Bed

Here's a blog post talking about how I did a small project of my own - building a car bed in my Nissan Tiida hatchback for small road trips.

Pro-tip: always reverse into the best view.

Ever since going camping in my friend's Honda Fit - a relatively small hatchback - I started thinking of what I could do with my own car. My workmate also removed the back seats from his van and created a plywood haven with a kitchenette, providing inspiration. Staying in Airbnbs and motels/backpackers can get a bit samey and I've always wanted to give the character-filled camp sites a go without the drama of a tent.

The Honda Fit has the advantage of having the back seats lay down flush with the boot floor, so add a foam mattress and you're sorted. My Nissan Tiida is a different story - the seats laid down are quite a bit higher than the boot so it needs something to raise it up.

The Tiida is longer than it looks and with the front seats pushed as far forward as possible, there is just enough length for me lying down. Anyone shorter should be fine!

The car bed in it's set up state, mattress in. You can see the storage space underneath.

Chuck bags up the front, less used items underneath, the arm rests/door pulls hold our phones. 

Putting my architect skills to good use, I measured it up and started drawing.

Lying down in the car, I could get a sense of how much room I would have to sleep. Headspace is an issue, but it is passable. The simple X-shaped baffle support was the brain child of my fellow architect Han. Highlights the importance of bouncing ideas off others. One of my engineer friends thought up something far too complicated. Go architects!

I ended up purchasing a single sheet of 1.2 x 2.4m plywood (12mm thick) and cutting them into panels. Then a few cut outs and some sanding later, it was all done!

A bit of planning before prefabrication, always best to use material as efficiently as possible. I also made sure the plywood was E0 grade which means that almost has no toxic formaldehyde emissions as we would be cooped up in the car with it.

All it needs is a bit of set up and a thin self-inflating mattress. Unfortunately the head space isn't very much but it's alright as a sleeping platform. Feels like a capsule hotel in Japan. The upside of building it up a platform is that we get storage space inside the baffle construction.

A few details: we made 'curtains' with suction cups to stick to the inside of the windows. For the back seat windows we opened them up a crack for cross ventilation and put mosquito nets over the doors.

None of it is permanent, it's just a few plywood panels that can be removed through the side door. To drive, we just slide the panels on top of each other and slide the front seats back to driving position.

Now we can do weekend road trips easy as!

Participation

Here's to my 300th post on Creative Collision! Thanks for all of your readership.

The public streamed into the exhibition this weekend, helped by large boat show happening next door. Non-architectural people readily engaged with architectural design with a workshop that was run over two days. In fact, some kids got so into it that they begged their parents to bring them to the second day!

The participatory design system is the brainchild of Tim de Beer, a Master of Architecture (Professional) student at the University of Auckland.

A 3-storey monopitch design by a 7 year old, created all by himself. Each floor is insightfully planned, too.

Working with the children and parents into imagining/designing space was an incredible process. It reminds us that a hands on approach to architecture can be so engaging to both clientele and architect.

And that's the end of Architecture Week 2013! For more of what happened see the Architecture + Women Facebook page. Look forward to it next year and for now I'll still be tweeting architectural things on Twitter.

Print

The device that helped a baby breathe again, custom designed and 3D printed.

3D printing is used often in the design world to model things that you couldn't model manually (i.e. by hand) and the printers are getting more and more affordable, with some even becoming 'open source', so you can make your own using a design on the internet. The range of applications stretch to even the 3D printing of most of a gun, which is shocking and slightly disturbing.

Now there is a story of a bioresorbable splint being made by much finer biomedical processes that involve the scanning and modelling of a baby's breathing tube. Thanks to the University of Michigan and Glenn Green, M.D, with the cast (shown above), a skeleton can be made to help the breathing tube not collapse and then in 3 years time it will be reabsorbed into the body. There's engineering, medical design and materiality playing a big part in this innovation.

What's more, this concept may be able to be applied to other medical conditions. The custom made nature of the technology means that it is adaptable and with bodies being different from one to the other it will be great to see where this all goes.

Thanks to +Alice Pan for the heads up. It's been a few weeks since I've blogged - yesterday I had my mid-year presentation. Hopefully I'll find time to blog about it though! For other blogs on Creative Collision about science (and it does exist here as a category), visit the Science section.

Tiny

Three great examples of tiny homes.

A while back I saw the video about Gary Chang's apartment in Hong Kong, curiosity piqued by the YouTube title "A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms". Seduced by the idea I watched the entire video (along with Chang's jolting Hong Kong English) and was mesmerised by the permutations that the shifting modules can create, apparently, 24 different spaces.

A more recent example is the New York apartment of Treehugger's founder. With an eco-efficiency mindset, the design of his home was crowd-sourced and ideas selected. The final solution makes use of some really excellent product design to supplement a much simpler sliding spaces arrangement.

It highlights the move away from 'rooms' at all, but space and how we use it. Micro-houses are already a huge thing in Japanese architecture due to tiny sites. These apartments economise space even further by thinking about the specific programmes of the space with a bit of human intervention. Rather than sprawling houses on huge pieces of land (and a lot of lawn maintenance), the inner-city lifestyle has increasing appeal and design is making it all the better.

Whether it's the constraint of a tiny site or just a compact way of life, this sort of design is never short of innovation. Even garages have been converted into stylish small homes, a touch of architecture and a boatload of thought lets just enjoy the smaller side of life. Gems surrounded by stone.

Thanks to Nico and Alice for the great examples behind this post - love it when people feed me ideas and awesome creative things! I, for one, can't wait to design such cool little environments someday when I become an architect.

Hand

What is this tiny device that is hailed to be the next big thing in computing? It's the Leap Motion, a gadget designed to be a human interface tool (ie like a mouse helps you do stuff in the computer) but in 3D. Feels as if we are leaping from one dimension to the other in technology - the mouse has had a long slow evolution, touch screens are now growing rapidly and then now, something that seems to come from science fiction.

What's even better, and much more productive on a proactive creative front, is that they have a software developers kit (SDK) that allows those inclined to do so to explore the possibilities offered by this device. A new way of interacting with electronics has already started showing some great uses - controlling a quadrotor, for instance. That's right, fly a thing with the sensitive control of your own hand.

It'll be interesting to see where this ends up - we never really see a revolution coming. Who knew that touch screens would be so popular and easily worked into our electronic repertoire? 

Creatives

About a month ago I read an article about a "new creative venue" in Wellington called August that sits off the vibrant Cuba Street. The article touted it as a place for everyone to come together and celebrate craft, creativity and innovation. A collaborative creative space. 

How it actually plays out, I'm not too sure. It definitely will be one of my to-go destinations next time I'm down there. One month down the track, have any Wellingtonians gone there? If so leave a comment below.

Creative space is a tricky one outside of the university/exclusive studio environment. There's so much going on but different groups cling to certain people and areas. Spaces such as August are a great way to air the creativity that exists within lots of people. From where I see it, it sustains itself on a communal coffee shop with creative people using the space or exhibiting there, perhaps like Tea Culture on K Road. Run by the Te Karanga Trust, they have a radio station, gallery space and a fantastic loose leaf tea shop - one of my favourite spots in the area. Once I even went to a live poetry recital there.

In Auckland, there is a creative shared workspace called Tangleball which is intended for like minded people to meet, collaborate and develop their ideas. Another similar venture which is not tied to a particular space is Scribble which happens each week on a Monday. As well as being a great time, usually at a hip bar, it allows new ideas to be bounced off people of various backgrounds who have a vested interest in creativity and innovation. I've certainly found it useful and have enjoyed connecting with these groups.

Leave a comment below if you've been to any of the above or if there are any that you would suggest to the creative community. It would be great to foster more of these creative hotspots which take the creativity out of the private gallery/studio and into an all-embracing making space.

Parts

The intricacies of engineering and aesthetics such as the steam punk movement all glorify the innards of what most see as whole, very useful objects. In the way one might draw something as an exploded axonometric, Brittny Badger has photographed gadgets after painstakingly taking each component apart and recomposing them for the lens. Suddenly they become a thing of their own with shreds of familiarity to the pieces, whether it be the bit that glows in front of your morning toast, or the colours that are revealed when a cord frays.

Engorged2

Take a second look at this modern piece of furniture, for you can eat it. Nothing like a bit of attention to detail.

For more posts on food, check out the Culinary section.

Crates

When I first saw this crates project I was hesitant to even click it. Although a rather neat office space was created, would someone actually want to work around and about the wooden pallet feeling? The office comes complete with a crate wall divider (which I'm sure has no acoustic anything) and a set of perilous crate stairs.

Imagine walking around your office and 'desk space' with the thud and creak of the wood at every step. 

It's not that I don't like the reappropriation of used or common materials. If only there was a cleanness to the design or if the unit was transformed so you almost couldn't even tell it was a wooden crate (see the post where chopsticks transcend themselves in a chair design). There's a reason materials are dressed and prepared, like the Pacific notion of 'teu' - creating a pureness in the material before using it.

More about this design for BrandBase Office at Design Milk.

Kotuku 1

Yesterday I spent the whole day filming and photographing a good friend's beautiful product design project. Created by Kate Ramsay, it is a knitted light fitting and is intriguing at every angle so in a way it was really hard to capture; you were spoiled for choice for shots. 

Once we get past the painful post production process I'll be sure to put up the video but here's a photo of our set up for the shooting. Playing with the light studies I did last year, we painted light with fabric and created a dreamy Rothko/watercolouresque quality as the backdrop and for diffuse lighting. It was great fun! 

This piece is named Kotuku and is the Maori word for White Heron, a famously rare NZ bird that gathers delight whenever people see one. It will be displayed in the Art in the Dark exhibition.

Retro

In this day and age of plastic gadgets and sleek chic design, a wooden thing is practically a rare thing. All those hours of milling, sanding and drilling hardly makes it worth the instant plastic moulding technologies out there. So here is iPhone + wooden dock:

And this is not the only one. Retro mini TV, old school radio box - Jonas Damon draws his inspiration from that which is not today. The idea of using retro forms seem more important than the design itself (most are aesthetic only products after all). Countless iPhone accessories line themselves out the door for dazzled Apple fans: why not have the worked-up wooden version? What an iRoll.

Tour

For some reason I once did a post on a chair sofa made out of chopsticks and I thought that was pretty stellar, but then I found this elaborate toothpick sculpture of San Francisco. Both use an extremely commonplace product. The result though is very different. Whereas the chopstick chair is utilitarian and systematic, this toothpick sculpture is an organic manifestation likened to the vibrant city that it reflects.

Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from Learning Studio on Vimeo.

The visual experience reminds me of Peter Madden's Necrolopolous, which I saw at the Auckland Art Gallery recently, a sculpture which is busy by nature. You have to move around it to see all the different constituents that emerge from the delicate construction. The toothpick sculpture isn't all looks, though. Several paths through the sculpture allow balls to roll through on 'city tours'. It is packed with personal significance - something that the chopstick creation lacks entirely - and is a creation grown on one's love for their home city.

Data

Corporates are fast catching onto the idea of using creative mapping and tracking techniques to essentially 'brand' their product. Nike, an innovator of the sports industry, shows us with their GRID programme that technology can act to gather data on the trivialities of life. How far did you run? How fast did you jog? How does this data even get used without seeming silly?

A while ago I tried Nokia's Sports Tracker application which was a bit half baked. Subsequently it closed down. It looks like the technology has now been applied to snowboarding, which is very cool sport in its own right. So data is being used to brand their product, or support the brand. Being able to capture the essence of kinetic energy in creative graphics is a leap in not only the technology, but the way people can read into their own actions and how that affects the way we think about them.

The same way old school branding, such as logo design, a full set of stationery and a colour scheme, can influence the way we perceive an organisation, this method of incorporating the true heartbeat of the people into the branding/campaign goes that much further.

Constrain2

Carrying on from the themes of Constrain, here is an interesting project that tries to draw out the invisible Wifi landscape. Immaterials: light painting WiFi uses a rod of pulsating LEDs with long exposure photography to detect and map Wifi presence. This concept is obviously a mere budding technology, but imagine the practical/aesthetic based awareness-of-Wifi systems such a technology could develop into. In an age where the net is inevitably important, I can see this indicator being applied all over our urban lands in the future.

Chopsticks

Saw this and was amazed by cleanness of this design. I have to say, I've seen more than my fair share of skewers/chopsticks/ice block stick designs in person and they all seemed so banal that I feel they need that extra polish and usability to make it work.

Also, in honour of one of my best ex-archi friends, you know who you are KR, who got into a brill product design course, this post is the first specifically about product design! Enjoy the vid, but feel free to skip to the last quarter where the action happens.

SOFA_XXXX created by yuya ushida from yuya ushida on Vimeo.