Having finally found some time to go through hundreds of pictures, notes and a decidedly chubby catalogue, i’m ready to start a series of reports from last month’s visit to International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne, France. The theme of this 6th edition was Teleportation. The biennale, the website says, intends to explore paths of discoveries that will tend in their extreme expression to lead to a possible teleportation as the dematerialization of movement which appears to be an incredibly revealing notion of our era
Category Archive: design
Should you be interested in accommodating a small volcano in your living room, designer Nelly Ben Hayoun has one ready to cover your interior with dust and erupt gloop on your carpet. While the first prototype is still a fairly modest and manageable size, The Other Volcano aims to build a series of semi-domesticated volcanoes that would almost reach the ceiling and provide you with all the discomfort you can expect from this new breed of geological pet
Featuring an extensive collection of work in which images and space meld seamlessly into a single narrative entity, Staging Space offers new solutions for exhibition and event architecture, scenography, media installations, interiors, and stage design as well as multimedia brand concepts. The book also presents an array of hybrid projects whose focus lies on using space to achieve pre-defined dramatic effects
advertising
Creative Characters is a collection of in-depth interviews with the most influential type designers in the business as well as up-and-coming young guns about the motives and methods behind the typefaces
One hundred posters, selected from amongst the thousands of works submitted each year for the most prestigious awards, representing the best of Japanese graphics over the last ten years
The book provides a detailed insight into the techniques of ten creative individuals (Jason Bruges Studio, Greyworld, HeHe, Crispin Jones, the Owl Project, the Pooch, Bengt Sjolen, Troika, and Moritz Waldemeyer.) and how they exploit the latest computing technologies in their work and the impact this will have for creative practice in the future
social
This year’s Future Exhibitions aims at highlighting the exhibition’s spatial relationship to the visitor. How can architecture, stage design and technical innovation enhance the visitor’s overall experience? In conversation with some of the leading actors in the field, Swedish Travelling Exhibitions examines innovative techniques and explores the exhibition medium of the future
Nille Svensson, former member of Sweden Graphics, is a designer/graphic artist/illustrator i met in Stockholm a few months ago and the guy is so absurdly talented he doesn’t even have a proper website. See for yourself:
Sitraka Rakotoniaina’s project explores a possible ‘Hyper-normal’ space on the edge of normality, whereby a distorted experience of reality is induced because of physical or psychological stress, injuries, conditioning or training
An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture, in which the architecture of the magazines vied with buildings as the site of innovation and debate
The Nomadic Sound Systems is a wireless wearable sound system that frees electronic music from the restraints of immovable equipment, opening up possibilities for mobile performance and new forms of audience participation
If you are in the right place at the right time, you (may) experience something fantastic whether it’s a lightening strike, a sense of the paranormal activity around you or a perfectly dry space at the bottom of the ocean
An Elvis themed workshop hosted at primary schools throughout the UK with the purpose of addressing questions concerning the legal definition of impersonation and authenticity
Can airspaces be owned and activated by the public? What is the size of the airspace you can own? How can we employ wind farms in a way that disrupts conventional understandings of their use?
RGB features artists from highly diverse backgrounds, from household names to the newest young talents. RGB captures the UK’s explosively vibrant and unpredictable realm of graphic design, in 288 pages packed with exciting visual material
Performing space extends the theme of the exhibition to architecture. Architects are indeed increasingly interested in activating the spaces they are designing. Lawrence Malstaf and Laurent Liefooghe’s works interact with the gallery space and the visitors
The ongoing exhibition at Z33 puts the spotlight on performative trends in contemporary design. In Design by Performance the production process that leads to a product matters as much as -if not more than- the final product itself
The Phantom Recorder system projects a cold and damp sensation onto the skin surface, triggering the brain to hallucinate a phantom. As the phantom movement stimulates the peripheral nerves, its activity is captured by the neural implant and external wireless machinery
Two new projects by Tuur Van Balen. The first one involves manipulating the metabolism of pigeons and turning them from urban nuisance to winged dispensers of a soap-like substance. The second one harnesses Synthetic Biology’s potential to turn us into our own doctors and pharmacists
Ventura Lambrate was the new hip area during the Salone del Mobile. The landscape starts with swanky renovated buildings, there’s flower wallpaper on exterior walls, silver tree in a courtyard and fresh apple pie with hot butter. At the other side of the area, it’s quite the Wild Wild West
Wind knitting factory, washing machine in the park, CCTV chandelier, furniture covered in fungi, a Pavlov’s Dog system to train a man to be a caring father? It must be RCA again!
A few tips if you’re going to the Salone del Mobile, Milan’s international furniture fair this weekend. Zona Tortona smells a bit of a hasbeen area now that the big guys, the heavy glitter and the trashy panini di porchetta have moved in. The cool kids are showing their magic elsewhere in the city
Among Daisy Ginsberg’s latest activities are a residency at SymbioticA, a collaboration with James King and Cambridge University’s iGEM 2009 grand-prizewinning team and then there’s Synthetic Aesthetics. The project investigates shared territory between design and synthetic biology, invites exchange of existing skills and approaches, and enables the development of new forms of craft and collaboration
Or how an exhibition i disliked gave me the opportunity to interview an artist whose work i’ve been admiring ever since i started the blog
Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. The book features new possibilities for diagrams, maps, and charts. It investigates the visual and intuitive presentation of processes, data, and information. Concrete examples of research and art projects as well as commercial work illuminate how techniques such as simplification, abstraction, metaphor, and dramatization function
Justin is pursuing responsive media in the physical world, exploring the intersection between media technology and architecture, in order to produce programmed and interactive spaces that act at the scale of the spectator’s body
Crowbot Jenny is a manga character. She is a socially-awkward girl who prefers to spend time surrounded by technology and animals rather than with humans. She built the Crowbot. Perched on her shoulder, the crow-shaped robot can vocalize a variety of crow calls to control and converse with her bird army
Developed in 1972 to protect early microprocessors from dust, the Gesundheit Radio featured a sneeze mechanism that expelled dust from inside the casing every six month. A bellows system extracted dust from inside the unit, blowing waste from two outlets located on the front
The exhibition explores the new “updated” textile crafts that are developed by a new generation of serious amateurs, innovative craftsmen, engaged entrepreneurs and political practitioners. Once again the home is the workshop where economic and ecologic innovation happens – not only in the labs of the industrial expertise. After decades of outsourcing, the new modes of production are in the hands of the layperson
Nelly Ben Hayoun’s installation/performance attempted to demonstrate the visual equivalent of one of those massive sonic booms that take place inside Super K each time a neutrino meets an electron of extremely pure water. As ultra-pure water doesn’t exactly abound in London night clubs, the designer used the water from the nearest fire hydrant and turned the place into a 15 by 5m long swimming pool
Designers and architects have to make decisions regarding color every day. But how does one find the necessary inspiration? The appropriate color? How do other designers and artists deal with the issue? With “Chroma,” the Greek word for color, as its title, this illustrated book provides answers to these questions and makes it clear that color is much more than mere decoration – it is one of the central problems of creative work
Paper conquers the third dimension and demonstrates the undreamed-of possibilities it holds today for lightweight construction, product design, fashion and art
The book compiles over 400 pages of exciting ideas, never before seen experiments, self initiated projects and commercial work from Germans working and studying at home and abroad, as well as non-Germans working and studying in Germany
If you can’t afford Space Adventures’s multi-million ticket to fly into space and if you don’t want to wait till 2011 to hop on one of Richard Branson’s upcoming Virgin Galactic flights, then the Soyuz Chair, designed by Design Interactions graduate Nelly Ben Hayoun is the best you can hope for right now
You do remember The Toaster Project, don’t you? Thomas Thwaites has spent the past 9 months crafting his own toaster from scratch. I went to see the progress of his kitchen appliance last week at the Royal College of Art show and all i can say is: What a beauty!
Jen Hui Liao’s Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model’s help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait
A fictitious company called ENT International has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Some of the items listed in the catalogue of the bankruptcy clearance auction are perfectly mundane, others are fictitious. Put together they offer a detailed insight into the inner workings of a large corporation closely inspired by the Enron scandal
Directly influenced by the 50s and ’60s experiments, ExtraRoom puts the sensory deprivation practice in a near futuristic scenario, when mind reading technologies are in common use and thoughts are not private anymore
All logic and circuitry is pre-engineered, so you can play with electronics without knowing electronics. Tiny magnets act as connectors and enforce polarity, so you can’t put things in the wrong way. And all the schematics will be shared under an opensource license so you can download, upload, suggest new bits and hopefully see them come to life
While i was in Los Angeles ealier this month, i had the great opportunity to visit the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and chat with some of the students. The department educates designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation