virtual {mo}ritz

If you face a problem, one way to look for a solution may be to ask people from different fields. A lot of time a solution doesn’t present itself because the knowledge you have in a specific field also acts as a boundary for your imagination.

Before I continue talking about the subject itself, let me start with a story.

Many people have commented on the ‘Liquid’ shelf system my very good friend Sascha Ulber designed, in spring 2003. As trivial as it looks, the way it was conceptualized and most things about it were about five years ahead of the curve then.

While reading the story, you may want to keep the page with the ‘Liquid’ shelf open as a visualization aid.

Sascha is an ex-ærospace engineer who turned self-taught furniture designer about 15 years ago. His designs always had an influence from his past. Their choice of materials, the flawless and precise finish, the adamant attention to detail and the informed choice of processes, that make each of them viable for mass production, speak volumes of his original profession.

A Story

Sascha wanted to go to Cosmit’s Salone de Mobile in Milan, 2003. Salone de Mobile is the world’s biggest and most important furniture show. A booth there is completely beyond the budget of any aspiring designer. Let alone Sascha, who hadn’t been selling enough lately, at the time.

For people like him Cosmit created Salone Satellite. This is a separate space where young(er) designers are given an opportunity to show their creations. The booths there have a set size and are comparatively affordable. You have to be 35 or younger to apply for the selection process and there were only 300 slots in 2003. This number has increased in recent years. Sascha was just 35 at the time.

The designers who apply are newcomers, students, people who haven’t established a name or brand for themselves yet, or just people who want to get their feet wet bouncing some of their ideas off potential clients.

So Sascha had applied for Salone Satellite in 2003 and he had been chosen and given one of these 300 hard-fought booths to present his stuff in.

Because Sascha’s English sucked, to use a kind understatement, and he’s a a very modest and shy guy he asked me to help out with PR/communication a little bit at the booth (my English is quite ok and I’m the reciprocal of shy).

In early 2003 I was rather broke and “between jobs”. The latter is an euphemism for: I didn’t have another job yet. The VFX market in Germany was looking dire still, possibly in the wake of the recession that the dot-com bubble burst had caused in related markets. I was actively searching for jobs abroad. So this was a welcome distraction from the challenge of how to pay my rent in those days.

Sascha was busy with his prototypes until almost the last minute. One week before the fair, on a Sunday evening, we had a meeting at Sascha’s place to brainstorm about an imminent problem: Sascha had no booth yet. ‘Booth’ means the actual structure you put into the designated space on the fairground to attract people and to provide a ‘backdrop’ for the presented furniture, so to say.

That night, when we sat down at his kitchen table, Sascha told me had put everything into the two furniture prototypes for the fair and only had less than 1,000 EUR left to whack up the booth, seven days left to go and absolutely no idea. He was basically broke (that made two of us) and had no space yet to present his furniture in.

Luckily we had already organized couch surfing in Milan, at the place of some amazing woman, Laura, who is now a close friend of ours. She is the sister of the ex-boyfriend of an Italian friend of ours, Chiara, who looked after Sascha’s marketing at the time. Chiara organized the couch, ‘Italian style’. That is another story though.

So we knew we’d survive the fair, money wise. But we still had the issue of how to come up with a kick ass booth on a tight budget and schedule.

That Sunday night Sascha’s teenage daughter Nastja, Sascha and I had dinner together. Sascha cooked and we drank a few Caipiroskas (Sascha and I are experts in preparing them, Nastja had one w/o Vodka, of course).

As the Vodka started doing its deed, we began throwing ideas around.

The booth was 4×4m square at the base, 3m high and open above. One wall was missing, this would be where people entered. The light came from lamps at the ceiling, about 15m above, so we couldn’t close off the top or we would need to care for lighting as well.

I had already thought about one option, I just didn’t know if I could sell it to Sascha.

Sascha had told me in the past that he wanted to work with more organic shapes. He felt the software he used, Rhino, was limiting his ability to express his ideas sufficiently. After he had told me this, about two months before, I had reflected a few times on possible solutions.

At one point, I said: “How about we create an organic shape enclosing the booth, running along its 3 walls?” “We can use profile-milled OSB boards, orthogonally interlocked for stability, in a 3D grid, to create the shape.”

Sascha looked at me. I could see he immediately got it. “But how do we create this shape?”, he said. “No way to create something entirely free form and organic with Rhino easily. I go bonkers, it’s just not possible, least not in such a short time.”

“Well,” I said, “I thought about this already. We will use open source Wings 3D to create the organic solid base shape that runs along the wall of the booth. Then we transform that into subdivision surfaces and from there into bicubic patches via Maya. Then we import the bicubic patches back into Rhino were they will turn into NURB surfaces. Then you project the curves of the grid on them to create the milling tool paths for the CNC.”

Sascha looked at me. “This could work.”, he said. “But I know nothing about these programs and surface types you mentioned.”

Now this simple mini pipeline I described is stuff no designer knew about at the time. Let alone software they’d use (it was all AutoCAD those days, even Rhino was only used sparsely).

But I worked in VFX, not furniture design. We use a wide array of software to archieve our means. Unlike a product designer, the physical feasibility of anything we build is of no concern to us. If we can move the data round, we’re fine.

As Sascha likes to put it when he talks about my old job: “You guys are all about theory.”¹

I showed Sascha the whole pipeline on Monday.²

On Wednesday Sascha nailed the shape down.

On Thursday he had the parts down. There were 54 unique parts, the structure was self-supporting and required no glue, nails, screws or bolts (this was both elegant but also cost effective: you can easily spend a few hundred bucks on fasteners for a structure this size and Sascha’s budget simply didn’t provide for that option).

When I looked at the result I got all excited. Instead of using my idea of an all-axis orthogonal grid of interlocked boards, Sascha had only kept the orthogonality on the horizontal and vertical axes (and this even only because of necessity as dictated by the manufacturing process³).

The boards themselves were all at angles that made them point more or less towards the center of the booth. Thus giving a much better visual impression of the imaginary surface flowing through them from a greater variety of viewing angles.

On Friday the 54 MDF (not OSB) parts were milled at a Likoo in Hamburg, a company whom Sascha had done business with before and who gave him a price fitting the budget. Contingent his allowance for them to mill their logo into the front panel.

On Sunday morning, awfully early I recall, we went to Likoo to do a test setup with another friend as Sascha deemed three people necessary to set the piece up.

The guys at the company laughed at us. They said: “You never tested any of this, and all parts are different; it will never ever fucking work.”

Suffice to say, it worked and fit perfectly. The tolerances Sascha had calculated were exactly what was needed to make easy assembly possible yet provide enough rigidity once the whole piece stood.

The next week, in Milan, we set the thing up together with Chiara’s father who almost had kittens, working with us.

This booth was one of the most photographed pieces of that show in Salone Satellite 2003 (even though photography was strictly forbidden, in theory).

People said: “We love your shelf system, it is wonderful.” Shelf system? Sascha and I looked at each other.

After one day the coin dropped and we started telling everyone this was a customized ‘shelf system’. The name, ‘Liquid’, was invented after another day.

Conclusion

So here you have it. Engineering + design + ‘other’ discipline = awesomeness⁴.

What you don’t know, you can’t use to solve the problem. This sounds very obvious but it is something we rarely consider when trying to solve problems. Someone who comes from a different background will have different constraints. And what you get is the union of two fields of knowledge intersected with the problem domain.

When working interdisciplinary, one ‘hack’ is to describe the problem as loosely as possible to get a greater possible solution space in the domain of knowledge intersection. Loosely means “just enough for them to understand the problem”. But not enough to understand why you can’t think of a solution.

In 2002/2003 Sascha was doing organic shapes in Rhino all the time. But only in one, maximum two dimensions. The two pieces Sascha showed in 2003, the “Coffy” chaise longue and the “D. Flint II” chair are examples of pieces designed under these constraints.

He just didn’t know of a way to create organic shapes and get them into Rhino to create tool paths for manufacturing from them.

When I use the term ‘interdisciplinary’ I don’t necessary mean turning to an expert in another field. Most people who do any work that involves lots of problem solving know that plain telling a problem to someone else, i.e. turning the concept in one’s head into a description another human can understand, goes a long way in potentially finding a solution.

But if you pick the person carefully you may ripe additional benefits. What ‘carefully’ means again depends on context.

It could mean that their field of expertise intersects yours (as in the case of Sascha’s and mine’s) or that they are as far removed as possible.

Epilogue

These days I’m a proud member of the /*jupiter jazz*/ group. We are probably closest to a tribe as Cory Doctorov uses the term in his novel “Eastern Standard Tribe”. I.e. we do have a legal entity behind us, but we operate like a loose network of experts that form groups to solve a problem at hand, as needed.

Though our core body of members and work they have done revolves about feature film visual effects, we get more and more people on board who come from other disciplines. Sascha is one of our members, we have one more person, Tom Kluyskens, who recently turned away from VFX and picked up furniture design.

I lead a VFX-related software project at /*jupiter jazz*/ but I also started working on two fashion-related fabbing projects in my (rather limited) spare time.

We have people with lots of practical experience that can be applied to real world problem solving and we actively seek work and counseling on challenging projects that touch as many disciplines as possible.

We are a young tribe but we prosper. Our work model fits the philosophy of maximum exposure to other ideas. We encourage our members to work from wherever they like if the project allows it. We have all extremes from people that literally operate with laptops out of beach shacks from ‘somewhere nice’ in Asia and the Pacific to folks who just work from home with their kids playing around them.

Trying to work interdisciplinary is one of the aims I want to stay true to for the rest of my life. It is just one of the best work experiences you can have and the results are frequently surprising, even stunning.

But best of all: they always make you learn and discover something new about yourself.