Industrial revolution

Until Thursday next week, eight large-scale robots on loan from Audi’s automotive production line in Ingolstadt, Germany, will be working away, 24 hours a day, in their temporary home in London’s Trafalgar Square. Rather than their usual tasks of welding and gluing car bodies, these eight-metre robots are creating a buzz as the centrepiece for the London Design Festival, which opens today with 240 separate events spread across 150 London-wide locations.

Ever since Tom Dixon’s great chair grab in 2006, when the designer exhibited and gave away 500 of his EPS chairs, Trafalgar Square has become a focal point for the festival. Now Outrace, as the robot project is called, aims to engage visitors, passers-by or anyone with access to the web. Part light show, part social networking, it will, according to the festival director Ben Evans, broaden the definition of what design actually is.

Yet playing with the Audi robots is not just for visitors to the square, of whom there are around 2m a week. By logging on to the control website (www.outrace.org) through a smart phone anywhere in the world or one of the laptops onsite, the public can control the robots. Online, the user creates a short message and (after the software checks the text for dodgy or offensive remarks) the user gets a unique time-slot, one of 1,200 available per day. On cue, the robots’ tentacles get to work, writing three-dimensional LED light traces in the sky (each robot writes 10 characters).

The messages are recorded with specially configured long-exposure video cameras and uploaded simultaneously on to the web, and a link for each video is e-mailed back to the user, so they can be kept or shared.

A project such as this, combining design, media and architectural components, is typical of the work of its creators Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, who set up their multi-disciplinary design practice Kram/Weisshaar in 2002. With a “north” office in Stockholm and a “south” office in Munich, the pair and their team of 10 share a server rather than an office and meet wherever projects take them.

They first hooked up in 2001 when they were both independently recruited by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s AMO office to work on Prada’s Epicenters projects. American-born Kram was hired for media design after studying design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working freelance designing mathematical games in Silicon Valley; Weisshaar was brought into the industrial design team, after a degree in product design at Central Saint Martins, a stint with Munich-based industrial designer Konstantin Grcic, and a semester or two at the Royal College of Art in London. They worked together for AMO on integrating the physical and media aspects for Prada’s then revolutionary instore technology project, which included the Prada Atlas and the flat-screen hanging Ubiquitous Display.

“We always looked at these things in a holistic manner; we think product design as an isolated activity on its own is almost ornamental,” says Weisshaar. Their first major solo project together was “Breeding Tables”, begun in 2003 when they were working on the second Prada Epicenter, in Beverly Hills. At a visit to Milan during the Salone del Mobile furniture fair, they realised they had seen little evidence of the potential of contemporary technology in the world of furniture, so they set out to do something as cutting-edge and as challenging as the work they had been doing for Koolhaas and Prada. “Breeding Tables” was a plan to “genetically modify” furniture: creating an indefinite number of tables rather than the manufacture of one table based on a single prototype.

A custom computer code was developed so the pair could manipulate the forms it generated with shared parameters and then control the laser-cutting and bending machines that produced the tables.

Other projects followed a similar train of thought. “Vendôme” was a series of 99 one-off concrete objects, each generated through manipulating a custom-made piece of software that generated the 3D drawings and sent them straight to the casting mould. For Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg they have created exhibition design, a new store space for the manufactory, are consulting on brand strategy and have created “My Private Sky”. The latter is a seven-piece set of hand-painted plates with a design created using, yes, a custom-programmed computer application, this time one that plots the stars and constellations based on the place, date, hour and minute of the client’s birth.

For a private client in Cologne they installed “Hypersky”, a 24 sq m LED display set flush into the ceiling. A composite image represents the sky above, which changes as sensors outside collect data on wind speed and direction, rain (represented as drops on an augmented water surface), as well as a layer showing aeroplanes and satellites moving overhead – a beautiful contemporary fresco in motion.

So what do these projects tell us about cutting-edge design? Audi has apparently “supported and enabled” Outrace to the tune of €1.5m and can probably expect to recoup that in PR. It will certainly create excitement and a buzz for the festival, and a name for the pair. And more than that? Are projects like these anything other than expensive toys? The designers say Outrace enables the public to take control of industrial processing, in line with the current trends of Tom Dixon and others. In this case the “control” is just half a tweet at a time – but with some imagination, perhaps this points towards an exciting future in which, with the right software, the wifi’d-up public might be able to design their own, well, pretty much anything.

Trafalgar Square, London, to September 23

www.outrace.org

www.kramweisshaar.com