If you read magazines, newspapers or websites, spend a lot of time at business conferences, of happen to be in the marketing community, you are by now very aware of design’s alleged importance in successful business strategy.
The only problem is that until (very) recently, the business community had absolutely no reason to ever really cross paths with the design world.
Designers were freaks inhabiting loft spaces who used old doors as desks or lived in socialist gulag states like Denmark or the Netherlands. Meanwhile business folks were found in the tops of tall buildings, buried behind desks of paper.
Sure, there were famous designers whose work somehow crept into everyday life, but only in a garish three-generation-removed sort of way. The original Eames chair was a masterpiece of modernity, but the business community waited for years before releasing their pale, inexpensive imitations to the masses.
And now all of that has changed. Flexibly-aligned business units, post-Fordist production systems, CAD and rapid prototyping now allow us to create custom-fabricated goods to meet any design specifications imaginable to the human brain, inexpensively, and with incredible speed and precision. But honestly, what does all of that high-falutin’ talk really mean?
It means we can now produce physical objects in real time based on nothing other than a sketch in three dimensional space.
Put more simply, we can now design directly onto space.
The Swedish design group FRONT have developed a technique which allows anyone (artist, designer, hack, child, monkey, squirrel, etc.) to literally draw a sketch in three dimensional space and then inspect a real, physical, solid replica of the object cast from plastic in a matter of minutes.
That is correct.
If you can sketch your idea into three dimensional space, these folks can produce a physical prototype in minutes.
via | Core77
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