The Milan Furniture fair starts in a few days (Salone Internazionale del Mobile). Although it deals mostly with domestic and office furnishings, it is also an important meeting place for many of the world's designers working in all fields of Art, Design, industrial production technology, high and popular cultural analysts, trend spotters, entrepreneurs, sociologists and anthropologists.
Here is a very intersting product.
Countach Table
The designers Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar
“Interesting” and “growth” are fitting words to describe the Breeding Tables, which were conceived at the 2002 Milan furniture fair in response to the torpor the designers saw on display. At the time, Kram and Weisshaar were not even thinking of doing furniture; they happened to be in Milan for a project completely unrelated to the fair. “We went in, took one look around, and became quite depressed,” Weisshaar remembers. “The furniture seemed to be trapped in a rut, essentially unchanged for 10 years—no one was integrating technology.” Depression soon turned to inspiration. “We sat down at the Cadorna station and decided to grow products right then and there.”
Kram and Weisshaar began customizing Rhino—the programming language beloved of industrial designers—through algorithmic modeling to produce subtle iterations of a basic table shape. “We ended up adapting Rhino to allow it to act like an interactive system for genetic selection,” Kram says.
According to Weisshaar, “The program serves as a hyperextension of the designer’s hand, allowing us to imagine possibilities we would not be able to achieve on our own.” Indeed, creating 1,000 distinct tables would break the back of any designer. But the software acts “like a kind of digital sweatshop,” constantly shooting out proposals. From the initial lot of iterations, titled the 0 Series, Kram and Weisshaar weeded out the aesthetic runts, allowing only the “fittest” to advance to the next generation.
As in the computer-driven research phase, the production phase for the Breeding Tables was based on a software mutation. By designing software to push past conventional manufacturing routines into applications for customized forms, Kram and Weisshaar directed laser-cutting and steel-bending machines to shape their tables in ways no one had thought possible for a machine. “We recognized that there was a gap between the latent abilities of flexible, modern machine tools and the tasks they are generally given,” Weisshaar says. Most highly digitized laser-cutting machines are capable of extracting unique pieces from each bit of material, yet they are instructed to do only simple repetitions. “The intelligence within the machine serves the Henry Ford–logic of increasing efficiency, but their real potential remains unused.” Once cut, formed, and shaped, the tables are passed off to highly skilled technicians who finish them by hand.
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