I just finished some prototypes for an item that will soon be making a showing in the store. If you like the idea of wearing a scene depicting a kraken dragging a galleon down to the crushing deep on your eyelashes you might want to keep an eye out for updates.
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People have been asking for a more customizeable version of the Hackerspace Passports as a launching point for their own projects. I’ve made a kit packed with the illustrations I made for the passports, psd’s for all the patterns, stamp designs for the hackerspaces used in the passports, and the original InDesign file. This should be everything you need to build your own customized slice of awesomeness.
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For the past month I’ve been designing some passports with Mitch Altman. The purpose is to get people visiting more hackerspaces, interacting with the communities held within, and spreading ideas across different groups.
I find the scavenger hunt element – trying to fill every blank space in your “visas” section with stamps from hackerspaces across the world – incredibly appealing. I’m eager to see the stamps spaces come up with, the inks they use, and the clever elements they find to tuck in with their own passports.
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Many of you may not know this, but I spent a few years working in the movie FX industry. Specifically, I made animatronic props and movie monsters for films like AVP:Requiem, Snakes on a Plane, and Epic Movie. Interestingly a mini documentary just came out profiling the studio “Mark Rappaport’s Creature FX” and my beaver prop from Epic Movie’s featured about halfway through! It’s kind of exciting as I never actually saw Epic Movie and never had much of a chance to see the finished prop in action. Video after the jump.
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In college a friend told me about an artist who lived for several days wearing glasses that turned his vision upside down. Apparently after a day or so his brain adjusted to his new perspective so remarkably that he saw the world as being upside down when he finally took the glasses off. The story stuck in my mind and when I got an invite to create an optical illusion for some Berkeley neuroscience friends it all came back to me.
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While working as a designer for Instinct Engineering I developed some prototypes for Fusion Brands. The idea was to create rigid silicone volumes with attractive organic lines that matched their existing product lines. We started designing around a manufacturing process that would allow us to capture a rigid heatproof plastic structure in a silicone skin.
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As I’ve experimented with different 3d printing methods it’s struck me that, even though the process of printing an object is very different from the usual way products are made, the materials still move and bend in a predictable way. This set me to wondering if I could design features like living hinges, friction fastenings, and working mechanisms into a printed part.
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Bioshock was a beautiful game. After playing it, I got hooked on the idea of turning its logo into a metal belt buckle. The prototype was milled out of machinst’s wax over on the Tormach 4-axis CNC at Techshop. When I finished molding it in silicone, I had some wax duplicates cast in bronze. You can see more of the prototype on Flickr and view a tutorial of the process on Instructables.
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I find the structure of horns and bone incredibly enticing. It’s captivating how you can see them from many perspectives and appreciate their structure from many scales. If you observe the shape of a bone, it’s incredible to think of the way it was formed both by the outward pressure of growth, but by the direction of tension that came from the muscles that supported and attached to it. As you look closer you can observe the network of pores and veins that moved through it in a sympathetic relationship with its rigid structure, like the ventilation system of a building. On even closer inspection you can see the little microcosms of archetecture; thousands of repeated elements each with minute variations producing a lattice of strong yet light fiber. This whole marvelous mechanism becomes even more remarkable when you imagine how it was produced: by a sea of autonomous cells, each ignorant of the final structure but working harmoniously towards that end.
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