Hasta La Ideas

Olafur Eliasson, Neri Oxman and Ian Spalter are among the creators featured in the second season of Netflix docu-series Abstract: The Art of Design.

Abstract: The Art of Design 2 premieres Wednesday 25 September with six episodes dedicated to creators from various fields, including architecture, film and product design.

“The series goes inside the minds of the world’s greatest designers, showcasing the most inspiring visionaries from a variety of disciplines whose work shapes our culture and future,” said Netflix.

Costume designer Ruth E Carter, typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler and American toy designer Cas Holman complete the sextet.

Series follows careers of leading designers

The series follows the style of the original Abstract: The Art of Design, which comprised eight episodes dedicated to architect Bjarke Ingels, set designer Es Devlin, interior designer Ilse Crawford, graphic designer Paula Scher, automobile designer Ralph Gilles, Nike shoe designer Tinker Hatfield, illustrator Christoph Niemann and photographer Platon.

As with the first season, the creators in the second series have achieved major successes in their respective industries.

Icelandic-Danish artist and architecture Eliasson, whose installations often play with cognizance, has amassed a large portfolio of works that are currently the focus of major retrospective Tate Modern exhibit in London.

Bio-architect Oxman works at the intersection of design and biology, and heads the Mediated Matter Group, one of the best-known departments at MIT Media Lab. Hoefler is the founder of New York’s Hoefler Type Foundry, and created the Macintosh computer fonts and the Gotham type used for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Black Panther designer and Instagram’s former head of design feature

Carter won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Costume Design for the outfits she created for blockbuster movie Blank Panther, including an intricate collar and crown created using 3D printing. Spalter is the former head of design at image-sharing app Instagram, and behind its logo and design.

The Abstract: The Art of Design 2 series is produced by Wired’s former editor-in-chief Morgan Neville, Scott Dadich, Dave O’Conner, Justin Wilkes, Jon Kamen, Radical Media and Tremolo Productions.

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a movie-streaming service, but has since started creating its own series and movies.

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The guys behind the Runamics stumbled across a pretty strange and worrying fact. Your synthetic polyester sports and gym-wear has pretty far and wide-reaching consequences. With each wash, small plastic fibers dislodge from your garment, finding their way eventually to the oceans. These are then consumed by the marine life there, which eventually finds its way to your plate of fish or seafood. That’s why the guys at Runamics felt it was time to redesign sports and gym-wear… because these clothes may promote a healthy lifestyle for you, but they should be healthy for the earth too.

Runamics’ sports and gym gear rely on a material that’s as functional as poly-fibres like polyester, but doesn’t contain synthetic materials. The hybrid bio-fabric uses a blend of merino wool (known for its softness and breathability) and Tencel, an Austrian fabric developed using eucalyptus pulp (comfortable, anti-odor, anti-bacterial, and thermo-regulating). Together, these two fibers make up a functional hero-team. They wick perspiration effectively and keep your body cool and odor-free while working out, but remain a 100% natural and nature-derived.

The sportswear series developed by Runamics is currently limited to a sports upper and a pair of drawstring shorts with a rubber/cotton elastic band. There’s additionally a pair of tights that also integrate Spandex in absolutely minimal amounts, but overall all of Runamics’ apparel is anywhere from 90% to a 100% natural, sustainable, and cruelty free. Designed to encourage you to work out more, knowing that you’re not passively contributing to plastic pollution, Runamics is designed to keep both you as well as our marine ecosystem fit!

Designer: Lena Rix

Click Here to Buy Now: $54 $72 (24% off).

RUNAMICS – Minimal Plastic Running Gear

Functional alternative to plastic running gear – fighting the Microplastic epidemic by making running gear that is minimal in its plastic usage, lightweight, anti-microbial, and temperature regulating.

Why Plastic is Not the Best Idea for Sports Gear?

Almost 100% of sports gear available is made of pure plastic. Plastic means the fibres are fully synthetic, made of melted plastic granulate typically from crude oil and a wild mix of other chemicals. The most commonly known plastic fabrics are Polyester, Nylon (aka Polyamide), Polypropylene, or Elastan (aka Spandex).

There are 3 major downsides of plastic textiles.

1) Microplastic – It´s produced when you wash your running gear in the washing machine. Millions and millions of pounds are floating in our oceans. Synthetic textiles are one of the main polluters.
2) Non-biodegradability – Plastic stays alive for centuries and does not dissolve easily. Third, toxicity. Scientists have highlighted the toxic impact of plastic in the ocean.
3) Doesn’t seem to be the smartest thing to wear on your sweaty body while working out right!

Minimal Plastic – Minimal Footprint – Happy Running

For the first collection the team is replacing plastic fibres with great natural and non-harmful chemical fibres: Merino wool and Tencel Lyocell.

Merino Wool is the most functional natural fibre for active usage. It’s fibres are very fine and super soft, it can perfectly deal with different temperatures and moisture. With its antimicrobial strengths, bad odor doesn’t stick to it like cheap polyester fabrics.

Tencel Lyocell fibre is a modern viscose that is wood based (eucalyptus, beech trees). It is produced by the Austrian manufacturer Lenzing. In some ways it performs similar to Merino wool, but 2 specific strengths are its softness and its cooling effect. Together, Merino and Tencel are an unbeatable team.

The Collection

The collection consists of 4 pieces. The lightweight knitted shirt, the woven short, and the knitted tights in long and short. While the shirt and short are made with 100% non-plastic fibres, the tights still need a tiny touch of Elastan to be strong and flexible (less than 10%).

– The Tee Shirt is 50% Tencel Lyocell 50% Merino Wool with Cotton Label
– The Running Shorts is 100% Tencel Lyocell
– The Running Tights (Long and Short) are Tencel Lyocell + Merino Wool + Plastic (Less than 10%)

The cords used are made of 100% Tencel. The elastic waistbands are made of natural rubber and organic cotton. Label tags are made of woven cotton. We use screen printing with water based colors for the logo prints.

After coming home from your run you can simply put the gear on a hanger and hang it into the window. Let the air do the rest. It’s Fast drying and the odor vanishes. You don’t have to wash this gear as often as your plastic gear. That’s good for the textile, good for the environment, and saves you work. Thanks Merino for the epic antimicrobial goodness!

Colors: olive green or anthracite-black

Shirt and tights are sewn with high quality flat lock seams. This means they lay flat on your skin and will not chaff.

Eco-Conscious without the Sacrifice

The fabric combination offers many perks, fast drying being one of the best.

Wouldn’t be a good running shirt if it didn’t vaporize that sweat, now would it?

The 50/50 blend of Merino Wool and Tencel Lyocell is woven into a super lightweight fabric.

The magic of Merino Wool. Keeps you cool when it’s warm and warm when it’s cool.

Click Here to Buy Now: $54 $72 (24% off).

The artistic director of this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial Yesomi Umolu has picked five highlights from the event, including a glass memorial dedicated to victims of gun violence victims and a small cinema set that explores race and gender in the 20th-century.

Umolu and co-curators Sepake Angiama and Paulo Tavares developed the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, titled …And Other Stories, to explore a wide-range of contemporary themes and incite a variety of responses.

Exhibits, installations and other programme activities produced by over 80 contributors fall under one of four curatorial brackets – No Land Beyond, Appearances and Erasures, Rights and Reclamations, and Common Ground – and address issues like social housing, gun violence and cultural histories.

The Chicago Cultural Center, the event’s hub, which is open to the public from Thursday September 19 until Sunday 5 January 2020. Read on for Umolu’s five highlights:

The Gun Violence Memorial Project by MASS Design Group and Hank Willis Thomas

Gun violence is a national epidemic whose sheer scale often reduces victims to statistics. MASS Design Group, in partnership with the artist Hank Willis Thomas and the gun control advocacy groups Everytown for Gun Safety and Purpose Over Pain, developed The Gun Violence Memorial Project to honour the lives of gun violence victims.

Through advocacy and remembrance-object-collection workshops, they invite the public to contribute stories and memories to the ongoing memorial. The objects will reside in a collection of glass houses representing the magnitude of gun-related deaths that occur over a single month in the United States.

Images Letters Stones by Wendelien

Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s outdoor cinema screen Images Letters Stones addresses the history of modernism – the international movement that responded to the advancements of modern life – through the lens of race and gender.

It explores the ideals of the Bauhaus-trained architect Lotte Stam-Beese and the activist and writer Hermina Huiswoud, who fought for racial and class equality through communism in the 1930s and 1940s. The words are partly drawn from archival materials related to their lives, and partly from writings by housing activists and scholars working today in Kharkiv, Ukraine; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and Chicago.

Eating Our Histories by Vivien Sansour

Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, founded by Vivien Sansour, has amassed a large collection of seeds from plants that are nearing extinction thanks to either colonial practices erasing communal farming or environmental change – or, more often, a combination of both – thereby preserving local ecological spaces and systems, and restoring knowledge and memories among Palestinian farmers.

Telling personal stories of foragers, survivors, and farmers in both Palestine and the US heartland, Marj and Prairie: Eating Our Histories uncovers the hidden power of plants to disturb colonial narratives.

Three Trees: Jackson, Obama, Washington by Walter Hood

Walter J Hood’s Three Trees: Jackson, Obama, Washington responds to ongoing conversations surrounding the building of the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago’s Jackson Park, in Chicago’s South Side.

The precedents of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson and Washington Parks, the nearby University of Chicago, and the legacy of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which took place in Jackson Park, weigh heavy on this dialogue. Hood relocated trees from the South Side to the Chicago Cultural Center, effectively transferring memory present in landscape to a new place. Emerging out of the mulch of decay, the trees tell a story of renewal.

Regenerating Detroit: A Palimpsest of Landscape Strategies

Detroit contains 11.25 square miles of publicly owned vacant land – about equal to nine New York Central Parks – a unique problem for a city whose urban density has been impacted by loss of industry and population decline. In response, the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department has devised seven revitalisation strategies, all involving gardens, parks and natural habitat filling the blank spaces.

Regenerating Detroit: A Palimpsest of Landscape Strategies (2019) suggests neighbourhood linkages through greenways and commercial avenues. It also manifests close work with residents to ensure that the urban plan also reflects their heritage and traditions

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Teppei Takeda est un artiste-peintre japonais qui réalise des portraits abstraits : Les sujets sont peints de telle sorte qu’il est impossible d’identifier leurs visages, mais uniquement les vêtements qu’ils portent. L’artiste, grâce à ses coups de pinceau vifs et plein de couleurs, brouille les pistes de leur identité, les rendant ainsi anonymes aux yeux du public. La première exposition de ses oeuvres a eu lieu en 2016, dans une galerie japonaise. Sa nouvelle exposition, intitulée « Paintings of Paintings » est visible jusqu’au 12 octobre dans la petite librairie Morioka Shoten Ginza, à Tokyo.

Andrew Morlet, chief executive of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, will speak at Dezeen Day about how architects and designers can help transform the global economy from a linear model to a circular one.

Morlet will explain the foundation’s mission to “inspire a generation to re-think, re-design and build a positive future circular economy”.

He joins a growing list of speakers at Dezeen Day, our international architecture and design conference taking place in London on 30 October.

The circular economy is an economic system that generates no waste or pollution, with materials being reused again and again rather than used once and thrown away. It also works in harmony with nature, nurturing natural systems rather than exploiting them or degrading them.

Founded by former round-the-world sailor Ellen MacArthur, the foundation recently called for 20 million designers to sign up to its circular design programme and make circularity “the new normal”.

In an exclusive interview with Dezeen earlier this year, MacArthur said that designers were “absolutely vital” to the push to dismantle the wasteful and destructive linear economy.

Before joining the foundation, Morlet was a consultant strategy partner at McKinsey & Company, Andersen Consulting and Accenture. Prior to that he worked in medical research focused on HIV/AIDS epidemiology.

Dezeen Day takes place at BFI Southbank in central London on 30 October. The international conference aims to set the agenda for architecture and design. It will discuss topics including design education, future cities and post-plastic materials.

Speakers include Paola Antonelli, Benjamin Hubert, Dara Huang and Patrik Schumacher. See all the speakers that have been announced so far.

Reduced early bird tickets plus a limited number of half-price student tickets are on sale now. Buy them using the widget below or click here to subscribe to the Dezeen Day newsletter for regular updates.

The illustration is by Rima Sabina Aouf.

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