Hasta La Ideas

Frankfurt designer Reinhard Dienes presented this adjustable lamp with a long shade at Maison& Objet in Paris last week.

Called La Grande, the design for German brand Anthology Quartett has a metal base and mechanism with a wooden stem.

More about Reinhard Dienes on Dezeen »

The information that follows is from Dienes:

La Grande by Reinhard Dienes for Anthology Quartett

Reinhard Dienes is delighted to invite you to the launch from La Grande for Anthologie Quartett at MasonObjet 2011.

La Grand is a room lamp with an adjustable lampshade (position & direction). The long lampshade can direct the light to the floor or the ceiling.

Steel, walnut & textile

See also:

.

Interview with Dines at [D3] Dezeentalks 2010	Friday by Reinhard Dienes	Tonic by Reinhard Dienes

We’ve teamed up with publishers Fiell to offer our readers the chance to win one of five copies of Cult-ure by graphic designer Rian Hughes.

The 356-page paperback bound in faux leather is the result of 10 years work, combining graphics and text to explore the language of signs, symbols and meaning in contemporary culture.

Hughes is particularly interested by the way ideas can now travel further and faster than ever before via the internet.

The volume is divided into eleven chapters: ideas, communications, media, representations, frames and maps, objects, perceptions, solutions, arts, identities and proscriptions.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Cult-ure” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.

Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 15 February 2011. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Here are some more details from the publisher:

IDEAS CAN BE DANGEROUS

Ideas are the currency of our modern me- dia-driven world. They shape our very culture. CULT-URE is your incisive survival guide for navigating this modern landscape of ideas.

From the far past to the future, it shows how ideas were coded first in signs and symbols – the spoken word, the flag, the alphabet.
Now virulent ideas, whether they be a YouTube video, a political ideology or a fundamentalist religion, have the ultimate delivery mechanism – the internet. Ideas are travelling further and faster, and now have the power to change the cultural landscape like never before.

In our new electronic ‘democracy of ideas’,political and religious authorities no longer controlwhat we are allowed to have access to. Cultural power is devolving to the creative individual, who can now address the world. Soon we will all have the means to create; we just have to decide whether it be art or bombs.

Why do you think what you think? Where do our values, beliefs and prejudices comefrom? How do symbols and signs, the codifed lan- guage of ideas, shape our perceptions? Who controls the very ideas that shape our culture?

Through words and pictures, the language of our media age, CULT-URE powerfully il- lustrates how ideas are created and ma- nipulated.
Culture is your local consensus reality; your clothing, cuisine and hairstyle, the music you listen to, the films you see; it is the lens through which you interpret reality. Cul- ture, unlike your race or eye colour, is not a compulsory accident of birth, but an intel- lectual position.

Written and designed by celebrated graphic designer and illustrator Rian Hughes, CULT- URE represents a new experiment in ‘au- thored design’, a unique melding of graphics and text that provides a thought-provoking exploration of the media age, the pervasive language of signs, symbols and meaning, and the ideas – both benign and dangerous – that travel through them.

The ‘Gideon’s Bible for the boutique hotel’, CULT-URE is an insider’s guide to the changing nature of communication, perception and identity, and is set to become a cult publication for the digital generation – the 21st century answer to Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage.

A must-have bible for anyone interested in the power of ideas, CULT-URE is both a bold graphic statement and a potent inoculation against infection by contagious ideas. CULT-URE will help you survivive the next Cult-ural Revolution.

CULT-URE
Written and designed by Rian Hughes
Published by Publishing Limited December 2010
Bound in faux leather with foil blocking and gold page edges
Size: 229 mm x 152 mm (6×9”)
356 pages, 500 illustrations, die cuts, tip ins.
ISBN 9781906863289
RRP: £24.95/$45.00

Also available in numbered limited edition which includes limited edition print signed by the author, real leather binding, slipcase and sticker set.

About the Author

Rian Hughes is an award-winning graphic designer, comic artist, logo designer, and typographer. He studied graphic design at the London College of Communication before working for an advertising agency i-D magazine, and a series of record sleeve design companies. In 1994 he founded his own studio, Device, and has since worked with a wide range of international clients in publishing, advertising, comic books, music and fashion.

Buy this book and others at the Dezeenbooks store
(in association with amazon.co.uk)

As about 300 Compostmodern participants sat in the Green Room in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, Joe Khirallah, CEO of Green Bear Group and our moderator for the day, led us in an exercise to extract 50 different topics that would be discussed in breakout sessions throughout the Unconference session. The assumption being that if “you gather a group of passionate people who have a shared interested, the conversation is destined to be fruitful.”

Discussion topics ran the spectrum of sustainability and design, from big picture ideas to those seeking answers to project specific questions. How can we harness creativity collectively for solutions? How do we make sustainability desirable for the mainstream? How can we use design thinking to reconstruct curriculum in our K-12 schools? How can we radically rethink the way companies are structured to foster environments for greater creativity and productivity? How do we put design tools in the hands of communities so that they can design their own solutions? What will be the physical manifestation of our memories if everything is digital? How do you change the mindset that new is always better than used?

Before breakout sessions were formed, we were reminded of 5 key tenets of the unconference: the people who come are the best people who could have come, whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened it starts when it starts, it’s over when it’s over and the Law of Two Feet (if you aren’t learning or contributing, it’s your responsibility to find a better session for you). Once topics were displayed on the “marketplace,” we were tasked with finding those in which we were interested.

As a newcomer to the unconference format, I found it incredibly exciting that we would be able to harness all of the inspiration from the previous day and take that to approach real, substantive questions.

As a student in California College of the Arts MBA in Design Strategy program, I was eager to sit in groups with equally motivated designers to come up with solutions. It was there that I saw how important it is to ask the right question in the first place. I was more compelled by conversations that encouraged us to look at the larger system and underlying motivations behind people’s behaviors and then asked what sort of mechanisms we could put into place to change habits. Less successful groups ignored systems thinking because it seemed to be too daunting of a task.

I was reminded of a quote from Albert Einstein which essentially states that we cannot solve the significant problems that we face using the same thinking that created them in the first place. As designers, we are being given the opportunity to redesign the world in which we live, but it will not happen unless we ask the big questions. For instance, rather than simply finding ways to reduce packaging, we should look at recreating the system that requires an excess of packaging. Dan Phillips of the Phoenix Commotion challenged us to examine why we all assume that new is better than old and to create systems that encourage reuse rather than consumption. This thinking is what will change the world.

It is time that we all start acting like 4 year olds again by asking “But why?” ad naseum to our social and environmental paradigms. Instead of lauding design solutions that create a more efficient office chair, ask “but why do we need an office chair?” I am not implying that small steps aren’t important because obviously small steps in the right direction are better than no steps at all. However, let’s ensure that these small victories are not simply quick fixes, but rather are laying the groundwork toward a collective shift in thinking.

If you are interested in learning more about the solutions proposed in each of the breakout sessions, notes will soon be added to the Compostmodern Unconference Wiki.

Jessica Watson is completing her second semester of the innovative MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts’ where she is focusing on sustainability and social entrepreneurship. This is her first Compostmodern conference, but she is sure it will not be her last.

(more…)

It’s a very familiar and widely acknowledged fact that large retail chains, shopping centers and casinos design their floor layouts to intentionally try and guide consumers along a somewhat confusing path in order to keep them away from the exit and get them to see as much of their merchandise (or slot machines, in the casino’s case) as possible. They’re are varying degrees of this general irritation, but a team of researches at the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London has discussed a study they’re working on that has found that Ikea is perhaps the worst offender. Exits are hard to spot, the only easy-to-navigate paths push customers through every inch of the store, and because the layouts are so confusing, consumers fear they won’t be able to find an object again and wind up buying it just so it won’t disappear. While, again, there’s nothing altogether new there, particularly if you’ve ever spent any time at an Ikea, Alan Penn and his colleagues at the Centre have established that Ikea pushes the maze-like design to levels significantly above the average, having one of the most difficult sets of floorplans in the business. In their defense, a spokesperson for the company told the Daily Mail that they’re just trying to give consumers options and for those who already know what they want, they” have created shortcuts.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.