Hamburg based gallery CAI showed the work of Japanese Artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu at the Tristesse Deluxe Gallery in Berlin, Karl-Marx-Allee. In his work, Yoshiaki uses outerwear - and in this instance the jackets of a particular sponsor - as the source material for sewed animals. These animals are attached to the still recognisable source - so that it looks like that there is a metamorphosis going on.

The entertaining process with you is, that the portrayed animals lend their characters to the fashion item. For me at least, a pink training top will never look the same again.

Interestingly enough another big sportswear company launched an advertising campaign earlier this year, showing work by Federico Uribe who also used products by the manufacturer as base material.

Customization vs Personalisation

There’s been a real focus in the past year on 3D prototyping technologies and the opportunities that it gives to product designers and potential users. Along with the excitement, as expected, there are many buzz words flying around. The one that pricked my curiosity most was “CUSTOMIZATION”. And in most cases I thought it was totally the wrong word to use.

Maybe I am being picky, but I think customization is really interesting - and far more interesting - when we think of it as something distinct from personalisation and bespoke design, and therefore beyond the control of the design process (a post design stage and not necessarilly a pre-design stage).

The main distinction I see in customization is that it has that moment of hacking - in that a base product has been produced that lets you have access to its outer shell and/or innards, allowing you to mess around with it, add to it, change it, improve it, renew it, until you have created what you want. The process and the resulting object creates a positive experience that sits between making and using.

Rapid prototyping machines enables designers to produce very specific products that can meet the very specific and personal wishes of a potential purchaser. But this specific process on its own I think is bespoke design, albeit potentially cheap and quick bespoke design, and not necessarily customization.

Access Points for Customization

I have been customizing furniture, (chopping legs off, adding wheels, swapping doors, changing handles, stripping, re upholstering, patching, painting) long before I even thought about becoming a designer. At first it was mainly for economic reasons and later for more personal and emotional reasons – as this process allows you a certain sense of ownership of the product that goes far beyond the transaction process. It sows the foundations for your own personal narrative with the object. And because of the structure of most of the objects, my customization wishes were relatively easy to realise and my bond with the objects I shaped, timelessly strong.

And infact from what I saw on show at particularly at the Design Mai and from some of the reports of Milan was, whilst many products utilising 3D rapid protyping techniques offered many opportunities for bespoke designs, almost none of them seemed to be, (in my point of view) - customizable. There were some really beautiful objects; poetic interpretations of fleeting moments captured in 3D …

Attracted to Light - Geoffry Mann

… and shapes that defied traditional construction …

A1 Stool by Assa Ashuach, Solid CI Chair by Patrick Jouin

… but the access points had been magically 3d rapidly prototyped out! Moulded, sealed airbrushed. If you wanted to hack/customize any of these sophisticated constructions, it would most probably be with a very unsophisticated saw, causing havoc.

Growing Old Gracefully

And this really made me think. With all these new technologies and machines that are transforming our physical product landscape, what is going to happen to them when we get old. How are we going to look after them in their relative old age. Will their shape and form slowly transform and reflect the experience of living together? Will our very expensive, injection moulded, stapled and then sealed organic shaped chair grow old gracefully? Would we be able to take it to an upholster (or maybe we have something new like a sofa equivalent to a botox surgeon?) to get it all pumped up and fluffy again. Or will we just chuck it out and get a new model.

I think it is really interesting that in parallel to the new wave of bespoke - short run, niche - products, people are more than ever also scouring the flea markets for furniture to fill their homes (and not only for economic reasons).

Escaping Their Designed Destiny

I find Martino Gampers 100 chairs in a 100 days, (presented at the Design Museum) a really great example of old school customization at its most beautiful and most bold. And as he is working with both old and new furniture, it is clear the restrictions and opportunities he has with both, in giving them a new life, a new form. Crudley cutting and forcing plastic and foam, and rejoining and screwing the wood. But not everyone has his sensitivity to composition and textures, and talent in creating a perfect, quirky balance of furniture colliding. He is an experienced furniture hacker - inspiring his work with a new (unexpected) life.Martino Gamper’s Chairs at Vienna exhibition (taken from his site)

What would interest me are the ways that we can open up these new 3D rapid prototyped products to inexperienced furniture hackers; to see furniture/objects, that utilise modern techniques whilst also thinking of hidden access points where people can begin to mess around, and create things that the original designers perhaps never even thought of.

Poster at the Deutsche Historische Museum.

This post comes late - but hopefully not too late, especially for those who are desperately looking out for signs that housing in and around London might become affordable in the foreseeable future.
There is hope and this hope manifests itself in an exhibition at the Architecture Foundation’s Yard Gallery in Old Street, East London.

On show is a complete prototype section of a house which pushes the terminology “Prefabricated” to new limits. This impressive section has been built by FACIT, a company which derived from the logical conclusion that in order to get the best possible design implemented, a building process needs to be found which works much more effective and precise than any other building process currently available.

Conceived by the architects Bell Travers Willson, the key factor to this new process is digitalisation. The 3d Model of the building project gets translated in various different structural and non structural modules. All these modules consist of assembled elements of engineered timber which get cut out by a CNC Router (Computerized Numerical Control) on demand and, at best, on site. The various modules get assembled on site in the order they are needed and are slotted in place. This way much faster realisation times can be achieved and since engineered timber is used the CO2 footprint of the building is dramatically reduced.

The show is unfortunately only running until the 20th of March – so you home owners to be: rush – and have a look at your truly digital house.

The pictures were all taken on the opening of the show on the 7th of March 2007

A short comment on the Exhibition art_clips at the Media Museum ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany.

This exhibition is curated by Gerhard Johann Lischka and shows 90 short clips produced between 2000 and today, for the purpose of hammering the message home dubbed ‘art_clips’, from three countries: Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The DVD is available in the local Museum Shop.

What is worth a comment about this exhibition is the fact that this exhibition unintentionally raises the question what’s happening to the way video art gets distributed these days.

The resume states that these “art_clips” are the “subject-centered answer of art to the end of industrially produced music videos for television.”

Thinking of why one has to pick the music video industry as the point of reference, in order to define oneself, leaves one with plenty of question marks. But the desperation for one’s own position on the curator career ladder in art history shall be not of our interest in this case.

In times when Filmmakers like Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham are shown on various Music TV Channels, selling successfully their work in form of DVDs on unpretentious places like Amazon, one might wonder what the point is this exhibition tries to make?

There is clearly the attempt to offer artists a forum, a point of access to the ‘market’ – which is definitely a good thing as such.
And the ZKM is a well established place do do so … but why do they opt for an exhibition? Videos in exhibitions are boring Everybody who has been to an exhibition presenting predominantly videos, knows how fantastically well those work.
And why on top of it release a DVD as a distribution method for clips, which are obviously for a fragmented niche market?
Would it not be better to seek the challenge to broaden this niche, to allow that niche, wherever it can be found, access to this material? Instead of opting for making yourself at home in the corner of clichés and using a distribution method which is simply to expensive to make it work well?

In times when artists take it on themselves to put their clips up on You Tube, when their clips become very popular and even get commissioned by the likes of Coke, and you see yourself as a curator for the good cause why not become the filter for particular clips you call art_clips , open an account on You Tube and offer your choice – or even better create something like You Tube only better suited for your peer group (there is definitely space) since you are not only a museum but also a research facility?

Funnily enough the flyer of the exhibition (above) makes use of the top level domains (.de, .ch, .at) - maybe as a subconscious reference to where it should be heading. While underscores might be popular with file names, they are a no no if it comes to URLs - if only the ZKM would know … !

The exhibition is open until the 25th of March – and the DVDs can be bought in the local Museum Shop long after …