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Core77 Broadcasts: Live at the Nokia Design Studio in London
Nokia has over 300 designers worldwide, and ships over 1.2 million products everyday. So we were anxious to attend Nokia's recent London design event, offering a curtainpeek at their design process, ethnographic wanderings, sustainability initiatives, and plans for the future. Listen in as we chat with Younghee Jung from the services and UI design team, Rhys Newman from the Homegrown Project, and Anton Fallgren and Aki Layneh, two industrial designers out of the Copenhagen studio--all of whom share an enthusiasm for the power of design and an appreciation of the responsibilities inherent in creating the next generation of connectivity artifacts.
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Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design studio based in London, founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art. They are possibly most well-known for their Cloud installation for British Airways in Heathrow's new Terminal 5 that was featured on Core77 in January.
Apart from the Cloud, they also created 'All the Time in the World', a 22m-long electroluminescent wall along the entrance to the First and Concorde Galleries lounges. They comprise an unusual combination of disciplines, ranging from graphic and motion design through to engineering and interactive artworks. Andy Polaine talks with Sebastien Noel (right) and Eva Rucki (centre) about Troika's inventive approach and the secret life of electronic gadgets.
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Photo: Joshua White, courtesy of SCI-Arc.
The impossible-to-categorize work of LA-based designer Elena Manferdini has been making waves throughout the worlds of fashion, industrial design, engineering and architecture. Her stunning laser-cut creations have nabbed her clients from Fiat to Valentino, and she was recently featured in the MOCA exhibition Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture which opens at the Somerset House in London this Thursday.
For a new site-specific installation, MERLETTI< inter >LACE, Manferdini interprets traditional Italian lacemaking techniques in a dramatic canopy that drapes across the SCI-Arc Gallery in downtown LA. Corelifornia correspondent Alissa Walker caught up with her at the opening just as the DJ cranked up the techno music. MERLETTI< inter >LACE is up until May 11 at SCI-Arc.
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Jason Bruges, founder of Jason Bruges Studio, is one of the key figures in a growing trend of cross-disciplinary studios working across public interactive artworks, architecture, installation and events.
Some projects are high-profile public installations, such a the studio's Wind To Light project, commissioned by onedotzero, used 500 mini wind turbines to generate power, which illuminated hundreds of mounted LEDs, creating firefly-like fields of light, visually interpreting the power of the wind. Others are smaller scale but no less engaging, such as the interactive shared space for Beaufort Community School in Gloucester.
Andy Polaine talks to Jason in his London studio about his roots in architecture, the journey to interactive surfaces, sustainability and his thoughts about giving this emerging area a proper name.
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Paola Antonelli's exhibitions for MoMA often feel like a science fair planted in a museum. Her current show "Design and the Elastic Mind" is no exception, showcasing the fertile relationships between design and science, sculpture, engineering, architecture, and computer programming. Alex Terzich attends the press preview and opening, where he interviews Chuck Hoberman and Peter Hall, and sits with Paola Antonelli for a longer interview the following day.
With backgrounds in sculpture and engineering, Hoberman is a kind of live prototype for the ideal Elastic Mind contributor. He specializes in the design of transformable objects at scales ranging from toys to tents to full-scale architectural enclosures. His kinetic sculpture "Emergent Surface" was commissioned by MoMA specifically for the show and he discusses its origins and ideals.
Peter Hall is a critic who has written extensively about product design, data visualization and emergent cartographic practices. His essay "Critical Visualization" is featured in the exhibition catalog. On opening night he weighs in some of the work in the "Data Visualization" section of the show and outlines his essay on critical visual practice.
Paola Antonelli began her curatorial career at MoMA in 1995 with Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. Her exhibitions are consistently popular, challenging and expansive. In this interview she reflects on opening night and our emotional attachments to objects.
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London-based Hector Serrano was recently hailed as "Britain's finest young designer" by Space magazine, although he is originally from Spain. Much of the work coming out of Hector's studio demonstrates a playful curiosity about our emotional relationships with the objects we encounter and possess. This is skilfully blended with an imaginative take on sustainability and the future of product design. Here he tells Andy Polaine about the challenges facing designers, tourist souvenirs of the future and giant clouds off plastic floating off the coast of Hawaii.
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There was a ton of material during the discussion and Q&A portions of Core77's Offsite event, Design, Wit, and the Creative Act, but we've put together a tasty sampler of some of the best.
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After a brief introduction by Allan Chochinov, Ze Frank takes the stage at Core77's Offsite Event at the Art Directors Club in New York City: Design, Wit, and the Creative Act.
In this video, Ze kicks off the day by introducing Marcel Duchamp's The Creative Act, and breaking down the triad of players in the metaphoric room--here, Designer, Object, and Audience--talking about the interrelationships and dynamics between the three. "What is the designer's relationship to wit?" "How does this translate to the actual process of making things?" "As you're designing things, do you have a proto-audience member in your mind that you're having a conversation with?" And finally, "What happens when the audience takes control of a piece--completely misinterprets it?"
All of these juicy questions and more in this wonderful start to a provocative (and amusing) day.
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You've probably read about it, but if you haven't, spoiler alert: Tobias Wong's appearance at the Art Directors Club in New York City for Core77's Offsite Event, Design, Wit, and the Creative Act, was not exactly on stage.
What does that mean? Well, Tobias was indeed in attendance, but he was sitting in the audience, enjoying the day like everyone else. And instead of taking the mic for his presentation--and his director's chair for the panel discussion portion--he sat amongst the crowd, drinking in the design, wit, and creative--in this case subversive act--by having a stand-in take his place at the lectern.
Rama Chorpash, chair of the Undergraduate ID Dept. at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a great designer to boot, did what can only be described as a pitch-perfect job of presenting Tobias's work (and later answering, Q&A as Tobias, remaining authentic to the designs as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the Wong oevre.
Turns out that the two of them had rehearsed the event to death, preparing responses to any discussion points that might come up, and treating the event not as a stunt but as an artwork.
Chorpash later remarked that "there are a lot of parallels between doing this [switch] and teaching, because in teaching you need to give up your identity a bit to better understand the different models and possibilities of design. To be able to talk about Philippe Starck, for example, you need to understand where he's coming from."
People in the audience who knew Tobias or knew what he looked like were in on the joke, and those who didn't needed only to look in their program for Tobias's headshot. Still, an incredible gesture that provided a sly twist to the day and a workout for Chorpash.
Watch 'til the end of the video, when you can see the two of them together, never breaking character throughout the cocktail reception.
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Paul Budnitz takes command of the room at Core77's Offsite Event at the Art Directors Club in New York City: Design, Wit, and the Creative Act.
In this video, Paul talks about the role of wit and creativity in the work of Kidrobot, and in his own creative acts. After a quick review of some of the merch, he discusses abstraction and scale, followed by an amazing sequence on writers' block and how creativity is beaten out of us at an early age. (DO NOT MISS THIS!) It is essential to learn to kill the ego, he argues, because "to be creative, we need to find ways to work around our minds."
Next, he delves into the roles of nostalgia and appropriation, "since Kidrobot uses a lot of appropriation", discussing the SUCKLORD and his StarWars toys. He ends with a movie from the same, an hysterical romp through, well...you'll just have to watch it to see.
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Steven Heller returns to the Art Directors Club in New York City for Core77's Offsite Event: Design, Wit, and the Creative Act.
Heller keeps his remarks short at the start, telling a couple of jokes and then moving quickly to his main event: "Humor is all about timing," he asserts, "and since I don't think I have much of it, I did a little film for you." Well, we don't buy the first part of that sentence, but the audience was glad to sit back and enjoy a delightful, top-20 list of "what's so funny." We've got the reel film here [sic], so you won't have to sit through a crappy video of a crappy projection. Promise.
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Core77 welcomed Kelly Dobson to the Art Directors Club in New York City for its Offsite Event: Design, Wit, and the Creative Act.
Dobson starts out talking about our relationship with objects and technology, examining how we communicate with them and the role they play in our lives. Showing footage from films she made around Screambody (a pouch-like device worn around the chest that users can scream into and play back later), as well as Core-fave Blendie (a tricked out blender that users growl at to activate), the role of humor and wit took center stage through, most certainly, acts of creation. You've gotta watch the videos to get the full hit here, and the last one--focusing on machine therapy and how machines can "comfort" other machines--is a riot.
Find more of Kelly's work here.
WATCH NOW (13 min.) | iTunes | More Broadcasts
