Posted by
Sam Dunne | 1 Oct 2012
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It seems like every year the London Design Festival extends its creative tendrils further and further into the metropolis. This year it's the turn of Seven Dials—the miniature round-about where seven quaint Covent Garden streets meet— to be colonised by the creative great and good.
Dezeen have comissioned 7 renowned designers to erect an installation each above one one of the Seven Dials cobbled roads. For the most part, the odd 'hipstallations' were inspired by the areas colourful development from inner-city to slum to thriving cafe culture hot spot.
The most visually spectacular of the lot would have to be Canadian designer Philippe Malouin's clear PVC "Bunting," a playful twist on a British street icon. We also particularly enjoyed "The Birds of Seven Dials," an arch of bird cages representing the areas forgotten past as a bird market—the cages poignantly left open and empty.
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 1 Oct 2012
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100 was a popular number at London Design Festival this year. 100% France showed off new work from its young designers at 100% Design, LDF's answer to New York's ICFF. Meanwhile, across town in Shoreditch, 100% Norway created a special exhibition as part of the design shows at Tent London, where they haven't made an appearance since 2006. The group's London-based curator, Henrietta Thompson, and co-curator, Benedicte Sunde, selected works by 22 designers, most of whom are up-and-coming young Norwegians fresh out of design school with a few iterations on classic regional designs thrown into the mix, like the Popcorn chair by Sven Ivar Dysthe and the Garden chair by Peter Opsvik (above), which visitors were eager to climb up into to view the show from its tree-like seat.
After a five year hiatus, Norway seems anxious to show how, according to Thompson, "after spending years in the shadows of its rightfully much lauded neighbors creatively, it has now fully emerged as a significant global player in its own right." This is not to say, however, that 100% Norway wishes to push a cultural stereotype or point of view wholly separate from their fellow Scandinavians. "That notion is redundant," Thompson said, especially "as national borders become ever more blurred with designers completing their education all over the world." What the exhibition does reflect is Norway's history of craftsmanship, its ideals of "modesty and purity," and its focus on the quality of materials and the simplicity of the object. In that way, Norwegian design isn't any different than Scandinavian design in general, and the very excellent work on display is evidence enough that Norway is no shrinking violet, but is entirely capable of standing tall amongst its Scandinavian design brethren and potentially even leading the pack. Take a look at our five favorite pieces from the show.
"Mono sofa" - Anderssen & Voll for LK Hjelke
Two of the founding members of former design studio Norway Says, Torbjorn Anderssen and Espen Voll, broke out in 2009 to establish their eponymous studio, which has gone from "strength to strength," launching products for manufacturers such as La Palma, Established & Son, and Muuto. The Mono sofa, their latest product, was recently awarded the prize for Design Excellence from the Norwegian Design Council.
"Bunadspledd blankets" - Andreas Engesvik for Mandal Veveri
Meanwhile Andreas Engesvik, the third founding member of Norway Says, hasn't done too shabbily for himself since the studio disbanded. He's created a wide range of products for Iitalia, Muuto, Ligne Roset, and Asplund. His Bunadspledd blankets are inspired by bunads, a 19th century national costume for both men and women with over 400 variations that differ by region.
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Posted by
LinYee Yuan | 1 Oct 2012
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Steel rebar, concrete and glass are familiar currency in contemporary China. When Beijing-based architect Sara Bernardi first started working in the country, she used these materials in constructing buildings. Now, with her independent studio practice MICROmacro, Bernardi has created a furniture collection employing the same elements.
The CON-TRADITION collection draws inspiration from traditional Chinese furniture archetypes. Based on the, "apparent contradiction between the essentiality of CONtemporary style and the preciousness of the TRADITIONal Chinese antique style," Bernardi strips away the decorative and reconstitutes the furniture using rebar to draw out familiar shapes.
Concrete and Rebar stools inspired by the ubiquitous street stools.
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Posted by
LinYee Yuan | 28 Sep 2012
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When Lin Lin, co-founder of the Chinese design consultancy Jellymon says something, people usually listen. Her tiny frame conceals a ebullient personality and creative energy that has propelled Jellymon's unique graphic branding vocabulary into an insider's language of what's fun and cool in youth-oriented China.
At this year's Beijing Design Week, Lin Lin took over five rooms in a Dashilar Hutong to present her latest creative projects to the public—accessories and furniture, a new food endeavor and a sneaker branding concept.
Triple X Ohhh! Sauce from Jellymon's Spoonfull of Sugar Cafe
GFG is a personal project from Lin Lin that is an exercise of her passion for product design. The debut collection includes a range of accessories, furniture and tableware. I love the punchout DIY nipple tassles (after the jump) that are packaged in a beautifully designed paper envelope, perfect for gifting. A small group of linked, overlapping "Top Me" rings are an obvious nod to Vivienne Westwood's Knuckledusters but display a delicacy and femininity in the details.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 28 Sep 2012
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Although not technically part of the London Design Festival at all, the proximity of the Science Museum to all the designerly action in South West London this month, has resulted in many a festival goer straying over to the Google Web Lab exhibition that promises—a smidgen ambitiously, we soon discovered—to 'bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life'.
Keen to fill our minds with the secrets and web wizardry of everyone's favourite internet Goliath—dreaming of the multi-millions our future tech start-ups would make, when endowed with this supreme knowledge—we bounded down to the dimly lit basement and entered 'the lab.'
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 28 Sep 2012
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At first the O furniture series by British design studio, JiB, appear to be a lovely but more or less conventional console or credenza, but if you stand over them you see a collection of hand crafted ceramic pots nestled in the sunken top, changing the geometry of the pieces completely. "Handcrafted by a celebrated ceramicist, Sun Kim," specially for this collaboration with JiB, the off-white ceramic vessels are designed to be used as planters or small storage, but we think the arrangement looks best when they have mixed uses - a few for carefully selected tall and low-lying plants, a few for holding house keys, barware or loose change, and a few left empty to balance the composition.
At 100% Design during London Design Festival, Je-Uk Kim, who founded JiB just a few months ago in April 2012, had the two pieces arranged simply, with just a few orchids to keep from distracting from the beauty of the furniture and their unique sunken feature. Of course, their use is entirely up to the user. You could remove them completely, use the space for storing books and scatter the pots around your home. We happen to think filling each planter with soft green moss would set off the white lacquered body unit and the natural oak legs perfectly. The smaller console version has six ceramic pots with wooden lids that are well suited for storing dry goods in the kitchen.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 28 Sep 2012
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What with the realities of urban life, the design of municipal benches is subject to any number of creativity restricting limitations—leaving our city landscapes lined with fairly generic, sturdy, functional and all just a little uninspiring public seating.
Teaming up with the London Design Festival organisers this year, renowned British manufacturer Established & Sons have commissioned a series of one off benches for the V&A's epic John Madejski Garden space, specifying only the material each designer must use in their creation.
On a sunny day of festival going we snuck in some cheeky shots of revelers testing out the designer seating on display.
AL_A architects, creators of last years V&A doorway installation "Timber Wave" teamed up with Catalan ceramicists in Barcelona to produce their layered tile seating.
A magnificent, monolithic, mock-marble slab of bench from the guys at Industrial Facility.
Portuguese designer Fernando Brizio contributes a very Iberian pig hoof shaped bench made from his country's finest cork.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 27 Sep 2012
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It seems like everybody's got their own anniversaries to celebrate during this landmark 10th London Design Festival.
The Fritz Hansen Store, smack dab in the centre of town, is inviting festival revelers to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Arne Jacobson's St. Catherine's College design for Oxford University and the bespoke chairs the architect and designer created for the campus.
As well as launching new variants of the chairs for LDF, the store also hopes to attract some design enthusiast with, what they are calling, 'An Educated Exhbition' featuring all sorts of wonderful design geekery, from slides, sketches and scrap books from Arne's personal collection to charming photographs and early prototypes of his furniture.
Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 27 Sep 2012
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Four years ago La Boite Concept, the French sound product designer and manufacturer, introduced La Premiere, a hi-fi laptop dock in a tall, standing unit with an overall appearance that can best be compared with an arcade game. Its retro body yet superior acoustics wowed analog fans, but not everyone has space or the budget for what's essentially a modern day jukebox. With that in mind, La Boite Concept develop a new line of sleeker and more functional laptop docks called the LD series, which they debuted at the 100% France exhibition at 100% Design during London Design Festival.
The LD series, available in 100, 120 or 130 watts, is still the first and only high end docking station dedicated to the laptop, as opposed to the iPhone. The USB DAC Hi-Fi sound card is integrated inside the speaker to improve the sound quality of your laptop independently from its sound output, which is projected from six speakers - two medium woofers (13cm), two tweeters with domes (silk 25mm) and two full range rear drivers for the unit's patented Wide Stereo Sound, a system developed by La Boite Concept that improves the range of the surround sound so that a listener positioned at any point in the room gets the full surround sound effect. And whether you want to use the desk to work on or DJ from, the desktop is made from silicon in a range of colors to prevent the speakers' vibrations from shaking the laptop.
Full specs are available on La Boite Concept's website.
Posted by
Sam Dunne | 27 Sep 2012
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For the second year running, the V&A museum and its supporters have used London Design Festival (and perhaps the inevitable few too many glasses of bubbly that surrounds it) to gather some funds for the innovatively named 'Design Fund to Benefit the V&A'.
The little extra dosh is set aside to enable the museum to purchase stand out examples of contemporary design—or, in other words, some very attractive, if obscenely expensive, bits of furniture— acquiring the design icons of the future, if you will. Amongst their haul this year was this worryingly delicate 'SOFA_XXXX' by Yuya Ushida that is, in fact, an expandable and contractable seating solution for cramped living conditions. Also on display was the organic form of Dutch designer Joris Laaumann's 'Bone Chaise' complete with the (almost more interesting) wooden cast for the chair.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 26 Sep 2012
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So, it turns out Keiichi Matsuda's epic 'Prism' insallation wasn't the only installation to be taking over the secret spaces of the V&A museum this London Design Festival.
German designer and artist Rolf Sachs has been playing with the vast stone stairwells of the museum by dropping individual droplets of bright, primary coloured pigments six storeys earthwards to explode in a burst of swirling colour into a small glass water tank.
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 26 Sep 2012
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To celebrate BE OPEN's Sound Portal installation in Trafalgar Square during London Design Festival and to wax poetic on the nature of sound, Wired Magazine Associate Editor, Tom Cheshire, hosted a panel to discuss the future of sound and how our "sensory systems can help us design more innovative products that enrich our everyday lives." In addition to Lauren Stewart, a neuroscientist currently doing research on musical nueroplasticity, and the composer Matthew Herbert, Tom Dixon was set to start off the discussion on sound design, though through an error in the briefing he received he prepared ten minutes on how he designed a vibrator instead.
Bone, the vibrator commissioned by two women who, after working together for Tesco, decided to create a brand that introduced gallery-worthy products into the design-deprived adult toy industry. They approached Dixon, who described himself as "a British man, so I'm not used to talking about sex at all. But there was something about the project I couldn't turn down." He observed that most sex toys "are so far removed from the pleasure and sensuality of the act." By Dixon's estimate, 50% of sex toys are based on the male phallus, which 70% of women think is "an ugly object." Once you surround that object with more ugly design, from the packaging, materials, graphics and photography, you have a product category ripe for redesign.
Instead of silicone and plastic, Dixon proposed that given the intimate nature and proximity to the body, a sex toy should be more like a piece of jewelry, an object that's not only hygienic and a pleasure to touch, but precious as well. The consumer sex toy market hovers around the £15–£35 price range, so why not make a more expensive object in a market mostly devoid of luxury items? Getting back to the panel's focus on sound, Dixon also found the motors used in most sex toys are far too loud. "In a time when your senses are heightened, the motor only becomes that much more distracting." Thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones, miniature, motorized vibrators are not only reliable but readily available as well.
For Dixon's first model he paired a cell phone vibrator and a watch battery in a sterling silver vibrator worn like a ring. However, even with Kate Moss' celebrity endorsement, the 10-minute battery life rendered it a commercial failure. But Dixon was determined, so for his next model he moved away from jewelry and turned to sculpture for inspiration, thinking now that a vibrator should be treated more like a tool and less like a toy. He used a more powerful yet completely silent motor that can be recharged with a phone charger, and he gave the elegant sculptural form a weight that lends it a material quality reflected in its £120 price tag. And instead of plastic blister packaging, Bone is nestled into a beautiful and anonymous-looking dark box. Though this was most certainly not the talk Wired and BE OPEN intended to elicit for their panel, it was actually a great introduction to discussing the senses in general before honing in on sound and its pleasurable and pervasive effects on the body and mind.
Posted by
Sam Dunne | 26 Sep 2012
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As a joint celebration of the a 10th successful year of London Design Festival, and the 25th year of the world famous Conran shop at the Michelin Building in London's leafy Kensington area, Sir Terrence has turned his flagship into a tribute to the iconically British pillar box red, as sported by post boxes, phones boxes and London buses.
Whilst a lot of the pieces on display (and for sale) were, of course, well know design icons given a splash of colour, there was also a small amount of new pieces on show. We particularly enjoyed getting a good look at Sebastian Bergne's clever Measuring Square Scarf and its gorgeous minimalist red box. A great deal of noise was also being made about Alexander Taylors "Grip" LED flashlight, apparently inspired by BMX handle grips. We did appreciate the demonstration of the soft rubber torch suction-cupping to walls, but we were mightly disappointed to find that torch doesn't turn on an off with a squeeze—rather a slightly apologetic button on the handle end.
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 25 Sep 2012
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Image courtesy Schon Magazine
Though Swarovski may first call to mind bedazzling rather than design, their sponsorship of and collaboration with artists and designers over the past decade have allowed people like Maarten Baas and Paul Cocksedge to work with materials and resources that have "served as an experimental platform for leading figures in design to conceptualize, develop and share their most radical ideas." This year Swarovski partnered with Design Museum London on "Digital Crystal," a new exhibition for which they asked 13 artists, designers and design studios to use cut crystal in projects and installations that "explore the meaning of memory in the digital age," specifically how our intangible digital database of images and video have replaced more permanent methods of memory-saving like diaries, printed photographs and scrap books, and how that shift might impact that way we remember our past.
Image courtesy Mocoloco
You can Tweet a fleeting moment to "Lolita," Ron Arad's spiral chandelier (#DigitalCrystal or text +44 (0) 78 6002 1492) and watch your message swirl around and down its form, lasting only for seconds, or the lifespan of a typical Tweet. Yves Behar lights a black room with "Amplify," a cluster of faceted paper shades lit from within by a single crystal. The lanterns create a darker and moodier space than Arad's more ebullient crowd sourced installation. Nearby, Anton Alvarez made a high-speed spinning machine that wraps Swarovski crystal yarn at random around its clunky wooden body.
One the smallest yet strongest pieces comes from Hye-Yeon Park, whose "Unfamiliar Mass" takes an unintelligible circular swirl of solid crystal and slices through it to reveal the hidden silhouette of a polar bear.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 25 Sep 2012
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You might remember, about this time last year, gawking at the mesmerizing Troika illuminated signage erected in the V&A museum's tunnel entrance.
Well this year, Dutch electronics giant Philips have added to the lighting display with an interactive installation in the same tunnel—and another hidden away in one of the lesser know gallery spaces of the vast Victorian edifice.
"Walk The Light," a collaboration with Domonic Harris and his Cinimod studio, illuminates unwitting V&A visitors with a trail of bright white light and a spectrum of colour that transitions from a cool blue to a intense red as they approach the museums door.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 24 Sep 2012
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Up-and-coming London-based design star Lee Broom has been joining in the LDF12 festivities this week with a beautifully crafted pop-up shop in Shoreditch, taking his charming handcut crystal pendant lightbulbs to the streets—perfect for festival goers hoping to take home a piece of the designerly action.
The bulbs themselves are hardly groundbreaking but arranged in the store like this the 90 GBP price tag begins to seem a little more reasonable. Lee has been racking up some major interior design awards over the last couple of years, so it is, perhaps, no surprise to see such characterful interior and displays—the floor even strewn with sawdust—essentially just to flog a few lightbulbs.
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Posted by
Sam Dunne | 21 Sep 2012
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In recent years, the ubiquity of design events and festivals have been met with quiet grumbling from some members of the design industry, criticising the inevitable focus on chairs and the more exhibition friendly facets of design.
It is, perhaps, this tension that design duo Nendo chose to play when commission to produce a piece in the glorious surroundings of the V&A for London Design Festival 2012. Entitled "Mimicry Chairs," the installation spans the length and breadth of the museum, with these strange, fragile and ethereal (completely non-functioning) archetypal chairs, sprouting up everywhere.
The ghost-like objects—crawling up stairs, suspended from ceilings, swarming in gallery spaces—reflecting the museums interior, take on the characteristics of their surroundings—arranging themselves like the regimented paintings on the walls to give just one example.
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Posted by
Ray | 21 Sep 2012
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Following his work as a Designer in Residence at Northumbria University, it seems that Neil Conley can do no wrong: we loved his beautiful, thought-provoking glassware and his recent award-worthy medals. The Newcaste-upon-Tyne-based industrial designer is pleased to unveil the "Submariner," a dimmable table lamp, at DesignJunction 2012.
The barrel-like exterior of the lamp consists of two pieces of bead-rolled steel—available in galvanized, enamel gloss or textured matte—neatly fastened with a pair of worm-driven clamps. "The process of bead rolling introduces rigidity to the lightweight sheet structure; providing a return to house the diffusers whilst creating exterior channels for the clamps." The diffusion plates are available in "a selection of heavy tints, allowing the bulb to be at maximum luminosity without creating glare, with light escaping through the aperture at the rear."
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 21 Sep 2012
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With few exceptions the products on exhibition at Designjunction have already made the rounds in New York and Milan. Some, like the Designers in Residence ICFF award-winning exhibition, "Tools for Everyday Life," are worth a quick revisit. A group of designers working and studying in the open-ended residency at Northumbia University created a range of products in response to a brief to explore traditional craft manufacturing of helpful objects for, as the exhibition title notes, everyday living. [Editor's Note: They presented several of these projects as well as several new ones at this year's ICFF.]
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 20 Sep 2012
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DesignMarketo, who brought popular pop-up bar and exhibition Bar Alto to Milan, asked Ariana Mouyiaris, Founder and Creative Director of Haptic Thought, a visual consulting group, to curate a presentation from their collection for Brompton Design District during London Design Festival. To embody what she calls DesignMarketo's "warm and welcoming" approach to design, the "communal nature of sharing and exchange" and their engagement with "food and design," Mouyiaris developed "Kopiaste," which comes from a Greek word traditionally used in Cypriot culture as an invitation to "take the trouble to come, sit down and share."
The large front room in the Brompton Design District townhouse has been turned into a relaxed communal dining room with books to browse, a small exhibition to view and a spread of traditional Greek foods to snack on. Not all the food on the large, rustic wooden table is meant to be eaten, however. Ye Olde Feta Cheese, for example, is the product design group Greece is For Lovers' "sarcastic attempt to comment on our countrymen's need of resorting to the safety of the familiar in times on uncertainty," like, say the European debt crisis, which is continually addressed to varying degrees in all the work on view here, none more pointed than Michael Anastassiades' €uro Bread.
Traditionally, wooden dough stamps for prosphora, a typical Greek bread, are used in bread baked at home or in a local bakery and offered at Sunday church services, where they're shared with the congregation. Anastassiades' stamps, however, veer away from the religious and toward the political with graphic patterns of the European Parliament symbol, a remix of the European Union flag or an image of Angela Merkel, "a controversial symbol of a faltering system."
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 20 Sep 2012
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Inspired by the cabinets of curiosity, or wonder cabinets that once traveled around Europe as the first iteration of what later become the modern day museum, curators Livia Lauber and Maria Jeglinska invited eight designers from five European countries to create their own personal cabinet of curiosities for the Wonder Cabinets of Europe exhibition on view at Brompton Design District during London Design Festival. The eight resulting raw plywood cabinets provide a look into each designer's methodology—their work in process as opposed to their work in progress. "Each cabinet is conceived as an exhibition within the exhibition—an atomized gallery space."
The cabinets are both intimate and clinical. Though each designer has allowed us a glimpse of their personal approach to the design process, the displays are a precise, calculated display of what Jeglinska and Lauber call designer DNA. "We could have called this exhibition "The Way We Work," but that would have restricted it to the perimeter of our studios. It was important for us to place it within a larger context, to take another step back." Jeglinska and Lauber went on to discuss how their circle of designer friends are the first generation to benefit from the possibilities of the EU, and how much of their design work is a result of studying and working in cities they didn't grow up in. Even the most casual of festivalgoers will notice an 'internationalization' of design—a mix of modernism, minimalism, craft and materials that draws influence from a variety of Scandinavian and European countries.
On a personal note, the idea of creating a personal cabinet of wonder seems like an ideal studio project for design students, forcing them to focus on their own process and discover what's most important and meaningful to them. Jeglinska and Lauber agreed, adding "We hope that the cabinets provided the designers with an opportunity for introspection, stimulating them to reflect upon their own praxis and the driving elements behind their approaches."
Posted by
Sam Dunne | 20 Sep 2012
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Celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year, London Design Festival is finally in full swing. What better place for us to join in the festivities than the beautiful V&A museum, home of the festival for the fourth year running.
We were fortunate to be amongst the first to behold London-based designer and film-maker Keiichi Matsuda's enormous digital installation, "Prism," hidden away in the V&A's cupola roof space, a part of the museum never before made open to the public.
Presenting "an alternative view of London," Keiichi's formidable installation—constructed from a 2 tonne steel frame, bespoke Japanese paper, an aluminum structure and 5 projection units—visualizes vast swathes of publicly available data, from humidity and pollution levels, to energy usage in No. 10, Downing Street, and even the number of Boris bikes currently in use.
You might be wondering how this enormous piece made it up to the roof rafters of an enourmous Victorian edifices. As Keiichi informed us, and his stunning making-of video on Wallpaper* illustrates, all the materials and projectors were carefully hoisted through the tiny gaps in floors of the building.
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Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 19 Sep 2012
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Tourists who crowd in the area between the National Gallery, St. Martin-in-the-Fields church, the two Sir Edwin Lutyens' fountains and the four enormous lions guarding Nelson's Column in that famous plaza known as Trafalgar Square now have something else to feverishly photograph, at least until the end of London Design Festival. The Sound Portal—an installation commissioned by BE OPEN, the international arts think tank founded by Elena Baturina (pictured below), and designed by the engineers at ARUP—stands apart from its centuries-old stone surroundings, marking the square like a big black thumbprint.
Inside, a looping incline leads to an airy white central space where floor-to-ceiling speakers covered in a white mesh fabric line the walls. A wide, white ottoman dots the center of the room, above which the glass ceiling transforms the space into a cathedral of sound.
The center of the room is the optimal location for visitor to hear "pure acoustic experiences" designed to transport them from "one of the busiest and aurally chaotic environments in London." Sound and Music commissioned soundscapes from five musicians who each interpreted the Sound Portal and its location within the city in entirely different ways. Ivan Pavlov (COH) created a choral piece that addresses the sacred nature of the space and offers "a universal religious experience" he describes as "a missionary UFO landing at one of the planet's most visited spots." Nathaniel Robin Mann's piece, on the other hand, "evokes steam train frenetics, creaking organ bellows and pet shop cacophony."
Jo Thomas' piece "made from the reflective sound of cymbals recorded with a soundfield microphone... is designed for 9 Channels of Ambisonic sound," making Tom Jenkinson's solo guitar piece perhaps the most accessible of the group. The most conceptually compelling, however, is Jana Winderen's "Ultraworld," which she made using special microphones, placed both on land and underwater, to record species who communicate using ultrasound—frequencies inaudible to the human ear. To create a musical piece, she stretched out the sound to a frequency audible to the humans ear, bringing the heretofore unheard sounds of marine and land species into the heart of London. If you didn't notice just how loud the buzzing square was before you entered the Sound Portal, you'll leave not only aware of its variety of sounds and diversity of languages, but, like it or not, you'll be tuned in to the sounds of the city in general as you make your way through its streets for the remainder of the day.
Elena Baturina
BE OPEN's Sound Portal is in Trafalgar Square from September 19–23, 2012.
Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 19 Sep 2012
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There's a lot to see in the comparatively small townhouse at 4 Cromwell Place where Brompton Design District is on view during London Design Festival. The venue was a smart choice, offering festivalgoers a more intimate experience with each exhibition. You feel very much at ease here, falling into casual conversation with the designers and curators as you stroll from room to room.
We recommend starting on the second floor, where you can watch trending news headlines printed live on the half hour using wood block type in "Out of Print," a collaboration between design students at Goldsmiths College. Software especially designed for this project "lets users generate seemingly random headlines" from new stories breaking at that very moment. "By combining multiple sources, the app allows more news to be read, but like our experience of digital media, results in less being understood." This idea is illustrated in the nonsensical headlines printed (and available for purchase) using beautiful new woodblock type CNC-milled by Goldsmith students. Typically, you only see letterpress prints made with older wood block type, which lends them a nostalgic or 'vintage' quality, but since this project is about how the abundance—and perhaps overabundance—of new technology only confuses our sense of what is truly breaking news, brand new wood type was made.
Next, head down one floor and have a cup of tea and cake at Wundertute Tea House, where you can play a dice game to win a piece of Arabeschi di Latte's archive in celebration of their ten year anniversary.
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Posted by
Ray | 19 Sep 2012
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"Birdland"
Once again, Core fav Noma Bar will present new work during London Design Week, on display at Outline Editions' booth at DesignJunction. His latest series of work abides by his simple yet compelling vector aesthetic, a handful of visual puns with punchlines for titles.
L: "Ouch"; R: "Open Face"
"Pop Art"
In lieu of the "specially commissioned, Heath Robinson-esque embossing device/sculpture" (as in last year's exhibition), Outline Editions is offering new limited-edition prints from Bar, as well as Kristjana S. Williams, Anthony Burrill, Marion Deuchars, Malika Favre and more.
L: "Fatal Attraction"; R: "Therein Lies the Tail"
"The Last Emperor"
Outline Editions
Stand C2
Designjunction
21-23 New Oxford Street
London, WC1A 1AP
Hours: September 19, 3–9PM; September 20, 10AM–7PM; September 21–22, 10AM–6pm; September 23, 10AM–5PM
Posted by
core jr | 18 Sep 2012
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We've been championing the new design enterprise bubbling in Detroit—from Dave Seliger's Route 77 Motor City wrap-up to coverage of Maker Faire Detroit and of course showcasing work from CCS students. But it's the work of the people on the ground that get us most excited about design opportunities coming out of Detroit.
Longtime Coroflot member Brook Banham and his partner Judith Grubinger Banham recently announced the opening of their design studio, Middlecott, in the historic Penobscot Building in downtown Detroit. The husband and wife team are kicking off their new venture with an Open Studio and Sketchbattle this Friday where designers compete to the sounds of DJ Reverend Robert David Jones and DJ Guttertrash Evan. Guests get to vote for their favorite sketches at the end of each heat. Prizes include signed material from Scott Robertson and Syd Mead as well as some art materials from Utrecht.
Sketchbattle, click for full-size flyer!
As part of the 2nd annual Detroit Design Festival and DC3, the event promises to be a great opportunity for the larger design community in Detroit to get together and celebrate. On this occasion, we took the opportunity to talk a bit more with Brook about Detroit, design and music!
Middlecott Design Studio Opening + Sketchbattle
Penobscot Building, Studio 2100
645 Griswold
Downtown Detroit
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Core77: People have a lot of preconceived notions about Detroit. What are some exciting things going on in the design landscape of the Motor City?
Brook Banham: The Motor City is where its at, seriously. Its fresher here then in any other city in America and maybe in the world. Just about no other city can offer what Detroit offers, affordability and an extrememe entreprenureal spirit, these two probably go hand in hand. The entrepreneurial spirit is fostered by all sorts of creatives moving into the city which makes a very diverse and available skill set. If you need something fabricated in metal, wood or rapid prototyping and CNCed, it's all here. The low overheads and the community spirit make such services very approachable. The economy often works with a barter system because nobody has any cash in the city. All of this is would not be possible in other cities like Boston or San Francisco.
Designers here can take greater risks in their creative approach. In Detroit, designers have a low overhead so they can afford to break out of the mold more easily. You may pay 1/10th of the rent you might pay in a place like San Francisco, which allows you the flexibility and freedom to do what you really want. We just leased a 21st floor 1500sq/ft studio space in the beautiful Penobscot building for the fraction of the price that it would cost in Boston or even Mumbai.
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CAMPANA BROTHERS: CONCEPTS
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - WANTED DESIGN
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - SATELLITE SHOWS
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - ICFF
