Studio Aisslinger in Berlin. Man on left is in detention. Woman on right is watching a company ping pong game. The hex screen in foreground gives us a taste of the eponymous designer’s predilection for modular design.
In our gathering of modular product designs from all the world, it’s hard not to notice that many of them emanate from Italy. Just think Magis, B-Line, Kartell and already you’re talking about a slew of top-flight and enduring interactive pieces. Maybe it’s the climate, the food, the culture – who knows why such a regional concentration exists for this type of design? Still, it would be hard to develop a convincing theory on Italian supremacy without having to explain why, just a few hundred kilometers to the frozen north, the modular meter spikes again as we approach the Berlin studio of Werner Aisslinger.
Aisslinger is a very talented, multi-media and prolific designer who has generated some of the world’s most innovative product, interior and architectural design for brands such as Mercedes Benz, Swiss furniture company Vitra, adidas and Bombay Sapphire (Bombay Sapphire?). He’s got offices in Berlin and Singapore, so we’re talking about a global reach of considerable dimension. That’s good news for aficionados of customizable design.
Aisslinger’s chairs and chaise on display inside the Berlin studio. Below is his Plus Unit for Magis.
The company’s artistic philosophy focuses on making sophisticated new designs from novel materials and technologies, whether modular or not. Fortunately, this is not the stuff of geeky sci-fi fantasies devoid of the human dimension. Rather, the design firm says it wants to change the paradigm of modern product design by looking beyond purely functional capacities to integrate a “dialogue between emotions and technology”. Progressive? We’ve just barely scratched the surface. In an estimated 5 to 10 years the firm has plans to install a small chip inside every product that will generate product information (producer, designer and distributor) and an opportunity for instant purchase when scanned with any type of wireless communication device.
Aisslinger’s deep interest in repetitive, modular design is evident in some of the product displays in his Berlin office. On the left is Mesh, a 2007 concept design for a lightweight semi-opaque screening system (more on Mesh below). On the right is a 2008 modular bookcase made out of, what else, books!
We aren’t the only ones with an interest in this portlfolio: Aisslinger has had his furniture and product design featured at world-class museums such as MoMA (where he has a permanent exhibit on his chair design ), the MET, the French Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musuem Nue Sammlung in Munich and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil, Germany.
What follows is just a sampling of the modular designs to have come out of his offices over the years.
Coral Seating and Lighting
TOP: Coral seating cushions lay on the beach as if they’ve been washed up from the sea. BOTTOM: Translucent Coral lights using a similar hex unit.
Inspired by the micro organisms emanating from the deep depths of the ocean floor, these modular seating arrangements and lighting fixtures from 2009 are composed of flexible hexagon funnels made from a mix of felt and polycarbonate that create a coral shape when joined in multiples. The sea-inspired pieces come in varying color schemes and, being modular, can be scaled to suit.
NetWork
Embroidered design enters the Age of the New Industrialism.
Perhaps you were under the impression that crocheting was culturally retrogressive. No more. Aisslinger managed to transform this traditional, old-school craft into a progressive, interactive and contemporary design form using high-technology and software. Its 2-dimensional embroidery designs are directly programmed into ‘smart’ machines that stitch the pattern together to make 3-dimensional objects.
Mesh
Your request for privacy should not result in staring at stark white walls!
Gone should be the days of the opaque wall divider or cubicle. For subtle separation with visual appeal, Aisslinger designed a lightweight textile structure evocative of honeycombs. The units interconnect to form customizable interior dividers with the potential to be bent into 3-dimensional shapes – distinctly unlike most separators, which are typically confined to straight planes. Made with three different types of relief structures, the hex motif and ribs were inspired by a blow-up of a vegetable organism. The color contrast of the fibers and directional changes in the weaving pattern add perforation, depth and texture to the dividers.
PLUS Unit for Magis
Stack up or down with the playful storage design unit by Aisslinger.
Similar to UP’s, the PLUS unit is a modular storage system that allows for customizable configuration of shelving units. Traditionally stacked or stacked side-by-side like a staircase, the aluminum drawers add a dimension of fun to functional design. Check them out at our store.
UP’s for RS Barcelona
Here’s how Studio Aisslinger explains the UP’s design:
“UP´s is a totally new modular block-system which integrates the open space between the attached boxes for the scheme: UP´s can generate endless modular sideboard landscapes or shelves always including the “free” space between the box-elements. These box-elements are offered in various types, such as the standard open box, box with sliding doors or boxes with folding wings. All these front-options can be later attached to the basic steel box-element. The visual “architecture” of the UP´s system is a rhythm of closed volumes with airy gaps in between”.
Loft Cube
TOP AND BOTTOM: Get sweeping views of any city with the 360 panoramic views of the Loft Cube. It travels anywhere you go and comes with a handsomely coordinated interior design. Will not fit into an overhead compartment.
Meet the modern day mobile home. This architectural piece is so cutting-edge that it may still belongs in the future. Composed of four walls of either translucent, transparent or opaque material, the structure forms a mobile living cube with 360 degree panoramic views. Custom interior design options are available so that lucky cube-owners can turn the Loft Cube into any type of living or working space, anywhere they would like. Made with the highest quality lightweight materials, the Cube Loft takes only a few days to set-up.
Light Wave
Bombay Sapphire sets the mood blue with their lighting fixture designed by Aisslinger.
Created for Bombay Sapphire, this large-form lighting structure created the ultimate mood lightning for one of the gin brand’s events. Made of 50 x 50 cm modules, the communal lighting object can be arranged in a variety of pixel-like configurations to create larger formats. Each individual module is designed to create a 3-dimensional shape that allows for an infinite number of additional modules. When shaped together, the overall product is an installation of fluid movement among convex and concave shapes (that’s fluid, in case you didn’t see the connection).
And this just in:
Hemp House at DMY Berlin 2011
TOP AND BOTTOM: A structural system made from the cannabis plant. A modular Mary Jane anyone?
Exploring sustainable materials, Aisslinger presented his Hemp House at DMY berlin 2011. The structure is made of more than 70% natural fibers, such as hemp and kenaf, bound together with acrodur, a water-based acrylic resin from german chemical company BASF.
The compression of renewable raw materials forms a new environmentally-friendly composite that is lightweight yet durable. Says Aisslinger, “Design history is driven by new technologies and material innovation. For us designers, the advent of these technologies has always been the starting point for new objects and typologies in design”.
Modular Screen by Moorhead & Moorhead. Click on image to enlarge. Get it here.
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Opening Lyrics to “At Long Last Love”
Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock? Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy? Or is what I feel the real McCoy?
No, it’s just that the world’s first webstore for customizable, reconfigurable, modular art and design has now gone live.
BeadBrick: A Modular Building System by Rizal Muslimin. Ancient building technology in the modern world. (Click on images to enlarge and play slideshow.)
A few recent projects remind us how powerful and cost-effective modular design can be in creating aesthetic effect by means of pattern-making, both in terms of hard costs (physical production) and soft costs (design effort).
Let’s start with a just concluded design competition exploring the innovative use of brick, one of mankind’s oldest modular systems. The very idea of looking for fresh thinking in a building technology now some 7,500 years old is in itself an intriguing concept; not surprisingly, the various solutions offered by the entrants feel both emphatically contemporary and deeply grounded in traditional sensibilities.
That duality is most evident in the programmatic requirement that design solutions be environmentally sustainable. Only in a culture that has lost some of its connection to nature would such a requirement need to be imposed from without. It’s particularly ironic in the context of a re-examination of brick construction which, by its very “nature”, was a “green” building method long before green meant anything but the color of leaves. But we suppose it’s better that we have to re-discover what our ancestors knew thousands of years ago than to disregard it altogether, as had been the case until relatively recently.
Two winning entrants to the 2011 Brickstainable competition embody the new synthesis of past and present. MIT student Rizal Muslimin’s proposal calls for a roughly triangular brick system that can form 2- and 3-dimensional assemblies by variously joining the bricks along vertical and horizontal axes. Bricks are fabricated using both digital and analog fabrication methods, another reflection of the dual character of the project brief. A second team comprising Kelly Winn, Jason Vollen and Ted Ngai of CASE New York was awarded a prize for their Climate Camouflage system. Drawing on recent developments in biomimicry, their submission explores the potential value of applying the age-old art of ceramics to addressing issues of thermal dynamics, self-shading, moisture reduction and other techniques needed to reduce our carbon footprint.
Winning entry to Brickstinable by Jason Vollen and Kelly Winn of CASE (New York). Once again one of nature’s signature modular geometries – the hexagon – is successfully applied to architectural design. Architects are drawn to this pristine geometry like bees to honey!
Beyond their shared ecological investigation, the Muslimin proposal is notable in expanding the traditionally humble, human scale of modular brick to the urban dimension. Unlike the banal repetitive grids of International Style architecture, or the scale-less wrappings applied to many contemporary skyscrapers, however, his imaginative eco-brick generates architecture that appeals to human sensibilities visually as well as empathically, in large part by the repetition of scalar, modular elements.
The newly launched DIY software Repper is as emphatically 2-dimensional as the Brickstainable proposals are 3-dimensional. If the name of their product doesn’t make it obvious, their tagline certainly does: “Everybody Loves Patterns”. They apparently like them so much they’ve developed the software for you (and us) to generate patterns of your (and our) own making that can then be applied to websites, products, interior design components and graphic design. Particularly appealing is that they don’t just leave you hanging with some pretty pictures on your screen, but have set it up so you can take your designs into production by linking up with various manufacturers and production facilities able to turn your visual patterns into a 3-dimensional reality.
We have no idea what this video is about, but it’s on the Repper site so we thought we’d share it with you anyway.
One of the marvelous things about modular pattern-making is that if the originating designer has done the job well, it’s rather difficult for the likes of us (and you) to generate patterns that are, well, downright ugly or mis-conceived. That’s because an aesthetic safety net is, in effect, built into the design unit, whose positive aesthetic qualities are retained when multiplied into a larger assembly. Coupled with the democratizing capabilities of mass customization, the promise of modularity as a tool for broadening the reach of good design continues to be fulfilled.
There has been much talk in recent years about the convergence of the creative disciplines. The divisions that once differentiated art, design, fashion, and even advertising from each other are now said to be dissolving under the influence of the digital revolution and other cultural forces. To be sure, the impact of these changes has not been limited to the arts; the boundaries that once existed among all sorts of categorizations have similarly eroded in the recent past.
Take day and night, for example: traditionally what people routinely did during the so-called waking hours was rather distinct from what they did after dark. Now we can sometimes barely tell the difference between the two as we check our email or do some online shopping in the depth of night. Same with the physical setting of home and office: once upon a time we traveled from the former to the latter before returning home again, with no confusion as to which was which. Now we might occupy one space for both purposes, or use our digital communications devices to keep working even when we’re away from the workplace. Near and far have similarly lost much of their antithetical qualities: the vast distances that used to make us feel separated from people on the other side of the globe now hardly matter at all as we video-conference with them in real time.
So back to the arts. As those of you who’ve followed A.R.T.’s trajectory know, we started our venture with a portfolio of modular art. From there we launched a blog and twitter stream in which we explored modularity and the related topics of mass customization, digital fabrication and co-creativity. In researching material to write about we came to discover that there’s a slew of well-designed modular products out there, but which are currently scattered among many vendors and venues. It occurred to us that what was lacking was a central hub in which to present this rich cache of design work. Thus was born Module R, which aims to fulfill precisely that purpose. And since art and design can now co-exist in a harmonious relationship rather than be segregated into separate venues, we decided to marry Module R (how fast they grow up!) with A.R.T. by opening a popup gallery exhibiting both modular art and design.
The gallery is located at 400 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, and will run through January 9th. There’s a reception on December 2 at 6.30pm, to which you’re all invited (it’s the least we can do for the nice folks who read this blog). For those of you who can’t make it, below is a small sampling of some of the design pieces we have on display at the shop. Either way, we’re looking forward to your feedback, and to the future success of Module R.
More:
The modernistic approach to the design of a large number of objects, such as a housing estate, was to design a limited number of types and then to repeat it based on market analysis. This approach led to uniform housing and rigid urban plans. Contemporary processes may overcome such limitations by using rule-based computer-aided design and manufacturing processes. The goal is to give mass-produced houses some of the qualities associated with individually designed ones and to endow planned environments with the qualities associated with traditional settlements. The lecture will first focus on research carried out to develop a rule-based framework for customizing mass housing and then explain how such a framework might be reconfigured to enable flexible urban design. Several case studies will be presented, including systems for existing planned and non-planed designs, such as the one for Siza’s Malagueira houses and the one for the Marrakech Medina, as well as systems for original designs. The last part of the lecture will focus on real-time responsive environments, seen as a particular form of customization.
Organizer:
AIANY Technology Committee
This AIANY event is made possible – and kept free – by the generous support of ABC Imaging.
Full disclosure: this is not an essay about the people who pose for artists, as intriguing and largely neglected a subject as that might be. Rather what we want to write about is the economic model by which contemporary visual artists operate. Wait! Get your hand off that mouse or trackpad – you’re not clicking out of here so easily. This really is an important discussion which is absolutely intertwined with fundamental questions surrounding contemporary art…you know, like, what makes it contemporary? So stick around, it might just be illuminating.
Let’s start by looking at the contemporary artist in terms of his/her production model, since economics are closely related to production. How do visual artists generally make their work? Surveying the kind of art generally exhibited in galleries, which is the preferred venue for artists producing quality work, we can safely say that the vast majority of pieces are made largely by hand. Of course, we find an extensive use of various types of machines as well, be they mechanical printing devices, chemical processes such as are used for engraving and etching, and power tools for the production of sculptural objects. Despite the intercession of these non-manual techniques, however, we can still characterize the overall production process used for such work as being essentially manual, because they all require the human hand to operate.
That, in turn, means there must be a degree of variability in the execution of each piece. For example, if a sculptor uses hand-held power tools to carve one block of stone into a figure, and then tries to repeat exactly the same design in a second, the two will be different in small or large degrees, depending on how well the artist can match the ‘choreography’ of the first version. But they will never be exactly the same.
Beyond its purely aesthetic qualities, it is the quality of uniqueness that endows the work of hand-made art with much of its perceived monetary value. That is simply a function of supply and demand economics, and in particular, of the Scarcity Principle. This principle states that the the rarer an object is, the greater its value if there is demand for it. That value will then increase further as demand grows and especially if it exceeds supply.
The perfect storm for artists and gallerists – in the positive sense of the term – is for an artist’s reputation to grow, as that will increase demand for what is inevitably a limited supply of product (sorry, that’s what it is). Because as we all know, a human being can only work so many hours in a day and will only live so long; by its nature supply is going to be limited and finite as long as the artist is expected to be personally involved in the physical production of his/her work.
Some artists have managed this ‘problem’ by operating as proto-industrialists, setting up workshops populated by trained assistants who then carry out much of the labor required to produce their work. Koons, Murakami and, until his recent market collapse at least, Hirst have each employed dozens and even hundreds of such surrogates as a way to boost production to feed excess demand. All have ample historical precedent: Warhol worked under the same arrangement in his aptly named Factory in the 1960s and after, as did the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens in 17th century Antwerp. Nor was Rubens the first to do this; workshops centered on individual artists working for personal gain can be traced back as far as antiquity.
Whether the artist is highly successful or barely known does not ultimately affect the economic model under which they operate; it’s still very much a question of supply and demand as to how their work is valued. This poses several problems from a market standpoint. Generally speaking, the more successful an artist is, the higher the price for their work, which means fewer and fewer people can afford it. The less successful an artist is, the lower the price, which is positive in terms of affordability but means that the emerging artist is increasingly unlikely to be able to earn a living from it (not to mention the challenges to the gallerist trying to sell it).
Several responses to this problem have been devised over the years. Mechanical processes such as photography and printmaking offered an opportunity to produce artwork in unlimited qualities. In the 1960s the concept of the art multiple was taken up by a number of artists and dealers as a way to make art more democratic and affordable. Keith Haring opened his first Pop Shop in 1986, where he sold gear like t-shirts, bags and posters embellished with his signature line drawings. Even the exalted Gagosian Gallery has entered ‘democratic space’ in opening up a retail store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
But the fact is that none of these developments has truly solved the problem of the market. In fact, the polarities of the market seem to have never been greater. At the upper tier the prices for the most coveted artists continues into the stratosphere (only partly halted by the recent global slowdown), while the ‘bottom’ of the market is more and more served by websites that sell open edition work by the yard, ranging from the not so good to the pretty okay. For quality artists caught in the middle, the financial challenges of sustaining their calling remain significant, while the buying public with real interest in acquiring compelling contemporary art that is not restricted to the usual suspects of photography and prints is left with relatively few choices. That most art galleries are mom-and-pop businesses and therefore limited to certain geographic areas only exacerbates their difficulty in accessing art other than through the internet outlets.
Naturally, we think there is a potential solution, or why would we be going on like this?
Over the past few years there has arisen a wholly new mechanism for the physical production of objects. We have nicknamed this novel set of production capabilities the New Industrialism. It can be considered new because for the first time in history industrial manufacturing equipment has been married to the computer. Laser and water cutting, CNC milling machines, rotational molding and many other techniques have been developed out of this synthesis of the digital and the analog.
The New Industrialism also encompasses what we might call new design and production strategies; these would include mass customization, crowdsourcing, open innovation, on demand and short run production, and various other ways of working that were not viable in the pre-Digital Age.
In Part 2 of this thinkpiece, we will expound on the ways that artists can utilize the tremendous creative possibilities born out of the New Industrialism and in doing so rethink the economic and production models that have guided them for centuries.
This model lost her head over her fabulous bag she was so happy with it!
If shoes are punctuation points encasing a part of the body, then a handbag is its extender as the body transitions from arm to hand to bag. The handbag, or pocketbook as it’s also been called, has many roles to play, including 1) to hold stuff; 2) to catch the eye of anyone design-savvy enough to know something cool when they see it and initiate conversation with said individual; 3) to complement and accentuate the rest of the fashion ensemble, thereby further advancing item 2; 4) to express one’s individuality and taste; and 5) to hold stuff. So, given how tightly the identity of person and bag are interwoven, what fashion object lends itself more naturally to the concept of mass customization than the pocketbook?
Laudi Vidni clearly realizes the insightfulness of our viewpoint, since they’re a web-based company that offers buyers the opportunity to personalize their handbags by selecting styles, materials, colors, ornaments and other details from an array of interactive menus. Their flash configurator is among the most visually and functionally sophisticated we’ve seen for ecommerce sites and is almost worth a visit for that reason alone.
Interestingly, this approach to handbag design is in some ways directly opposed to the counter-trend of creating value by elevating a mass produced item to cult status. The folks who put out the high-end Prada, Louis Vuitton and Hermes bags are continually searching for a singular, iconic item (like the Kelly bag) which they hope will be acquired by large numbers of people; Laudi Vidni facilitates the production of an almost limitless number of different bags each of which, ideally, would be acquired by just one individual. We see no reason why both approaches can’t remain viable in the marketplace for the foreseeable future, which makes this an excellent time to be alive and in the hunt for a handbag.
By the way, if you’re wondering about this company’s unusual sounding name, here’s a clue: think ANAGRAM. Now do you get it? Ahhhhhh, yessssss…of course!
Within the sphere of customizable products one might say the two areas most ripe for personalization are the things you put in your body (food) and the things you put on your body (clothes). We’ve already begun to look at examples of the latter (as in this earlier post), so now let’s check out the food department (pardon the puns).
Of course, one could say that cooking is itself a process of customization — mixing together individual ingredients in infinitely diverse combinations to produce coherently tasteful ensembles. What’s perhaps fresh about the idea of customizable edibles is that it’s happening now at the level of prepared foods, rather than remaining at the miniature scale of individual preparation. Especially since this is not an industry known for finessing its wares — listen, when they say General Foods, they mean general foods!
Now, we understand the economic (and perhaps even moral) challenge of trying to shift the packaging of food from the scale of mass production to one of mass customization, but then, that’s what the shift towards the New Industrialism concept is all about. So here are just a few of the companies working now to satisfy the hearts, minds and tummies of their customers by personalizing their comestible wares.
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Chocri: Customized Chocolate Bars
Chocri is a German startup, founded in September 2008, and then launched in the US in January of this year. Chocri enables its customers to design their own chocolate bars by selecting from a menu of base chocolates (white, dark or milk) and toppings, of which there are over 100. These include global favorites, like nuts and dried fruit, but if you really want to surprise someone you can also choose real gold flakes, roasted almonds, pretzel, chive rolls, and even jalapenos! Talk about hot chocolate…Anyway, the bars are made in Germany and shipped globally.
Chocri says it wants you to eat chocolate and fully enjoy the good feeling it creates, so they claim to use only the best ingredients, such as organic, fair trade chocolate from Belgium. And, since goodness comes in different forms, they also state that they donate a percentage of their revenues to DIV Kinder, an organization that supports children in the West African country of Ivory Coast. According to a running tally on their website, these donations are approaching $50,000 to date.
YouBars: Customized Trail Mix, Cookies and Other Nibbles
This online operation takes the cake (sorry) when it comes to the variety of customizable food products offered by a single site. Here’s the list of offerings: nutrition and energy bars; protein shakes; trail mix; cookies; and cereal. While the cookie category stands out at first glance as not exactly aligned with the nutritional goals of the other products, the company has done a pretty good job of offering healthy choices among its ingredient options. The website even provides a nutrition chart on every category page, which is not a universal feature among the other sites reviewed here. The About Us page, by the way, tells the classic story of a start-up launched by a mother/son team and the business’s subsequent evolution. We wish them the best of luck with their venture.
We love our animals, certainly enough that we’re willing to spend time concocting their very own chow online. Yup, pup — you heard us right: throw away that bag of Purina, you’re getting a custom mix of your very own! And same with you, my friendly feline. Actually, the degree of product customization is relatively modest; you go on the Red Moon website, select one of the available base formulas, add a supplement or two from another list and choose your bag size. The order is then shipped direct to you and your mammalian companions. Re-order the very same mix from the saved formula when that last shipment’s been devoured by the hungry beasts.
Forget the iPhone, forget the iPad, forget even iTunes — the topper is now…iScream! Yes, the old chant “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM” can finally be put to rest, or at least truncated after the very first line, since WE no longer all have to grab spoonfuls of the delicious foodstuff from the same container as it’s being passed across the sofa. Thanks to an online purveyor of customizable ice cream called eCreamery, we can now create our very own personalized flavors and have them shipped to us in tastefully designed containers bearing the flavor names of our choice. Don’t ask us how they manage to get the stuff to our doors without melting in a gooey mess, but they do.
The company’s configurator is easy to use and involves a four-step process of which the most impressive part is the long list of mix-ins — those added accent flavors that take ice cream out of the bland chocolate/vanilla/strawberry mode that existed before Baskin-Robbins’ 31 Flavors arrived on the scene in the Early Boomer Age. Thanks to mass customization we can now guffaw at the notion of having only thirty-one flavors to choose from — although we’re not sure the world is quite ready for avocado-flavored ice cream!
Okay, so this is the kind of food product that you DON’T want people trying to customize, at least, not in terms of formulating the food itself. So what do you do if you still want to provide your customers with the co-creative experience? You let them design some of the packaging, of course! That’s what the people at Heineken did, and we must say, it would be pretty cool to serve your guests a bottle of beer with a picture of your frat brother’s derrière on the reverse side – you know, a heiny on your Heine!
General disclaimer: listen, we’re art and design types, not food critics, so we can’t vouch for the taste or preparation quality of anything discussed here. That’s why we’re inviting our readers to send in their own reviews and recipes for customizable eats from these or any other sites, so we can compare notes and all head to the nearest food configurator!
Flor carpet tiles, Alexander Girard, designer. Girard is best known for his contributions to American textile design while working for the Herman Miller Company from 1952 to 1975.
Co-creative design hits bottom with modular carpet tiles from the company Flor. The concept is elegantly simple: users create customized area rugs and carpeting by joining together square carpet tiles in a design of their choice. Tiles come in a broad array of colors and patterns, so there’s a pretty wide range of expressive possibility available. In addition to the company’s own tile designs, there are a few collections from guest designers, including Martha Stewart, famed textile designer Alexander Girard and, yes, Walt Disney (or at least, his eponymous company). Hey, kids deserve nice floors too! (And if you surround them with beautiful things when they’re young, maybe they’ll grow up to make the world an even more beautiful place than we did.)
In case you’re wondering how the tiles stay together…well, we did too. Dots. Or more specifically, adhesive dots that are applied to the underside of adjacent tiles sticky face up. When placed on each tile they knit the whole into a pretty tight mesh that isn’t susceptible to movement any more than a conventional rug would be.
Most of the face fibers in the tiles are made from nylon, while others are composed of natural fibers like wool or PLA (polylactic acid, a natural derivative from corn). The backings are a vinyl composite, some of which are made from recycled materials. According to the company, the carpet tiles meet or exceed the Carpet and Rug Institute’s Green Label Plus standards for VOC emissions (Volatile Organic Compounds) and are recyclable.
Looking at this product we are inevitably drawn to make comparisons with the traditionally crafted textiles of bygone eras. At the highest reaches of artistic refinement are the great rugs of the Islamist cultures, marvels of intricate patterning and quality of weave. Right alongside them we can place the best wall tapestries from the Middle Ages and the later classic rugs from Aubusson and other European centers of production. One can only imagine the time and effort that went into these pieces, both in terms of their actual production and the years of learning that it took to develop the craft and train the craftsmen who did them.
The there’s Flor. In place of the strand-by-strand approach of traditional weaving we have pre-fabricated squares of material. Instead of specialized craftsmen we have a product design company teaming with non-specialist users to create pieces of aesthetic and practical value. Instead of great works of art accessible only to the very affluent, we have a widely distributed article of embellishment available to large numbers of people. Such are the consequences of economic and artistic democratization.
By the way, the concept of modular floor coverings goes back quite a ways, and is not confined to the western hemisphere. The Japanese placed straw mats on the floors of their dwellings for centuries. Known as tatami, their approximately three foot by six foot proportion corresponds to the outlines of a person lying down – an interesting contrast to the abstract square geometry of the Flor tiles. A whole tradition of how to lay out the tatami inside a room evolved over time; in some cases the size of the room was even determined by the arrangement of the mats. Much of the tatami tradition has now disappeared from common use, but maybe a little of its spirit continues in its modern incarnation at Flor.
The story of Blank Label is a reminder that the power of the traditional press hasn’t entirely disappeared, despite the gradual disintegration of the industry’s historic business models. This start-up venture in customizable men’s dress shirts recently received a pretty glowing review in The New York Times. As a result of the avalanche of customers that ensued from the article, the fledgling company (launched with about $10K in seed money if you can believe it) is running fast to keep up with the new orders.
The first step in the customization process on the Blank Label website. This software is an example of a ‘configurator’, which is the principal digital tool used to guide the customer through the design process.
The article also touched on a number of themes associated with mass customization and co-creation, of which Blank Label is a classic – if we may use this term – example in action. Bespoke tailoring used to be the exclusive province of the affluent; now pretty much any person of male persuasion who can afford the shirt on their backs can tailor them to their specifications. Colors, sizing, details are all customizable via easy-to-use software on the company’s website. The price? Less than the cost of ready-made items in many department stores. It’s that democratization of the marketplace thing all over again. Holy shi(r)t!
Henry Ford, move over – the era of mass production has come to a close! Personalization is the name of the game now. People want a role in shaping the physical world around them to suit their individual needs, tastes and resources; to satisfy that goal they're looking for works of art and design that are reconfigurable, interactive and scalable. This blog explores how creatives are responding to the quest for customization, as well as the impact customization is having on the creative disciplines themselves.
