Hasta La Ideas

Dutch collective Envisions has experimented with ways of cutting into, printing on, and transforming materials for its Wood In Process exhibition at Milan design week. 

The exhibition, which has been created in partnership with Spanish wood manufacturer Finsa, showcases discoveries made by designers during the research phase, rather than completed pieces.

It sets out to emphasise the possibilities of the process, which the collective sees as an undervalued and rarely explored part of the industry.

“Functioning as a conceptual breeding ground, the preliminary phases of a product’s formation present limitless possibilities and deserve the spotlight in their own right,” said the collective, which was founded by students at Design Academy Eindhoven.

“Corporate companies often stick to the road of proven practices and clearly defined objectives, missing the possibly fruitful alternatives discovered while taking the path less travelled.”

Each of the 12 members of the collective were invited to visit Finsa’s production facilities to find potential new uses for its range of materials, as well as by-products created during manufacturing.

The results will be presented at the group’s exhibition at Palazzo Clerici during Milan design week.

Rather than using MDF as a cheap substitute for real wood, Roos Goomperts has added collage and cut-out shapes to turn it into a more striking choice for flooring or furniture.

Simone Post has similarly played with MDF’s reputation as a wood substitute, adding prints based on exaggerated versions of grain and knots.

Aukhe Fleur Janssen has taken woodgrain patterns and colour samples and transformed them into brightly patterns that could be used in wrapping paper, while Elvis Wesley designed gridded pieces he based on medieval engraved objects.

Working alongside fashion brand Dries Van Noten, textile designer Henriette Tilanis turned sheet products into pliable fibres, and Sanne Schuurman split sheets into blocks, and transformed them into interlocking geometric patterns which expose the inner fibrous texture.

Dutch duo Vantot took a slightly different approach, embedding electronic paths into Finsa’s wood products and experimenting with the possibilities of adding light.

Photographer Ronald Smits captured the manufacturer’s materials through a multiplane camera – a device invented and used by Walt Disney for animation – which makes the sheets appear to be sitting behind rather than on top of one another.

The Envisions group sets out to open up better dialogue between designers, clients and manufacturers through their presentations. During last year’s Milan design week, they presented a similar collection of materials, showcasing the possibilities of the research process rather than the end product.

The Envisions exhibition is on from 4 to 9 April during Milan design week, and takes place at the Palazzo Clerici. Other exhibitions on display during the fair include a showcase of meat alternatives and a collection of furniture made from the foundations of Paul Cocksedge’s London studio.

Photography is by Ronald Smits.

The post Envisions’ Milan exhibition shows the process instead of the final product appeared first on Dezeen.

This apartment inside a São Paulo block designed by the late modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer has been overhauled to reveal its original ribbed ceiling and board-marked concrete walls.

The 137-square-metre apartment is located on the 11th floor of the 38-storey Edifício Copan in downtown São Paulo, a building completed by Niemeyer in 1961.

Among the country’s largest buildings, the apartment block is known for its sinuous facade that is covered in rows of sinuous concrete ribs.

Local studio SuperLimão was asked to transform the flat into an open-plan, loft-like space, but were prevented from doing so by two existing structural walls that run the full length of the space.

The architects instead removed a series of partitioning walls to create three long spaces that connect to windows at either end, allowing for plenty of natural light and ventilation.

The studio also made large openings in each of the structural walls, providing views and easy routes through the apartment.

“The challenge was to create spans in the project, since the existing structure did not allow to transform the apartment into a loft,” explained the studio.

“The solution was to open as much as possible the structural walls. The circulation gained fluidity and increased cross ventilation that enters both sides of the building.”

The inner structural walls are stripped back to expose the original board-marked concrete, and the ceiling plaster was removed to reveal the ribbed slab.

The granite flooring throughout the residence is the same as that used in the common areas of the apartment block.

Each of the three spaces has a different function. A television room is placed nearest the entrance, while a combined kitchen, dining and living area is set in the centre, and the bedrooms and bathrooms are located at the farthest end.

The concrete brises that define the facade of the building run across the windows of the television room and the lounge.

The kitchen and dining room, and the master bedroom occupy the other side of the building, where perforated breeze blocks cover the majority of the windows.

The only exception is the upper portion, where hinged windows open to allow the breeze through.

Lighting in galvanised steel tubes runs through the ceiling and the walls – one of a number of industrial-style finishes in the residence.

Others include the colourful steel kitchen cabinets in hues of green and red, a large storage cabinet and the lounge table made from a wooden pallet.

“The industrial language is reinforced in the interiors, on the customer-mounted shelf in a steel frame and in the kitchen, with steel cabinets,” said the architects.

Niemeyer, who died aged 104 in 2012, is one of Brazil’s most acclaimed architects and was a key figure in the development of modernist architecture.

He is perhaps best know for his series of civic and government buildings in Brasília.

Many of his projects across the country, as well as internationally have been restored, with the most recent including his Haifa University library building in Israel and the Hotel Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.

Other apartment renovations in the city include a home and studio for an illustrator featuring a translucent fold-up doorway and a flat finished with traditional ceramic blocks.

Photography is by Maíra Acayaba.

Project credits:

Architecture: SuperLimão Studio
Project team: Lula Gouveia, Thiago Rodrigues, Antonio Carlos Figueira de Mello e Sérgio Cabral.
Collaborator: Juliana Sae
Management of execution: Maria de Lourdes Poloni

The post SuperLimão strips back São Paulo apartment in Oscar Niemeyer-designed building appeared first on Dezeen.

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Across platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, an estimated 78% of Americans have at least one social media profile, and according to The Pew Research Center, around 62% of Americans turn to social media for news.

Obviously, if you’re working in digital journalism, you can’t afford to ignore that captive audience.

For this reason The New York Times, led by Senior Editor Jonathan Ellis, is gearing up to launch on Snapchat’s Discover platform.

With a daily edition modeled after the Times’ popular “Morning Briefing,” Ellis hopes to capture a new, younger readership and continue to shape the future of multimedia journalism, one ten-second video at a time. Here’s how he’s doing it:

Why did you guys decide to launch on Snapchat Discover?

Snapchat Discover is a relatively new medium with a lot of interesting, new storytelling opportunities, so it’s definitely an exciting place.

There’s this opportunity to reach an entirely new audience—people who the Times might not be reaching right now, but who might be interested in finding a really trusted news source with a lot of great other features as well.

In terms of the actual content, how are you shifting it for the platform to ensure that you reach those audiences in a compelling way?

There’s not going to be room in any given day’s edition on Snapchat Discover to fit in everything that the Times is doing, so it’s about finding the right stories that would appeal to the audience on Snapchat. And I think a lot of that is in the curation of the story selection.

I think the mistake would be to try to pander to a certain audience, whoever that audience may be. We certainly don’t want to try to do anything that’s supposed to appeal to the kids out there. That’s just a recipe for disaster. So instead, it’s about finding the stories that matter to people.

As you build a team around this to prepare for launch, what are some of the digital journalism skills you’re looking for in potential hires?

I would say that motion graphics design is one of the linchpins of everything that we’re doing, because [Snapchat] is based on ten-second moving videos.

So you need some very creative motion designers who can not just take direction, but who can interpret the story that we’re trying to tell and come up with their own ways of telling them visually.

You also need video editors and video producers who can think about telling stories through video, research and find existing videos, work with the rest of The New York Times video team to make sure that we’re getting all of the good stuff that they’re working on into the platform, and think about original content.

I should also mention that just thinking in terms of vertical video is important. [It’s different] than what they might have always been working on in the medium of traditional, 16:9 widescreen video.

We’ve also got other editors on the team, who are sort of thinking about the story selections in general [and] applying their news judgment to what we’re putting into the edition every day.

We also have a photo editor on the team who is bringing the entire great world of New York Times photography into everything that we do. And that’s another way that we can tell these stories visually.

What are some of the soft skills needed to launch an endeavor like this?

Overall, we’ve found that this process is collaborative at its core, so even though everybody brings some specific skillsets to the table, it’s almost like everybody has to wear a lot of hats, and wear each other’s hats at various moments.

When we started working on this, we, I think, were a little too disconnected from each other, and people were working in their separate corners on their separate things, and it wasn’t jelling very well.

We realized pretty early on that to be able to produce this kind of cohesive, visual-first edition every day requires intense collaboration. People need to be sitting together, looking over each other’s shoulders, and communicating at all times with one another about what they’re working on and what ideas they have.

So instead of having everybody simply working in their own disciplines, people have to be very flexible, and [those are] the kind of people that you need on the team.

Aside from that initial hurdle of collaboration, what would you say the biggest challenges are now, leading up to launch, and can you foresee any future challenges down the road?

The collaboration challenge was obviously important at the get-go, and it still is. We’re still trying to figure out exactly the right workflows, so I think that will be one of the big challenges as we get closer and closer to launch. Just making sure we’re being as efficient as possible.

We are also trying to figure out the proper timing of all this. How do you prepare an edition that…[gives] you the latest news that you need to know that morning. And at what time does that all get prepared? The previous day, previous night or overnight?

There’s also just a lot of the refinement to be done in how we approach the mix of content that we put in each edition. What do we think is going to resonate with the audience? What’s the best way to arrange and organize all of that?

The other thing is that, until we launch, we won’t be able to gauge the audience reaction to all of this, so we’re doing this without the benefit of analytics.

Then after the launch, I think one of the things we’ll have to focus on is how our audience is responding. What’s successful that we didn’t expect to be? What’s not doing so well that we thought was going to be a big hit?

How do we adjust to that, and then, how can we build and grow an audience on a platform where you have a lot of other great media publishers? How can we make it clear to our Snapchat users that this is [content] that’s worth coming back to every day?

You touched repeatedly on building a habit with users and establishing brand loyalty. Would you say that’s the overarching goal of this initiative?

We’re excited to be a part of a platform that is changing the way that a lot of people get their news, and the way that a new generation gets its news. And we certainly want to bring to the table new ideas about how best [to] do that.

We’ll learn things about visual storytelling by doing this project, and we certainly hope that we can spread some of that knowledge throughout the rest of the organization, once we’re up and running.

I think everyone would agree that Snapchat has been so innovative in changing how a lot of people consume media, entertainment and journalism.

That’s a great thing that Snapchat does, and it’s a great opportunity for us to think about how we can change what we’re doing, as a whole, at The New York Times.

Want to learn more about multimedia content production to advance your career in digital journalism? Sign up today to be notified when our Digital Journalism course launches and receive an exclusive discount.

The post Oh Snap! Go Behind the Scenes of The New York Times’ Launch on Snapchat Discover appeared first on Mediabistro.

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