Jon Liow’s Solar concept is an interactive light and smartphone app system that synchronizes with a user-specified timezone to mirror the sun’s natural light cycle. The user’s curiosity can run wild as they explore different timezones from the comfort of home. This unique take on time allows us to feel connected with places we may have never even been or seen, with the user being able to experience the light cycle of any location in the world.
The device has several different functions. In its simplest form, the user can either allow the app to automatically sync with the light to trigger a twenty-four hour cycle based on their current location, or manually select any city in the world. Once the light is triggered by the app via Bluetooth, it runs independently without needing to be connected to the smartphone. Secondary functions of the system include the ability for the user to invert the light cycle. This option allows the user to reverse the function of the light, resulting in it shining brightest during the timezone’s darkest hours and remaining dark during the timezone’s brightest hours. The ambient function allows the user to disengage the twenty-four hour light cycle, and control the brightness of the light manually.
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Solar Movement Light was originally posted on Yanko Design)
As essentially the only company making OLED applications available to the consumer market,Blackbody—a sub-brand of innovative Italian-French lighting developer Astron Fiamm—is leading the charge to bring the versatile lighting option to a wider audience. We’ve seen…
È risaputo che gran parte degli italiani (me compreso) non se la masticano molto bene con l’inglese. Cloudbuster Studio ci dà una mano grazie a questi loghi dei brand più famosi ridisegnati con l’esatta pronuncia. Basta solo leggerli come sono scritti e non diremo più Niche ma Naiki.
Remember Casey Neistat’s car commercial shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats? Then you probably remember the salt-sprayed shades he was wearing. Enough people asked about them that Neistat subsequently did his thing, posting a DIY video on how he replicated the look post-shoot. Watching the ad-hoc way that he bangs these out using commonly-available materials, I felt like I was back in the ID shop at school.
Opinion: in his latest Opinion column, Sam Jacob argues that objects tell us more about ourselves than literature or imagery and sets out his manifesto for “a culture of design informed by archeology and anthropology”.
My last column talked about new stuff, about how digital culture is changing our relationship to objects. Now, I’d like to think about old stuff. I’d like to do this as a way of forming a kind of manifesto for understanding objects, whether they might be new or old. A manifesto, in other words, for our relationship with objects – a relationship of very long standing that goes back to the very origins of humanity.
We have a longer relationship with objects than any other cultural form. Things emerged before language and before image making. This fact – along with their propensity to survive in the archaeological record – means we could convincingly argue that the history of human culture is written not in text but in objects.
That objects are themselves a form of language is suggested by the idea that language developed out of the kind of complex, sequential, abstract thinking that object-making required. Design, in other words, preceded and enabled the development of language. We could – and should – think of the record of things as a central plank of the library of human experience that only later includes images and writing. Things, in other words, are a form of literature too.
Like literature, objects are containers of human experience. They are embodiments of thought and knowledge made into material form. We might not know, for example, what Stonehenge was used for, but we can trace the outlines of the intelligence that brought it into the world. Its substance and arrangement are a record of the technologies necessary to build it, the organisation of a society necessary to implement it and the imaginative capability needed to conceive it.
Objects occur at the intersection of spheres of knowledge: at the overlap between science, technology, culture and desire. Even the most mundane of objects acts as a roll call of forms of knowledge and intelligence necessary for it to come into the world – even (or especially) the novelty section of the Argos catalogue talks of mining, processing, transportation, engineering and economics, as well as desire and imagination. Each contributes to the possibility of that particular thing being in the world.
It was this kind of imaginative and intellectual capability emerging in early human culture that brought objects into the world for the very first time. The stuff formed by cosmology, geology and biology became, in the hands of someone, somewhere, the first primitive thing. As this first object came into existence so did a new kind of humanity.
When, say, a lump of stone was struck by another to create a sharper edge, it was also an act that projected our imagination into the world. The newly formed edge was an abstract idea materially formed. Things, in other words, are also concepts.
Once formed, that very same stone tool amplified the ways in which we could act. Even in its most primitive form, design gave us the ability to extend our own body’s reach into the world by allowing us to cut in ways our own hands couldn’t. At the other end of the technological spectrum, philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan described electronic communications as extending our nervous systems around the globe (and now, even beyond the edge of the solar system). Design produces things that act as bridges and interfaces between our human state and the environment around us.
Once born into the world, objects helped us transform our natural environment. They began a process that shaped nature into synthetic human habitats. Cutting stone, wood or flesh was the first step that eventually created the synthetic worlds of Tokyo, London, Munich, Paris and so on (and, of course, the equally synthetic places that are preserved as a form of nature: Yosemite, the Lake District, Antarctica even: places that are now just as defined by ideology, law and politics as any city).
The world after objects was no longer a given quantity but something constructed. Design – even the design of the smallest of things – is the act of constructing new worlds.
Our relationship with objects might be even more profoundly linked. Just as we make things, things also make us. A human with a stone tool is an entirely different creature to one without – or rather the human capable of conceiving of an object is an entirely different proposition. The act of designing and making is a two-way street. Intention might shape the way we make something, but once made the made-thing acts on us too. The moment the first transformation of rock to object occurred, the possibilities of being human also changed. If design precipitated language, perhaps it brought something else into the world too. Perhaps objects make us human.
The history of humans and things, intertwined as completely as it is, suggests definitions of design which I’ll set out here:
We’ve come a long way since the first object. The sheer quantity of stuff that now surrounds us is overwhelming. Contemporary material culture seems often to be shallow, marked by excessive consumption, over-infused by marketing, inauthentic and exploitative.
Yet these objects and the design cultures that create them are still part of a continuous culture that spirals back into pre history. Judgements of value – monetary, aesthetic, taste or whatever – are only one way of viewing design. In many ways, these kinds of judgements only serve to narrow the definition of design as a fundamental human activity.
Instead we should argue for a culture of design informed by archeology and anthropology, one that recognises its embedded intelligence, its philosophical and radically propositional nature. Even – or perhaps especially – when it’s something as seemingly debased as a Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza.
Vertical yellow and grey stripes decorate the exterior of this family house in Mexico by León firm tactic-a (+ slideshow).
Located in the city of Lagos De Moreno, the two-storey residence was designed by tactic-a to make the most of natural light while also maintaining privacy for the clients and their two daughters.
An L-shaped plan frames a private garden in the south-east corner of the site. The architects have added a row of south-facing windows behind, which open the space out to a double-height living and dining room at the centre of the house.
A sawtooth roof creates additional windows facing eastward, bringing morning light into the top floor and down into the living room.
Other windows are partially concealed behind the facade, creating sets of thin apertures that are reminiscent of barcodes.
“The north facade is blind and windows on the west facade are ending with full transparency into the garden in search of the best sunlight and thermal conditions,” said the architects.
A staircase with thick wooden treads ascends from the living room to the first floor, which has the master bedroom at one end and the shared children’s bedroom at the other.
The master bedroom also leads out to a roof terrace with a pebbled surface.
A garage forms the south-west corner of the house and features wooden doors that match up to a wooden picket fence that extends around the back garden.
Photography is by Diego Torres + Gerardo Dueñas.
Here’s a project description from the architects:
Huit House
The location of the house in Lagos De Moreno, firstly induces to develop a typology related to its historical condition (north and east facades are open to the outside, trying to get close to walls and colony’s buildings scale) in contrast, the facades of west and south playfully try contemporary living typologies currently undergoing an intense process of change and revision, in this case is peculiarly attractive by the degree of collaboration that occurred with the clients.
While this family is formed by four members, only two rooms were built, one for parents and another (with multiple possibilities of customisation) for their two daughters in order to encourage their negotiation and socialisation skills. In the house there’s also a large social space, a home office where the couple could work and a media room that can also be room for guests.
This program is materialised by an ‘L’ shaped block. The upper level has a light covering, divided into three double sections light oriented triangles pointing eastward. The north facade is blind and windows on the west facade are ending with full transparency into the garden in search of the best sunlight and thermal conditions (south).
A system ‘ladder-bridge-lamp’ located in the heart of the house acts as a filter between activities: work, socialising and cooking. The upper level that contains the two rooms on each extremes of the house allows a double height for the home office and the socialising space.
Fallon in London has created this crazy Halloween-themed ad for mobile phone network giffgaff, which is based on the idea that being different takes guts. Literally.
The ad features a great soundtrack in Deap Vally’s Walk of Shame, and bar the (ever-so-slightly awkward) branding bit at the end, feels more like a music video than an ad. The shoot must have been hilarious…
Credits: Agency: Fallon London ECD: Santiago Lucero Creative director: David Dao Creatives: Manu Diaz, Gonza Delgado Production company: Riff Raff Films Directors: Jonas and François
Non sans rappeler le projet de Beth Galton, Nathan Myhrvold a écrit un livre appelé Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking dans lequel le photographe Ryan Matthew Smith propose des clichés de plans de coupe de nourriture et de cuisine très réussis. A découvrir dans une sélection d’images.
It looks like Aramique Krauthamer has been keeping busy since we visited Nike’s “Art and Science of Feeling” pop-up experience last month. We encountered the NYC-based installation/interaction designer at the opening of “PLAY: A Visual Music Experience,” the latest installation that he’s designed with Fake Love for his ongoing collaboration with premium home audio purveyors SONOS. No brainwave sensors this time around: Since true haptic feedback would have required speakers with custom top panels, the ‘touch’ sensor is actually a discreet optical input, which toggles the colors of the ripple-like projections. The visuals reflect not only the amplitude of soundwaves (as in your iTunes visualizer) but also the pitch, tone and a few other attributes.
Frankly, I couldn’t tell the difference, but I did share Aramique’s interest in the custom ‘furniture’ he designed for each ‘room’ of the installation. The lucite boxes are embedded with LEDs that match the projects and were fabricated for the project, which is en route to SONOS’ Los Angeles studio after its one-night-only debut earlier this week. The occasion for the celebration is the worldwide availability of the new PLAY:1 speaker, which debuted two weeks ago, just in time for the holidays.
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