Hasta La Ideas

London designer Christopher Jenner has teamed up with British heritage brand Elkington and Co to reimagine everyday pieces of silverware for London Design Festival 2017.

Called Epicurean, the collection comprises 24 pieces and features luxurious iterations of items such as sugar bowls, tea pots and salad servers.

The collaboration arose after Jenner became interested in elevating commonplace domestic utensils, focusing on ways they are crafted.

The designer turned to Sheffield-based company Elkington and Co, which has practiced silver plating since it was established in 1824, to closely study traditional and modern silversmithing techniques.

Jenner then applied this knowledge to his designs, while also making visual references to minimalism and geometric shapes.

This can particularly be seen in the collection’s spoons, which are made with a squared instead of curved tip, and a simplistic water jug that appears to be moulded from a single piece of metal.

Other materials have also been applied throughout Jenner and Elkington’s homeware range. Hand-blown crystal forms the cover of a butter dish, while walnut is used for the lid of an ice bucket.

For the launch of the collection at this year’s London Design Festival, Jenner also called on the help of Studio Appetit, which specialise in culinary design projects.

The Dutch studio has devised five food installations that will act as the backdrop to Jenner and Elkington’s creations, each one a monochromatic still-life that uses ingredients relevant to particular Epicurean pieces.

These installations are on display at the Thomas Goode and Co store, 19 South Audley Street, London W1K 2BN, from 18 to 22 September 2017.

Other brands will also display home accessories at the design festival, which takes place citywide from 16 to 24 September 2017. Architecture collective Assemble has made a series of plates with unique paint splatter combinations, while Pulpo has worked with a host of designers to create their Fabulously Awesome Tablescape collection.

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Dezeen promotion: designers whose work spans design and technology, including Daan Roosegaarde, Carlo Ratti and Moritz Waldemeyer, will be among those taking part in the first EDIT festival in Toronto this month.

Dezeen is media partner for EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation and Technology, which will run from 28 September to 8 October 2017 at the Canadian city’s East Harbour venue – formerly the Unilever soap factory.

Organised by Toronto’s Design Exchange museum, the programme will encompass talks, immersive exhibits and interactive workshops.

“The 10-day biennial, in partnership with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), will celebrate and recognise high-profile international visionaries for the significant impact they have made to propel humanity towards EDIT’s overarching theme, Prosperity For All,” said the organisers.

Among participants will be Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde, who will showcase a model of his Smog Vacuum, which uses ionisation to suck pollution out of the air and turns the particles into jewellery.

As one of the speakers for EDIT’s Making Change series, former Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dadich will discuss his Netflix documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design and the power of storytelling.

Dadich is also one of Design Exchange’s 2017 ChangeMaker Award winners, along with Ian Campeau of musical group A Tribe Called Red, urban planner Jennifer Keesmaat and environmentalist David Suzuki.

As another Making Change speaker, 16-year-old Achilleas Souras will present his Save Our Souls project, which involved creating temporary shelters for refugees from discarded life jackets.

During the expo, architect and academic Brigitte Shim will also take to the stage, speaking about the future of social architecture, while architect Sharon Davis will talk about her human-centric work in New York City and Rwanda.

Visitors will be able to interact with an LED installation by London-based artist Moritz Waldemeyer, who has previously worked with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan and singer Rihanna.

“For EDIT, Waldemeyer is encouraging social discourse by producing an interactive artwork that illustrates how economic policy impacts society,” said the organisers. “Visitors can alter a forest of LED lights by touching a screen to set different rates of taxation, manipulating the tax level for low-income, middle-class and high-income households.”

Carlo Ratti, whose urban research and architecture projects integrate technology in a variety of ways, will curate an exhibition around the theme of Shelter.

The other main exhibitions will focus on Nourish, Care and Educate, as well as the overriding Prosperity for All topic. These themes were influenced by the UNDP’s 17 Goals for Sustainable Development.

Other participants will include Rhode Island School of Design president Rosanne Somerson, and Toronto art duo Christine Leu and Alan Webb.

EDIT will kick off with a launch party, when 1,000 will get a sneak preview of the events to come. Tickets are on sale now. The expo will close with the Toronto edition of Feeding the 5000 – a feast made using food that would otherwise be wasted.

For more information, the full programme of events, and to register to attend, visit the EDIT website.

The post Toronto’s EDIT announces participants for inaugural event appeared first on Dezeen.

Disasters like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are inevitable when we construct cities in harm’s way, says Aaron Betsky, who believes we have designed ourselves into a Catch-22 of create and protect.

It could have been worse. That is the best you can say about the twin natural catastrophes that hit Texas and Florida recently. The question remains: in how far did design and planning both put more people in harm’s way and helped prevent a higher toll of death and destruction?

The answer is both: the design profession’s focus on minimising harm that its own decisions, large and small, threaten to bring on, was on full display.

This is most obvious at the biggest scale. Most of Florida is – or was – swamp and mangrove forests, with barrier islands helping to mitigate the sea’s furry. By turning it into the home of tens of millions of people and building their homes and business on those swamps and barriers, we are inviting a disaster that the removal of nature’s defences only makes worse.

The same is true in Texas, where the bayous have been channeled, the porous prairies have been turned into asphalt, and one of the world’s largest and dirtiest industrial ports has been put directly in harm’s way.

What prevented the results from being worse than they could have been, especially in Florida, was improvements in both information services and building codes. Even trailer parks are now better able to withstand hurricanes, and millions of people got themselves out of harm’s way in time.

Helped by a little luck in the storm’s track and the particular direction of water flows that lessened a threatened storm surge, Hurricane Irma left the state remarkably unscathed.

Extreme weather events highlight the intrinsic contradiction in the way we approach design

In Houston, the toll was higher, partially because Texas and most of its municipalities take a more laissez-faire attitude towards planning and codes. While it is debatable whether any degree of planning would have helped when some of the highest rainfall totals ever recorded in the continental United States deluged the area, those people who built on higher land or elevated their houses remained relatively unscathed.

Similarly, the hospitals and cultural institutions that were built on slightly higher ground (also the territory usually occupied by the wealthy) and had robust defence and back-up systems did not see their operations affected in any significant way.

These extreme weather events highlight, as such limit cases often do, the intrinsic contradiction in the way in which we approach design: we create situations where we might harm ourselves, and then design for risk mitigation.

That is true in the case of even products, where the border between ergonomics or human factors design and harm prevention is often difficult to find. It is not just chainsaws, which put superior chopping and cutting firepower at our fingertips, thus creating the very real possibility that we might lose these digits, that need design ingenuity in order to ensure that we keep those digits.

We have to make sure the lithium batteries in our computer can’t explode or, if they do, that they will not explode the airplanes in which that occurs. We let ourselves have beverages that are too hot to drink and then design ways to make sure we don’t burn our mouths.

We create situations where we might harm ourselves, and then design for risk mitigation

These examples might seem trivial because they are so small, but we repeat these defensive design strategies every day wherever we are. At a larger scale, we design high-rises that put us in places where a fire, let alone an earthquake, leaves us little escape, and then devote a significant amount of space, money, and design time, to building in redundant escape methods.

That is an obvious example, but what about the importation of human-made materials that make even our low-rise spaces look good, cheap to build, and efficient. We now know we never should have used asbestos or lead-based paint, but what will we find out tomorrow about the materials we use today?

So we create testing laboratories and build more coverings and ventilation systems into our buildings to try to prevent possible dangers, devise labels with ever larger and more complex warnings, and continue to improve our graphics to help us figure out how to get out.

At the scale of communities and regions, we put ourselves at risk in the most obvious manner possible, by building in flood planes, and removing wetlands and natural barriers, but also by building in forests that burn periodically, on top of earthquake fault lines, or even in areas with few natural resources such as water.

The more we build in areas that endanger us, the more we erect defensive systems, cocooning ourselves in air conditioning on top of water supply systems that pipe our lifeblood from hundreds of miles away in vulnerable pipelines and on earthquake dampers, buying water rights, engaging in xeriscaping, raising ourselves on platforms above flood planes, and following the smartest of the little piggies by building out of ever more solid materials.

Since seeing what a hurricane such as Sandy can do, the New York region has invested billions in expanding its water defences in the hope that it can continue to occupy its former wetlands, islands, and other vulnerable areas for as long as possible while sea levels rise.

Design is an attempt to protect us from our thoughtless actions

That is not why designers think they exist or do what they do. We often think of design as making some thing or some place better. We even dream that we are stacking up the building blocks for utopia. In reality, what we are doing is engaging in defence.

Design is an attempt to protect us from our thoughtless actions, but also from the situations our architects, planners, and designers have created.

Should we accept the notion that design is risk mitigation and that paranoia rather than aesthetics or “problem solving” is its true driving force? I am afraid I do not see much alternative, except in the realm of that much-derided notion of theoretical design.

If we can show alternatives to the way we design, build, and plan today, from building with the land rather on it, to creating artefacts that extend, rather than replace, our own faculties, we might get closer to design as something of faith and wonder.

Yet, we should remember: every act we as humans do to make ourselves more comfortable, extend the space we control, or reshape the world in our image puts us at risk.

It is only when the scale of that risk becomes large enough to catch the attention of our global culture – itself perhaps our most complex design triumph and biggest threat to our well-being – that we recognise the hole or hellish Tower of Babel we have designed for ourselves.

The post “The more we build in areas that endanger us, the more we erect defensive systems” appeared first on Dezeen.

Located in the creative heart of East London, the
London Design Fair is a four-day industry event that brings together 500
exhibitors from 28 coun..

Last week, I spoke about turning to experts when you want to achieve something, and to develop a plan. Now that you have the plan (in my case, lose weight and eat more healthily), you need to make sure you stay motivated along the way. And you do that by taking a look at your goals and ask, “How much do I really want this?”

Think about your life – what are you doing because you feel you should want it? Or I should say, what are you not doing even though you feel you should want it?

Weight-loss is a common goal, and yet report after report all over the western world show that obesity is on the rise. If say you want something, but aren’t doing anything about it, stop a moment and ask yourself some more questions.

When do you claim to want something but then let fear stop you?

Fear of failure and fear of success are the two biggest stumbling blocks. The former is easy to understand. If diets and changes in lifestyle haven’t worked in the past, why will they work this time around? I have food intolerances. When I eat outside of my healthy choices, I put on weight (apart from feeling generally out of sorts). The temptation to eat the not-good-for-me food is always high, and I always end up falling off the wagon. It would be easy for me to never start because I never manage to not fall off the food-intolerance wagon.

When it comes to fear of success, I also often fall victim to a twisted piece of illogic. You see, if I succeed in my goal of changing how I think about food and keep off the weight once I lose it, I will have to recognize that I am a capable, confident person. At times, it’s easier to believe that I am neither of those things, so I sabotage my progress with whatever goal just to prove to myself that I can’t follow through on anything. That, however, isn’t true. I am capable. I can be confident. I just need to act on my desires.

Which, unfortunately means work. Lots of work. And that leads to another question to ask yourself:

What are you not tackling because it’s too much work?

I believe that human beings are rather lazy by nature. Successful change requires work and that all too often is enough of a demotivator to never get started. Better to stay safe and sound with the current situation. At least we know it well.

In her one of her hugely successful writing courses, 30 year writing veteran Holly Lisle says “SAFE never starts.”

SAFE can keep you locked up in your house, never daring to step foot outside the door. It can keep you locked in a job you hate that has no future, just because you’re afraid if you walk away you will never work again. SAFE can kill your hopes and dreams by telling you they were never worth pursuing, that you were never good enough to make them real, that you were only kidding yourself.

Basically it all comes down to excuses and because you’re getting something out of your inaction. As long as you don’t move forward, as long as you don’t follow through on your dreams you still have hope that the dreams will come true. The thing is, no matter how much hope you have, if you don’t act you’ve already failed.

Are you actively engaged or on autopilot?

One of my favorite phrases here on the blog is “life is choice” – from the decision to get up each morning through to going to bed at night (well for me the last one isn’t that much of a choice – my body just shuts down at some point and I get no say in the matter). It’s easier to go with the flow than to make active choices that might inconvenience other parts of her life. Getting out and getting exercise means not working quite so much. Taking time from work means the renovations on the house take longer and vacations can’t be as exotic as she would like. And so on and so on.

If you grew up in the 1980s, you might remember a series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure. Life’s like that – full of choices with consequences. Are you going to decide what action you take or will you let some invisible author make those choices for you?

When are you choosing safe over happy?

Sometimes safe is important – for example in the basic needs of life, but beyond that, safe does nothing but block our desires. Don’t risk, don’t stand out, don’t be different from anyone else. As long as you choose safe over happy, you’ll always feel unfulfilled and happiness will always remain out of reach. Happiness requires risk. What are you willing to risk to gain happiness?

It’s time to wake up, take control of your life and make the changes you want to make.

By doing nothing you already have your no, so why not try for yes instead?

Post written by Alex Fayle