Brintons is a carpet manufacturer in the UK that recently made a custom carpet for a music organization in Manchester. What’s unsual is the three dimensional, photo-realistic images in the carpet. Possibly a first. Here’s a sample:

Michael Trainor and William Chitham wanted to create a three-dimensional image that typifies modern 21st century music. They used high definition digital images of the specialist plugs, sockets, cables and connectors that are commonplace in the music industry and manipulated them using computer imaging techniques to create an image that could be used across two floors in the venue. The images were then coloured and shaded using bright red, blue, green and yellow before being placed on a grey background.

Apologies for the large photo but it just doesn’t look as cool with the smaller image. I think it’s fun that the various connectors lead customers through various parts of the store; a visual navigation system that’s hard to beat -provided you knew what each connector and color represented. But if you were in the music business, you probably would.

You can read more about how the carpet was made here. Except of course, I have to mention the carpets were made on Toyota looms and around here, we like all things Toyota. If you’re wondering how Toyota went from cars to carpets, it’s exactly the opposite. Toyota got its start in the apparel industry making weaving machines. The innovation that made the firm’s mark was designing a loom that would cease operating if a flaw was introduced, say a thread broke, which sent workers scurrying to repair the problem. Result: Instant quality. This concept of stopping the production line when an error occurred is the root of what we know as lean manufacturing today. Defect=stop. You may as well formalize it. Sewing operators come to a stop (hesitation and pause) every time they find a problem in sewing so you may as well root out the difficulty all official like.