Material Explorer
For the Architect or product designer it can still be quite hard to track down products on the web if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, but one website materialexplorer is really useful. You can search by type or property (if you want something soft and fluffy for instance!) or how about trying to track down those funky tiles that mvrdv used in their last project, then just type in the arcitects name. Only a couple of problems, you have to register, and the database doesn’t appear so large at the moment. I think they are specialising in new materials and definitely better for product and interior designers. The registering is not all bad either, you can build up a neat folder system of materials, forinstance for differet projects. A really nice idea well executed it will become more and more useful as more products are added. Check it out.
photos left to right are;
sensacell an interactive led surface mountable almost anywhere.
liquidfloor walk on the tiles, the liquid inside moves and swirls around.
plywall element by Finnish designer Jouko Kärkkäinen.
vectogramm for transferring images onto sheet materials (concretes, mdf, plastics) by means of milling technology. This is so cool!