L’agence canadienne Rack & Pinion Creative a pensé une campagne pour Psiphon : un outil conçu pour contrer la censure dont sont victimes des millions d’utilisateurs d’Internet se trouvant dans les 25 pays où la liberté d’expression n’est pas un droit acquis. Sur chaque poster, on voit des sculptures de papier représentant Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook et Google avec une phrase qui atteste de la censure.
Credits :
Creative Director: Lenny Poplianski Art Director: Dorota Pankowska Copywriter: Adriano Marchese Managing Director: Deryn Robson Published: March 2015
Dezeen promotion: the thirty finalists shortlisted for the 2015 New Design Britain competition will exhibit their work at this year’s May Design Series.
The three-day trade show will take place at the ExCel exhibition centre in London from 17 to 19 May.
Material Illusions by Sophie Rowley, Surfaces category. Main image: Plag by Wael Seaiby, Accessories category
The New Design Britain awards give recognition to young designers in the fields of furniture, accessories, surfaces, fabrics, architecture and interior design.
Kai by Daniel Lau, Furniture category
The finalists have been narrowed down by a panel of judges including British Institute of Interior Design president Daniel Hopwood, MAKE Architects director Katy Ghahremani and furniture brand DeadGood co-founder Dan Ziglam.
Tension by Charles Parford-Plant, Furniture category
One winner will be chosen in each category and announced at the event on Monday 18 May – see the full shortlist.
Off the Radar by Phil Parkin, Architecture category
To find out more about the May Design Series and to register to attend for free, visit the event’s website. Read on for more information and the shortlist of New Design Britain finalists from the May Design Series organisers:
May Design Series 2015: New Design Britain competition reveals the design stars of tomorrow For the past 12 years, the New Design Britain Awards has been a magnet for bright, innovative students and recent graduates from British design schools. The competition is also a springboard for the winners’ careers, some of whom have gone on to become leading talents in the design industry; past participants like Daniel Schofield and Cristiana Ionescu have had their work stocked in Heal’s, made.com and Habitat.
The thirty finalists have been invited to exhibit and sell their products at the May Design Series, an exhibition and conference which in 2015 takes on the theme “Curated for Business”. This is in response to extensive research into the needs of retail, residential, commercial and hospitality design communities. Returning to ExCeL London on 17-19 May, the show offers visitors the chance to be amongst the first to purchase stylish pieces from these young stars of tomorrow and, on Monday 18 May, learn who has won top honours.
Fashion boutique Caramello by Karina Fisun, Interiors category
Strengthening the spotlight for the contenders this year is the awards programme’s new partnership with online retailer ACHICA. The entrants have been shortlisted across six categories – Furniture, Accessories (in partnership with ACHICA), Surfaces, Fabrics, Architecture and Interior Design. Hundreds of entries were whittled down by an expert panel of judges including Daniel Hopwood (President, BIID), Katy Ghahremani (MAKE Architects) and Dan Ziglam (DeadGood), to leave five finalists in each category.
In order to bridge the gap between design and industry, the entrants were judged on the commercial viability of their concepts, as well as aesthetics, functionality, and product development. Each of the six winners will receive a coveted industry placement, as well as career coaching and a complimentary stand at May Design Series 2016.
Nuntius de Navibus by Amelia Hunter, Architecture category
Finalists in the Furniture category are Charles Parford-Plant from Kingston University, for Tension; Daniel Lau of Nottingham Trent University with his entry, Kai; Heena Patel, also from Kingston University, for Transforma; Joe McAlonan, also of Nottingham Trent University, for his Jake Chair; and Simon Taylor of Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), with his Randonneur Chair.
Tiles Collection by Catherine MacGruer, Fabrics category
In the Accessories category, Alison Smith from Nottingham Trent has been shortlisted with her Geometric Pendants concept; Camilla Lee Lambert of the University of Brighton for her Organic iPhone Amplifiers; Joseph Kennedy from Plymouth University with 3888.7; Samuel Bellamy of Nottingham Trent University for his Moroccan Lamps and Wael Seaiby from the University of Edinburgh with his entry entitled PLAG.
The Surfaces category sees Alicia Cox of Staffordshire University shortlisted for her Perfectly Imperfect concept; Sophie Rowley, from Central Saint Martins/UAL, for Material Illusions; Olly Mason, University of Leeds, with an entry entitled Concrete; Jenna Brown from Duncan of Jordanstone (DJCAD), with Botanical Allure; plus Amy Bartlett of Leeds College of Art, with her Form and Structure entry.
Form and Structure by Amy Bartlett, Surfaces category
In the Fabrics category, Hannah Lois Sangwin of Birmingham City University has been shortlisted for Monochromatic Modifications; Ailsa Lishman from Manchester Metropolitan University with her Nature Abstracts designs; Zohreh Adle-Ghadjar from University of Brighton for her Exploration of the Loom: From Past to Present; Catherine MacGruer of The Glasgow School of Art with Tiles Collection; and Anastazia Hadjiyiakoumi of Loughborough University with an entry named Eden.
The shortlist for the Architecture category includes Catherine Sparkes from Nottingham Trent University with A New Era of Defence; Georgi Diliyanov Arnaudov of The University of Greenwich for Homogeneous Architectural & Landscape Organisms (HALO2) Arena; Amelia Hunter of The Royal College of Art with her entry entitled Nuntius de Navibus; Eva Ciocyte from the University of Westminster for her Re-arrangeable Wall System; and Phil Parkin of Nottingham Trent University with Off the Radar.
Interior Design finalists include Marinella Vronti from De Montfort University with The Social Hub: The Community Library of Limassol; Karina Fisun of KLC with Fashion Boutique Caramello; Laura-Anne Robinson from Sheffield Hallam University with Collaborative Care Centre; Cathrine Dal from Inchbald School Of Design with her entry named Bathyal; and Emily Davies from Falmouth University for Life Stream. “The standard of work was extremely competitive and we genuinely found that there were many more winners than we had space to select,” said Giles Miller, Director of Giles Miller Studio and judge in the Surfaces category.
Organic iPhone Amplifiers by Camilla Lee Lambert, Accessories category
Liam Butler, ACHICA Brand Director and Accessories category judge, said: “The final five finalists demonstrated a strong industry and commercial awareness and their products covered a broad range of materials from natural stone to plastic, recycled elements to wood – all on trend elements for 2015.”
The May Design Series showcases 500 of the best international and British brands across five sectors: Furniture, KBB, Lighting, Decor and DX, a pavilion focused upon the use of new technologies and materials. High-level thought leadership seminars from industry authorities and tastemakers will explore the purchasing and development implications of changing technologies, demographics and concern for wellbeing.
Opinion: hiding in plain sight, the NSA headquarters is the model for all future domestic architecture, argues Jack Self, as he reveals previously unpublished details about the inscrutable building.
There is an old expression that an Englishman’s home is his castle — and even for those of us who are not male or English, we still imagine the home to be a refuge against the bustle of the street and the prying eyes of nosey neighbours. When we go home we make a retreat from the chaos of the world, hunkering down into our own private kingdoms, places of safety and security.
How architects think about the domestic reflects a popular desire to control how much of our home life we reveal. The Viennese modernist Adolf Loos believed that the outside of the home should be unremarkable, without ornament, plain and anonymous like a face lost in a city crowd. By contrast, the interior should be materially rich, eclectic and highly personal.
How we design our homes, he argued, sends strong messages to society about who we think we are, and who we want to be. For Loos, sending messages was giving the game away — if we really want to be ourselves at home we have to conceal our lives from public scrutiny.
That concealment is becoming harder and harder to manage. As you read this, the United States’ National Security Agency (as well as a myriad of other corporations and governments) are almost definitely monitoring your home internet traffic and scanning your emails.
Under a programme called “Prism” they are keeping records of your phone’s geolocation, harvesting your metadata and tracking your browser history. They are filing and documenting your most intimate details, and as we know from whistleblower Edward Snowden, NSA workers routinely share your nude photos with their colleagues (in an office culture apparently closer to fraternity “bros” than intelligence specialists).
Your data is siphoned directly from the biggest servers in the world through so-called “backdoor” surveillance tools — including those of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — and stored in the NSA’s Massive Data Repository in Utah. Alongside your own personal information, more generalised data scooping and snooping is banked, logged and then synthesised, analysed and cross-compared.
The results are probably processed at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. I say “probably” because, although the main building itself is not a secret, nothing is known about what goes on inside. It is an elegant rectangular cuboid and its graceful proportions are based on the Golden Ratio.
On forums and chat threads it is rumoured that the sleek facade of highly reflective blue-black glass is designed as a massive Faraday cage — a shield capable of disrupting electronic waves, thereby making it impossible to either scan the building’s interior, or alternatively leak transmissions. The headquarters is hermetic, in the literal sense of being impenetrable and completely closed off. It is a grounded stealth bomber, silent in its military landscape.
Official photograph of the NSA headquarters
But rumours and hearsay aside, the authorised information available on the building could practically be published in a single tweet.
There is only one official photograph (although it is not known when it was taken) and nothing is known about who designed the building or when it was completed. Nonetheless, it is clearly visible on Google Maps and the collection of vintage aircraft mounted in the car park can be freely photographed (albeit only from approved perspectives).
This strange condition of being both very much in the public domain, and yet totally unknowable, intrigued me a good deal. Yet the more I researched, the more I realised how tightly information was being controlled, and this only piqued my interest further. I wanted to unravel this architecture, but without a contact or lead I wasn’t sure where to start. So I emailed info@nsa.gov.
My question, “who designed your headquarters, and when was it finished?” was met with appropriately profound suspicion and a cold politeness. The response email, title “re:CLASSIFICATION:UNCLASSIFIED,” read simply, “Dear Sir, we can neither confirm nor deny that the referenced project has been completed.” Subsequent correspondence from the press office was polite, but understandably curt and frustratingly uninformative.
Separately, I had found the name of a possible contractor, located just ten kilometres from Fort Meade, specialists in “utility consultation” called B&R Construction. Yes, they said, they were involved. Unfortunately, they weren’t at liberty to say anything more, since the headquarters was a secure facility. They recommended I contact the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), who managed the project. After being shuttled around the inside of USACE for a few months, I finally struck upon a really helpful ally at the Baltimore District Office, and information began to trickle out (delayed, like a radio relay from the moon, as each answer was carefully redacted).
The information in this article has been made public for the first time. In addition to the mechanical services provider above, I can say that the Corps of Engineers finished construction of the NSA Headquarters on March 26, 1986. The official photograph is presumed to date shortly afterwards. The prime contractor was Centex Construction. The designers were New York-architects called Eggers and Higgins, responsible for the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and National Art Gallery (both in Washington D.C.). The Eggers Group was later acquired by Hillier Architects (at some point in the 1990s), which was in turn absorbed into RMJM in 2007.
Electronic Frontier Foundation photograph of NSA’s Utah Data Center
Nothing more about the project can be known: when the NSA closes a door, it stays closed. Conversely, when we close our own front doors, the NSA floats right through, as invisible as ghosts. The headquarters is hiding in plain sight, perfectly detectable but completely inscrutable.
Just because we can see a building doesn’t mean we can understand it, especially when — unlike the modernist trope of form following function — the form of the NSA Headquarters is purposefully divorced from its function. Its architecture is generic, uniform and homogenous. It is hermetic, not porous, and it receives but it does not transmit. In this sense, it is the perfect model for a new form of home, one capable of resisting the very penetration of our privacy the building perpetuates.
I would like to thank the NSA Press Office and Baltimore District Army Corps of Engineers for their generous help in researching and declassifying information relating to the Fort Meade headquarters.
Jack Self is a designer and writer based in London. He is reviews editor for the Architectural Review, where he has worked in a number of capacities since 2009. He was previously associate editor at Strelka Press (2012-13).
Artist and musician Nick Cave’s latest book offers a visual document of a 22-city tour of North America scrawled on the back of airline sick bags. Designed by Pentagram’s Angus Hyland and published by Canongate, it’s a fascinating collection of doodles, lyrics, thoughts and verse…
Described as “both mythic and contemporary…[a text that] lies somewhere between the Wasteland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, the book contains images of sick bags written and drawn on by Cave alongside prose, poetry and lyrics.
As Patrick Burgoyne wrote about in our August 2013 issue, Cave (who trained as an artist) often composes albums and songs in notebooks stamped with dates, covered in drawings and adapted with both typed and written corrections. The super deluxe edition of his album Push the Sky Away, designed by Tom Hingston, came with a detailed copy of one of his notebooks, complete with coloured stickers and a scribbled-on hotel notelet concealed in a pouch on the inside cover.
The Sick Bag Song offers a similar glimpse into the workings of the musician’s mind – arranged in order of his 2014 tour, it begins in Nashville and ends in Montreal. There are no obvious ‘sections’ as such, but each destination is introduced with a simple graphic (pictured below) and image of the corresponding sick bag, stamped with a date and littered with sketches and observations. There is an underlined title on each, alongside arrows, small drawings, asides and corrections written in different coloured ink or overlaid on stickers.
The text offers fleeting glimpses of North America, from an image of a boy on a bridge to mountains, lakes and prairies, alongside some surreal and dark imagined scenes. It also provides a record of the inspiring yet gruelling experience of being on tour – an entry from Toronto, towards the end of his journey, notes: “We have traversed borders…We have moved across the land, over wheat fields, mustard fields, corn fields, bean fields and fields of sunflowers,” before documenting the airlines he has flown with, airports he has sat in, food he has consumed and the venues he has performed in along the way.
Hyland says the book’s design was inspired by the visual language of airlines. Text on the cover and an accompanying website, for example, is inspired by a message printed on one of the sick bags featured (shown top). “It’s a very pared back design – it’s laid out as a serious book of poetry [and] the look and feel of the packaging takes it cues from the idiom of blue chip, corporate America,” explains Hyland. “We treated the sick bags as if they were works of art, showing both the front and back. If you took a pair of scissors to it, you could cut them out perfectly,” he says. The book’s cover features a white blind embossed design (pictured above), which Hyland says was designed with the intention of creating “something tangible and tactile.”
As well as a standard edition priced at £30, Canongate will release a limited edition package containing a unique “and fully functioning” sick bag customised by Cave, a signed and numbered edition of the book and a limited edition vinyl pressing of Cave reading the text aloud.
Priced at £750, it’s extraordinarily expensive – almost ten times the cost of his super deluxe Push the Sky Away package – but given Cave’s cult following, and the popularity of previous deluxe releases, there will undoubtedly be fans and collectors who feel it’s a worthwhile investment for a custom, one-of-a-kind Cave doodle. It seems a shame not to have included an original sick bag in the package, however. One produced in a moment of inspiration during the actual tour is surely more meaningful than one created to justify such a steep price tag.
To promote the book’s release, Cave will be hosting three live events: one on April 8 art the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles; another on April 10 at New York’s The Florence Gould Theatre and on April 16 at The Porchester Hall in London, where he will read from the book and take audience questions.
Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard, directors of 20,000 Days on Earth (a fictionalised documentary about Cave) will also be releasing a series of short flims on the Sick Bag Song website.
The Sick Bag Song is published by Canongate on April 8 and costs £30. Copies are available to order at thesickbagsong.com
Which do you think is trickier: Dreaming up a form for an entirely new sort of object, or re-imagining an established form factor? Industrial designer Stian Korntved Ruud recently undertook a massive project falling into the latter category. Oslo-based Ruud has become consumed with “making objects with pure functional or aesthetic features,” and decided he would spend a year designing and making new spoons.
The thing is, he decided he’d design and make a new spoon every day, until he’d created 365 designs. Hence the project’s title, Daily Spoon.
By repeating the production of a spoon every day for a longer period of time (365 days), the goal is to challenge and explore a spoon’s aesthetic and functional qualities.
I make all the spoons in a traditional way with only hand tools. The point of this is to actively cooperate with the material, in this case wood.
In a modern industrial production the machines overwrites the wooden structures and natural growth pattern. When using manual hand tools my hand collaborates with the wood structure during the forming process. This underpins all the spoons unique qualities.
Ruud began the project in March of 2014, so assuming he’s kept pace, the project should be wrapped (though he’s made no mention of stopping).
You can see the astonishing diversity of designs Ruud’s produced on his Instagram.
Here’s to hoping Ruud continues, and/or switches over to forks and knives.
Desktop file holders work well for quick and easy access to the files a user needs most often—usually active files for bills, work in progress, etc. They also allow a user to work almost anywhere in the home and office, since they can easily be moved to a new location.
The Bigso file box shown above has no lid, which works well for users who need to see their files and want the quickest possible access to them. The handles will make it easy to move the box around. It comes with eight hanging file folders, which is about all this box will hold. That’s a fairly common size, limiting the desktop space required, but it will be a little too small for some users.
The Magis XX File Holder, designed by Jasper Morrison, has the advantage of being stackable. That lets the user store more files in the same desktop footprint, but it does make the files in the lower holder significantly less accessible. Sadly, the holders are often sold in sets of four, so users who don’t want to stack them (and who don’t have a large available expanse of flat surface) are out of luck.
The Lee Flexifile Expandable Collator/Organizer holds standard file folders, not hanging folders. Anticipating users’ varying needs, Lee makes this product with six, 12, 18 or 24 slots. The open design means it can hold varying file folder sizes: U.S. letter and legal files as well as sizes used in other countries.
The WoodWorx StepUp file is one of many products often called step files or incline files; the angled base makes it easier to see all the files. But users who want to have their desktop files be mobile might prefer a different product; files could easily fall out the sides when this one is moved, unless the user is careful. And users aren’t always careful; they’re in a hurry, they’re distracted, etc.
The StationMate desktop organizer would be easy to move around, since all the files go into compartments with sides. It comes with 25 PocketFiles, so it’s a large-capacity product. That will be perfect for some users and too bulky for others.
Less & More makes a smaller-capacity inclined file organizer with slots for the files. Putting the files away won’t be quite as easy as with the WoodWorx StepUp file, which may frustrate the impatient or those with physical challenges, but many users will be fine with it. Buyers have commented appreciatively on the sturdiness and the high quality of workmanship.
Some users may prefer to have a lidded product; they may be concerned about privacy or dust, or they may simply be people who prefer a more hidden-away look, aesthetically. Lidded boxes also pretty easy to carry around.
This box from Snap-N-Store can hold U.S. letter-sized or legal-sized folders—a nice bit of flexibility. It stores flat, and is snapped together when needed. However, some buyers have had problems with the snaps coming loose, especially as the boxes got close to full. (Note: Users often overfill any storage container, so the design should take that into consideration.)
Another concern has been the fit of the lid. As one buyer noted: “If your hanging files have tabs, as mine do, the box top will just sit perched above these tabs. So the top doesn’t really close, it just loosely sits on the files.”
Some users might want to take those active files with them when they leave their homes or offices. Rather than taking the files from wherever they’re stored and putting into a briefcase, messenger bag or backpack, they could simply keep the files in a Jamie Raquel file tote. This is not a lightweight product, but it’s very sturdy.
For users who want or need to protect the privacy of their files, Vaultz has locking file totes, with double combination locks, which they say are HIPAA compliant.
OneLessFile from Heckler Design could be used on a sturdy tabletop, if there was enough space, or it could just sit on the floor. It’s 18.25 inches by 12.32 inches, so it might work for users who need something a bit bigger than the normal desktop file. Since it’s made from heavy-duty steel and weighs 12.9 pounds, it will work better for users who aren’t looking for a mobile filing product.
World Backup Day is March 31 — a good reminder to take a moment to think about how you’re doing your backups, and whether or not there’s something you’d like to adjust. Consider the following points:
Are you backing up all your critical files?
Some backup tools will back up everything on your computer. Others won’t backup your software programs (Microsoft Office, Evernote, TurboTax, etc.), assuming you can simply reinstall those. Some may depend on you to list exactly which files you want to back up. And you may use an entirely manual process rather than a program, which also means you need to determine the files you include in your backup.
In the final two cases, especially, be sure you’re thinking about all your important files. I’ve seen people lose extensive collections of bookmarks/favorites from their favorite browser because the relevant files weren’t backed up. (They aren’t stored in the same place as documents and photos.)
Do your backup programs fit your needs?
You may choose to run one backup program or multiple ones for added protection (one local backup and one in the cloud, for example). In either case, consider the following guidelines:
Make sure at least one backup program runs automatically. Everyone’s busy, and almost everyone is a bit lazy about backups. Having a program that runs automatically can save you from yourself.
Make sure at least one program creates an offsite backup. That usually means using a cloud backup service, but it could also involve taking a backup drive and putting it in a safe deposit box. This will protect you if there’s a theft, a fire, or some other tragedy that could affect everything in your home.
Make sure at least one program saves files you’ve deleted from your computer as well as older versions of files you still have. If your only backup is one that mirrors your computer as it is at the time of the last backup, you’ll be in trouble if you delete a file by mistake, make an update you didn’t want to make, or wind up with a corrupted file because of a hardware problem.
If having a new or repaired computer fully functional as quickly as possible is critical to you, look for a program that will create a bootable external backup drive. This means you can start your computer using an external hard drive as the data source, rather than your computer’s internal hard drive. SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are two alternatives for those using Macs, and I’ve been very happy with SuperDuper. I’m not as familiar with what’s available for those using PCs.
Do you check your backup status messages?
Programs will handle this differently, but all will provide some status indicator. For my cloud backup service, for example, I get daily emails. It’s easy to overlook these repetitive messages, but don’t do that. Take the time to make sure they aren’t alerting you to a problem.
Have you tested your backups?
As Gabe Weatherhead of MacDrifter tweeted, “A backup doesn’t count until you’ve done a restore from it at least once.”
While restoring all files for testing purposes is usually not practical, you can certainly try restoring a file or two and making sure things look okay. I knew someone who had to restore a great many files, and had never tested her backups until that time. Sadly, she found that while that files got restored, the date stamp on the files was not correct, which caused her numerous problems.
If you’re creating a bootable external backup drive, try booting from that drive and making sure everything seems to work okay.
Do you have the license keys and/or serial numbers for all your software?
In order to get your software programs reinstalled or to get them running again after you’ve restored them from a backup, you’re likely to need your license information. Do you have that information readily available? If not, gather it up now so you don’t need to scramble around for it when there’s a problem.
For the second year in a row, President Obama has been left off of Fortune’s “World’s Greatest Leaders” list. That’s… Something.
The President didn’t make the cut of 50 people “judged on their leadership within their professional domains, industries, or fields of service or governance,” but Taylor Swift did.
The President didn’t make the cut of 50 people “with vision who moved others to act as well,” but Jimmy Fallon did.
The President didn’t make the cut of 50 people who have “the courage to pioneer,” but adamant pro-lifer Pope Francis did.
When reached for comment on Fortune’s omission, Obama replied “What list?”
Jazmine Hughes has been named an associate digital editor for The New York Times Magazine. Hughes is a contributing writer at The Hairpin and previously served as a web producer for New York.
Hughes’ work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and more.
In a memo to staffers, Times Mag editor Jake Silverstein said Hughes joining the team was “Great news for the magazine.”
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.
