La scrivania da lavoro di Tomas Kral ha un sinuoso bordo in metallo che corre lungo i tre lati del piano che evita di far sbordare tutto. I più precisi invece potranno riporre tutto con accurata selezione.
Al volo non fai in tempo ad accorgerti ma il Michael Jordan in questa foto è in realtà una action figure di Enterbay. Verrà prodotta in scala 1/6 in occasione dell’ottavo anniversario del suo ritiro (con tanto di maglia numero 45). La precisione realistica è davvero impressionante. Aspettiamo la release ufficiale.
If you have little ones in your life, you might also have a not so little situation known as toy clutter. Letting go of toys can be difficult because you may be considering passing them on to younger or future children or you might think that reducing the number of toys means that you’re depriving your children of enjoyment and learning experiences. You don’t have to be a parent to experience this dilemma. If you’re a grandparent or family member who often has kids stopping in for quick (or long) visits, you will likely need to determine what to do with an overabundance of toys.
How do you decide when it’s okay to let toys go? There isn’t a super hero to swoop in and take away toys that are no longer needed, nor are there flashing signals to let you know the exact moment when it’s time to let go of a toy. But, over time, you’ll begin notice whether your children’s interest in specific toys increases or wanes.
To help you recognize when it’s time to part with some of their playthings:
When I was a teacher, I spent a good amount of time observing the children in my classroom. This helped me create lessons that suited their learning styles. Though interacting with them gave me lots of insight, I found that simply observing them when they were “in the moment” helped me to get to know them better. To truly discover the types of toys that your children love (or don’t love), you’ll likely need to do this as well. That doesn’t mean that you need to spend an entire hour with a clipboard in hand ready to jot down what you see. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to figure out which toys they reach for often and which one they don’t pay much attention to. Those that are not as interesting to them anymore are great candidates for donation. And, you can then decide which specific toys you’d like to introduce them to.
I once worked for an organization where the motto was, “Each child is unique, precious, and unrepeatable.” Toys on the other hand, are not necessarily unique. You may have duplicates or several that function in extremely similar ways. As I mentioned before, your children will let you know which are their favorites based on their typical play habits. This means you can easily donate or give away the ones they don’t play with often.
Limiting the number of toys that your children have to play with will help you get a better sense of their likes and dislikes, and give them ample opportunities to play with specific things. Having fewer toys to focus on can be less overwhelming for them and they can get on with the business of fully learning about each one (rather than bouncing around from item to item). Rotating toys in and out will also stop them from taking over adult spaces and will make it easier to unclutter and maintain children’s areas in your home.
Once you’ve determined which toys your children no longer play with (and which ones you’ll keep in rotation), you can do a toy swap with friends or donate gently used items to a local family shelter. There are also several organizations, like Goodwill, Loving Hugs, and Second Chance Toys, that will accept used toys that are still in good condition.
Need help getting organized? Buy the DRM-free audiobook version of Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week today for only $8.99.
A Tokyo townhouse fronted by a stack of gardens (above) and a conceptual extension to the Guggenheim Museum in New York lead Dezeen Mail issue 137, which also features the latest news, jobs, competitions and reader comments from Dezeen.
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Voici l’excellent travail du photographe Michael Johansson qui s’inspire du célèbre jeu Tetris pour reproduire un principe de rangement géométrique dans des situations de la vie quotidienne. Le résultat donne des œuvres drôles et intrigantes à découvrir dans la suite de l’article en images.
Foldin is a modular shelving unit comprised out of a framework and foldable shelves. Each shelf is made out of three plywood plates connected with a p..
British singer Sivu went inside an MRI scanner and sang repeatedly for 2 to 3 hours to make this music video.
From the very beginning of Kartell’s history plastic and design have been the mantra. Founded by Giulio Castelli, a chemical engineer, the Italian furniture brand is the most influential proponent of plastic industrial design, building a sizable following through quality production processes and design contribution by innovative designers. The…
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Guess what we’re making
The 2014 Corvette has been unveiled, and the video being used to promote it reminds me how far the public perception of industrial design has come. Years ago, a commercial for a new Corvette would feature the car cruising down an idyllic country road, tearing up a track or whipping down an American highway. But as you’ll see, the ad below starts off with footage of the team scraping out the full-sized clay model, with accompanying soundbites from designers Kirk Bennion and Tom Peters. We’re then teased with some fleeting computer modeling and wall-o’-sketches shots before they hand it over to the aerodynamics team.
Sexy logo update, no? We’ll get to that in a minute.
Opinion: in this week’s column, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs wonders why London’s Design Museum is so reluctant to talk about money, arguing that design classics “aren’t theoretical exercises but sophisticated appeals to the wallet.”
I’ve spent much of last week ignoring phone calls and emails from news reporters. Architecture weekly Building Design and London daily the Evening Standard were both desperate to confirm that the Design Museum in London used eBay to source items for its permanent collection; the museum refused to comment so all that was standing between the tabloids and a sensational scoop was my indiscretion.
This inconsequential media frenzy started when I blithely mentioned on Twitter that the museum was scouring the online auction site for design classics for its newly assembled collection, which went on permanent display for the first time this week in an exhibition titled Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things.
This seemed logical: why wouldn’t a contemporary museum use a popular and reliable bartering platform instead of (or as well as) more traditional procurement avenues such as auction houses, galleries and bequests?
If it was odd that reporters thought this was newsworthy, it was equally strange that the Design Museum wouldn’t admit it was true. The museum’s exhibition title declares that the items in question are “ordinary things” – and the internet is the obvious place to buy such goods.
If you or I wanted to buy nappies or a Kindle – both of which are included in the collection’s 3000-strong inventory – there’s a very good chance we’d turn to Amazon. Yet the Design Museum’s press release obliquely references objects that have been “added to” the collection, rather than “ordered online”.
Even items such as the Tulip chair, the Valentine typewriter and the red K2 telephone box, while not being household items for most of us, are today available on eBay for £180, £399 and £5,800 respectively. They’re not rare and precious artworks; they’re mass-produced consumables being openly traded in a secondary market.
In short, normal people go shopping, but design institutions seem obliged to avoid such crude inferences of lowly commerce. They must instead “collect” and “acquire”.
The texts accompanying the Design Museum’s exhibits avoid any suggestion of money changing hands, not only in their acquisition but in their development and everyday use. The “extraordinary stories” include explaining how design can “create a sense of identity” and “communicate clearly” but never “sell more products”.
The story of the development of the London 2012 logo tells how “for the first time in the history of the Games, the Olympics and Paralympics embraced the same logo,” according to the exhibition press release. “The logo was created to be a ‘design for everybody’ – the exhibition will reveal the design process and thinking behind this symbol of Britain as a world stage and allow audiences to interact with it.” Not a word about how the logo was a vital money-spinner for the games, crucial to securing sponsorship deals and shifting merchandise.
Even the purpose of money itself is disguised by selective rhetoric: the pound coin is “a strong symbol of Britain” rather than a quotidian trading token while the design for the new Euro notes had to “work on many levels” including making EU nations feel properly represented, making fakery difficult and being “easily distinguishable for the visually impaired”. Hang on, what about being convenient for shopping?
It seems curious to cast design as an altruistic social service and ignore its parallel commercial purpose: most of the items in the collection were created to be sold. The form and function of a Tizio lamp or a Myto chair aren’t theoretical exercises but sophisticated appeals to the wallet.
Of course many famous design classics have been comprehensive failures in a business sense, which makes for even better “extraordinary stories”, but ones that are similarly too rarely told. This tendency to airbrush out design’s commercial narrative is not confined to the Design Museum; it’s a strangely common position among the institutional elite. Business is considered dirty while creativity is seen as untainted.
But one of the reasons I’m interested in design is that it perfectly straddles both culture and commerce. They keep each other grounded. To ignore one in favour of the other is to tell stories that are not extraordinary, but curiously incomplete.
Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things is at the Design Museum in London until 4 January 2015.
More opinion on Dezeen: read an introduction to Dezeen Opinion in which Marcus Fairs explains why it’s taken so long for us to take a stance and Sam Jacob’s first opinion column about how sites like Dezeen are affecting design culture.
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museum use eBay?” appeared first on Dezeen.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
