Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Takeshi Iue

Takeshi Iue is strongly influenced by both traditional and contemporary Japanese design. based in Adlelaide Australia, he runs his own studio producing furniture and lighting with subtle and minimal forms. during the state of design festival he showcased a variety of pieces including his autumn stacking stool, bamboo side tables and black gallery bench. two of the stand out designs included the tripod table lamp made from solid wood with an LED lighting unit and the geometrical habit chair that was designed with an aesthetic focus on the backside (since this is what is seen when the chair is tucked into a table).


Via: Designboom

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

New Transmaterial Website Launched

Transmaterial, the online companion to Blaine Brownell's similarly titled book series, has just been relaunched as a highly searchable database of the latest in "materials that redefine our physical environment", designed to better facilitate access to critical developments in the field.

Via: Core77

Monday, July 27, 2009

100 Years of Design Manifestos


Today I came across this fantastic list of design manifestos and I had to post them.

The following list was complied by John Emerson.

Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what’s right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.

* 1909 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti

* 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Antonio Sant’Elia

* 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, Walter Gropius

* 1922 Manifesto of the Painters’ Union, Taller de Grafica Popular

* 1923 Topology of Typography, El Lissitzky

* 1923 The New Typography, László Moholy-Nagy - a call for design against the bourgeois, in support of the proletariat.

* 1959 The journal "New Graphic Design," though not explicitly a manifesto, called for a radical rethinking of design along more scientific lines.

* 1964 First Things First, Ken Garland

* 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

* 1971 La coscienza del designer, Albe Steiner

* 1978 Atlante Secondo Lenin - not so much a design manifesto, as a designed manifesto. The innovative infographics visualize theories for gaining power.

* 1979 Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development

* 1983 The Free Software announcement, later clarified in 1985’s GNU Manifesto

* 1987 Design memorandum. Dall’etica del progetto al progetto dell’etica.

* 1987 Ten Rules of Good Design, Dieter Rams

* 1989 Carta del progetto grafico

* 1990 A Scandinavian Design Council Manifesto on Nature, Ecology and Human Needs for the Future

* 1991 The Social Role of Design, Pierre Bernard

* 1991 The Munich Design Charter

* 1996 Viewer's Declaration of Independence

* 1998 Ne Pas Plier statement

* 1998 People's Communication Charter

* 2000 First Things First update - not just about advertising this time, but setting new values.

* 2000 Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, Bruce Mau (though I thought Dean Allen did a tidy job of demolishing this.)

* 2001 AIAP, diseno etica e comunicazione

* 2001 Socialist Designer's Manifesto - a series of ideologically driven limitations along the lines of Dogme 95.

* 2001 Designers Against Monoculture, Noah Scalin

* 2002 First Declaration of the St. Moritz Design Summit

* 2004 The Free Culture Manifesto

* 2006 The Public Role of the Graphic Designer

* 2006 Free Font Manifesto, Ellen Lupton

* 2006 Owner’s Manifesto, The Maker’s Bill of Rights

* 2007 The Designer’s Dilemma and subsequent Designers Accord

* 2007 1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design, Allan Chochinov

* 2008 White Night Before A Manifesto, Metahaven

* 2009 The Repair Manifesto from Platform21

Via: Social Design Notes

Heatherwick’s Paperhouse Kiosks Open for Business in Kensington

By Amanda Birch

Project: Paperhouse kiosk
Designer: Heatherwick Studio
Structural engineer: Tall consulting structural engineers
Location: The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

Newspapers have to work harder than ever to get themselves sold. Yet in London, they are often purchased from ramshackle newsstands positioned near most London Underground stations. Their frequently makeshift appearance was cause for concern for Kensington & Chelsea Council’s deputy leader Daniel Moylan.

Moylan, who has been spearheading a campaign to de-clutter the borough’s streets and make them cleaner, commissioned Heatherwick Studio to design an alternative kiosk that was more distinctive and ergonomic. The solution was a cold-patinated bronze-clad kiosk with a mild steel and plywood frame and a glass fibre roof floating over a polycarbonate clerestory window.

Two of the 2.5m-tall Paperhouse kiosks were installed earlier this year — one outside Earls Court Tube station and another at Sloane Square, transferred there from a pitch outside the Victoria & Albert Museum during last summer’s London Festival of Architecture. Two more have been built and are being fitted out at subcontractor 2D:3D’s workshop in London’s Park Royal.

Stuart Wood, a designer at Heatherwick Studio, explains that while the ambitious base model design, costing £30,000, is a constant, each kiosk is modified to match its vendor’s individual needs. For example at Sloane Square, the kiosk vendor wanted refrigerators incorporated into the interior, while the Earls Court vendor wanted extra display space for newspapers and magazines.

Toby Maclean, director of structural engineer Tall, says: “The form follows the geometry of the tiered shelves on which the magazines and newspapers are stored and displayed, and the doors themselves rotate open to reveal yet more shelving.”

“In operation, the Paperhouse is open and welcoming and when out of use it remains a sculptural object in the street scene.”

When conducting early research for the design of the kiosks, Heatherwick and Wood visited the vendors early in the morning to gain an understanding of their needs. They discovered that it took about an hour for the vendors to set up every morning and to pack up at the end of the day and there was little protection from inclement weather.

Heatherwick Studio’s response is a structure that is permanent. Each morning the vendor simply unbolts the padlock to the doors and slides them open. The newspapers, cigarettes, food and drinks are already arranged in the plywood shelving so the vendor doesn’t have to spend time setting up.

The kiosks have a flat back so that they can either be leant against a wall or left free-standing. They are designed to be stable without having to be fixed down to their sites, and are delivered on the back of a lorry, placed on the site and plugged into the electrical mains. If the pavement is uneven, six screw legs fixed to the structure’s underside can be adjusted

Standing inside the kiosk, it feels secure, and vendors have a good vantage point as the platform in the kiosk where the vendors stand is at a higher level than the customers.

David McDonald, conservation and design team leader at the borough of Kensington & Chelsea, which project-managed Paperhouse, says there has been a mixed reaction from the public. “People do remark on them, but perhaps this is more to do with the shock of the new,” he says.

The planned sites for the next two Paperhouse kiosks are still to be decided by the council, though McDonald says South Kensington tube station is a likely location.

The Structure

Toby Maclean, director at Tall Consulting Structural Engineers, says that the structure of the two-tonne Paperhouse is driven by its geometrical form.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

NOVA: Secrets of the Parthenon

Launch of the new EcoMag

EcoLabs gives us EcoMag — “a magazine about art, design & sustainability. Each issue will focus on a theme while investigating issues lying at the root of the ecological crisis”.

Where EcoLabs differs from other players in our field is our focus on the systemic causes of our unsustainable lifestyles. Rather than place the blame on individuals and work to get everyone to change their light bulbs and turn down the heat we focus on how communities can design sustainable systems and initiate the change to put this into effect. We aim to inform systems literacies & transition culture through communication design and artwork.

The theme of the first issue is ‘Future Scenarios’ which can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

via: Visual Culture

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Monday, July 13, 2009

Monday, July 6, 2009

Daniel Libeskind at TED



Daniel Libeskind builds on very big ideas. Here, he shares 17 words that underlie his vision for architecture -- raw, risky, emotional, radical -- and that offer inspiration for any bold creative pursuit.