Object Architecture

Amazing video creating various architecture landmarks out of objects such as books, bowls, knives and even a wig. For any architecture lover, this is pretty great. Created by Luis Urculo.

Via Arch Daily & Veronica

It doesn't get much cute than this! Little Printer brought to us by BERG



Full article on FastCo

Prouve RAW

I really want these chairs
I may just have to settle with seeing them at the NYC Vitra store...

via FastCo Design

London Squared

Today is full of awesome.

For anyone who knows me...this video is like an amazing motion version of my "Faces" project that I've been doing for years now. These faces found around New York City are not static, however, but talking and singing!!

Combine anthropomorphized newspaper bins and insane stop motion - are you kidding me - this is best thing ever!! LondonSquared - hats off to you. This is spectacular.

And to top it all off - it is yet another amazing part of the MoMA Talk to Me exhibit I have yet to see!

Thanks to @veroacosta for knowing me so well and sharing this!!!

Also...both videos autoplay - sorry. The first one is a music video and the second is hilarious personalities talking about life.

Freaker!

This is quite possibly the most brilliant Kickstarter video ever!! And he sells these in Union Square - how fun! Look for Zach Crain.



He's already reached his funding, so just enjoy this ridiculous video :)

Grampa's gonna look like a baby

This is my FAVORITE commercial!! I've acted it out for like 10 people - now you can just see it for yourself :) love it!!

Kickstarter

This post has been a long time coming and I'm so happy to be able to share some truly awesome projects. For those of you not familiar, Kickstarter is a GREAT site that serves as a funding platform for creative projects. Its been featured on just about every major site you can think of and every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. On the site, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands.








Some awesome projects that have been funded through Kickstarter include:
The Noun Project which started on Kickstarter here
TikTok+LunaTik started on Kickstarter, going on to raise nearly one million dollars and soon to be sold through Apple (via FastCo Design article)
Designer Frank Chimero's new book The Shape of Design was fully funded almost immediately on Kickstarter













So here's the best part - there are some really great causes on Kickstarter as well as some great projects from friends of mine. Check these below that friends of mine have been involved in -



Parsons Splash House - a graduate architecture project providing lockers and changing rooms for a Washington Heights pool so that the areas rec center can remain open throughout the summer. The project must reach its funding goal by June 1 2011. See the project website here.




Switch Hooks - a great project by Andy, a friend of a friend, converting light switch panels into multi-functional objects for holding things like keys or phones. See the project website here.




Trade in Hope: Fighting Child Sex Slavery in America - a powerful project to create a feature length documentary about American children being sold for sex. See the project website here.

Everynone

Absolutely stunning!! These videos are by Everynone, an amazing filmmaking team based in NYC with Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercandante and Julius Metoyer III.

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

The Johnny Cash Project

See the full project at The Johnny Cash Project



This is a project by Aaron Koblin, with director Chris Milk, that is, of course, completely amazing. He's the brillant mind behind The Sheep Market, Flight Patterns, Radiohead's House of Cards video, and Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown video, among others.

This latest project again uses the crowdsourcing method of The Sheep Market and Ten Thousand Cents where participants are asked to create small bits of the project, that when put together create something spectacular. The Johnny Cash Project is a collective effort to create the final Johnny Cash music video for his final studio recording - Ain't No Grave. Participants draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash from a still within the video creating an always evolving video and images are always able to be added. Over 250,000 images have been drawn by people from 172 countries - and this number is always growing.

Buffalo Run Productions

I love when I have awesome friends doing awesome things!

Evan Bauxbaum's Buffalo Run Productions has put out some pretty cool short films and now a new feature length film called La Linea will be coming out soon. Its about the story of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexico/US border and looks awesome. Here's the trailor below:



Evan is the writer, director and producer all the films. Many of his short films have won awards at film festivals all over the country. Here's the trailer to one of his short films, "The Roofer" below.

The Roofer - Trailer from evan buxbaum on Vimeo.

If you like his work, or just like supporting talented people, check out his new Facebook fan page for updates on videos, awards and photos from the filming or follow him on Twitter.

Cookie Dough Creations

Let it Dough! - an incredibly cute and creative holiday story by Christoph Niemann for the NY Times.

To see all the images Niemann created, check them out here.

(Hand)soap

I love these...so very much...but at the same time, I find them a tad bit creepy haha Regardless...I want some :)

Check them out on Etsy - $16.00 for a set of 8 or visit the whole shop at foliage on Etsy.





















































Photos by Marie Gardeski

Lauren Manning Design Work

Hi my name is Lauren Manning and here's a bit of my work in a temporary portfolio while my full site is under construction. here is my new portfolio site.

I am a designer, thinker and storyteller interested in constructing brand stories through design systems, solving problems with collaborative thinking and innovative solutions, and creating a narrative from raw data to communicate effectively through visualization.

Contact: lmanning729@gmail.com

For more information on any project, my resume or recommendations, feel free to email me.


Data Communication/Visualization
“It’s like comparing apples to oranges.” This phrase is the best way to describe the current state of data visualizations. For the designer, its easy to find good visualizations and bad ones, but how to apply the successful elements of particular designs to one’s own data set starts to get a little more complicated. Data sets vary tremendously, so one man’s brilliant solution can be another’s complete failure. Instead of seeing many excellent visualizations of all different data sets, what if you could see tons of visualizations of the same data set? What new comparisons, knowledge and structure might be developed from this?

Using a data set created from two years of meticulous life documenting, I visualized one point of data – food consumed – over forty ways. Exploring various methods, techniques, styles, degrees of complexity, degrees of additional context and many other elements, a true “apples to apples” comparison has emerged.

The project has been featured on datavisualization.ch and infosthetics.com.

















The Curiosity Project
The Curiosity Project is an effort to bridge the very unique gap between the print and digital worlds. By combining QR codes (that work!), a blog, hand making and pure curiosity the hope is to restructure the way we interact with both print and digital media.

















Be Versatile
Part of a self promotion piece, this project showcases multiple hand-crafted techniques to create various letterforms spelling the phrase “Be Versatile.” The making of all of the letters was videotaped and the one hundred hours of footage compressed into a two minute high speed time lapse. The video shows the “proof” of the making process while the phrase itself it meant to inspire designers to use methods beyond the computer to explore ways of communicating.

Gingerbread Awesomeness

Tis the season for gingerbread creations!

Here's a few nice ones I found - but I was a bit surprised to find so few that weren't your typical gingerbread shed with candy cane fence.

















I particularly love the gingerbread houses on the cups. The blog, notmartha.org, shows not only how she made them, but how to do it yourself! Love it!

















How creative...I think you can buy them...or just be really creative this holiday season and make them yourself :)



















If only...















And I love this one! I really wish this what my old architecture professor wanted when he asked us to use creative modeling materials :)

iPad's Everywhere in JFK's Delta Terminal

I flew into JFK today on what can only be described as a miniature version of an actual plane. We had to deplane close to a half-mile away from the terminal and after the walk, we emerge through a sketchy, back staircase into the ancient Terminal 2 & 3 of JFK currently occupied by Delta.

HOWEVER

Upon entering the terminal I was pleasantly surprised to see a snazzy looking restaurant, Croque Madame, equipped with iPads at every table...yes, this borderline vintage terminal has gone technology friendly and this new restaurant (it just opened November 16th) lets users not only order their food from these iPads, but also check email, check their fantasy football scores and hop on facebook.


Unfortunately, I didn't take the time to snap an actual picture of people using the iPads...almost every singe table was occupied and most people were using the iPads. Along with the iPads, there is also an impressive array of outlet/charging options at each table.

According to Delta, this will be expanded to LaGuardia later this year. Within JFK, they have this iPad installation at both Croque Madame, a French-inspired dining concept developed by New York chef Andrew Carmellini & Bar Brace, an Italian dining concept from New York restaurateur Jason Denton.

Picture from Gothamist

PIXMA Sound Sculpture

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

This Dentsu London studio just absolutely blew me away. This video is incredible and the concept behind this is brilliant. To rejuvenate the brand for Canon's PIXMA printer, Dentsu took bits of paint on a stretched membrane, hit it with some sound and created some pretty amazing stuff. The video shows the whole process and some video of the paint actually moving slowly in time. Absolutely stunning.

If you do check out Dentsu London's website - make sure to check out the people page. A brilliant way to show a bit of each employee's personality :)

See in Fast & Company Design

Virtual Shoe Museum

The Virtual Shoe Museum is a showcase of some of the strangest and most creative shoes ever made. There are shoes made of every conceivable material, for all sorts of uses ranging from early concepts to completely finalized shoes. The first shoe above is the Invisible Shoe by Andreia Chaves using a mirrored material on a faceted surface that picks up all of its surroundings. The shoe below it is the Mojito Shoe by Julian Hakes.

If you have some time to kill, need a good laugh, or just want to see something that looks absolutely crazy - check out the Virtual Shoe Museum.

Renaming architecture

Polshek Partnership, creators of great buildings like The Standard Hotel(2008) above, the William J. Clinton Presidential Center (2004), and the Rose Center for Earth and Space(2002) at the American Museum of Natural History recently changed their name to Ennead. The more ambigous name follows a popular trend to steer away from the "white male architect" leading a firm, to a more collective environment. Polshek is also looking to retire and wanted to remove his name from such a prominent position.

This NY Times article mentions other firms who have done the same thing including Hugh Hardy Architects to H3 and Fox & Fowle to FXFowle. These older firms are following in the footsteps of younger firms, who created names like these from the start. Firms like OMA, Pentagram and Morphosis all have big name designers in them, but aren't reliant on that one designer's name should anything change.

Its certainly an interesting topic, especially with the generation of starchitects reaching very old age, and almost all their firms simply being named after themselves. The question becomes, can a firm continue on if its namesakes passes away or wants to retire? In the next 10 years, I think name changes like Polshek to Ennead will become very common. The design understanding and firm reputation does not need to be lost just because the namesake is no longer an integral part.

The Beauty of Data Visualization

This is a talk by David McCandless, author of Visual Miscellaneum, at TEDGlobal 2010 this July. He's is journalist turned designer and in his talk he discusses some great concepts. He mentions how incredibly vital context is when creating and understanding an infographic. I think that is so true, especially with all of the infographics now used in the media. We think we're better understanding an issue or problem, but if the proper context is not included, we could be totally off the mark.

McCandless says he loves finding hidden patterns within data. I could not agree more and I think thats a huge reason for my daily life documenting project (ongoing for 637 days as of today, Sept 29). The revealing of hidden trends and patterns through data design is definitely one of the best parts.

Here is the original video from TED. TED = awesome. Also if you're as enamored with a few of his comments as I was...surprise, TED has a Interactive Transcript feature that allows you to skip around to any specific moment in the presentation by phrase.

Brillant Stop Motion Videos

Always and forever my favorite music video EVER! And also one of the most spectacular stop motion videos I've ever seen. Done by Oren Lavie, the singer, along with a few others. The video is composed of 3225 still images and took only two days to shoot, but 4 weeks to plan.



Similar is style, this Amazon Kindle commercial was done by gallantandkeen. I love how the narrative is created using the shot-from-above stop motion technique.



And lastly, the other most spectacular stop motion I've ever seen. This video is actually one stop motion within another - CRAZY! The printed image storyline was shot first and then the photos were laid out to create the secondary stop motion. Brilliant