As this blog is also about alltime favourites in design and interaction, this series of posts called “Favourite Designers” collects all designers that really fascinated me during the last years. This is not shit-hot news, but rather “golden oldies”.

First in this series is Rob Hodgin, an interaction programmer and designer living in LA. He works at The Barbarian Group and has a personal research blog called flight404. Back in 2004, when this page still his portfolio, he received an honorary mention at Ars Electronica. Converted into a blog in 2007 (as far as I can remember), he presents his breathtaking stuff and earns a lot of recognition for his experiments. Just look for yourself:

An image I myself created in Processing with flight404’s particle emitter script. For a lot of his experiments there is the sourcecode available. Great!

A still from a demo he showed at UCLA in January. Remember, this is all programmed, generative design and it can move (although not in realtime when the detail is so high) and react to any kind of input.

A still from an animation by flight404 made with music by Goldfrapp. There also used to be an iTunes-visualization called Magnetosphere available, but they took it down recently - just to be updated, I hope! It incorporates a lot of styles in one plugin, and it is amazing to look at.

Still from Magnetic Ink, another experiment that shows how diverse generative design tools can be.

It’s cool that tools like Processing are available with so many libraries and code examples, that can be used for realtime visualization and interactive installations. I used it for the design of our data visualization Similar Diversity, and have done some experiments in generative and sound-reactive animation already.

Be sure to check out his videos and photos and prepare for a long ride through all kinds of particle spaces.