Ronen Kadushin‘s works blow my mind over and over again. Ronen is a Berlin-based designer, mostly he works on furniture. The twist: It’s all open-sourced & released under a Creative Commons license. You can take his designs, copy them, remix them, hack them. It’s yours for the taking. And more importantly, it always looks awesome, as top-of-the-line designer furniture sometimes just does. (WIRED loves it, too.)
One of the design principles here is not to use joints: Joints are complex, hard to reproduce. They would make those designs de facto impossible to hack, manipulate and clone. Designing along more simple patterns helps to keep the works not just open source by the words, but by the spirit of open source. All you see here can actually be reproduced fairly easily.
To get a better idea of the process, check out these these photos (after the jump).
Before: a sheet of metal.
After: a Hack Chair
So here’s a prime example of how design, innovation and sharing can go hand in hand.
I first met Ronen at an exhibition of his works, then again at OpenEverything meets OpenDesign. And I sure hope we can win him over for a presentation at the OpenEverything track at atoms&bits, too.
On a side note, I’ve been obsessing over this shelf, and as soon as I have some time on my hands I’ll see if I can get myself one of those:
Ronen Kadushin: Italic Shelf
Some more info on the Hack Chair over at Dezeen. And make sure to consult Ronen’s website for some background info and more mind-blowing designs.
