In an environment of change, with exiting new technologies and rapidly changing customer requirements, Product Design is looking for a dynamic and insightful Design Director Mack Trucks. The Design Director is a key role for our capability to innovate and prioritize design solutions for future products and services, to continue to build the legacy of the legendary Mack Truck.
Astronauts take plenty of grooming products into space—soap, lotion, deodorant, toothbrushes and more—but back in 1978, NASA believed women would also want a full make-up kit. NASA’s History Office shared an image of the kit, along with a quote from……
With plenty of reverb, “Miss You” is a minimal but tropical track by Cashmere Cat, Major Lazer and Tory Lanez—with props to Palmistry for the original beat. While it’s certainly got an island-style vibe, the tune steers clear of becoming gimmicky—thanks……
The plastic mirrors typically found in Parisian barber shops provided the cues for this design by French duo Normal Studio, for Scandinavian brand Muuto.
Launching at IMM Cologne this week, Mimic Mirror is designed by Normal Studio‘s Jean-François Dingjian and Eloi Chafaï as a contemporary take on the traditional table mirror.
The Paris-based duo based the design on the mirrors they had often observed in barber shops, which typically featured a sculpted pattern on their back.
A soft coated plastic surrounds the mirror’s face, contrasting with the solidity of the sculpted cement stand. The designers suggest this gives the mirror a sculptural but friendly appearance.
The product takes its name from the various repetitive elements in the design – from facets around the base of the stand, to a pattern of triangles on the back – but also references the mirror’s function.
“Mimic Mirror grew from the idea of having a table mirror with a sculptural expression, making for a design that is both an object of decoration and use,” said Dingjian and Chafaï.
“We wanted for the design to exist in harmony with the space in which it is present while adding to the atmosphere of the room through its characteristic expression. Bringing a new perspective to the traditional table mirror, Mimic has a playful appearance while serving its intended function with a friendly ease.”
Mimic Mirror is the first product that Normal Studio has designed for Muuto. It is available in three colours: midnight blue, nude and grey.
Muuto is presenting the mirror at the IMM Cologne furniture fair all this week, along with a range of other recently launched products.
These include the Loft Bar Stools by Danish designer Thomas Bentzen, the Fiber armchairs by Copenhagen studio Iskos-Berlin and the Outline Sofa Chaise Longues by Oslo-based Anderssen & Voll.
With a minimal aesthetic and muted, pastel tones, each of the five products in the collection are intended to complement one another.
In the Barbarella house situated in the Yongin-si Gyeonggi-do, two households, who are a family, is living and sharing. The main objective was to desi..
La photographe Lituanienne Auste Stikleryte a photographié les Pyrénées, à la frontière Franco-espagnole, depuis le siège arrière d’une voiture. En noir et blanc, avec un fort grain vintage à souhait, sa série aussi puissante que paisible reflète la force de cette immense barrière naturelle. Suivez le travail de Auste sur Tumblr et Instagram.
We’ve seen a lot of hidden compartment furniture lately, but this company takes the cake.
QLine Designs is a New-Hampshire-based design/build firm that produces high-quality pieces made from solid wood and using traditional techniques. Decidedly untraditional are the clever ways in which they’ve added secret storage, accessed in unusual ways.
Check out how their Rotating Table operates:
The clever use of space in their Executive Desk:
The sheer amount of hidden storage in their Design Dresser:
The unusual drawers in their Dining Table:
You can see more of their designs here. And for those of you into shop porn, the company’s facility looks pretty killer. They use everything from traditional hand tools up to a CNC mill.
Lastly, the company founder has written a great essay on quality design and construction, and we recommend giving it a read.
The Obama Presidential Center will be presented to the Chicago City Council today. But its proposed siting in the city’s Jackson Park will both remove acres of public land and blight Fredrick Law Olmsted’s historic landscape design, argues The Cultural Landscape Foundation president Charles A Birnbaum.
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien are gifted architects. Their work displays a sensitivity to materiality that is often revelatory. A few of my favourite projects of theirs are the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla (1995) and the Cranbrook Natatorium (1999).
The former is to be celebrated especially for the masterful way it responds to its site. As Tsien succinctly stated: “Our whole thought about making places is that people can enter them without destroying the clarity of space.”
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s most recent renderings of the Obama Presidential Center show the tower and altered landscape of the campus
Williams and Tsien are currently mired in a controversy not entirely of their making. They are the architects of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) in Chicago, now in the planning stages. The OPC is controversial because it is slated to be built in historic Jackson Park, which was designed in 1871 by Frederick Law Olmsted Senior, and Calvert Vaux, who also designed the world-renowned Central Park in New York City.
Jackson Park is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and, along with Washington Park and the Midway Plaisance, is part of Chicago’s South Park System (the only park system designed by Olmsted and Vaux outside the State of New York). Some twenty acres of Jackson Park – parkland held in public trust for 150 years – have been confiscated to build the OPC, a privately operated enterprise.
How did that happen? It began when universities in Chicago, Honolulu, and New York competed to host what was billed as a presidential library. The University of Chicago’s audacious bid called for the confiscation of public parkland on Chicago’s South Side, rather than using the university’s own landholdings in that area.
Some twenty acres of Jackson Park have been confiscated to build the Obama Presidential Center
Imagine if Columbia University‘s bid had proposed confiscating 20 acres of New York City’s Central Park. It would have been called absurd (and more). But in Chicago, it was called the winning bid. For while the competing universities all touted their connection to the Obamas, Chicago offered a very special connection indeed. There, the backing of mayor Rahm Emanuel (Obama’s former chief-of-staff) would ensure that the Chicago Park District, Plan Commission, City Council, and, ultimately, the State Legislature would all “get on board”.
Enter Williams and Tsien, who won the prestigious OPC commission. They are now faced with the daunting prospect of adding their vision to a park designed by the “father of American landscape architecture”. Notably, this won’t be an entirely new experience for them. Williams and Tsien designed the Lefrak Center in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – also by Olmsted and Vaux. The park is administered by the Prospect Park Alliance, and the manager of the project was landscape architect Christian Zimmerman, who has been with the Alliance for decades.
Jackson Park today still possesses a high degree of its Fredrick Law Olmsted, says Charles A Birnbaum
The collaboration produced a recreation complex nestled within the 26-acre Lakeside, a $74 million (£53.6 million) restoration the Alliance calls “the largest and most ambitious project in Prospect Park since its creation over 150 years ago”.
In the New Yorker, design critic Alexandra Lange noted: “The architects chose a parking lot installed during the twentieth century as their site, taking out a minimum number of trees and restoring naturalistic planning that had been overrun by asphalt.” And New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote: “What Mr Zimmerman, Mr Williams and Ms Tsien have collectively done is at once an act of reclamation and a reimagination of Brooklyn’s pastoral heart. In essence, the project bids to turn this area back into the park’s center of gravity, as Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux imagined during the 1860s.”
To guide them in Chicago, Williams and Tsien have Olmsted’s prolific writings about public landscapes and his ideas about Jackson Park in particular, where he worked for decades. And yet their centrepiece for the OPC is a 235-foot-tall (72-metre) tower that would dominate the park, a design intervention completely antithetical to Olmsted’s intent. We know that because Olmsted said so.
The tower would be a design intervention completely antithetical to Olmsted’s intent
Following the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park and a series of fires in 1894 that left the site a charred ruin, Olmsted came back with a plan to heal the park. In a letter to South Park Board president Joseph Donnersberger, he wrote that the Museum of Science and Industry – a holdover from the Exposition – was to be the only “dominating object of interest” in the park, and that “all other buildings and structures” were to “be auxiliary to and subordinate to the scenery of the park”.
In Prospect Park, Williams and Tsien were careful to achieve a sensitive insertion in an already heavily altered area. But in Chicago, they will have entirely reoriented the visual and spatial experience of a landscape that still possesses a high degree of its Olmsted-era design integrity.
Olmsted and Vaux drew up their original plans for Chicago’s South Park system, with Jackson Park on the right, in 1871
Moreover, the tower has gotten taller along the way, and the overall concept has morphed from a library administered by the National Archives to a “campus” (their word) comprising 7.4 acres of hardscape (buildings, plaza, and parking), with a recording studio, sports facilities, outdoor sledding paths, an auditorium, and other add-ons.
Ron Henderson, Professor and Director of the Landscape Architecture and Urbanism Program at Illinois Institute of Technology, has called the project an “urbanistic failure” that assumes if the tower is “good enough, it merits the appropriation of public land and the removal of hundreds of trees”.
He adds that the accompanying “low-slung, set-back wall of buildings overlooking a parking-lot-sized plaza would better serve a high-end suburban shopping center”. We seem to understand naturally the inherent shamefulness in destroying a significant work of architecture. That’s something Williams and Tsien experienced first hand when New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired the neighbouring American Folk Museum (by Williams and Tsien), with its signature bronze facade, and tore it down.
Why is it so difficult to show understanding for a significant work of landscape architecture?
MoMA was excoriated for doing so, and the architects were heartbroken, to judge by this Tsien comment: “Emotionally, it’s very painful. We don’t do that many buildings, and this one is so important to us.” I know those words ring true, but I wonder why is it so difficult to show the same understanding for a significant work of landscape architecture – especially one created by an undisputed master whose design intent is perfectly clear.
The Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin’s recent column was dismissive of Olmsted’s design intent, questioning The Cultural Landscape Foundation for brandishing “an age-old quotation from Olmsted as though it were Holy Writ”.
The Obama Presidential Center is planned to take over 20 acres of the public parkland
This prompted Williams to suggest that Olmsted’s idea for the park “can be reinterpreted.” Of course it can be, but I hope we will have the courage to ask whether it should be. The latest design of the OPC will soon come before the City Council and other authorities. If past is prologue, every municipal agency will acquiesce to pressure from the Obama Foundation, the University, and the mayor and will rubber stamp an approval.
Fortunately, a federal review that has recently begun could have a greater impact, and there are many organisations on a national and municipal level actively involved in it. As the CEO of one of them, I want to say clearly: I’m not against the OPC, nor am I against it being built in Chicago; and I congratulate Williams and Tsien on their commission, along with the landscape architecture firm of Michael Van Valkenburg Associates. But there simply is no need to take public parkland, and there is no need to destroy one significant cultural legacy in order to celebrate another.
Main image of the Obama Presidential Center is by DBOX.
A reader who goes by the name of Overwhelmed wrote in with this dilemma.
I am newly married and my mother-in-law and I have a strained relationship. She tends to show her affection by buying things and she goes way overboard. If I tell her specifically not to buy me something, she will buy it anyway.
She buys new clothes for my husband every time she is at the store. (He has several plastic bins full of clothes he has never worn). We do not have space for a dining table because the entire dining room is full of boxes of stuff she bought for my husband that he doesn’t need/want.
My mother-in-law kept telling me that for Christmas she was going to buy me something from our wedding registry that hadn’t already been purchased. I told her it was unnecessary because we were inundated with stuff and had already purchased the extra items we needed. She asked me if I wanted a convection oven that I had listed on our registry. I specifically told her that I no longer wanted it because it would not work in our current apartment.
So, she surprised me by buying the convection oven as a Christmas gift. This item is huge and very expensive which makes me uncomfortable. We have no space for it at all in our apartment.
I want to be grateful for the gifts but I feel disrespected that she didn’t listen to me. What is the polite thing to do with this oven (and all the other gifts) and how can I get through to her to listen to me when I tell her no?
I’m sure Overwhelmed is not the only reader with this dilemma. There are probably many people out there looking at piles of Christmas or birthday gifts asking, “How can I get this to stop?”
Because this is your husband’s mother, the first person you need to have a conversation with is your husband. I mentioned your situation to Unclutterer writer Alex and he strongly recommended the book he reviewed, Crucial Conversations. You may want to read it before you speak with your husband or read it with your husband before you speak with your mother-in-law. Regardless of if or when you read the book, it is important that you and your husband agree on how and when to approach your mother-in-law with your decisions on what to do with the all of the gifts you have received to date, as well as what to do with any future gifts you do not want.
Many people give gifts because they love the recipients. For whatever reason, gift-giving may be the only way the giver knows how to express that love. In the eyes of the giver, asking him/her not to give gifts would be like asking them not to love you anymore — an almost impossible task for many mothers.
Your mother-in-law is facing an empty nest now that you have moved out and is probably trying her best to keep a connection to you and her son even if she is going about it in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Perhaps you could try and build a connection with her that doesn’t involve material possessions. You could have regular “Sunday Roast,” (a British tradition where extended family gathers together for a mid-day meal) or schedule an outing to a museum or theatre. There may be a leisure activity you might be interested in starting such as yoga or ceramics. You could ask your mother-in-law to join you. You might find that working together at community service/charity events works best for you. This would allow you to show that you appreciate her presence (as opposed to her presents).
After you have made your wishes about gifting known to your mother-in-law, you can start disposing of the things you no longer want. Your mother-in-law will likely ask about certain items and I know it may feel awkward at first, but, with loving kindness, reiterate the decisions you and your husband have made regarding gifts and reassure her that you appreciate and value her thought, effort, love, and generosity.
Note: If you have received an heirloom item and you’re not sure of its significance, ask your mother-in-law to provide a detailed history (written or verbal). It will help you decide if the item is worth keeping or passing along (possibly to another family member).
It’s your home and you can decide what stays and what goes even if it was a gift. Remember that the gift is not only about the recipient but also about the giver, so always show your gratitude then move on.
Thanks for your great question Overwhelmed. We hope that this post gives you the information you’re looking for and all the best of luck with your situation.
Do you have a question relating to organizing, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject as “Ask Unclutterer.”
The one thing that makes Apple so desirable is the one thing that will kill it. Exclusivity. While it tries hard to make everybody adopt its technology, the truth still remains that over 80% of smartphone users use Android, and that inclusive strategy is the one to beat. Google’s betting hard on that strategy by now making its AI assistant available to third parties to integrate into their hardware. Take for instance JBL’s Link View. It combines the best of both worlds… JBL’s heavy-hitting audio, along with Google’s incredibly integrated experience. The JBL Link View is basically JBL’s wireless audio with a screen that allows you to interact with Google’s Assistant, letting the speaker not just be an audio device, but something MUCH more useful.
Google isn’t a hardware company. JBL is. Google doesn’t care whether you use the Google Home speaker, it just wants you to rely on its impeccable service… and JBL helps deliver on that! The Link View comes with a screen sitting between two 10W speakers. Flip it over and you see the JBL logo resting on a subwoofer that adds that heart-warming bass to your audio that the Google Home Mini isn’t capable of providing. The 8-inch HD screen itself lets you look at everything from album art, to your photos, to recipes, to google searches, to even your appointment schedule. Ah… life!
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.
A reader who goes by the name of Overwhelmed wrote in with this dilemma.
