Interview

Knitic project, or how to give a new brain to knitting machines

  (originally created and posted on Arduino blog) Knitic is an open source project which controls electronic knitting machines via Arduino. To be more precise, Knitic is like a new ‘brain’ for the Brother knitting machines allowing people to create any pattern and modify them on the fly. Knitic kit is composed by an Arduino Due, a diy printed circuit board on top of it, connected to the electronic parts of the original machine, (like end-of-line sensors, encoder, and 16 solenoids) and a software to control the needles real-time. In the past days I interviewed Varvara & Mar, the duo who developed the project. They’ve been working together as artists since 2009 and their artistic practices lay at the intersection between art, technology, and science. When I run into their project I immediately liked their approach as they see knitting machines as the first real domestic fabrication tool, that has been  overlooked in the age of digital fabrication. Check the

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Designing Economic Cultures

Designing Economic Cultures is a three year long research project that Brave New Alps have been carrying on since January 2011 investigating the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects. The main question they are trying to answer is: how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system with its organisational forms and problematic consequences, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market? I was one of the persons involved for the interviews and here’s the result. ——— CONVERSATION This conversation was held in Zoe’s kitchen in Milan in February 2012. Bianca Elzenbaumer: Considering all the creative activist groups you have initiated and been part of, we are wondering what path brought you to be so thoroughly engaged with precarity. Could you trace your path for us? Zoe Romano: At the beginning I

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Markus Kayser: Sun and desert in the industry of tomorrow

Article originally published on Digicult – Articolo originariamente pubblicato su Digicult   “I see no future without technology, but even future without nature, they must find a balance at some point.” This is the statement by Markus Kayser, German designer with a studio in London, who with his latest project Solar Sinter, has won the Arts Foundation Fellowship 2012 (http://artsfoundation.co.uk/Artist-Year/2012/all/318/Kayser) for the Product Design category and was shortlisted for the prestigious Design of the Year 2012 sponsored by Desing Museum of London (http://www.designsoftheyear.com/category/genre/product/product -2012/page/2/). With Solar Sinter, Markus found a meeting point between technology and nature, going behind the process of creation of objects: sun, heat and sand. In addition to the marriage between technology and nature, he has also found a link with the history and the origins of the creation of glass objects, which have appeared in Egypt since ancient times. The idea is simple: the sand in the Egyptian desert is mainly silica, ie when heated to a certain temperature it melts and is transformed into glass, once it has

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Geometrie di corpi lasercut

Ho incontrato il lavoro di Federica Braghieri seguendo il blog The Laser Cutter. Mi ha subito colpito il gioco di forme e tagli dei suoi modelli e l’ho contattata per approfondire la sua metodologia di lavoro. Dopo uno scambio di mail e avendo capito che le nostre agende non ci avrebbero fatte ncontrare a breve abbiamo fissato un incontro in Skype e questo è il risultato della chiacchierata. Qual’è stato il tuo percorso di studi? Ho frequentato il politecnico in Bovisa per 3 anni laureandomi nel 2007 in design e moda. E’ stata una formazione con un focus principalmente sul progetto e troppo poco sul “making” delle cose. Molta ricerca e molta teoria e di pratico praticamente nulla. Solo il primo anno abbiamo lavorato su 3 gonne, ci hanno fornito dei cartamodelli base da cui trarre il capo che volevamo realizzare. Sono poi passata a una laurea specialistica post-graduate a Londra in Creative Fashion dove invece è stato praticamente tutto

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Activating knowledge and empowering clothing communities with open source fashion

Oscar Ruiz Schmidt is originally from Costa Rica and studying in a master of Fashion Design at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin. Together with his partner Ingrid Cordero, created Obra Gris, a clothing label (and a blog) with a metaphoric Spanish name referring to something in construction or in progress. He wrote to Openwear to exchange some views on the topic of Open Source in Fashion to be inserted in his 35-pages essay: “Having recently studied in Europe with all it’s facilities, and returning to my country, where materials are scarce, there is no fashion school and local design initiatives are uprising without enough educational support, I’m trying to find a solution to activate all this knowledge and empower communities to develop clothing competence since my recent research in the field has broadened my spectrum. The following questions arise.“ I answered as co-founder of Openwear but also as one of the creators of Serpica Naro back in 2005. Oscar Ruiz

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