This is a project I worked on a couple years ago. I met someone who was really into automata toys (which is the technical term for those cool wooden gear crank toys where you turn a knob and something crazy happens). So I thought the concept might be interesting if applied to home products. This is a simple lamp with a dimmer switch, but the dimming function is activated by automata-like gears. The point is to just adds a little excitement to our daily routine.
I go to a mega-church (seriously, it’s huge). But I’ve never found a higher concentration of awesome people, so I’m o.k. with mega. They opened up an outreach center for a very economically challenged area of Birmingham. For the building they restored an incredible fire station from the 30’s that was abandoned and boarded up. I decided to use the building as the logo, because it had such an awesome castle-like look. This historic structure reminded me of dreaming in a whimsical Disney kind of way.
This project was all about collaboration. I met Byron Sonnier, a graffiti artist in Birmingham, at a Bare Hands Gallery show where he was exhibiting his work. I was already hatching a plan to incorporate graphic art with furniture in a way that would be repeatable and highly customizable for the artist. I love how certain industrial designed items have become a canvas for 2D art (skateboards, t-shirts, ect.). By taking advantage of a simple 2D pattern cut with a CNC router and pieced together to form a 3D product, mass artistic customization would be possible.
So how it all went down was- I got a piece of plywood over to Byron (after I told him the idea, and after I borrowed a friends pickup), and he tagged it with his own graffiti style. Then I had another friend carry the board down to Auburn and the chair was cut out by Auburn’s Industrial Design professor Chris Arnold (and he gets credit for the first two pictures too, thanks Chris). Finally my parents delivered the cut pieces back to me and I assembled the chair.
To all who helped out- I salute you.
My friends and I have a group called The Birmingham Art Collective. We were asked by Space One Eleven to take on their window display area for the months of Feb and March in conjunction with a show opening inside by Margot Wade.
My contribution was three styrofoam pieces of sculpture. Each one housed a light source and let that light seep through the seems. The idea behind the large structures, was to create a light pipe that one could look into and yet not see the source. This would draw the viewer in to be lost in a white vision.
Recycling is all about sorting. Sorting is all about organization. Organization is all about bins!
This idea is to allow a person to make as many recycling categories as they want, simply by stacking bins higher and higher. If your local center takes glass- add a bin. If your local center separates PETE from HDPE- keep adding bins. If you drink way more vitamin water than should be humanly possible one week- grab another bin.
This is not so much a blog post as it is a paid advertisement….buy a shirt!!!
I started a line of shirts to remind people that they’re an important part of our community. To make a city better, I’d say just make yourself better. That is the basic story behind I AM BIRMINGHAM.
The most fun was developing a website, packaging, and all the peripherals. The not fun part was keeping records of everything on a spread sheet. So far over 100 shirts and counting have found a proud owner.
This was a project I worked on at PUSH for a local art gallery fundraiser. Apparently skate boards as canvases have become quite the trend. We didn’t want to do something purely graphic (because we’re product designers) so we stuck a bunch of LED lights in there. The phrase “bling, bling” actually started as a joke, but I think it works.
Thanks to Foster Philips for the images.
Watch the video to get the whole picture.
At PUSH we were privileged to work on a project for people suffering from brain injuries. The concept was to develop a communication device using the iPhone’s touch screen. We wanted to also use the GPS feature to pull up specific word lists that someone could speak based on specific locations. For example, you would want to say “one tall coffee, please” when in a Starbucks GPS location. I used the name Locabulary to mean “location-based vocabulary.” I also developed the icon for the app store.
