For our 2024 New Year’s greeting, we wanted to share the starry sky of New Year’s Eve from above our studio with our friends. That’s why we’ve calculated and frozen the exact view of the firmament on January 1st, 2024, 00:00 am on a card. More views of the stars can be found here.
Burning Flowing Melting Glowing — At our first international workshop in Paris, we worked with 35 students to bring typography to life using a variety of physical processes. Many thanks to Intuit Lab Paris for the invitation and to all students for the amazing week!
On April 01, 2023 we had the honor, together with our dear colleagues from Morphoria and Prinzträger, to tell the design students of the Rhein-Wahl University of Applied Sciences about our experiments. We are thrilled to have been a speaker at HSRW’s first “Rhein What” showcase and thank Michael Menge of Oppa Franz for the invitation!
Together with our students from the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf & Dortmund University of Applied Sciences, we made material visible and audible by the use of remote-controlled sound machines during the winter semester 2022/23. We are pleased to announce that our Distant Material Orchestra won the Podest-Award, the first place of the audience award, at the following exhibition in Dortmund. Congratulations to our students!
Since its birth in 2012, we have been supporting Mischfutterwerke Mannheim GmbH in all design matters, from corporate design, illustrations, packaging design, and print products to, of course, cinematic product presentations. For the 10th anniversary, we celebrated the valuable power granules in gold — accompanied by Beethoven’s “Ode to Feed”.
In every agency you will find the obligatory kicker table as a symbol, work and toy for collegial togetherness. In every agency? UX&I is a UX consultancy that accompanies and supports at eye level. To transport this colorful, free and human-centered workflow cinematically, we designed an airhockey table that playfully stages the logo, claims & pictograms. The entire “FLUXI” case is available here.
On the occasion of the IAA Transportation 2022, we set the well-known logo in motion for the Krone Group on three different topics. In this way, the logo literally gained substance in the sense of automation, digitalization and sustainability in each case. Click here for the entire case.
Fashion For Bank Robbers Exhibition
With our Limbo Cocoon and our Soap Mask we were represented twice at the first @fashionforbankrobbers exhibition in Munich’s Maximiliansforum. Great exhibition! Great people! Great opening! We are happy that we were part of it!
After three semesters of digital teaching, we finally had the opportunity again to conduct material experiments with our students in face-to-face seminars, which were presented in an exhibition at Düsseldorf’s “Atelier am Eck” at the end of the semester. As part of the exhibition, the students also initiated a fundraising campaign for the UN refugee aid, which raised a total of 600€.
At the beginning of the year, we had a visit from kultur.west, the magazine for art and society in NRW, to whom we were allowed to give a little insight into our lab. The article, which appeared in the analog February issue of the magazine, can also be read in digital form here. Thanks to kultur.west for the visit!
In recent months, the circumstances of our getting to know and identifying each other have changed dramatically. Analog and digital filters have found their way into our everyday lives, not least in the context of university teaching. We have made a virtue out of necessity and, together with our students, experimentally explored the possibilities of disguising, alienating, amplifying, expanding or reinventing identity. Among other things, you can find out about some of our Covered / Uncovered Identities at Fashion for Bank Robbers.
Sometimes our Experimental Fridays, where we freely experiment with material, yield results that take a little spin around the world. The creature that hatched out of our Limbo Cocoon enjoyed great resonance (among others from Stefan Sagmeister), far-reaching featurings (including Fashion for Bankrobbers) and lots of interesting namings. The whole project is available here.
The urban field experiment, consisting of ten self-luminous electromagnetic disposable glove pendulums, is making another guest appearance in the KomKuK window. From August 17 to September 10, the installation in the shop window of the former „Stern-Verlag“ publishing house at Friedrichstraße 24–28 in Düsseldorf invites passers-by to a greet-Laola. A small insight into the shop window can be found here.
Last semester we took another opportunity to gain a new perspective on our immediate and familiar surroundings with our students. This time different sound machines out of everyday objects and materials were created for our Distant Material Orchestra 2021. A big thank you to all participants & helpers!
Video: Simon Fricke, Marco Spick, Svenja Rümler, Elizaveta Vasileva, Jelena Lemesch, Yejoon Ur
“Rethinking material” On the occasion of this theme, a team from the cultural journal arte TWIST accompanied us for a day during our laboratory experiments with soap, steel wool, slime and dry ice, up to the motion visual staged especially for the program. The full length episode can be watched at arte Mediathek. Thank you to Yasemin Ergin and the whole team for the great report!
How do the passers-by of the Lorettostraße react to ten self-luminous electromagnetic disposable glove greeting pendulums? From 07 May to 04 June you can stroll past our alternating pendulum game in the KomKuK window. A small insight into the shop window can be found here.
This time we were pleased to open our lab doors for the Deutsche Welle Euromaxx film team. And where there is already so much design potential in the name, it is hard to resist a spontaneous logo staging. We would like to thank Serdar Vardar and his team for the exciting day and the great contribution!
At the beginning of February we had the opportunity to give the viewers of WDR Lokalzeit some insights into our laboratory and our work. We would like to thank Ina Reuter for the great report and the staff of WDR Düsseldorf for the hospitality on site from the make-up to the studio.
Our Soap Mask does not offer protection. However, we were able to enrich the lockdown with a few optimistically colored prospects. Fortunately, we have encountered unexpectedly great feedback. Thanks to numerous online magazines and blogs from various fields like Designboom, Hypebeast and Fashion for Bank Robbers our airmail spread almost all over the world in no time. Click here for the project.
Every year, 32 innovative companies are honored on behalf of the German Federal Government and Ministry for Economic Affairs as “Kultur- und Kreativpiloten” of Germany. We are grateful and proud to be among this year’s title winners together with many other inspiring companies! More about the award: www.kultur-kreativpiloten.de
For our recent design workshop series at HSD we stayed at home and gained a new perspective on our immediate, familiar surroundings by listening to the acoustic properties of everyday objects, common handles and textures. Check out the results of the student work at www.d‑m-o.net. Simultaneous playback of the videos in the desktop version allows individual scores from material sounds.
We have been supporting Mischfutterwerke Mannheim GmbH in all design matters since 2012. All the more reason for us to be pleased that our latest product staging assignment will help us to remember the Corona period as a masked ball in the cellar of our friends at grown videoagency. The whole film and further insights “Behind the Waltz” are available here.
Our presentation at the fifth Creative Mornings Düsseldorf anniversary on 28 February 2020: “Take your time”. We are happy that we were able to give insights into our experiments to more than 150 visitors at this special evening! Great evening, great talks, great people! You can find our and other lectures from the Creative Mornings series under the following link: Creative Mornings Düsseldorf
When you are invited to a birthday party, you usually do not come empty-handed. Cake, presents, flowers… We decided to do what we do best: letting material speak. Here’s our liquid birthday serenade for the Creative Mornings Düsseldorf on February 28, 2020.
“Presenting things in a different light” — Following this guiding principle, 28 students illuminated three dark rooms of the HSD with interactive, light-kinetic exhibits. The exhibition was the result of the experimental seminar series at the Department of Design in the winter semester 2019/20 under the direction of Thomas Wirtz. Further insights will follow.
Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts report it feels good. T‑25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T‑15 seconds, guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9 … ignition sequence start … 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 … All engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff … Happy new year 2020!