The French design school École Nationale Supérieure de Création
Industrielle, known colloquially as ENSCI Les Ateliers, seeks to
train industrial designers with a special bent on pushing the
materials envelope. "In this industry undergoing profound
change, the dominant technologies are not only those of wood,
metal and thermoformed plastic," they write, "but the
implementation of new materials (sometimes traditional materials
revisited), composites, functional textiles, et cetera" (not to
mention liquid nitrogen). This type of thinking has yielded a
bizarre and interesting use of materials in Marianne Cauvard and
Raphael Pluvinage's "Noisy Jelly." By combining an Arduino
microprocessor, a capacitive surface, software, and gelatin,
students Cauvard and Pluvinage have created a series of musical
instruments that looks like something Cornelius would've brought
on stage in the '90s: (I'm 99% sure they didn't clear that Devo
soundtrack, but if anyone would let that slide to support the
project, it's Devo. Or Corne