**2013 Webby Awards, Official Honoree—Mobile & Apps Best Visual Design**
**FWA Mobile of the Day—12 February 2013**
**2012 Pixel Award Nomination & People’s Champ Winner — Magazine Category.**
**19th AIMIA Award Nomination — Best Application for a Tablet.**

Welcome to issue 63 of Object magazine, with a focus on Bio-Inspiration, a major profile of artist and designer Janet Laurence, a feature of the recent fab8nz conference in New Zealand, and more, all housed in a beautiful and interactively playful app.

This issue has been designed for your iPad, responding to your touch. Click here to download it now from the App Store for free.

From the moment you open this app you will see that it is not like those that have come before it, with the title page growing into contents that move and respond to your touch. An essay by Lisa Cahill introduces Bio-Inspiration, a growing discipline seeing science, nature and design converge to find better solutions drawn from those already realised in the natural world. Around this circle four profiles of designers using Bio-Inspiration in their practice.

Australian artist and designer Janet Laurence has spent three decades creating celebrated works with a strong bent to the natural world. Patrick Abboud explores her rich history and huge body of work with a deep and multifaceted profile — multi-media and in depth, it is an immersive exploration of her career involving sight, sound and touch.

Fab Labs are a burgeoning global distributed manufacturing, education and design network, born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now spanning 35 countries. Delegates from around the world attended their recent conference in Wellington, sharing developments, innovations and ideas for the future. This introduction to Fab Labs and wrap up of the conference and symposium explores the current and future possibilities of this growing network on the verge of an explosion.

Plus, in this issue we introduce Bonnie Abbott, who will write three responses to interviews of emerging designers originally published on her own blog Gather & Fold, which will update in the app over time, and reviews Swept Away from the Museum of Art and Design in New York and Life In Your Hands, a touring exhibition from Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery.

Not merely a magazine in digital form, Object magazine issue 63 embraces the format to truly immerse you, the reader, into these fascinating stories of forward-thinking design and beautiful art and craft. Moving image, written word, audio interviews, soundscapes, music and interaction combine to make the experience rich and rewarding.

If you don’t have a tablet, don’t worry — you can access the content right here on this page. Click the cover image below to open the browser version of the magazine in a new tab. As the file is quite large, full of all of this issue’s wonderful content, it might take a moment to load — please be patient. Once you are in the magazine, you can navigate forward and back through articles, or return to the contents, using the controls at the bottom of the page.

This is the fourth issue of Object magazine available for iPad, brought to you by Object: Australian Design Centre. You can download previous issues by following the links within this app, or you can find:

Issue 60, International Ceramics, here;
Issue 61, Design Thinking/Design Action, here;
Issue 62, Studios & Eco-Fashion, here.