Hasta La Ideas

The Swing Chair was shown for the first time this month in Turin during the WABI SABI show. The Swing Chair comes from Antonio’s Aricò re..

The final extract from our Book of Ideas selected by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs this week is a 24-hour performance involving two janitors constantly sweeping lines of rubbish to represent the hand of a clock. The book makes an ideal Christmas gift and is available for just £12.

“Design performances were in vogue at the tail end of the noughties. Design fairs featured young creatives drilling, sawing and hammering and the process of making chairs, tables and lighting was suddenly seen as more interesting than the finished products,” explains Fairs.

“Dutch designer Maarten Baas had shot to fame earlier in the decade for his Smoke range of furniture that was generated via the most extreme performative process of them all: he scorched timber items with a blowtorch. Baas’ 2009 show in Milan proved to be the high-water mark of the design performance movement. Within a darkened warehouse he presented a range of functioning clocks in which the passing time was marked by human actions, rather than machinery or circuitry.”

“Sweeper Clock was the most dramatic of these: a 24-hour, non-stop performance involving two men sweeping rubbish around a concrete yard, filmed from above, with the detritus forming the moving hands of a clock as they worked,” he describes. “Whereas most other design performances were merely a means to an end, Baas’ clocks were also the product: you could buy the movie on a hard-drive and turn your widescreen TV or computer screen into a clock.”

Sweeper Clock by Maarten Baas

Two janitors continuously sweep a large expanse of concrete as part of a 24-hour long performance by designer Maarten Baas. Pushing two lines of trash around with their brooms, the two men mark the time of day, with one pile of detritus advancing precisely every minute, and the other every hour.

The performance was recorded by a camera mounted overhead and went on for 12 hours non-stop to create a film that, when endlessly looped, functions as a clock.

Sweeper Clock was one of a series of time-based films created by Baas in 2009 as part of a project called Real Time. Shown on screens during the furniture fair in Milan, the films were also available for sale on digital hard drives that, when plugged into TV screens, turn into working timepieces.

Other elements of Real Time include Analog Digital Clock, a film in which a performer replicates a digital clock by painting over and wiping clean red panels on a black glass screen; and Grandfather Clock, which appears to feature a person inside an upright case repeatedly wiping off and drawing hands on the back of a glass clock face with a black pen.

The boundary between art and design has blurred in recent years with the rise of the limited edition, gallery-driven collectors market, yet Baas insists that the functional nature of these films – the fact that they tell the time – grounds them firmly in the world of design.

Read more about this project on Dezeen | Buy Dezeen Book of Ideas

Dezeen Book of Ideas features over 100 fascinating ideas for buildings, products and interiors from the world’s most creative brains. The book’s A5 format makes it highly accessible and the £12 price tag makes it the ideal impulse purchase or Christmas gift.Buy the Dezeen Book of Ideas now for just £12.

Reviews of Dezeen Book of Ideas

“From flip-flop art to a mirrored retreat in the sky” – Wall Street Journal

“The Sliding House and The Book of Ideas: Radical Thinking Required” – Forbes.com

“Fairs personally guides readers through the wonders of innovations like a balancing barn, a textile-skinned car, and the first aesthetically pleasing CFL — all of which share an ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ awe factor” – Sight Unseen

“Fabulous” – It’s Nice That

“Totally wonderful!” – Naomi Cleaver

“Handsomely repackages Dezeen’s coverage of the best in architectural, interior and design ideas” – Glasgow Herald

“Teeming with innovative projects handpicked by the people behind Dezeen … readers will be hard-pressed not to find something to gawk over in this intriguing new compendium of beautifully articulated concepts” – Dwell Asia

“Beautifully laid-out, to suit the content, and straight-shooting, non-convoluted descriptions make it user-friendly as well as eye-catching” – Lifestyle Magazine

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by Maarten Baas appeared first on Dezeen.

The budget for the U.S. Department of Defense is precipitously close to plunging headfirst down the impending ‘fiscal cliff‘ that’s making headlines these days, but thankfully the folks at DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D division, have already set aside at least a few million bucks to develop the next generation of tactical vehicles, and they’re looking to reward a few lucky taxpayers with cash prizes for their savoir-faire. According to Program Manager Lt. Col Nathan Wiedenman, DARPA is “seeking to engage innovators outside of the traditional defense industry.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is calling on innovators with expertise in designing and engineering drivetrain and mobility systems to collaboratively design elements of a new amphibious infantry vehicle, the Fast, Adaptable, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG)…

Each of the three planned challenges will focus on increasingly complex vehicle subsytems and eventually on the design of a full, heavy amphibious infantry fighting vehicle that conforms to the requirements of the Marine Corps’ Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV). In the course of the design challenges, participants will test DARPA’s META design tools and its VehicleFORGE collaboration environment, with the ultimate goal of demonstrating that the development timetable for a complex defense system can be compressed by a factor of five…

Many current approaches to the development of heavy military vehicles have proven inadequate for the timely delivery of much-needed capabilities to the warfighter. FANG’s primary goal is to fundamentally alter the way systems are designed by decoupling design and fabrication and using foundry-style manufacturing to compress the development process timeline.

The first challenge focuses on “Mobility & Drivetrain,” will launch two weeks into 2013, with a tentative submission deadline of April 15, 2013. The winning design will be realized at the iFAB Foundry, with a $1m cash prize for the winning team.

DARPA is looking to launch the second challenge, for the “Chassis & Structure” of FANG, in late 2013; the final challenge, to develop a full vehicle is slated for 2014, with higher stakes. In addition to double prize money, “the winning team in the third and final challenge could have its vehicle tested by the Marine Corps alongside ACV prototypes in operational testing.”

Learn more and register at VehicleForge.org.

You’ll have to come up with something better than this…

via PSFK

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Good design is the result of foresight and planning, often undertaken years in advance, and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design is now laying the groundwork for 2016. Yes, it’s that time again: Following this week’s Helsinki-to-Cape-Town handover of the World Design Capital title—Cape Town’s got it for 2014—the application process is now open for the next city in line.

Helsinki was deemed a success, with ICSID President Soon-in Lee reporting that “Record-breaking tourism levels and initiatives such as the Design ROI project from the Finnish Design Business Association and Aalto University are direct answers to the objective of how we can increase the understanding of design’s role as a promoter of business life and economics.”

Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille was optimistic about her city’s prospects. “Cape Town’s approach to the World Design Capital 2014 will support the premise that excellence in design is using what you have to realise what you want,” she said at the convocation ceremony. “What we hope to do is design the change we want to see in our city, using the very building blocks of which our city is comprised.”

Assuming a fairness in rotation continues, the next WDC will presumably be in Australia, North America or South America, the remaining continents that haven’t yet had a go.

ICSID closed the convocation ceremony with a video highlighting the first four cities to win their WDC bids: Torino in 2008, Seoul in 2010, Helsinki for this year and, of course, Cape Town:

Download the application for the 2016 bid here.

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Despite being surrounded by electricity pylons, this hillside cabin in Japan by San Francisco firm Anderson Anderson Architecture generates all its own energy and heating using photovoltaic panels and a ground-sourced heat pump (+ slideshow).

Named B-House, the single-storey building is positioned on a slope overlooking Kumamoto, so Anderson Anderson added a wall of glazing to the rear facade that gives residents a view out across the city from the living room, study and bedroom.

The house was built on a tight budget and sustainability was key to the design. “The extremely modest budget required a close collaboration of the architects and builder to achieve a high quality, off-site fabricated timber frame construction meeting high sustainability standards,” explain the architects.

The edge of the roof is tilted southwards to maximise sunlight to the photovoltaic panels, while integrated channels collect rainwater so that it can be reused.

There is no air conditioning, so when the temperature increases residents can slide open the glazed north-facing walls.

There are only clerestory windows on the southern facade, which allow hot air to escape and prevent the unnecessary heat gain that would occur with larger windows.

The whole house sits on a thick concrete base, while the walls and roof were constructed using locally sourced timber.

The house was completed in 2009, but hasn’t been widely published.

Other sustainable houses we’ve featured include a pavilion-like house in Germany that generates all its own power, as well as a concept for a house that is entirely self-sufficient.

See more stories about houses in Japan, including a concrete residence with barely any windows.

Photography is by Chris Bush.

Above: floor plan – click to see larger image

Above: section – click to see larger image

Above: south elevation – click to see larger image

Above: west and east elevations – click to see larger image

Above: north elevation – click to see larger image

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Anderson Anderson Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.