Brazilian designers Fernando and Humberto Campana have created an indoor “forest” of flax and wood at the Bildmuseet in Umeå – their first project in Sweden (+ slideshow).
The Campana brothers‘ site-specific Woods installation inside the Swedish contemporary arts museum comprises thick angled strands of textured materials sourced from the local countryside.
“We found the inspiration in nature,” said Humberto Campana in a statement. “The message we wanted to generate was bringing nature indoors. The forest taking its place back and turning tables.”
Strips of wood and flax are shaped into shaggy forms that reach up to the ceiling. Visitors to the museum can walk around and in between the vertical elements.
The São Paulo duo, best known for creating unusual furniture pieces from everyday objects and materials, gathered the lengths into bunches and attached them to strings so they hang downward.
The bristly tree-like elements become thinner as they reach the ceiling and are angled to pass across each other.
Some sections stem from others like tree branches, creating more complex structures that tower above visitors walking through the space.
Housed in a white room within the Bildmuseet, the installation creates a setting designed to look like a surreal woodland. Woods opened on 2 November and runs until 8 February 2015.
“He had the capacity to understand design,” said Humberto Campana. “Design is not just about functionality: it’s about concepts, getting a reaction, not following trends, following your own heart. That’s something that I learned from him.”
Nineteen London-based designers including Dominic Wilcox and Paul Priestman have created miniature fantasy rooms for an exhibition of Dolls’ Houses at the city’s Museum of Childhood.
Offline Hideaway by Dominic Wilcox
The V&A Museum of Childhood in east London commissioned designers to create their “dream room” inside a 30-centimetre wooden box. Combined in one installation, these form the finale for the exhibition Small Stories: At Home in a Dolls’ House, which showcases dolls’ houses dating from 1712 to 2001.
The Longest Party Table in the World by Paul Priestman of PriestmanGoode
“The brief was very open – basically, I asked people to create their dream room in miniature, to reflect on the idea of ‘ideal’ or ‘fantasy’ rooms,” curator Alice Sage told Dezeen.
Wellbeing Bathroom by Roger Arquer
“It could be fantastical, whimsical, aspirational or technological, it just had to be small!”
If You Don’t Know Where You Are Going, Any Road Will Get You There by Pearson Lloyd
Sage said the designers were selected because “they all have really different points of view, are based in London, and do interesting innovative work that I though would be fun to see in miniature.”
Bermondsey Studio by East London Furniture, Reuben Le Prevost and Jessica Sutton
“I wanted a selection of designers from different backgrounds, a few well established designers as well as people just starting out who are doing great work,” said Sage. The contributors range from furniture and homeware designers – such as Peter Marigold and Bethan Laura Wood – to textile designers including Donna Wilson.
Into the Trees Playroom by Pantxika Ospital of Jentil
Dominic Wilcox‘s Offline Hideaway, Sage’s personal favourite, shows a girl on a sofa reading, at the top of a precarious-looking stack of furniture. A tiny laptop is used to prop the leg of a wobbly chair. “In Dominic’s little room, there is space and time away from the demands of the digital,” said Sage.
Llama Dreams by Donna Wilson
Paul Priestman of Priestmangoode, the design studio behind the new driverless London tube trains, has used two-way mirrors to create a never-ending party table covered in seemingly unlimited liquorice and cakes.
If a Budgie Dreamed of Being a Magpie by Bethan Laura Wood
“Paul looked back to his childhood, and the memory of making pin-hole viewers out of shoe boxes. The experience of peering into a darkened space, and seeing something unexpected and magical, stayed with him,” said Sage.
Monsters in the Pantry by Peter Marigold
Product designer Roger Arquer has created a minimal bathroom with a wall of green moss and marble pebbles. Two curved brass faucets emerge from the floor while a glass bulb hangs from the ceiling.
Wilderness Dreams by Orly Orbach
Furniture design studio PearsonLloyd‘s dream room is titled with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Three different-coloured plastic tubes and a white ladder fill the mirror-lined box.
A Night in the Studio by Ina Hyun K Shin
“The room is both a playground and an in-between space where you are just as likely to simply pass through as hang around,” said PearsonLloyd. “What lies beyond is simply a matter of dream and the imagination.”
Room with a View by Nancy Edwards
East London Furniture has mocked up a miniature version of their current studio space, complete with lead windows and brick walls. “As East London Furniture move on to new studios, this little room will act as a memorial and reminder of the Bermondsey building,” said Sage.
My Dream Space, My Toy Box by Design K
Both Bethan Laura Wood and Donna Wilson have filled their dream rooms with miniature versions of their own designs in colourful patterns.
Library (A Recent Plan) by Liberty Art Fabrics Interiors
Peter Marigold’s Monsters in the Pantry features three feasting creatures while illustrator Orly Orbach‘s room shows a sleeping figure surrounded by cave drawings of wild beasts.
I Always Dreamed of an Underwater Aquarium Bathroom by Katy Christianson
In the exhibition the boxes are stacked on top of each other to create a complete Dream House, which sits underneath the words “In miniature, impossible dreams can come true”.
Not a Magnolia Room by Dionne Sylvester
Small Stories: At Home in a Dolls’ House is on show at the V&A Musuem of Childhood in Bethnal Green until 6 September 2015 and entrance is free.
MenoMenoPiu Architects says its concept to reinvigorate the Seine with a string of capsule homes on stilts could help prevent Paris from becoming a “city museum” (+ slideshow).
Paris-based MenoMenoPiu Architects proposes installing a temporary series of raised cabins along the edge of the city’s main river, which could be used as short-term accommodation for commuters or tourists.
According to the architects, the Eauberge Paris Capsule Hotel would combat the “gradual decentralisation of Parisians” in the French capital by making the city centre more active, and hence more attractive for residents.
“Just like the other European capitals such as Rome, Venice, or Barcelona, Paris risks becoming a city museum,” said MenoMenoPiu Architects, the studio founded by Rocco Valantines, Emanuele Salini and Alessandro Balducci in 2011.
“Paris has the largest concentration in square metres of museums in the world, nearly 120 museums in total, with many urban areas that tend to be transformed into living conservatories,” they said.
“This makes the city susceptible to becoming an architectural ‘outdoor’ museum. The continued growth of tourist attractions therefore risks making everyday life less interesting for local residents.”
Drawing inspiration from the city’s riverside booksellers, as well as from Japan’s capsule hotels, the architects propose introducing small boxy structures in the heart of the city, where they claim there are 9.5 kilometres of unused riverside.
Plan
The proposal images show metal-framed constructions, each containing a bathroom and a single or double bedroom, with views out towards Notre-Dame cathedral.
Section
“To fully integrate oneself into the site and to have the lowest visual impact in places of such cultural importance, the cabins will be serviced by a secure corridor along the banks that will be accessible only by the users,” added the team.
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Occupation: Founders and partners of the design studio Doshi Levien
Location: London
Current projects:
Doshi: There are many. We’re working on a range of textiles. We’re working on quite a few projects for Galerie Kreo, which is a gallery based in Paris. We’re working on new collections for B&B Italia, Moroso, Kvadrat—there are quite a few different projects going on.
Levien: The work is very varied. Which is great, because we hop from one project to another, and they tend to feed each other in terms of ideas—there’s a lot of crossover between the different areas.
Mission:
Doshi: “Mission” sounds a bit too New Age to me. I think that when you work as a designer, your aims and your ambitions develop over time. Considering that we have worked a lot on product and furniture, I see the next step for us as working on space—it could be a public space, a hotel, a gallery.
Levien: As you go into a larger scale, the social aspect becomes a factor in the work, and I think that’s really interesting for us. We designed our perfect house not so long ago, for an exhibition called Das Haus at IMM Cologne in Germany. I think that was the beginning of a new way of working for us, a new direction for our studio.
Doshi Levien’s Almora lounge chair for B&B Italia, released earlier this year
An early sketch for Almora (left) and the first model of the chair
When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer?
Levien: I didn’t know that design existed as a profession until I had been to cabinetmaking college at 16. Design was not really a focus at that point, more the idea of making things perfectly and learning about wood. I value that experience so much now, as it established a kind of tacit understanding of and feeling for materials, a kind of sensitivity that I now apply to any production process. After making for a couple of years, I realized that what was missing was a design element—considering why things exist, and not just focusing on how things are made. So, in a way, design was a natural step from a making background.
Doshi: When I was growing up in India, design as an organized profession didn’t exist. I applied to study architecture, and then one of my tutors told me about this design school which was founded on the manifest of Charles and Ray Eames, the National Institute of Design in India. And it was after having applied there that I really understood what design was. Up until then it was just an idea for me, but I first fell in love with the campus and the whole environment, and I knew I wanted to be creative in that way. It was actually through studying design that I understood I wanted to do design, if that makes sense.
“I noticed I was using packs and packs of mechanical pencils at work as disposable items,” writes Andrew Sanderson, who spent six years as an aircraft propulsion technician and a decade as a gas turbine engineer. He subsequently switched to product design, with the goal of creating a mechanical pencil that you could keep and use forever.
“I set out to design a mechanical pencil that would reduce the waste, be a testament to U.S. manufacturing and design, and not break the bank,” Sanderson explains. “Having a single mechanical pencil that replaces the endless packs of plastic that end up sitting it landfills and floating in our oceans has to be a good thing.”
What most impressed me about Sanderson’s design is how he endeavored to hide the seams. It really does look like the conical tip and the shaft are one solid, machined piece, though of course they’re not. Take a closer look:
For many years, together with a number of design educators, I have been discussing how design can address the complex socio-technological systems that characterize our world. The issues are not new: many people and disciplines have grappled with them for some time. But how can design play a role? Do our educational methods, especially the emphasis upon craft, prepare designers for this? What can design add?
In Fall 2014, a number of us found ourselves in Shanghai where we were serving as advisors to the newly formed College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University. (The list of participants appears below.) We decided it was time to act. As a result, over the next month we wrote a position paper, describing the nature of the issues and the framework for working on the problems. We didn’t know what kind of design we should associate with this approach, and after many iterations on a name, we simply called it X—as in the algebraic variable that can take on multiple values. Hence, DesignX. The next section presents highlights from our statement.
Collaboratively authored by (in alphabetical order): Ken Friedman (Tongji University, College of Design and Innovation and Swinburne University Centre for Design Innovation), Yongqi Lou (Tongji), Don Norman (University of California, San Diego, Design Lab), Pieter Jan Stappers (Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering), Ena Voûte (Delft), and Patrick Whitney (Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design). Contact email: designxcollaborative@gmail.com
In the 1830s, an upholsterer and cabinetmaker named Theodore Alexander Robert Jupe was awarded British Patent No. 6788 for an expandable table design. The round six-seater table contained a particularly ingenious mechanical mechanism that must have astonished citizens of the Georgian era. Before we get into the mechanism, have a look at the table from overhead:
Here’s what’s funny: In my opinion, the auctioneer actually uses the table mechanism incorrectly! Watch the footage from 0:21 to 0:27, and you’ll see he turns the table counterclockwise to separate the wedges, which is correct. But after adding the inserts, at 0:44 to 0:48 he rotates the table clockwise to tighten the leaves. I feel he has missed the most important point of the table’s mechanism, which is called a Capstan mechanism. Watch the CG animation below to understand how it works:
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Portrait by Peter Krejci
Doshi Levien’s 
An early sketch for Almora (left) and the first model of the chair
