Reform Flow | 2021-01-10 - 2021-01-10

Designers: Juhana Karhu and Design Reform Team, Design Reform Oy., Helsinki, Finland
Client: Design Reform Oy., Helsinki, Finland

An industrial designer often faces many different constraints in his or her own work. Most often, a professional designer encounters a labyrinth of production and technical realities in his projects. When the customer's and end users' expectations for the product or service being developed are added to this, great challenges lie ahead.

A good designer professional can handle these challenges so that a good solution to the need to be developed can be found together with other professionals. We did the same in the Urban Infra Revolution project https://www.uiainitiative. eu/en/uia-cities/lappeenranta where our task was first to visualize the urban structures and furniture of the future, made of new concrete like ecological material. Our second task was to develop a virtual city model for Lappeenranta, which could also involve citizens to plan their common environment and provide feedback on the plans.

On top of that, outside of the project, we came out of the box: as a creative office, we wanted to throw ourselves above realities and dream of the future. Dreaming of what the 3D-printed house of the future could look like? Dream of what could be done with the new 3d printable material and what 3d print technology could offer for house building in the future.

A new kind of house was created and we wanted to tell the story of the house in a way that would leave a mark on its viewers. This included virtual visualization and its transformation into a dynamic format. That is, we modeled the concept on a game engine and made it both an immersive application to be experienced with VR glasses and a cinematic video to be implemented with a camera drive. We chose cinematic narration as the video genre to better remember the content. The video is also because it is easy to share online as well. We have made numerous world-class virtualizations of new plant solutions for large Finnish engineering companies. Our goal has been to produce a modern tool for concept-phase, pre-planning, marketing and communication. This

form of narration is still evolving and we are sure here at Reform that many companies will use virtual visualization as part of future success.