Hasta La Ideas

How do you get an entire city, no, an entire country to talk about design? To learn how it evolved from art, culture, and an innate need to solve problems? You host a week-long event open to all, housing some of the greatest design talent from 11 countries, talking about design as not just a profession, but also as a way of life.

With the theme “Design Moves Life Moves Design”, Amman witnessed its second Design Week in two years, seeing a footfall of more than 35,000 people as designers from countries like Bahrain, Morocco, Palestine, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Netherlands, Norway, Italy and USA gathered to display their works to show how life can impact a designer, and how their designs in turn can impact life!

This year’s Amman Design Week was in every sense bigger, but more nuclear. Rather than having events at three different locations across the city, the festival saw everything happen in the town’s creative hub, AKA the Hangar and the Ras Al Ein Gallery. With just a 40ft road separating the two venues, patrons could visit all the exhibits in a single day, spending much more time at the event. With incredible design works within the Hangar, along with a Student Exhibition, to a Crafts District filled with indigenous crafts and handicrafts on display and for sale, as well as a Cultural Plaza for talks on design, the Amman Design Week left no stone unturned.

We first look at the Hangar. An iconic building in its own right, the Hangar used to be Amman’s Power and Electricity Hub. After the city started expanding, the Hangar was decommissioned and shut down. It now houses a different kind of spark (if you know what I mean!), as designers gather to showcase their creative abilities and techniques while also conveying a variety of messages. With more exhibits than the last time, the Hangar’s curator, Ahmad Humeid had to be extremely selective, adhering to the theme but also showcasing diversity. With massive installations on the outside to attract one’s attention, and a wide selection of design work on the inside, the Hangar provided what can only be described as an accurate image of how talented the designers in the middle east are, and how this talent can be harnessed to truly uplift lives in and around the area.

Amal Ayoub’s installation shows how the Dead Sea is losing its salt over time with commercial abuse. The installation fills up with water and the salt crystals gradually dissolve.

MEAN (Middle East Architecture Network) showed a heart-rending picture of the earth drying up and cracking with their stone and distressed metal installation.

A miniature of Ammar Khammash’s Masonry Bridge shows how the bridge is to be built with its scaffolding that will gradually disappear, leaving just one single bridge in its place.

Rawan Kakish and Hamad Al Sultan’s “A Path of Synergy” literally lights up the outside space of the Hangar with these laser cut butterfly wings that light up and flutter as you stand underneath!

Uraiqat Architect’s X3 project features independently moving mirrors that break and then rejoin your reflection, in an attempt to make you introspect. Easily a crowd favorite!

Bricklab’s Dividied by Congregation paints three soundscapes of a city. One consumed by the chaos of the city, one by the cacophony of religion, and lastly, the serenity of nature.

With EYEN’s vending machine, you can literally buy a font file! Just pay the machine and you get an authentic piece of Arabic calligraphy, and in turn, you support a slowly dying craft.

Sahar Madanat Design Studio’s Press Fit gathered a lot of attention for being one of the few exhibits that showcases design as a problem solving tool.

Ever wanted your own miniature fermentation setup? The Brinery is designed to simplify the fermentation and marination process. Plus, the food created in it helps diversify the healthy bacteria in your intestines!

Andrei Visuals’ crazy motion installation uses a Microsoft Kinect and an algorithm to capture human movement and turn it into a colorful painting. People spent hours dancing in front of this screen!

What you’re looking at is a completely new material. Kutleh (Arabic for block) is made by joining together spare/waste pieces of stone to create this layered material that can be used for sculpting and machining. Doesn’t it look incredible?

Yasmeen Sabri’s traditional swing was a hit among the public. Using just wood and rope, and with a cleverly designed IKEA-esque assembly manual, anyone can make one of their own.

Catching all eyes as you enter the Hangar is the Left of Passage, Right of Passage, an installation by Anmahian Winton Architects that you can walk through. The installation mimics the passages of Wadi Rum’s sandstone walkways.

‬Aperçu’s Mirage uses stone, crystals, and resin to create some wonderful showpieces that looked great from afar and even better up close.

Ammar Kalo showcased his unique and mystifying furniture, made from unconventional techniques.

Hanna Salameh returns to ADW with the Flo Desk, a wonderfully layered desk that looks like it’s been stacked together.

Crystallization is usually accidental in ceramic baking. What if you turn an accident into art? My opinion is it looks much better!

Hashem Joucka’s experiments with ferrofluid and oil paints yielded some incredibly interesting results!

Right across the road from the Hangar was Amman Design Week’s Cultural zone. A part that showcased handicrafts in a commercial light, while even having a dedicated space for reviving dying crafts from within and outside Jordan. What you see below is a look at the Cultural Plaza, a place to conduct design seminars, held below a rather beautiful bamboo strip ceiling, and the Crafts Hub a place that revived crafts like Bedouin felt-making, traditional Syrian Arabesque Mosaic making, Jordanian Stone Mosaic making, and swordsmithing. If the Hangar showcased the future of design, the Crafts District helped give it context in many ways.

We end our tour of the Amman Design Week on a happy note. With news that only months back, the Jordanian Government withdrew its ban on 3D Printers, the country rushes to embrace the technology. Designers Sahar Madanat and Sara Bdeir talk about how industrial processes integral to design like metal fabrication, electronic integration, and plastic molding haven’t really caught on in the Middle East (forcing most designers to take up more traditional practices like furniture or textile design or to practice abroad), but the future looks bright as designers are working hard to bring talent as well as industries to the country, with the legalization of 3D printing just being the very beginning of what I can imagine is a very bright future for Design and Life in Amman and Jordan. So how do you get an entire country to talk about design? You do it the way Amman Design Week did it!

Image Credits © Amman Design Week 2017 & Yanko Design.

Recently I’ve been feeling rather overwhelmed at work. With the introduction of a new database and several people off on sick leave my to-do list never gets shorter. Fortunately, I am an organized person and manage to move forward even if it’s just a few priority items. But what if being organized is a challenge for you? That feeling of being overwhelmed becomes so all consuming that paralysis sets in.

Let’s imagine a situation that many people face. Let’s call our test subject Gloria. She’s a single mother with two children and has recently decided that she will pursue her dream of working in television full-time, as a freelance writer and producer. When looking one year into the future she clearly pictures having implemented some of her program ideas, having produced the show she wrote, and being able to support her children financially.

The problem is that she’s so overwhelmed by the normal anxieties of life that she can’t see clearly. There seems to be so much stuff that she’s paralyzed by it all. She’s moved her office in-house so that she could work on things 24/7 but that hasn’t worked (which isn’t surprising). Bringing the office into the home often creates more anxieties not fewer. Without a clear separation of work life and home life, the stress and guilt of working or not working 24/7 multiples exponentially. Every moment at work outside of regular hours takes away from family time and every moment with the family is one less moment striving for the work-related dream.

In our go-go-go world this sense of paralysis is common and it’s something many people suffer from. It happens when you allow your to-do list to get longer and longer which results in panic and paralysis.

Gloria especially feels anxious when she looks at all the day-to-day tasks. That often happens when people keep it all in their heads — it builds and each item seems unrelated to anything else. As well, as I said working on things 24/7, is not the best way to get things done. Time off is important, not just to recharge the batteries, but also to allow ideas and projects to simmer in the back of the brain.

So what should Gloria do?

She needs a plan. She needs to know what she’s working on when. However, she can’t create that plan until she knows exactly what she wants to work on. Yes, in her one-year-in-the-future vision she hints at what she might work on now, but the ideas are still very abstract. They are results, not actions.

When looking into the future, it’s important to focus on actions. Outcomes are great, but they don’t motivate well because they leave a gap between the current state and the future outcome. That gap can only get filled by action. And what actions does Gloria need to focus on? What actions do you need to focus on if you want to achieve your dreams? How can you choose any one thing when the to-do list is longer than a line-up to buy U2 concert tickets?

She might just pick one random item and work on that. Or she might pick the top three things that have reached crisis mode. Or she might take a bit of time to plan out her actions, which first requires some research.

In this case, research doesn’t mean going out and looking up information or talking to others. For this type of research she is going to interview herself. Using a blank piece of paper, Gloria is going to write down the numbers 1 to 100. Next, she will fill in all 100 slots with everything she does during the day, as well as everything she feels she should do and everything that she wants to do, but hasn’t got around to yet.

What will Gloria get out of overwhelming herself even more? How will this exercise help?

Right now Gloria feels overwhelmed by all of her to-dos. These to-dos however are only in her head, which she needs to liberate to allow more focused thought take over. Getting it out on paper does just that. Plus by giving herself a goal of 100 items she’ll likely have a hard time filling in every number, and she’ll realize that she doesn’t actually have as many things to do as she thought, taking off some of the pressure.

So now she has a list of items that she does (or wants to do). How does she take this list of actions and turn them into a plan that works for her, gives her time to relax, and moves her towards her dream? By prioritizing, delegating, and deleting items from the list. And no, it’s not easy. In fact this sort of challenge paralyzes many people.

Gloria will most likely need help. She’ll need the outside objectively of someone who isn’t so intimately connected to the actions, someone who can help her decide priorities and what doesn’t really need to get done after all. That help could come in the form of a friend, a family member, or a professional (like an organizer or a coach).

So, just how short should her list become? That depends on each person. In my case, I can have a very long to-do list without panicking, but others might need short lists, with tasks and projects spread out over stages based on priority.

Finally, Gloria needs to get started. Lists are great tools, but they need to be used. She might decide to use a system like Getting Things Done, or Bullet Journal (as I’ve been doing). But whatever the system, she needs to commit to it and let the lists guide her through the minefield of task-related anxieties.

Post written by Alex Fayle

Printing images from your phone have just had their game stepped up with the latest release of the Fujifilm instax Share SP-3 SQ Printer. Select your best shots from your smartphone and get instax prints by just transferring the shots from the app to the SP-3 via a Wi-Fi connection. The instax Share boasts an impressively quick printing time of 13 seconds. Split one image into two, set up collages of up to 9 images-in-one or set up the Real Time Template which enables the user to take a photo with the date, place, weather, temperature, and humidity then being indicated in the frame. The design of the SP-3 SQ is a gorgeous upgrade from the SP-2. The aesthetic of the new model is admirable and shows that Fujifilm is serious when it comes to hardware design. I’d like to see a new camera released by Fujifilm to match the same edgy look of the SP-3 SQ.

Designer: Fujifilm

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A third release, in theory, from a still unannounced follow-up album to 2013’s Woman, “Taste” by Rhye makes for a soulful, airy R&B number. Lead singer Milosh delights with a balance of warmth and wonder. The bassline might be the backbone to the track……

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British studio Ström Architects designed this timber-clad annex to house a bar and games room for a home in England’s New Forest he completed seven years ago.

Watson House Annexe replaced an existing two-storey structure demolished prior to its construction. It is situated in the garden of the client’s main residence which – like the annex – is clad in sweet chestnut wood and black brick. Magnus Ström worked on the design for the residence while working at John Pardey Architects.

While the materials are intended to offer visual continuity between the main house and the new addition, the annex’s pitched roof and small windows give it its own distinct character.

A key aspect of the brief was to ensure that the building would be suitable for parties and social gatherings, and provide additional accommodation when needed.

“The client wanted to demolish the existing annexe on site, and replace it with a more comfortable, fun party house,” architect Emma Ward-Lambert told Dezeen.

“He wanted a cosy building that felt like a rustic boutique hotel, as weekend accommodation for guests and his adult children, hosting small relaxed groups of revellers,” she explained.

“We set about focusing on how and when the spaces would be used – primarily in the evenings for drinking, dancing, relaxing and partying.”

As such, the project has a different feel to the studio’s other projects, which are characterised by their large open spaces and abundance of natural daylight.

Instead, small slot-like windows are positioned sparsely around the structure, limiting views to the surrounding forest.

“We sought to focus the users more internally, limiting the views out, keeping spaces moody and darker, and providing more tactile internal finishes that can stand up to the wear and tear of parties,” said Ward-Lambert.

For the interior, Ström chose to position a double-height living area on one side of the space, equipped with a bar and games facilities.

Two compact bedrooms for short-stay guests are located on the other side of the structure, which can be accessed via a grey Valchromat MDF partition.

Above this is a storage mezzanine space that can be accessed via a ladder made from blackened steel.

On the terrace there is a semi-sunken hot tub where the residents can relax and enjoy their surroundings.

A built-in brick pizza oven and a bench that doubles as a niche for fire wood also provide further opportunities for socialising outdoors.

As the New Forest is an ecologically sensitive site, the architects undertook extensive wildlife surveys prior to the building’s construction to ensure all necessary measures were in place to protect the natural habitat of different species.

“Works were carefully planned around roosting and nesting periods for birds and bats, and vegetation was cleared to best suit the active reptile season and encourage their dispersal from the construction areas,” said Ward-Lambert.

“Before and during demolition we had specialist ecologists on site to ensure that no bats were directly disturbed by the works, and we installed several bat boxes in the surrounding trees and on the completed building,” she added.

“The building also occupies a similar footprint and location as the original annex, so we could be comfortable that we were not encroaching on existing habitats.”

Ström Architects was founded by Magnus Ström in 2010. The studio’s other projects have included a larch-clad retirement residence and designs for a luxury residence developed to launch a bespoke architectural service for super-rich clients.

Photography is by Richard Chivers.

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