In his bestselling book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, financial journalist Thomas L. Friedman lists his top 10 global “flatteners” – things that have and will make our world entirely different as the years unfold. Within the list are such buzzwords as “outsourcing,” “insourcing” and “offshoring” – shorthand terms we now use to describe the way the world is changing in an increasingly global economy. One of these concepts, open sourcing, resonates especially loudly with us at Azure – as it does with Friedman, who calls it the greatest flattener of all. Referring to the vast amounts of information now sailing through the ether and accessible with little more than a few keyboard taps, open sourcing captures a particular moment in time as designers use new technology to fuel their work. In the spirit of Friedman’s book, we’ve compiled our own top 10 list of designers who have found ways to unravel complex concepts and bring them into the physical world, to everyone’s benefit. While these leaders are not all hooked on electronic information, the free flow of ideas has, in one manner or another, influenced and accelerated their creative processes. Their outstanding ideas are routed toward information sharing as much as to science, creative ingenuity, and that beautiful human habit of dreaming. By Catherine Osborne
Above: Mobile Performance Venue, Norway
Ibrahim Elhayawan and Jim Dodson, Architects
At 3,900 square metres, the Mobile Performance Venue is expected to be the largest transportable performance space in the world. Designed by Various Architects of Norway, the inflatable structure is no bouncy toy. With a robust web of pumped-up hexagons wrapping a collapsible lightweight core of steel and aluminum, its surprisingly sturdy construction houses ticket booths, restrooms, cloakrooms, and a bar on the upper mezzanine.
The honeycomb-like hexagons are made from PVC-coated fabric tubes, which make the structure extremely rigid, says architect Jim Dodson, who founded Various Architects with Ibrahim ElHayawan last year. Water tank foundations keep the whole thing anchored to the ground. The partners, both 37, previously worked together at Snøhetta, and developed the Tubaloon, an inflatable bandshell for Norway’s Kongsberg Jazz Festival. Arts Alliance initially approached Snøhetta with the job, but the firm’s principals suggested they work with Dodson and ElHayawan instead – a “great parting gift,” says Dodson, that led to Various Architects’ first commission.
The Mobile Performance Venue, with standing room for 3,500 people, is significantly larger than Tubaloon, initially raising environmental concerns. “We weren’t sure about the sustainability issues related to shipping this monster from one place to another,” says Dodson. However, when deflated the final design shrinks to just four percent of its deployed size: “It’s an extremely efficient structure, which helps limit the number of containers needed to move it.”
Funding for the structure is still being finalized, with plans to begin touring it internationally by next year. In the meantime, Various Architects have become experts in the field of inflatables. “It’s amazing the amount of interest this project has generated,” says Dodson. “We get calls all the time.” By Tim McKeough
Below left: Processing Language
Ben Fry and Casey Reas, Computational Designers
Just eight years old yet hugely popular, the Processing computer language is specially geared toward creating visual art. Simple enough to be picked up in a matter of days, the open-source language is now being taught in design schools worldwide, and used for everything from rapid prototyping to scripting patterns for interactive installations.
Like many great ideas, Processing evolved out of need. While studying at MIT’s Media Lab, Ben Fry, 34, and Casey Reas, 36, wanted a simplified language to teach programming. Meanwhile, they were looking for software tools that would help them sketch out design ideas. “We realized there was a lot of intersection between these two goals,” says Fry.
The simplicity that makes Processing a teaching implement also makes it a powerful creative tool. Using its facility for whipping up 3-D graphics, artists can test ideas before bringing them into the real world. And like many electronic media, it possesses unique strengths: it can interact with its audience, for instance, and crunch staggering volumes of data. Processing, in fact, excels at producing generative art – art that’s created on the fly from mathematical algorithms – and at rendering visualizations of data in real time.
In 2008, French artists Heiko Hansen and Helen Evans of HeHe used Processing to trace a power plant’s emissions above Helsinki with bright green lasers. The language enabled them to illustrate the amount of electricity being used by the city moment by moment. When citizens were encouraged to use less energy, the illuminated cloud shrank in size.
That’s just the kind of project that brings software as an art form into its own. As Fry puts it, “Computation is used to make something accessible that wasn't before – a project that couldn't be realized in another medium.” By Ivor Tossell
Below right: Living Synthetic Constructions, Boston
Neri Oxman, Architect, Reserch Fellow, Artist
It isn’t just that the woman is part of the Computation Group at MIT’s architecture department, or that she has recently won a slew of awards. What’s most important about Neri Oxman, 33, is that she’s currently pursuing her Ph.D. in a branch of design computation that is so cutting edge the exact name for it has yet to be thought up. Oxman likes the term “material ecology” – the idea that “artificial matter continuously informs our environment and therefore should be informed by it.” But the best way to explain her complex ideas is to describe how she works.
Oxman develops computer algorithms, which in turn determine her projects’ forms. The shapes are then printed out using rapid prototyping, building up each structure, layer by layer. What’s unusual about her work is how she generates her algorithms. Her initial inspiration came while she was researching the early Modernists, examining such classics as Le Corbusier’s steel and leather chaise longue. Oxman explains, “Here’s this elegant chaise that separates the metal forming its structure from the leather that is its support surface.” One of her goals is to create a piece of furniture generated from one material that integrates structure and function. Why is this exciting? Because if she proves this is possible, it represents enormous potential savings in material, energy and resources.
One of the results of her early research was Monocoque, a material that works like a honeycomb, within which structure and skin are fused together. In Cartesian Wax, her algorithm produces a waxlike membrane, similar to how leaves grow, with a thick, opaque stem supporting a thin, light-sensitive surface.
“I tend to be more interested in process than product,” Oxman says. “Instead of designing a building and then determining the construction technologies, I thought, let’s try it the other way around.” Next up from this ground-breaking visionary: gloves designed to alleviate carpal tunnel syndrome. By Rachel Pulfer
