Core77

The Northern Oddities showing at Ivana Helsinki Concept Store features "eight curious Finnish design brands on their crusade to New York City." This is the first time any of these designers have sent their work "beyond the borders of the Old Continent," and their colorful, graphic patterns and fun, approachable products are a safe bet for a warm reception during NY Design Week.

If you make your way past Ivana Helsinki's dresses and blouses you'll see a table set with Northern Oddities' wares: kitchen accessories, lamps, toys and paper goods, like the plywood notebooks by Private Case. The notebooks come in two sizes and are made from birch wood, a material indigenous to Finland, where they use it for everything from "hand tools and furnishing to bridges and churches." The wood is thin enough not to be bulky and hard enough to provide a sturdy surface to write on. There's even a handy little pencil holder on the side.

Sanna Pelliccioni made the boldest statement with Bombo, her line of colorful kitchen accessories (above) with bright blue and yellow graphics of families printed on hand towels, serving trays and plates.

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Years ago a Frank Lloyd Wright sketch of what appears to be a globe stand (above) surfaced at the Foundation in his name, which holds archives for more than 20,000 of his drawings. A Chicago-based company named Replogle Globe, the world's largest manufacturer of globes, approached the Foundation seeking permission to realize it. Permission granted, they produced the Wright Globe, a walnut pedestal supporting an antique-hued globe and standing at 39 inches.

The drawing is an unidentified concept for one of the Prairie Homes that Mr. Wright designed in the early 1900s. The only marking on the drawing is in his handwriting and says, "Something like this." The proportions, and interpriation, of the drawing were calculated based on the scale of other drawings from this time period.

They apparently met with some success, as they then produced an entire line of Foundation-authorized Frank-Lloyd-Wright-branded globes, the others not drawn from sketches but rather cobbled together from a combination of Wright's design signatures.

I have mixed feelings about this. But I think it would be awesome if a missing next page in the sketchbook surfaced, and it turns out that the scale was all wrong, and that Mr. Wright actually intended to venture into outer space to encase the Earth in a really big walnut pedestal space station.

In my wildest dreams, it comes to light that the sketch had been doctored to remove the following annotation:

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Lead Interaction Designer - Touch Interfaces & Applications
Bresslergroup
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Bresslergroup is seeking an experienced (5+ years), full-time interaction designer to join our team of UI designers, researchers and industrial designers. The designer will work on an interesting variety of projects including interfaces within consumer products, medical devices and industrial equipment as well as stand-alone applications.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Artist: lunchbreath
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The British are coming! Tom Dixon continues his global takeover with the launch of London Underground, an independent satellite event staged during NY Design Week/ICFF. Held in the basement of the Bleeker Street Theater, the show will debut the Luminosity lighting collection in the United States as well as host a special off-line Fab.com x Tom Dixon pop-up store. In addition, visitors can grab a cup of Stumptown Coffee or check out Surface Magazine's retro-'60s inspired broadcasting station.

Core77 had an opportunity to chat with the trailblazing designer about being a Brit in New York during Design Week, the future of manufacturing and his opinions on light, love and rock 'n' roll.

London Underground
Bleeker Street Theater Basement
45 Bleeker Street and Lafayette
Through May 22nd

Core77: We're counting down tonight's kickoff of 2012's New York Design Week. A lot of European designers skip over New York after the madness of Milan. As a designer who has had a consistent presence at ICFF and New York Design Week, why is it important for you to be here every year?

Tom Dixon: Well, we've always thought it was an interesting market and we like hanging out in New York anyway. We decided several years ago to invest in the United States properly. We've been taking baby steps to get the infrastructure in place—having a little office there, a partnership with the warehouse and taking it seriously. A lot of people just think that because I speak English they can just go to New York and sell things and people will understand. For anybody who's ever been in, I dunno, rock and roll—you've got to tour. You've got to be there. You've got to invest and spend time.

You've got to be consistent in your presence, otherwise, America just doesn't happen. So, we made a decision and we're pleased we did because people seem to like what we're doing. It feels just like a beginning of something a bit bigger. We also think that the United States has been quite conservative for a long time. We thought it was time to breathe a bit of fresh air.

We're definitely seeing more and more of your work here in the United States. In fact, this week you launched a pop-up store with Fab.com both online and in a physical pop-up at the London Underground exhibition.

America is so good at defining new business models. I think it's the same thing with the furniture industry worldwide—it has been very acting very conventionally. It's only really Ikea that does things in a really different manner. It is really interesting to see how fast and how quickly Fab.com is gaining traction and how it really challenges the way you distribute things. Things just went online this week so we don't know what the results are yet, but it's kind of fascinating to see that there are a million people over there that are interested in design in a slightly different way.

That brings us to your current collection, Luminosity. One of the things that I really enjoyed was the way that you're really playing with transparency and the process of actually creating these pieces. What were some of the design considerations you were thinking about when crafting this new collection?

We tend to think more about the sculpture of the object rather than what it's really doing. It was time to think a bit more about the effects and the functionalities—the effects that these lights were giving and whether we could think a bit more about how you build a character and the lighting in space rather than just thinking about the surface and the shape of the object itself.

It's still a really fantastic field in lighting at the moment because it's something which really is evolving and changing rapidly—through government legislation, technical development and more efficient ways of lighting things. People feel slightly nervous about using these new lighting technologies. I mean, everybody is much more comfortable with the incandescent bulb—you know what 100 watts does and you know that you're going to like the light quality.

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Audi is known for their four-wheel drive prowess, with the Quattro mentality embodied in their very logo. But at yesterday's Worthersee AutoNews 2012 show in Austria, they pulled the sheets off of a two-wheeled creation: Their lithium-ion-battery-powered E-bike Worthersee concept.

We've seen automakers design bicycles to tuck in the trunk before, but this one isn't intended as a crunchy green adjunct to driving; instead it's meant to be an unabashed display of Audi's design and technology prowess. They make no bones about the fact that the bike is intended for "sport, fun and tricks," which explains why the thing produces more torque than my VW Golf did and has a top speed of 50 freaking miles per hour.

The Audi e-bike Worthersee combines the Audi brand's principal competences - design, ultra, connect and e-tron—and explores the limits of what is technically feasible in terms of design, lightweight construction, networking and electric mobility. [The] ultra-light carbon-fiber frame weighs only 1,600 grams (3.53 lb). It makes use of bionic principles derived from nature. Material reinforcements are needed only at the points where loads actually occur. The swinging arm for the rear wheel is also made of CFRP. All in all, the Audi e-bike Worthersee represents the full extent of the brand's expertise in ultra-lightweight design.

The bike has three levels of power: You can either provide all of the juice by pedaling, provide some of the juice with the electric motor taking up the slack, or have the electric motor do all the work. Beyond that are two somewhat bizarre-sounding "Wheelie" modes, where you're meant to tip the bike back on its rear wheel and ride it like a Segway, with the motor taking care of the balance and braking or accelerating when you lean forwards or backwards.

Click here to read more details.

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If you thought Field Notes, the now famous 48-page memo book, was just another Futura-fueled riff on retro design, you obviously never read the statement on the back flap. "Inspired by the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Co., Portland, Oregon—in conjunction with Coudal Partners, Chicago, Illinois—brings you "FIELD NOTES" in hopes of offering "An honest memo book worth fillin' up with GOOD INFORMATION."

Draplin Design Co. is the brainchild of Aaron Draplin, a thoroughbred American who's serious about graphic design and how it's evolved over the past century, especially when it comes to everyday items for everyday, working people. After two decades of trawling to swap meets, flea markets, yard sales and antique fairs for gems of Americana (otherwise known as junking), Draplin has amassed an incredible collection of old memo books, simple, saddle-stitched pocket books that were once given as freebies to farmers and those in the agricultural business to advertise products like feed, tools or machine parts.

Draplin wasn't only interested in the books as ephemera, he wanted to know who designed them, who printed them and who stitched them together. He describes them as "purely utilitarian and free of anyone attaching anything cool or uncool or ironic to it...Some are really colorful and others are really, really spare. They're all different, so I want to think that someone was actually going through and laying every little bit and piece out."

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This invention is the opposite of the Schticky situation we posted about earlier, where you've got a mundane product and need to spice it up with a lively video; the Une Bobine coil is such a good idea, with merits so instantly obvious, that the boring video (below) does nothing to increase its appeal.

A great example of exploiting material properties, the Une Bobine takes the segmented, flexible metal cables of the sort used in industrial light fixtures and adapts it for iPhone charging, allowing the cable itself to serve as a stand.

While the idea is simple, manufacturing it isn't so easy: "Each end of the connector requires multiple injection molds to create the custom fitting in the housings that we need to securely attach to the flexible cable," writes designer Jon Fawcett in his Kickstarter pitch. "The connector housings are also sonically welded together, which requires additional tools to produce each end. Your pledges will directly pay for these startup costs required to produce the cable."

Perhaps he should change "will directly pay for" to "have directly paid for;" at press time this was yet another wild Kickstarter success, with the $25 device garnering $70,000, handily smashing its original sub-$10,000 goal with 29 days to spare.

And now for aforementioned boring video:

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During the recent CicLAvia, cyclists stretch as far as the eye can see on 7th St. from MacArthur Park into Downtown. All images by the author.

Los Angeles is a city of cars. This we know. Public space is few and far between, taking the form of long streets like Melrose Ave or the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Public-private spaces like the Grove and the Third Street Promenade create the illusion of a walking city, but most people first have to drive to get there.

But Angelenos are yearning for public space, and recent interventions are pointing at a way to create that space. The most prominent, certainly, is CicLAvia, a biannual event that celebrated its fourth installation this month.

CicLAvia is inspired by the ciclovías of Latin America, a tradition started by Bogotá, Colombia, a traffic-heavy city which shuts down streets every Sunday. In Los Angeles, this means shutting down over 10 miles of streets, stretching west from Beverly and Vermont, through to MacArthur Park, Downtown and Boyle Heights, with a north-south trail from Olvera Street to Central and Olympic. The distance pales in comparison to Bogotá's 85 miles of street closures, but as any Angeleno would attest, 10 miles alone would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.

It was my first CicLAvia this year, and it was stunning. The city that I grew up in suddenly felt smaller, more free, disentangled from the traffic that makes it so infamous. I could feel the city air, see the smiles on my fellow cyclists, gaze up at the buildings and notice details I never had time for when driving by. Key areas created an open public space on the streets for cyclists and non-cyclists alike—in MacArthur Park, for example, you could sit down, listen to live music, eat tacos, and just people watch.

CicLAvia's success has been a thrill to witness, but its ambitions and scale are also difficult to reproduce. Costing about $100,000, mostly for street closures and the accompanying safety presence, CicLAvia represents the extraordinary collective effort of a 13-person board, whose talents range from social media strategy to arts organizing to civil engineering. A recent piece in LA Weekly described the original founders, "As if casting for some kind of prisoner-of-war escape film, the group's initial members each had the exact higher-order specialties you would need to produce an impossible-sounding seven-mile, open-air, closed-streets, public event in Los Angeles."

CicLAvia raises much of its funds through donations. In a quieter section on the northern trail, a sign asks cyclists to text in a donation to keep the project going.

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TOKEN's founder's Emrys Berkower and Will Kavesh have a massive workshop on the ground floor of an old factory on the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn where they're set up to work with glass, metal and wood. They can draw up plans for a chair, for example, and walk into the next room to build it. In other words, it's a furniture maker's dream. A few weeks ago they were nice enough to set some time aside from their busy preparations for ICFF to talk about how they grew their studio, what they're working on now and what makes a good 'hangover chair.' Scroll through all the photos below to see a sneak peek of the new pieces they'll be exhibiting this weekend.

Origins
After Will and Emrys met at Alfred University in the mid 90s, they moved to New York where Emrys settled into the glass blowing community and Will began building furniture for Rogan. When Will needed some help he'd call up Emrys, and the two worked like this, collaborating on lighting and furniture projects until they decided to strike out on their own. They continue to handle Rogan's Objects line, but after doing custom design-build jobs, beginning with their first gig converting an NYU classroom, they needed their own space and so they made the move out to a spacious studio in Red Hook.

Even though custom jobs for clients took up most of their time, their goal was always to start their own line of furniture. "After two years of prototyping we finally just said, we're not going to do it unless we just start making it ourselves and building it," said Emrys. That was in 2009, when they officially began the TOKENnyc product line.

They still take on design-build jobs because, as Emrys explained, "Those custom projects are challenging and inform your own work because you're problem solving and coming up with different production or manufacturing systems to build something."
"It's like still being in school, in a way," Will added.

Ethos
Will and Emrys describe their designs as promoting purposeful and considered living. "It's about living with objects that have a real task in mind," said Will. "TOKEN would never design a really super fluffy down chair or couch that you want to be inside of when you're recovering from a hangover - we would never design something like that."
"Although," Emrys is quick to add, "there's a place in the world for that. But that's not what we want to promote. We would promote something that's more active and engaged."

Take, for example, the TOKEN Lounge Chair. "If you sit in that chair it's definitely a relaxed pose," said Emrys. "It's definitely a comfortable chair, but you don't want to curl up and watch a movie in that chair. You feel a relaxed engagement. You might want to read a book and not fall asleep reading it." That very purposeful aesthetic is evident in all aspects of their work, right down to the joints, which Will describes using the the industry term "work holding, a structural solution that would be used while making something, but we've adopted that vocabulary."

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