A children’s book with an interactive twist, Motion Silhouette engages readers through pop-up pieces that require lighting to animate shadow pictures on each page.

The idea is to add elements of manual animation that are necessarily subjective – each person will hold, turn and highlight the cutouts in different ways.

Secondary readers or viewers (young kids watching over parents’ shoulders) will also have their own unique experience each time.

Motion Silhouette is actually a sequel to another book, simply titled Silhouette (excerpts shown above), a work which similarly uses slightly less-developed pop-up pages to create a more basic multi-dimensional experience.

From its Japanese creators, Megumi Kajiwara and Tathuhiko Nijima: “I will begin to talk about the story and illustrations shadow falls on top of the page overlap. In this work, you can enjoy the animation of shadow phantasmagoric by you move the light. Trees and become bigger and bigger, which aims to train a distant star. Story that changes depending on the page falling shadows, shadows move around the top of the page.”

Known for his geometric art installations, Aakash Nihalani is back with a mind-bending sequence of shots that show humans interacting with his reality-warping work.

In Landline, individual and paired persons become part of the project, standing in front of urban surfaces and seemingly skewered by abstract shapes.

White shirts become backdrops for black squares sliced from each set of outfits, shot through in turn by bright neon pink, green, orange and blue rectangles.

For more of this artist’s work, including additional closeups that show the trick behind each sequence, you can follow his posts on Eye Scream Sunday.

Using recycled construction waste and rapid prototyping processes, a Chinese company is showing off how 3D printing technologies can be applied to building at astonishing new speeds and scales. More specifically: Winsun New Materials used a series large 3D printers to frame up 10 houses in 24 hours with a skeleton crew of builders.

These scaled-up printers mimic the additive approach their smaller plastic-extruding cousins, but deploy a mixture of glass fiber and scrap concrete instead.

The function-first walls of these homes are designed to provide shelter via robust solid surfaces and structural support, all while minimizing materials. Built-in truss shapes (with spaces in between) are made to leave calculated gaps for the later insertion of plumbing, electrical, passive and active heading and cooling systems.

In this initial run, the resulting prefab frameworks for ten residential structures were assembled in less than 24 hours and for just a few thousand dollars a piece. Securely enclosed by a small crew of builders, the weather-proof shells are then ready to be finished by other teams.

Given the pace of urbanization and construction within the country, it seems apt that innovators from China would be pushing limits like these, hopefully with more (and similarly eco-friendly) innovations yet to come.

The bigger the idea, the harder to understand, let alone distill. That is the idea and challenge  behind this growing set of graphic designs that seek to capture big ideas in simple shapes and single-sentence explanations.

Dubbed Philographics by their creator,  Genís Carreras, the original set contained just 24 designs, but has grown into a series of 95 (so far). Idealism, Dualism, Existentialism – if you can think of an ‘ism’ from philosophy, you can almost certainly find it represented here.

And consider the alternative, hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of words in the dictionary definitions of such terms – a great way to flesh out your knowledge, but hardly the place to get started.

In fact, philosophy schools often force students to better understand philosophers and philosophies by condensing and summarizing – having to articulate long thoughts in short form helps the brain process and codify that information.

As for the forms these are taking: the Kickstarter project (funded at nearly four times the initial goal) has been such a success that what started as posters has branched into postcards and, in pre-production, softcover,  hardcover and electronic book editions as well.

Like a flip book, there is no text, and each page of these volumes contains a slightly different scene. Except instead of paging through them rapidly to reveal the story, the ‘reader’ unfolds the entire book at once into a dynamic panorama.

Artist Yusuke Oono has a whole series of these 360-degree books telling stories of daily home life, remote jungle adventures, and everything in between.

Each one unfolds into a three-dimensional scene, created using CAD-derived designs and laser-cutting programs, completed with a splash of color.

The resulting negative space allows viewers to see through pages and visualize scenes, assembling them from the two-dimensional information on each layer – like rotational cut-outs of some miniature reality (or slices of life, if you like).

Ground, trees, walls and roofs provide the context – small figures of women, men and children tell silent stories that change with perspective and light. Each page is both a moment in space and in time. Brilliant, beautiful, simple.