Design

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Design

Roof of a Copenhagen Power Plant Doubles as Snow-Free Ski and Snowboarding Center

Danish architectural firm BIG recently transformed what would be another underutilized industrial space into a year-round entertainment hub as part of Copenhagen’s plan to be carbon-neutral by 2025. Copenhill, which opened in October of 2019, is situated on top of the waste-to-energy power plant, the Amager Resource Centre, in the Danish capital. Offering snow-free skiing and snowboarding, the outdoor space also allows hiking and running on its trails that border the 41,000-square-meter area. It even boasts the world’s largest climbing wall reaching 80 meters high.

The power plant can convert as many as 440,000 tons of waste into energy and heat for the hundreds of thousands of the city’s homes every year. Each machine is arranged by height, pushing the multi-use site to 90 meters at its peak.

Design

Elegant Jewelry Collection Designed by Mara Paris Profiles Subtle Faces

An admirer of Pablo Picasso’s and Henri Matisse’s single-line drawings, Ayça Ozbank Taskan of Mara Paris has developed an elegant jewelry collection influenced by the two artists. The Paris-based designer portrays the personas dominating her work through simple profiles with few facial details. Although the noses and mouths differ throughout the series, each figurative piece features a prominent eye. The delicate collection includes earrings, rings, and necklaces, in addition to a more uncommon piece: Designed to sit at the front of the ear, the Dina Ear Cuff is billed as “a gentle ode to art that is always found in unexpected places.” You can purchase the minimalist adornments in Mara Paris’s shop. Head to Instagram to follow the brand’s latest designs and to keep up with Ozbank Taskan.

Design Music

Barcodes Function as Techno Instrument That’s Played with Reused Scanners

Designed to recycle outdated electronics, multiple musical projects by Electronicos Fantasticos utilize a version of the barcode system found on every package on store shelves. When scanned, each pattern sends a signal to its audio component, emitting the corresponding sound wave. The black and white stripes produce a variety of rhythmic and tonal noises in two instrumental projects: the Barcoder, shown above, and Barcodress, a pattern-covered gown that’s played when the wearer moves in front of the scanner. Artist and musician Ei Wada (previously) leads the design group, which said in a statement that its goal is to create an entire orchestra of similar instruments. To watch more of the barcode projects in use, head to Instagram and YouTube.

Design Illustration

Connect the Dots to Reveal Animated Figures and Illusions in New Flipbook Set

Mimicking Connect the Dots puzzles, a new pair of flipbooks released by Flipboku reveals jumping characters and spinning geometric shapes. Created by the animation studio Zumbakamera, Dots & Lines is made of up two books by the same name—Dots features animations, while Lines unveils optical illusions—that utilize the technique of the classic game to create six different sequences that span the entirety of the book, depending on thumb placement. Flipping the book and positioning a thumb at the top, middle, or bottom of the books’ edges determines which animation the viewers see.

“With Dots & Lines, we’ve taken a 150-year-old medium and turned it up a notch, combining the popular dot-to-dot puzzle game with the original flipbook format,” said Flipboku co-founder Julie Reier. “It’s given life by gradually transforming the numbers into mind-boggling optical illusions and animated cartoon characters, ranging from astonishing to laugh-out-loud funny.” Get the latest on the live Kickstarter project on Instagram and YouTube.

Animation Design

Product Breakdowns Expose the Wasteful Side of Industrial Design in Stop Motion Animation by Dina Amin

Industrial designer Dina Amin takes discarded consumer products apart to see exactly what makes them tick. The hobby also exposes just how many resources and materials consumers throw away. A new stop-motion animation titled What’s Inside is a supercut of Amin’s breakdowns of familiar items, each splayed in perfect grids of plastic, metal, and rubber.

The exploding electronics featured in the animation are a blowdryer, a stereo cassette recorder, a point-and-shoot camera, and an old cellphone. Dropped by an invisible hand, each item becomes a schematic of itself as it hits the table. Screws, wires, and miscellaneous components are neatly and instantly sorted into piles on the empty surface. The pieces then reassemble to form the finished product.

“On Fridays I pick a random product, I disassemble it, examine it and make a stop motion story with its parts,” Amin shares on her website. Of the deeper theme of the work, the designer writes that “we consume too many things to the point that we forgot the amount of work that was put into bringing even the tiniest pieces of things! We rarely see what’s inside each product thus treat it as one whole part; not as a plastic cover, with buttons, vibrator motor, mic and so on. This makes it easier to throw things away, one thing goes to waste, and not many.”

To see more of Amin’s work, follow her on Instagram and check her out on Patreon, where this project was funded. (via Core77)

Art Design History

Historic Lithograph Reveals Anamorphic Views of Razed Bank of Philadelphia

In 1832, artist John Jesse Barker added depth to a drawing by Philadelphia-based William G. Mason to create an optical illusion titled “Horizontorium.” Part of a tradition of anamorphic works, this depiction of the Bank of Philadelphia is one of the two surviving works looking at the historic financial building designed by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. At the time, it was the unofficial bank of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that sat at the southwest corner of Fourth and Chestnut streets. The structure was razed in 1836.

Horizontoriums became popular throughout England and France in the 18th century, although this piece is the only one known to be made in America. Viewers would set the lithograph on a flat surface and perpendicularly position their face at the center of the work (note the semicircle on this lithograph suggesting a spot for a chin) to peer over the image. The sharp angle would produce a distorted perspective that appears to project the building and its passersby upward. Sometimes, viewers even would peek through a small hole carved out of paper or cardboard to block out their peripheral vision and give the work a more distinct look. (via Graphic Arts Collection, The Morning News)

Design

A DIY Construction Kit Lets Users Create an Intricate Obstacle Course on Any Magnetic Surface

A new kit asks users to test their design abilities by constructing complex obstacle courses with a goal of having a marble fall seamlessly into its final destination. Created by MakeWay, the buildable set features eight different tracks, twelve tricks (which include a canon, universal joint, and spinner), a lift, and connectors to attach each component to a magnetic surface. The adjustable designs are supposed to be used vertically, causing the marble to be launched, spun, and catapulted down the tracks. Each kit is available in either gold or silver.

MakeWay is headed by Reuven Shahar and Elyasaf Shweka, two industrial designers with backgrounds in engineering and woodworking, respectively. Conceived of in 2016, the project opened on Kickstarter earlier this month and has been wildly popular, meeting its $10,000 goal within the first day and surpassing it tenfold since with more than 50 days to go. Head to MakeWay’s page to back the modular kit.