques, he doesn’t mean old pots and clocks that sit all pretty on your shelf, but fully functional miniature Rebuchets, Guillotine and Catapults that you could use to raise hell by chopping off fingers of those who did you wrong or catapulting nuts at your secretary. Just the perfect medieval office toy, I tell you.

Never satisfied with just drive-by surfing, we cornered Mr. Harris and badgered him with questions:

Sensory: I really want to know how you first got into this. I’m sure you didn’t wake up one day and decided to sell miniature Guillotines.

Harris: Dunno how I ended up doing this. I’ve done a lot of different day jobs over the years; from cooking sewage (don’t ask) to corporate graphic design, but the end of each day would have me back doing the 2 passions: “Figgerin’ Out How Stuff Works”, and “Buildin’ Stuff”. I have built an unholy amount of stuff over the years, no shit. Once you get around the physics of the mechanisms, the form factors reflect, I guess, a post millennial mutation of the Victorian ‘Gentleman Inventor’.

Now, marketing the siege engine miniatures as executive rewards was pretty much a no brainer: If you’d just been named Salesman of the Year”, what would you rather receive as a commemorative trophy: a soapstone carving of a hooded ptarmigan (with an engraved brass plaque), or a fully functional hanging counterweight trebuchet that’ll fire chunks of sweaty cheddar all the way into the cube farm (also with an engraved brass plaque)?

No-Brainer.

AND, I get to do R&D on all kinds of wiggy stuff for new product lines. I have the coolest job ever!

Sensory: And do these models really work? Could I use them?

Harris: Yeah, the stuff all works, with varying degrees of impressiveness. The trebuchets are gravity powered, and there’s limitations as to how much mass you can stuff into the weight boxes. I market the trebs as being ‘coin operated’...park one on the corner of your desk and toss your pocket change into the weight box…by the end of the month you’ll have accumulated enough weight to toss a grape 30 or 40 feet provided you’ve taken the time to performance tune the piece.

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I like to imagine Mixko’s Alex Garnett slumped in his chair staring at his Pepsi soft drink, waiting for his digestive system to kick in and take on his high calorie lunch, when it hits him.

“I liked the way the bendy straw lent itself to be used in directing the lamp glow.” He later wrote about the lamp he created out of the soft drink cup (pictured above),” as a product it seemed very complete and yet all I had to do was tune my head into this way of recycling what already exists.”

He calls it the subversion of objects, that is, when you play with the perception of an existing product when you change it’s intended and ‘proper’ function while retaining the visual cues.

To elaborate, most people assume that the human eye is very much like a camera. The iris functions as an aperture, the retina as the film and the brain as the studio where the picture is analyzed and understood.

Yet whilst the camera will take in all that is ‘visible’ through the lens, in reality, the brain actually disposes of a lot of the data that it receives from the eye and instead completes the analysis or perception of what we see by using earlier experiences of familiar objects, which makes it all the more interesting when designers repurpose the ‘ordinary’, as in the case of the three we handpicked:

Who: Alex Garnett of Mixko Studios
What: Chair
From: 3 pin electric plug

Another one of Alex’s repurposed iconic object where he takes on the 3 pin electric plug and turns it into a chair. “Even the most bog-standard object can be made unique”, He adds.

Who: Ingo Maurer
What: Lighting.
From: Tea cup set.

This one’s by Ingo Maurer – A tea cup lamp that swivels 180 degrees and uses a spoon as a pull switch.

Who: Student Project at Eindhoven
What: Chandelier
From: Plastic clothes hangers.

And last but not the least, a student project at Eindhoven, for which students put together a chandelier with, believe it or not, nothing but plastic hangers. It’s almost like playing Magic Eye.

Only instead of pictures, you use objects.

Max Longin (above) on his “floating” bed

When we first received the floating bed at our SI office, we thought it came with the designer. After all, you’d make the same mistake if you had found Max in the box.

Needless to say, we tried our best to seperate him from the bed, but he wouldn’t budge. So we cut a deal – We’d give him a interview if he left.

We did, He left – with the bed. He claimed he didn’t say he was going to leave it behind.

In the end, All we had left was the transcript:

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Perhaps the never-ending list of questions about “what to do with the World Trade Center?” needs to be flipped on its head. What is there that we’re not hoping for a new World Trade Center site to accomplish? Republicans see the groundbreaking as an opportunity to cast their New York City convention in the best possible light, while
Democrats see it as perfect evidence of their opponents’ crass exploitation of human tragedy. New York designers, contractors, environmentalists, religious leaders, and cultural institutions compete for the opportunity to redefine the neighborhood’s – or even the entire city or nation’s – relationship to politics, civil society, the environment, God or the arts.

Just thinking about the World Trade Center seems to put people in state of imagining pure possibility. And while unbridled expectations almost inevitably yield dashed hopes, perhaps the massive creative energy associated with the WTC site is the very spirit to which this entire project should be dedicated.

The occasion of a new Trade Center is actually a tremendous opportunity to acknowledge a newfound public awareness of the role of architecture in our lives – both as practical space, and as symbolic form. Buildings, at
their best, serve functional and metaphoric roles, simultaneously. And these two roles can be wed to one another, as well.

Watching the towers fall, as so many of us did live from our rooftops or windows, changed our appreciation for architecture. For me, as each tower collapsed, I became aware of how the tower is representative of the human body.

As a column fell, I could feel a column in myself fall in sympathy with it.

This was not a symbolic event, but an intensely physical one. It was as if I was watching a human being bend, collapse, and disintegrate.

Then I watched – and felt – it happen again.

Yes, there were people inside – and yes, there was a whole semiotic about trade and the west and all that going on. But in the moment of the collapse, from the distance and place where I and thousands of others saw it, it was a
building – an architectural character – that was being brought down. In those moments, I couldn’t help but anthopomorphize the WTC.

This is one reason why its resurrection is so profound for so many people, and why so many of the uninspired, utilitarian, and market-driven responses to the call for proposals has been so disappointing. Even the memorials seem like obligatory nods to a “big sad thing” rather than soil for the imagination of new forms.

Yes, a building must work – but it must live, too.

If it were mine to do, I’d replace the World Trade Center with some kind of World Creativity Center. I’d make a building that both stands for and promotes imaginative new solutions to problems of all sorts. It’s not a building
to conduct or perpetuate business as usual, but to imagine, foster, and generate entirely new forms. The tenants bold enough to rent space in it immediately identify themselves as engaged in the most valuable (and wealth-producing) pursuit in the Western World: new ideas.

about the writer:

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of eight best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say, and the novels Ecstasy Club, and Exit Strategy. This is his first post for SI.

The TV commercial comforts you between reruns of MTV Cribs – “Until you make your escape, there’ll always be MTV.”

But lets face it, you’re not going to make it. You barely know your way around an air guitar, your application for Extreme Makeover was denied, and hiphop stars taunt you with their ice and tricked out cars.

But fear not, you could at least live in style – Just like that Music video, Just like Lenny Kravitz, At less than a fraction of what his pad is worth. And let me tell you thats no chump change.

Of all the Celebrity cribs I’ve come across, I’ve been most intrigued by Kravitz’s.

I’m not alone.

His crib has been featured in numerous magazines and the reason is a Michael Czysz, who is responsible for the transformation of Kravitz’s 1950’s Miami ranch house into a “sleek, throbbing James Bond-esque den of seduction”.


Fig 1. Lenny Kravitz’s Pad

Unfortunately, there is some bad news – The designer, Michael Czysz prefers to have complete control over his work. He custom-makes 90 percent of the furniture and personally selects everything, which means you’re not going to be able to make a complete replica with off the shelf components. For instance, In the case of Kravtiz’s Miami residence, he went so far as to pick out a silver Ferrari and custom designed a silver “Flying V” Fender guitar to go with the house (1)

On the other hand, The good news is that i saved a bunch of money with… :) just kidding.

You could still redo your den with a similar theme for around $20,000 – $25,000, without the Ferrari and the custom silver guitar (You could spray paint a second hand one) yet still retain its essense with these off the shelf soulful retro components below:



Name: Living Tower
Designer: Verner Panton
Price: $10,620.00
Year: 1969
Details: Large two-piece sculptured seating.



Name: Chrome plastic space age panels (10)
Designer: Unknown
Price: $399 for 10
Year: 1968-1972 Space Age Period


Name: White Space Panel
Designer: Unknown
Price: $399
Year: 1968-172 Space Age Period


Name: Spiegel Panel Red
Designer: Verner Panton
Price: $2,499.00 (ouch)
Year: Vintage item, produced by Louis Poulsen ca. 1969.
Details: It can be used as a wall or a ceiling mounted lamp.



A.Name: Gloss Table Lamp
Designer: Pablo Pardo
Price: $250 (Currently on Sale: $225)

B.Name: Nelson Marshmallow Sofa
Designer: George Nelson, Irving Harper for Herman Miller
Price: $2,595 ($114/month)
Year: 1956
Details: While this isn’t the only Sofa i would recommend, i decided to refrain from cramming in every stylish seat. You can easily find some more at Nova, Design within Reach and White on White

C.Name: Le Klint Hanging Light
Designer: Poul Christiansen
Price: $200 (Current on Sale: $180)
Year: 1971
Details: While I prefered this classic folded lamp, you can find similar suited lamps here.

D.Name: Luminous Ring Panel Red
Designer: Verner Panton for Vitra
Price: $525
Year: 1969
Details: Strongly decorative in character, it can be used as a wall- or ceiling-mounted lamp. Cheaper Alternative.



Fig 7. The Finished Room

And voila, your room is ready. No more lonely nights. No more midlife crisis. No more savings.

Core77 Articles: The More the Merrier – Steve Portigal at Core77 writes about how the boundaries between consumer and the producer continue to blur:

” In our culture there is a growing interest in trying to be like the professionals. As consumers, we’re interested in how business is done. The popular press reports the amount of money that a new movie makes in its opening weekend. Advertisements (most recently Dell) profile the product designers, user researchers, usability testers, and others who are behind the scenes for the products we buy. Many of the ubiquitous reality-TV shows are simply pulling back the veil on a previously hidden process (MTV’s Cribs documents the homes of the famous, Take This Job… tracks the work activities of people with unique occupations, Airline shows the minutiae of getting passengers boarded for an on-time departure, and Family Plots tells all about a family-owned funeral home). The boundaries between consumer and producer continue to blur, a change that was massively accelerated by the Internet. For more about this, check out The Cluetrain Manifesto. Customers (fans, really) of companies form communities to debate how those companies and their products should evolve. For example, Google’s social networking site Orkut includes two communities with over 1000 subscribers: “What Should Google Do?” and “What Should Orkut Do?”

But beyond simply acting upon that sense of ownership by talking about the companies, many people are taking advantage of new enabling technologies (i.e., Photoshop) to go one step further—to create new “products.” And, with a distribution channel like the Internet, they can also share their creation with an enormous audience, just like the professionals. “

Small Note: While the article celebrates the new shift towards participatory design, it does so with a condescending tone – “It’s exciting that these regular people are already creating partially cooked concepts on their own, without a client, without a PD session, without a designer, or a facilitator.”

I once read somewhere that design was the expression of the culture of objects, and that is how I see it, and what this site is about – The culture of objects.

While it’s not much to look at the moment (How i wish Blogger had categories), i intend to develop this site into a Magazine slash Weblog geared towards everything related to Design – whether it’s Books, Websites, Products, Furniture, and Architecture.

I’ve always fostered a fascination for design, and what better way to feed my obsession than to serve up a regular platter of news, reviews and the occasional rant.

If you have a product or an issue that you would want me to address, feel free to drop me a line at commonsense AT sensoryimpact DOT COM

My name is Adnan and I’ll be your host. :D

Also, There is a reason why i have my comments turned on – I like conversations. :)