A competition facilitated by The Designers Institute of New Zealand, on behalf of carpet company Milliken-Ontera, asked artists, designers and creatives how nature and the abstract notion of 'life' could be represented through a carpet design.
Along with architectural graduate Finn Sorger, we proposed using photogrammetry (a 3D-scanning technique) to create abstract visualisations of nature. Taking advantage of the point-cloud medium, we can create colorful snippets of local spaces.
Photogrammetry is a 3D-scanning technique that uses multiple photographs to construct a three dimensional representation of a space or object. One of the outputs from this technique is a point-cloud: hundreds of thousands, or even millions of points, each with their own colour value and coordinate in space.
Using this technique and the captured colour values, we argue that we can capture the essence of a place.
The ability to efficiently capture and process a given environment allows the carpet design to be responsive to the physical location it will ultimately be part of: carpet in San Francisco could have a design that captures the colors of the golden gate bridge, while a carpet for an office in London might capture the colours of the Thames, Hyde Park, or Saint Paul's Cathedral.
This dynamicism in design is part of our core concept for depicting 'life' and 'nature' in the carpet design, rather than a single static design that is replicated over and over again.
Using texturing software used in the gaming and visual effects industry, visualisations were produced to show the sense of style, scale and spatial quality of the designs, and highlights how this process could co-opt carpet into becoming a canvas for large scale art installations.
