As we spend a lot of time keeping ourselves up to date with the design industry, through mediums such as magazines, blogs and the news, we tend to come across a lot of projects that catch our eye and really draw us in. The Creative Roundup is a new series where we share projects we've discovered and feel are worth shouting about, focusing on all areas of the design industry from architecture to graphic design, fashion to fine art.
Life Faker
One of our favourite projects we discovered this month is Life Faker by mental health start up Sanctus. The website concept is an online life-faking service which allows users to purchase packages of photographs to post on their social media, including holiday snaps, the ideal yet unachievable body and Instagram-worthy meals. Whilst at first it may seem like a ridiculous concept, its actual purpose is to highlight the pressures of social media and its impact on mental health. We’re at a point where a service of this type doesn’t seem so unrealistic, so an idea like this puts things into perspective, highlighting how much of an impact social media has on individual’s lives.
Ford ‘Feel the View’
Another project we’ve discovered this month is ‘Feel the View’ by Ford. This is a concept to help the visually impaired experience landscapes outside their car window using up to 255 levels of vibrations to represent different elements of their view. The process of producing the vibrations involves an inbuilt camera capturing the view, before converting it to grayscale where each shade of grey is translated into a vibration of a different intensity. This project is particularly interesting as we often take simple things like being able to see beautiful views outside for granted. This new concept lets those who are visually impaired experience things which may not typically be considered.
Anima collection by Kosuke Araki
Kosuke Araki, a Japanese designer, has transformed daily food waste into beautiful tableware and vessels as part of his Anima collection. To create the products, carbonised vegetable waste is mixed with animal glue before being finished with urushi, a Japanese lacquer. We always love projects which re-use existing materials otherwise designated to be thrown away. In a society with an attitude to dispose items rather than finding other uses for them, projects like this are really useful to help change individual’s perspectives.
