Infographic: The Intricate Anatomy Of UX Design

Grasshopper Plug-In - Ladybug

Ladybug is a free and open source environmental plugin for Grasshopper to help designers create an environmentally-conscious architectural design. Ladybug allows you to: import and analyze standard weather data in Grasshopper; draw diagrams like Sun-path, wind-rose, radiation-rose, etc; customize the diagrams in several ways; run radiation analysis, shadow studies, and view analysis for your design inside Grasshopper.

Experimental Japanese Winter Cabin Blends Traditional Methods with Modern Materials

The conventional modern way of building for northern climates often involves synthetic insulation and some kind of mechanical heating — an energy-intensive and inefficient way to live out the winter. For the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, the traditional way of winter-proofed building is called “chise,” referring to a home that is built with earth, clad with bamboo and sedge grasses, with radiantly heated floors and interiors kept warm by a central hearth that is never allowed to go out.

In an experimental project for the Meme Meadows environmental research facility on Japan’s Hokkaido island, Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has constructed a dwelling that uses these indigenous principles and combined them with modern materials to create a translucent house that operates in rhythm with natural patterns of light and heating.

Via Treehugger

Between the Folds

Origami may seem an unlikely medium for understanding and explaining the world. But around the globe, several fine artists and theoretical scientists are abandoning more conventional career paths to forge lives as modern-day paper folders. Through origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science.

Via PBS

ZERO/FOLD SCREEN

Although digital fabrication has allowed architects and designers to explore more complex geometries, one of the byproducts has been a lack of attention to material waste. Often digitally fabricated projects are generated from a top-down logic with the parameters of typical material sheet sizes being subordinated to the end of the design process. This project attempts to reverse that logic by starting from the basic material dimensions and then generating a series of components that will minimize material waste during CNC cutting while still producing an undulating, light-filtering screen in the gallery.

Via MATSYSTEM

Stove Tiles Designed To Heat The Room Around Them

Old-world construction is like stew—the thicker, the better. Raw wood planks and rough stone bricks convey comfort in their permanence. So rather than feeling like you’re surrounded by something old and decrepit, you feel like you’re surrounded by something that’s only grown more grizzled over time.

German stove tiles are the epitome of this idea. Built thick to absorb and release a stove’s heat, they’re painted and glazed with a fatty, rustic sheen. But Daniel Becker wondered, could you modernize the design while making it more efficient? His solution was a new style of German stove tile—the “Berlin”—textured to increase surface area (and thereby increase ambient heat transfer) while speaking in an entirely new visual language.

Via FastCoDesign

Wanna Reinvent The Inner City? Reinvent Its Housing Stock

The Rock Street project came about after a local housing nonprofit tapped the university’s Community Design Center (a consortium of architects and students) to design housing for a plot of land stretched over nine vacant lots in Little Rock’s Pettaway neighborhood. Instead of building nine homes on nine lots, the team grouped the individual homes a la Chapin’s designs, creating shared outdoor spaces and pooling infrastructural resources. Homes are grouped in fours and sixteens, creating unique typologies that ring a common courtyard. “The project does a very interesting and successful job of co-mingling variations of public and private space,” commented the AIA jurors.

Stephen D. Luoni, the director of the Community Designer, acknowledges that Rock Street is a huge leap forward for most American homeowners. “Shared space is a difficult concept in contemporary America,” he tells Co.Design. “Even in urban neighborhoods, the prevalence of single-lot housing has inured residents to the homogenization in their neighborhoods and skewed conceptions of compatibility.” Community feedback from Pettaway residents was uncertain at first, because residents saw the design as a “separatist” development, which hugely surprised the design team. But after explaining the concept behind the proposal—that the entire neighborhood will benefit from the shared outdoor spaces—the community signed on.

Via FastCoDesign

Nudibranch | Add-on for Grasshopper3d

The Nudibrach Add-in for Grasshopper3d is a set of components facilitating and automating Grasshopper’s capacity to generate distance-based value fields, in addition to moving particles through attractor defined vector-fields while creating animated simulations of these particles.

In particular, Nudibranch aims to automate the attractor development process (one or multiple), while covering most of the frequently used cases, without however intending to replace or render useless the basic understanding of how attractors operate. Furthermore, three animation components enable the real-time interaction between attractors and the affected data.