A blobject is a design product, often a brightly-coloured household object which has smooth curves and no sharp edges. The word is a portmanteau of "blob" and "object".
Blobjects can be made of any material in any size or scale for the home, office, car, or outdoors. Common materials used in fabricating blobjects are plastic (especially polycarbonate, polypropylene, or polyethylene), metal, and rubber, with the aim being to give a more organic and animate feel.
The origin of the term is disputed, but it is often attributed to either the designer-author Steven Skov Holt [1] or the designer Karim Rashid.
Holt has defined a blobject as a colorful, mass-produced, plastic-based, emotionally-engaging consumer product with a curvilinear, flowing shape. This fluid and curvaceous form is the blobject's most distinctive feature.
Rashid, the contemporary designer who wrote the book I Want to Change the World, was an early leader in creating blobjects and has become one of the most celebrated designers of his generation.
While often viewed as a modern concept, Blobject can be traced all the way back to prehistoric sculptures like Venus of Willendorf. In the early 20th century, in the work of Joan Miró and Jean Arp, these characteristics appeared. After World War II, these design started appearing in home goods like La Chaise chair. [2]
In the 1990s, designers like Philippe Starck, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid led the way with the use of technology. Many of the most famous blobjects appeared in this decade. [3]
Blobjects can also be found in most areas of contemporary visual culture. [2] A blobject can be a typographic font (cf. Neville Brody), an animation (cf. Monica Peon), a piece of furniture (Marc Newson), an article of clothing (Rei Kawakubo), a motorcycle (GK Dynamics), a car (GEMCAR), a building (Future Systems), a painting (Rex Ray), a piece of sculpture (Hadeki Matsumoto), or ceramics work (Ken Price).
The blobject trend has largely been driven by advances in computer-aided design, information visualization, rapid prototyping, materials, and injection molding. These technologies have given designers the chance to use new shapes and to explore transparency and translucency without significant extra production costs.
Injection moulding is a manufacturing process for producing parts by injecting molten material into a mould, or mold. Injection moulding can be performed with a host of materials mainly including metals, glasses, elastomers, confections, and most commonly thermoplastic and thermosetting polymers. Material for the part is fed into a heated barrel, mixed, and injected into a mould cavity, where it cools and hardens to the configuration of the cavity. After a product is designed, usually by an industrial designer or an engineer, moulds are made by a mould-maker from metal, usually either steel or aluminium, and precision-machined to form the features of the desired part. Injection moulding is widely used for manufacturing a variety of parts, from the smallest components to entire body panels of cars. Advances in 3D printing technology, using photopolymers that do not melt during the injection moulding of some lower-temperature thermoplastics, can be used for some simple injection moulds.
Kinetic art is art from any medium that contains movement perceivable by the viewer or that depends on motion for its effects. Canvas paintings that extend the viewer's perspective of the artwork and incorporate multidimensional movement are the earliest examples of kinetic art. More pertinently speaking, kinetic art is a term that today most often refers to three-dimensional sculptures and figures such as mobiles that move naturally or are machine operated. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.
This page describe terms and jargon related to sculpture and sculpting.
A gobo is an object placed inside or in front of a light source to control the shape of the emitted light and its shadow.
Karim Rashid is an Egyptian-born and Canadian raised industrial designer. His designs include luxury goods, furniture, lighting, surface design, brand identity and packaging. Time magazine has described him as the "most famous industrial designer in all the Americas" and the "Prince of Plastic". He is based in New York City, as well as Belgrade, Miami and India.
Blobitecture, blobism and blobismus are terms for a movement in architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, building form. Though the term blob architecture was in vogue already in the mid-1990s, the word blobitecture first appeared in print in 2002, in William Safire's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine in an article entitled "Defenestration". Though intended in the article to have a derogatory meaning, the word stuck and is often used to describe buildings with curved and rounded shapes.
Marc Andrew Newson is an Australian industrial designer, creative director, and artist who, in a career spanning nearly four decades, has worked in many industry sectors including furniture, product, and transportation design, luxury goods, fashion, and fine art. His work is primarily characterized by smooth geometric lines, organic shapes, an absence of sharp edges, and the use of transparency and translucency.
Greg Lynn is an American architect, founder and owner of the Greg Lynn FORM office, an o. University Professor in the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and a professor at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. He is CEO and co-founder of the Boston based robotics company Piaggio Fast Forward. He won a Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2010 Lynn was named a fellow by United States Artists. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Biomorphism models artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. Taken to its extreme it attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices.
In sculpture, an armature is a framework around which the sculpture is built, when the sculpture could not stand on its own. This framework provides structure and stability, especially when a plastic material such as wax, newspaper or clay is being used as the medium. When sculpting the human figure, the armature is analogous to the major skeleton and has essentially the same purpose: to hold the body erect.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the visual arts:
Sterling Ruby is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, video, and textiles. Often, his work is presented in large and densely packed installations. The artist has cited a diverse range of sources and influences including aberrant psychologies, urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption. In opposition to the minimalist artistic tradition and influenced by the ubiquity of urban graffiti, the artist's works often appear scratched, defaced, camouflaged, dirty, or splattered. Proclaimed as one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, Ruby's work examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint. Sterling Ruby currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His studio is located in Vernon, south of downtown Los Angeles.
Business of Design Week (BODW) is an annual week-long design event organised every December by the Hong Kong Design Centre. BODW was launched in 2002. It includes a design conference, forums, seminars, exhibitions and award presentations.
Casting is a manufacturing process in which a liquid material is usually poured into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify. The solidified part is also known as a casting, which is ejected or broken out of the mold to complete the process. Casting materials are usually metals or various time setting materials that cure after mixing two or more components together; examples are epoxy, concrete, plaster and clay. Casting is most often used for making complex shapes that would be otherwise difficult or uneconomical to make by other methods. Heavy equipment like machine tool beds, ships' propellers, etc. can be cast easily in the required size, rather than fabricating by joining several small pieces. Casting is a 7,000-year-old process. The oldest surviving casting is a copper frog from 3200 BC.
Mark Dziersk was an American industrial designer based in Chicago, Illinois.
The Ford 021C was a concept car first shown to the public at the October 1999 Tokyo Motor Show by Ford. It was designed by Marc Newson and built by Ghia. The car's name is taken from the Pantone orange colour, said to be Newson's favorite, although it was repainted in lime green when it was brought to the Milan Furniture Fair in April 2000. Ford officials stated that 021C also stands for "21st Century." It was produced purely as a styling exercise and was not intended for production.
Spime is a neologism for a futuristic object, characteristic to the Internet of Things, that can be tracked through space and time throughout its lifetime. They are essentially virtual master objects that can, at various times, have physical incarnations of themselves. An object can be considered a spime when all of its essential information is stored in the cloud. Bruce Sterling sees spimes as coming through the convergence of six emerging technologies, related to both the manufacturing process for consumer goods, and through identification and location technologies. Depending on context, the term "spime" can refer to both—the archetype, as designed by the developer, or a user-specific instance of it.
Biomega is a Copenhagen-based, Danish brand of designer bicycles. It is known for engaging with international designers from outside the bicycle industry; including Marc Newson, Ross Lovegrove, Karim Rashid and Bjarke Ingels, often giving its products unconventional solutions. In addition to producing bikes under its own name, Falcon produces bicycles under a joined brand with Puma AG.
Designer People is a television documentary series launched in 2008 directed by Ross Close. Each episode showcases one of the world's leading artists in architectural design, communication design, industrial design, interior design, and fashion, centering on the creative insight of the acclaimed designer, whose work shapes our lives and our surroundings. The series was broadcast on Ovation.
Steven Skov Holt was an American design writer, curator, educator and industrial designer. He is known for an interdisciplinary practice that posited the ascension of design as the most significant late-20th- and 21st-century form of public art, and more specifically, elaborated its shift toward forms that were more fluid, biomorphic, hybridized, emotional and culturally literate.