What It Means To Be a Design Leader

March 19, 2012

Our speaker at the July 2011 CreativeMornings/NewYork was John Maeda (maedastudio.com), President of the Rhode Island School of Design with Becky Bermont (twitter.com/beckybermont), VP of Media at RISD The event was generously hosted by Galapagos Art Space (galapagosartspace.com) in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

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CreativeMornings is a monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types. Each event is free of charge, and includes a 20 minute talk, plus coffee! You can join us in numerous cities around the world. (creativemornings.com)

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A big thank you to Sy J. Abudu (syjabudu.com) for filming and editing the talk.

Annual Report Powered by the Sun

February 29, 2012

Solar energy is the main business of our client Austria Solar. That´s why we thought about how we could put this energy to paper. The result: the first annual report powered by the sun. Its content remains invisible until sunlight falls on its pages.
“The Solar Annual Report 2011 – powered by the sun”

client: austria solar
agency: serviceplan campaign
chief creative officer: alexander schill
creative director: christoph everke, cosimo möller, alexander nagel
art director: matthäus frost
graphic design: matthäus frost, mathias nösel
copywriter: moritz dornig
account: christina paulus, stefanie zillner
production: melanie dienemann
photographs: michele di dio
printing: mory & meier

Pendulum Video

February 27, 2012

This video documents the current state of my kinetic video installation work-in-progress. The images are video feedback, generated by the displaying of a camera feed on a monitor whose image is captured by a camera placed a few feet in front of the screen.

NY Photog Wows with Minimalist Sky Color Gradients

February 22, 2012

New-York based photographer Eric Cahan seems to be ‘suffering’ from a common syndrome affecting inhabitants of major cities. He is obsessed with the sky. Unlike most of us, however, Cahan is also immensely skilled at capturing the sky in photo format and presenting it before our very eyes in manners we’ve never previously imagined possible. His Sky Series is essentially a photographic essay depicting nothing more than beautiful color gradients. It is a muted meditation on the conjoined transience of time and light, and their impact on our daily lives.

Ever knew the sky could be pink, orange, purple and then black to blue? Ever fathomed that all these changes can occur over a span of minutes? Eric Cahan figured this out earlier than us, so he set out with his color photo filters and no fewer than four digital and film-format cameras. He declaredly aimed to “create a window into a time and a place, and to play with the abstract through color gradients, shifting, and manipulation.” In doing so, he haunted the same places across the United States, from New York to California and then back again. He woke up early, used dozens of filters, but also managed to come up with results that are breathtakingly beautiful.

Source

The Pulse Surface Controller

February 21, 2012

At the core of all music creation lies a pulse. In an age of gear-overload, many of us have forgotten the most effective and intuitive pulse generator – a finger tap.

The Pulse Controller is a hardware / software solution that liberates computer-based musicians and performers from conventional input devices by allowing a surface – i.e. desk, laptop, objects and more – to become a playable MIDI controller. An included piezo microphone coupled with a simple yet powerful software interface converts acoustic impulses into MIDI Note messages for playing your software instruments in an intuitive, responsive and connected manner.

The idea behind Pulse Controller was born out of the belief that as computer-based musicians and performers we should not feel relegated to a grid of small 1×1″ pads or a keyboard to create our rhythms and provide pulse to our music. Controllers once intended to give us the immediacy of playing an instrument often end up feeling more disconnected and distracting. With the Pulse Surface Controller System, controlling percussive instruments has a more visceral, immediate quality, and via a powerful MIDI generator that generates notes in predefined musical scales the user can easily extend into the melodic domain to tap into an inspiring world of happy accidents. Power to the fingers!

LED Cube and Volumetric Display

February 17, 2012

The volumetric display is a combination of a 10x10x16 LED matrix and Microsoft Kinect technology. Here, we have focused on creating volumetric imagery by using the depth camera to visualize information as a 3-dimensional display. To communicate with the LED cube and send information over the network, we used Microsoft .Net Micro Framework.

Skeleton tracking is another technology that we took advantage of in this research. By using the newest Kinect for Windows SDK inside the Unity 3D environment we were able to create simple games for our LED cube. In one of the games, the player can control the size of particles inside the cube by using their hands and in another game, they can interact with a bouncing ball.

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Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Surfer

February 17, 2012

Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes. The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher. “I was really drawn to the idea of a lone character made of light surfing through darkness,” says Sutton of his costume choice.

Filming in the suit was the most surreal thing I’ve done in 20 years of snowboarding

“I’ve always been excited by unusual ways of lighting things, so it seemed like an exciting idea to make the subject of the film the only light source.” Sutton, who has created work for the likes of Hermès, Burberry and The New York Times, spent three nights on a skidoo with his trusty Red Epic camera at temperatures of -25C to snap Hughes carving effortlessly through the deep snow, even enlisting his own father to help maintain the temperamental suit throughout the demanding shoot. “Filming in the suit was the most surreal thing I’ve done in 20 years of snowboarding,” says Hughes of the charged salopettes. “Luckily there was plenty of vin rouge to keep me warm, and Jacob’s enthusiasm kept everyone going through the cold nights.”

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