Behind layers of scrunched-up tissue paper, the installation was filled with motion-sensitive devices that triggered a system of concealed lighting.

As visitors approached, each cloud would start to glow, but when that person walked away the lights would slowly die down.

"The installation was an attempt to pull festival goers out of the commotion and noise that inevitably surround design festivals, to provide a space of tranquil and rest, if even for a fleeting moment," explains Mason Studio.

Gentle music accompanied the installation, helping to block out the noise from outside.

The Toronto Design Offsite Festival ran from 21 to 27 January as a showcase of the best in Canadian design. Projects on show included a matte steel sink with a polished patch in the centre that provides a mirror.

Clouds have inspired a number of design installations in recent years. Makoto Tanijiri of Suppose Design Office filled an exhibition with clouds back in 2009, while Tokujin Yoshioka filled a showroom with mist in 2011. See more weather-related design on Dezeen.

Photography is by Scott Norsworthy.

Here's a few words from Mason Studio:

Mason Studio, the Toronto-based interior design firm, created a large series of gentle, cloud-like objects to form a site-specific installation nestled in a side-street warehouse. In part of Toronto Design Offsite Festival '13, the installation was an attempt to pull festival goers out of the commotion and noise that inevitably surround design festivals, to provide a space of tranquil and rest, if even for a fleeting moment.

Fabricated from large sheets of semi-transparent tissue paper, the warehouse was engulfed with the billowing forms to submerge the visitors in a glow emulating the soft filtration of light by clouds at dusk. The ethereal installation was accompanied by a resonating soundscape, producing a numbing white noise to block any extraneous noises.

The motion-sensitive objects were reactive to the surrounding users and environment. Upon inspection, the forms gently intensified with light; walking away, they reverted back to neutral, leaving a trail of dark.

Soundscape produced by: aftermodernlab

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by Mason Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

The Icehotel is constructed afresh every year in the small village of Jukkasjärvi and is only open to guests for a few months before the walls of ice and snow begin to melt.

Each year a number of artists are invited to design and build a suite during November and December. This year, Wouter Biegelaar was invited for the first time.

He wanted to create "an iceberg in a soft environment", which prompted him to design a single icy object lit from within, incorporating a bed, a sofa and a dining table with two seats.

The arched walls and ceiling of the suite are covered with snow, sculpted to resembled the soft padded upholstery of a Chesterfield sofa.

"It was my first time working with ice and snow," the designer told Dezeen. "It was a really nice experience. You can work really fast with them. The best feature was that the materials have no grain or direction. Where a chisel would follow the grain in wood, in ice it's a direct result of how much pressure you apply, so it does exactly what you want."

Suites at the Icehotel can be rented privately for overnight guests but during the day each one also becomes a gallery that is open to visitors.

The hotel is now in its twenty-third year. Previous installations include a barrel-vaulted space with a bed surrounded by icy fins and an ice church.

See more stories about ice and snow in our weather category »

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at Icehotel appeared first on Dezeen.

The Nebula 12 by Swiss design studio Micasa LAB combines liquid nitrogen and hot water to create a billowing cloud of steam, which is kept in circulation around the lamp by vacuum suction.

The form the cloud takes and the colour of the lamp depend on the weather forecast for the next 48 hours.

A grey cloud appears on an overcast day, while a patch of low pressure is signalled by a red light seeping through the cloud. On sunny days the cloud disappears, leaving a warm yellow light, and at sunset the light turns warm orange.

The weather forecast is sent to the lamp via a WiFi connection with a Nokia Lumia 920 mobile phone –the only phone the lamp works with so far.

Micasa LAB is the design studio attached to Micasa, a German furniture and interiors brand.

Above: movie by Micasa LAB showing the Nebula 12 in operation

We've featured a few cloud-generating projects on Dezeen, including a house in Kuwait with a courtyard concealed by mist and a water feature in London that erupts in misty clouds.

See all our stories about weather »

Here's some more information from the designers:

The Nebula 12 is a concept developed by Micasa LAB, Zürich. Using meterological data from MetOff, the Nebula forms to represent outside weather: wake up to a flooding yellow light on a sunny day, or below a real cloud on that overcast winter morning. The cloud involves some peculiar techniques, liquid nitrogen, WiFi, and high power vacuum suction.

In the standard mode, Nebula 12 predicts the weather for the next 48 hours. A threatening low-pressure area is announced by a red cloud, and sunshine is shown in yellow. At the same time, the user can adjust the settings and define the source of information themselves. And the best is: regardless of how dark the cloud is, Nebula 12 never brings rain. At least, not within one's own four walls.

The light but stable creation can be used in many ways: Nebula 12 can, like a natural cloud, change in colour and brightness and thus can be used as a variable source of light for romantic evening meals, when doing homework, when reading or just chatting.

The cloud is easily connected by WIFI to your Nokia Lumia 920.

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by Micasa LAB appeared first on Dezeen.

The installation, titled Windswept, consists of 612 rotating aluminium weather vanes mounted on an outside wall.

As gusts of wind hit the wall, the aluminium blades spin not as one but independently, indicating the localised flow of the wind and the way it interacts with the building.

"Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon," said Sowers. "Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction."

"I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena," he added.

We've featured a number of kinetic installations on Dezeen recently, including an undulating web that ripples like the surface of water and a gallery that lets visitors play in the rain without getting wet.

See all our stories about installations »
See all our stories about weather »

Photographs are by Bruce Damonte.

Windswept is a wind-driven kinetic facade that transforms a blank wall into an observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between wind and environment.

Windswept consists of 612 freely rotating wind direction indicators mounted parallel to the wall creating an architectural scale instrument for observing the complex interaction between wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon. Wind gusts, rippling and swirling through the sculpture, visually reveal the complex and ever-changing ways the wind interacts with the building and the environment.

I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena. The Randall site, like many in San Francisco, is characterised to a great extent by its relationship to the wind. Climatically, onshore winds bring warm weather from the central valley while offshore wind bring us our famous San Francisco chilly weather.

Windswept seeks to transform a mundane and uninspired architectural façade (the blank wall of the theatre) into a large scale aesthetic/scientific instrument, to reveal information about the interaction between the site and the wind. Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon. Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.

Windswept is 20' high x 35' long. It is installed on an 1940s board-formed concrete building. The whole piece sits off the wall to allow an equal volume of air to enter a ventilation intake mounted in the middle of the existing wall. The wind arrows are made of brake-formed anodised aluminium. The arrow axles are mounted to a standard metal architectural panel wall system consisting of 25 panels. The panels have holes punched in a 12" x 12" grid pattern, into which the installation contractor secured rivet nuts to accept the stainless steel axles. Once the panels were installed the arrow assemblies were threaded into the rivet nuts.

Artist: Charles Sowers Studios, LLC
Project: Windswept
Location: Randal Museum, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA
Size: 35’ length / 20’ height
Client: San Francisco Arts Commission/Randall Museum
Contractor: Rocket Science
Engineer: Hom-Pisano Engineers
Project Completion: 11/19/2010

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Charles Sowers appeared first on Dezeen.

Located in The Curve gallery, Rain Room is a perpetual rain shower which lets visitors feel the moisture in the air and hear the sound of rain while remaining untouched by drops of water.

Cameras installed around the room detect human movements and send instructions to the rain drops to continually move away from visitors.

The water drips through a grid in the floor where it is treated before being sent back up to the ceiling to fall again.

Formed in 2005 by former Royal College of Art students Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood, rAndom International has created a number of installations involving audience participation.

"Rain Room is the first time that we've extended the level of our experimentation to the huge public space that is The Curve at the Barbican," rAndom International told Dezeen.

"Our other work has performed on a more intimate scale in terms of size and engagement, but what's common to most of our projects is that they extract interesting behaviour from the viewers," they added.

Their proposal to create a rain shower inside the gallery didn't faze the curators. "The curatorial team around Jane Alison has not blinked once in view of the actual implications of realising the Rain Room at The Curve – a never-done-before project featuring thousands of litres of water above a BBC recording studio and right next to a theatre and concert hall in a public art gallery."

The designers have also collaborated again with British choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose Random Dance company will perform short 'interventions' in the Rain Room to a score by Max Richter on selected Sundays during the exhibition.

"Working with Wayne and Random Dance has always been very rewarding, as his perspective seems to complement our way of working extremely well," said the designers. Earlier this year Dezeen featured their collaboration for the Future Self project at MADE in Berlin, in which a lighting installation mapped and replicated human movement.

Rain Room isn't the first weather-related art installation to appear on Dezeen – we've also featured a moving cloud of raindrops in a Singapore airport and an LED sign in a London park displaying yesterday's weather.

See all our stories about weather »
See all our stories about art »
See all our stories about the Barbican »

Photographs are by Felix Clay.

Here's the full press release from the Barbican:

Rain Room by rAndom International at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London
Admission Free
4 October 2012 – 3 March 2013

The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England. Rain Room has been made possible through the generous support of the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art.

Known for their distinctive approach to digital-based contemporary art, rAndom International’s experimental artworks come alive through audience interaction. Their largest and most ambitious installation yet, Rain Room is a 100 square metre field of falling water for visitors to walk through and experience how it might feel to control the rain. On entering The Curve the visitor hears the sound of water and feels moisture in the air before discovering the thousands of falling droplets that respond to their presence and movement. Rain Room opens in The Curve on 4 October 2012.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said: The Curve has previously played host to guitar-playing finches, a World War II bunker and a digital bowling alley. rAndom International have created a new work every bit as audacious and compelling - Rain Room surpasses all our expectations.

At the cutting edge of digital technology, Rain Room is a carefully choreographed downpour – a monumental installation that encourages people to become performers on an unexpected stage, while creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. The work also invites us to explore what role science, technology and human ingenuity might play in stabilising our environment by rehearsing the possibilities of human adaptation.

rAndom International said: Rain Room is the latest in a series of projects that specifically explore the behaviour of the viewer and viewers: pushing people outside their comfort zones, extracting their base auto-responses and playing with intuition. Observing how these unpredictable outcomes will manifest themselves, and the experimentation with this world of often barely perceptible behaviour and its simulation is our main driving force.

Finding a common purpose as students at the Royal College of Art, rAndom International was founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood. Today the studio is based in Chelsea – with an outpost in Berlin – and includes a growing team of diverse talent. With an ethos of experimentation into human behaviour and interaction, they employ new technologies in radical, often unexpected ways to create work which also draws on op art, kinetics and post-minimalism.

rAndom International have gained international recognition, inspiring audiences from broad multidisciplinary interests. A breakthrough work of 2008, Audience, marked rAndom’s first installation with audience participation. Motorised mirrors disconcertingly respond to human activity in their midst in inquisitive, synchronised movements, with the viewer becoming both active agent and subject of the piece. Swarm, a light work of 2010, emulates the behaviour of birds in flight: the sound created by the presence of visitors causes the abundant individual light sources to respond in swarm-like formations. With Future Self, a new commission by MADE Berlin in 2012, the studio explores the direct interaction of the viewer with the full body image of the self, represented in light in three-dimensions.

Other notable commissions include Reflex, a large scale light installation that inhabited the windows of London’s Wellcome Trust for one year, and the studio’s scenography for Wayne McGregor’s production, FAR, presently on world tour. rAndom International’s kinetically responsive sculpture Fly was premiered at the last Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, while intelligent light installation Swarm Study / III is on display permanently at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

rAndom International are represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London and Paris. An overview of their work, Before the Rain, is on show in Paris 8 September – 21 December 2012. Prior to this they have exhibited at Tate Studio at Tate Modern, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich and Museum of Modern Art, New York. They have won a number of awards including Designer of the Future 2010, Prix Ars Electronica – Honourable Mention, CR – Creative Futures Award, Wallpaper* Award and were listed in the Observer’s Top Ten Creative Talent in the UK. Earlier works form part of the permanent collections at the Frankel Foundation for Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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at the Barbican appeared first on Dezeen.