Infographic of the Day: This Is Your Brain on Design

It's a brave new world for product design: Increasingly, designers are encoding reams of data into the designs themselves, using 3-D modeling technology and rapid prototyping. Recently, there was a bracelet encoded with a year's worth of weather data. And next week, at the Bits 'n' Pieces exhibition, you'll be able to see a couch crafted from brain scans.

Lucas Maassen and Dries Verbruggen created the piece by scanning Maassen's brain for three seconds, as he thought of the word "comfort." The resulting 3-D object was then sent to a CNC-milling machine, which cut out the shape in foam. Finally, it was upholstered in warm grey felt--get it, like grey matter?

If you look closer at the sofa, it's actually what the scan looked like, over time: The X-axis shows the brain waves in hertz; the Y-axis shows the various waves, which were working simultaneously; the Z-axis is time, in milliseconds.

Check it out, starting Nov. 4, at the Bits 'n' Pieces show.