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.
BVI Art Reef Project
Richard Branson and Unite BVI have taken the Kodiak Queen, one of the 5 ships that survived Pearl Harbor, and transformed it into an underwater art installation and artificial reef. The ship has been transformed with an 80-foot steel octopus made up of rebar and mesh, which acts as an underwater eco-system perfect for divers to explore as sea life inhabit it. We find something quite intriguing about discovering another use for something so historically valuable which would otherwise be scrapped for metal, giving it a new lease of life for divers, sea life and marine scientists.
Ikea Space 10 Vertical Farming
As part of their Space10 lab, Ikea have created a space to grow microgreens indoors, providing a space-saving and sustainable way for individuals to grow food. The method allows vegetables to grow 3x faster than traditional methods, using 90% less water with no need for soil and sunlight.The element of this project we personally found most compelling was the link to Google Home, whereby sensors are added to growing trays which collect a variety of data about the plant growth to feedback to the user. The individual is able to communicate with the lab through speech, adding another dimension to the experience.To find out more about Space10 and how they approach sustainable living, simply visit their website here.
The Political Lamp
The Political Lamp has been created to represent the look of a cloudy sky, with a calming blue glow lighting up the room until a thunderstorm appears whenever Donald Trump tweets. It acts as a connected cloud, working in real time to materialise tweets as they are posted. The creators ParseError, have stated,‘the idea of the Political Lamp is to hide its true nature behind a beautiful object, which immediately modifies the observer’s behavior when its purpose is revealed, causing anxiety and fascination.’We love how the soft, beautiful glow of the lamp transforms into utter chaos in a matter of seconds, perfectly representing the danger of social media in the wrong hands. In this day and age, something as simple as a couple of words can have a huge impact on society, creating dangerous circumstances for millions of people.
Living Digital ForestLiving Digital Forest is an interactive exhibition designed my media art group teamLab. It uses real-time projections to display a series of beautifully rendered flowers and animals, transforming the installation as seasons appear to gradually change. Interactive technology is also embedded to allow the viewer’s actions to determine how the flowers grow and move. We love how captivating this exhibition looks, allowing visitors to engage and alter the visuals themselves, taking projection mapping to a whole new level.
