Turning to nature for inspiration, South Korean scientists have created a robot that can jump on water. The miniature invention is based on the Water Strider—an insect that’s capable of walking across the surface of water—and is made up of four hydrophobic……
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L’une des dernières usines de fabrication de pellicules argentiques de Kodak a été détruite le 18 juillet à Rochester, dans la banlieue de New York et la firme a annoncé en 2009 l’arrêt de la production de sa mythique Kodachrome. Le célèbre photographe Steve McCurry a fait la demande d’obtenir le dernier exemplaire.
De cette pellicule, il en ressort une collection de 36 poses, datant de 2010, en provenance d’Inde et des Etats-Unis, dont certaines sont devenues célèbres dans le monde entier. Un point final à l’histoire d’une pellicule devenue un symbole de la photographie argentique.
Trente ans après la catastrophe nucléaire de la centrale de Tchernobyl, dont l’explosion du réacteur est survenue le 26 avril 1986, la ville de Pripyat, située à trois kilomètre du site et déjà explorée, est totalement interdite à la fréquentation. Le photographe Roland Verant est allé immortaliser ce qu’il reste de la petite ville déserte. Un spectacle de désolation où demeurent encore les stigmates de la catastrophe. Une ville fantôme laissée à la merci de la Nature.
La designer Ellinor Ericsson, basée à Copenhague, a imaginé la collection de chaises et sofas Xme en se demandant pourquoi les meubles nordiques n’ont pas suffisamment d’ornements. Elle a donc fait des meubles en bois incrustés d’énormes fils de laine qui rappellent le tricotage et le tissage. Elle a choisi la forme de ses chaises et canapés en se basant sur une influence rococo pour créer une balance avec l’ornement scandinave et coloré de la grosse laine.
Italian studio Arabeschi di Latte and curator Jane Withers have installed a bar at London’s Selfridges that invites visitors to “imagine life without the plastic water bottle” as part of an exhibition about ocean plastic (+ slideshow).
The blue-speckled Water Bar is part of the Project Ocean exhibition, which intends to raise awareness of the environmental impact of plastic accumulating at the centre of the world’s largest bodies of water.
The issue has become a popular topic among designers. Pharrell Williams used it to produce a range of clothes, Adidas has launched trainers in collaboration with British designer Alexander Taylor, and a young designer has created a machine to harvest tonnes of the waste material from the sea.
“Between 5 and 14 million tonnes of plastic are estimated to enter our oceans every year, contributing to the existence of a floating plastic ‘soup’ now estimated altogether to be twice the size of the United States and amounting to five trillion plastic pieces,” said a statement from Jane Withers, who curated the exhibition at the department store.
Serving water treated with charcoal, minerals and herbs, the Water Bar was designed by Arabeschi di Latte – a London- and Milan-based collective that focuses on the intersection of food and design.
The bar is made from a terrazzo material comprising recycled glass and epoxy resin, with taps and pipes in copper and brass. A seating area is formed with enamelled metal and brass tables, paired with wood and terrazzo stools.
“The project concept was to reinvent water drinking rituals without the single-use plastic bottle that has become our default, but is so harmful to the environment,” Withers told Dezeen.
Related story: Adidas unveils sports shoes made from recycled ocean waste
“The project makes reference to the rituals of ‘taking the waters’ in Italian Terme and spas, and this also informs the design of the long bar and double taps and ‘terrace’ of tables.”
A range of vessels – from decorative ceramics to unusual glass containers – are displayed on a wall next to the bar, presenting alternatives to plastic bottles.
Located in Selfridges’ Ultralounge on the lower ground floor of the Oxford Street store, the exhibition also includes Studio Swine‘s series of objects crafted from ocean plastic.
To present their Gyrecraft project, studio founders Azusa Murakami and Alex Groves – along with collaborator Andrew Friend – installed a replica of the 22-metre research ship on which they sailed to the North Atlantic Gyre and collected plastic to make their collection of objects.
Inside the ship, visitors can listen to interviews with the crew recorded by journalist Kate Rawles and learn about the effects of plankton eating plastic.
At the entrance to the exhibition, London-based How About Studio has mounted over 5,000 used plastic water bottles – roughly the number used every 15 seconds or less in the UK – onto the ceiling.
Beside the installation is a poster by Barcelona agency Studio Smäll titled The Most Dangerous Creatures in the Ocean. The graphic depicts common plastic pollution in the shapes of fish, and describes its effect on marine life.
As part of the initiative set up with the Zoological Society of London and the Marine Reserves Coalition, plastic bottles have been banned throughout the store and visitors are invited to refill their own vessels at a drinking fountain in the food hall.
Project Ocean is open until 3 September 2015 at Selfridges, which is due to be overhauled by British architect David Chipperfield.
The store’s previous campaigns include a concept for gender-neutral retail spaces and a fragrance lab that attempted to distill visitors’ characters into scents.
The post Selfridges hosts Water Bar for marine plastic exhibition Project Ocean appeared first on Dezeen.
The architecture and design of the counterculture era has been overlooked, according to the curator of an upcoming exhibition dedicated to “Hippie Modernism” (+ slideshow).
The radical output of the 1960s and 1970s has had a profound influence of contemporary life but has been “largely ignored in official histories of art, architecture and design,” said Andrew Blauvelt, curator of the exhibition that opens at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this autumn.
“It’s difficult to identify another period of history that has exerted more influence on contemporary culture and politics,” he said.
“Much of what was produced in the creation of various countercultures did not conform to the traditional definitions of art, and thus it has largely been ignored in official histories of art, architecture, and design,” he said. “This exhibition and book seeks to redress this oversight.”
While not representative of a formal movement, the works in Hippie Modernism challenged the establishment and high Modernism, which had become fully assimilated as a corporate style, both in Europe and North America by the 1960s.
The exhibition, entitled Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia will centre on three themes taken from taken from American psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary’s era-defining mantra: Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Organised with the participation of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, it will cover a diverse range of cultural objects including films, music posters, furniture, installations, conceptual architectural projects and environments.
The Turn On section of the show will focus on altered perception and expanded individual awareness. It will include conceptual works by British avant-garde architectural group Archigram, American architecture collective Ant Farm, and a predecessor to the music video by American artist Bruce Conner – known for pioneering works in assemblage and video art.
Tune In will look at media as a device for raising collective consciousness and social awareness around issues of the time, many of which resonate today, like the powerful graphics of the US-based black nationalist party Black Panther Movement.
Drop Out includes alternative structures that allowed or proposed ways for individuals and groups to challenge norms or remove themselves from conventional society, with works like the Drop City collective’s recreation dome – a hippie version of a Buckminster Fuller dome – and Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison’s Portable Orchard, a commentary on the loss of agricultural lands to the spread of suburban sprawl.
The issues raised by the projects in Hippie Modernism – racial justice, women’s and LGBT rights, environmentalism, and localism among many other – continue to shape culture and politics today.
Blauvelt sees the period’s ongoing impact in current practices of public-interest design and social-impact design, where the authorship of the building or object is less important than the need that it serves.
Many of the exhibited artists, designers, and architects created immersive environments that challenged notions of domesticity, inside/outside, and traditional limitations on the body, like the Italian avant-garde design group Superstudio’s Superonda: conceptual furniture which together creates an architectural landscape that suggests new ways of living and socialising.
Blauvelt sees the period’s utopian project ending with the OPEC oil crisis of the mid 1970s, which helped initiate the more conservative consumer culture of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Organised in collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive, Hippie Modernism will run from 24 October 2015 to 28 February 2016 at the Walker Art Center.
The post Hippie Modernism exhibition at the Walker Art Center to celebrate design’s trippy side appeared first on Dezeen.
Weathering steel – often known by the brand name Corten – continues to remain popular with architects. The pre-rusted metal, which is created when chemicals are used to speed up the oxidisation process, has recently been used to clad a Brisbane community centre and a mountaintop family retreat. The rust forms a weatherproof layer of protection. See all our stories about weathering steel »
The post Today we like: weathering steel appeared first on Dezeen.
This week BBC4 screened All Aboard! The Canal Trip, a two-hour real-time journey down the Kennet and Avon canal in England. The graceful movement and lulling sounds of the waterways made for compelling ‘slow TV’ but perhaps the cleverest part of the project was the use of type that appeared on bridges, passing boats and even on the water…
The Garden Productions’ film, which originally aired in May and is now on the BBC iPlayer, was billed as a gentle antidote to television’s usual pace. And in fixing a camera to the bow of a boat, the beauty of The Canal Trip was its simplicity – a single 120-minute shot brought home some of the sights and sounds that people experience on the water.
But with the journey from Top Lock in Bath to the Dundas Aqueduct offering up numerous opportunities for conveying historic detail, the programme also aimed at being informative. So how to convey the relevant information without shattering the calm with an intrusive voiceover? Subtitles?
Well, in a way, yes – but the actual solution created by visual effects and animation studio Compost was far more in-keeping with the aesthetic of the film and a masterclass in subtlety.
From the opening shot – showing the lock at Bath, see image at the top of the post – it was clear that this film was going to be a little different and, as it progressed, snippets of social history appeared without fanfare on the surrounding environment.
Alongside archive stills sewn into the footage to show where old buildings had once existed, or what the canal had looked like when it froze over (see third image below), text was also placed over the film at various points, delivering facts about a particular part of the canal or its place in local social history.
Typography has always been linked with Britain’s canals and waterways through the signpainting tradition, and, for All Aboard!, this treatment was replicated a few times on the sides of passing boats.
Text also appeared on various bridges as the camera went under them and in panels which floated on the water. While the water-borne type was locked off in panels (and thankfully didn’t obey the ups and downs of the current), the bridge-based type often seemed to hark back to the time period in question.
The end result was a perfect match of film, subject matter and type which came together to make the whole two-hour journey even more enjoyable.
Compost has a showreel of sequences from the project on its website at compostcreative.com. Producer: Luke Korzun Martin; Sound Recordist: Marc Hatch; Director of Photography: Steve Robinson. All Aboard! The Canal Trip is on the iPlayer here.
Proving that they’re not always chasing Apple, Samsung has released a unique monitor with a wireless charging feature. Smartphones equipped with the Qi wireless charging standard can be placed onto the center of their SE370 monitor’s base, and the juice will flow, absent cables.
I love the idea, and I’m glad Samsung was the first to create one; although I’m a devout Apple user myself, as I’ve written before I believe that these two giants motivating each other to innovate can only be good for consumers.
That being the case, I still see some 1.0-ishness in this design. First off it wouldn’t work for me, as I’m a laptop user who positions my external monitor directly behind my laptop screen and elevated for clearance. To get to my phone I’d have to lower the laptop screen each time.
So let’s imagine that I’m one of the desktop users this monitor is designed for. This monitor’s charger features a flat design, as most wireless charging stands do, requiring you to lay the phone down on it horizontally. I think that’s fine for a nightstand situation, but not appropriate for a workstation.
If I’m at my desk, I want the phone within my peripheral vision at all times. If it’s missing because I left it in the breakroom or in my coat where I can’t hear it ring, I want to discover that sooner rather than later.
And with the phone on my desk, I want the screen tilted up and facing me. If I forgot to turn the ringer back on after a meeting and a call comes in, I want to see the screen flashing. Or if I’m on a videoconference and a text comes in I’d been waiting for, I want to be able to read it at a glance rather than leaning forward and craning my head, communicating to the others that I’m not paying attention.
These wants or needs, which I assume I’m not alone in, speak of a form factor that isn’t flat. I get that wireless charging is about minimalism and making the “dock” as unobtrusive as possible. But I’d prefer the charging mechanism be elevated and angled into a kind of cradle, to place the phone’s screen at a more visible angle.
As for it being integrated into a monitor, I’m all for it if the designers can figure out the right form factor. And lastly, I’d wish for it to be off to the side, so we laptop users wouldn’t obscure it with our primary screens.
The bottom line is I’m glad Samsung is pushing this initiative, and I eagerly await the 2.0 version.
Adults who play role playing games have money, and are willing to spend it on good design. That was the conclusion I came to after seeing Geek Chic’s beautiful gaming tables, which carry five-figure price tags and year-long waiting lists. And something I found outstanding about their approach was beyond their design work (which I also liked, by the way); it was that they really paid attention to the customer experience, carefully designing not just the furniture, but the process of how the end user orders one of their products and essentially has their hands held through much of the waiting process during fabrication.
Now another company producing wood products for gamers, this one called Wyrmwood, has again combined good design with clever business sense. First off let’s look at their product, which sounds simple, but does something surprising:
I’m not showing you that video to pump up their crowdfunding campaign; it’s already over, and they netted $246,719 over a tiny $10,000 goal. No, I’m showing it to you to as an illustration of how designing something relatively simple, but clever, and targeted at a highly specific audience can lead to great success.
If it’s not obvious from the video, the guys and gals at Wyrmwood had already designed, and were already selling, their successful dice tower system. What’s notable here is that they dreamt of offering it in a much wider variety of wood species—I’m talking 70 and including exotics—that they could not possibly afford to pre-buy the lumber for.
So they turned to Kickstarter to get precise information. By learning exactly how many people wanted exactly how many units in exactly what species of wood, they could order only what they needed. Wyrmwood designer and co-founder Edward Maranville explained their approach to Polygon:
Our Kickstarter is a bit unorthodox, in that the main reason we’re running it is to expand our variety of options, not the product itself. While we’d love to offer that kind of variety all the time, we just can’t do it from a logistical perspective — we don’t have the space for all the lumber, or the inventory.
Keep in mind we offer different sizes and surface options, so if we stocked our 15 product variations in 70 different woods … it quickly gets very out of hand. But, in the context of a Kickstarter, we can get all the pledges, order exactly what we need and make them in a series of large runs we can manage.
The really clever bit they’ve pulled off is the part that’s easy for Kickstarter novices to overlook: Accurately managing customer expectations. Because Wyrmwood was already tooled up, was already experienced with production times for the existing product and employs enough experienced woodworkers to know that Bubinga and Wenge are a lot trickier to work with than Pine and Walnut, they were able to create a precise system of timelines.
We took our time with the development of the Dice Tower System, refining the production process and figuring out what it takes to make them and how many we can make over a given period. We’ve set limits on our reward tiers based on this, and so we’re staggering out the delivery estimates in batches. The first tier was for 100 backers who would get early delivery a month away. The next is 3 months, the next 5, and we’ll simply add on new delivery windows as these fill to ensure we can always deliver on time, as promised.
In other words, these guys didn’t…roll the dice with their delivery times. [Cue rim shot.]
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.
