Hasta La Ideas

The future is truly in multitasking. It isn’t enough that your wireless charger charges only one device. It needs to charge three at a time… and your wristwatch? It should tell you the time, indicate your health, and also let you send and receive calls. In a world where all our products are designed to multitask, it seems like the smart-speaker is capable of a lot more than playing audio from the web on command. Meet the Soundform Elite. It’s a smart-speaker enabled with Google Assistant (and it looks a bit like the Google Nest Home too), as well as a wireless charging dock equipped with Belkin’s charging technology, and incredibly powerful audio drivers by none other than Devialet.

The partnership between Belkin and Devialet is interesting for a number of reasons. Belkin is famed for making some of the best charging cables, hubs, adapters, and extension boxes on the market, while Devialet still reigns as the most awarded audio company in the world. The companies announced their collaboration at CES this year, with the Soundform Elite, which happens to be Devialet’s second smart-speaker after its collab with Huawei. The Soundform Elite works just like any smart-speaker, albeit with a docking area for your phone. Equipped with a fast-charging 10W Qi charger, the Soundform Elite has the unique feature of being able to charge a wide variety of compatible Android phones as well as iPhones, making it a worthy pick for Apple enthusiasts too. Moreover, fitted with Devialet’s incredibly capable driver and woofer technology, the Soundform should easily outperform other speakers in its price category of $299.

The Soundform Elite comes in the classic Black and White color-schemes (much like the HomePod), and has a neat fabric clad around the outside which is practically a standard for smart-speakers now. It ships in Spring 2020, although it’s up for preorder on Belkin’s site.

Designers: Belkin & Devialet

The work of six up-and-coming French designers is on show at the Maison&Objet furniture fair in Paris, revealing an emerging trend for handmade rather than mass-produced objects.

The Rising Talents exhibition shines a light on six home-grown designers and studios: Natacha & Sacha, Laureline Galliot, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, Wendy Andreu, Julie Richoz and Adrien Garcia.

Among the exhibits are various experiments with craft processes in ceramics, furniture and electronics.

Return to craftsmanship

According to the judges, who included prolific designers Pierre Charpin and Pierre Yovanovitch, the showcase reveals that industrial design is falling out of favour in France.

“There are currently two main trends in the young French design scene,” said Ecole Camondo director René-Jacques Mayer, who was also on the judging panel.

“The first is that designers are developing stronger links with craftsmanship. They are distinguishing themselves less with industrial products than with objects produced in limited quantities using traditional savoir-faire.”

More than just a chair

“Secondly, they are no longer interested in simply designing a chair, but develop projects that are much more societal,” Mayer added. “Their overriding aim is to solve problems and come up with new uses.”

Rising Talents is a regular fixture at Maison&Objet, always with a focus on one country. Organisers chose France for the January 2020 edition, to coincide with the biannual fair’s 25th anniversary.

The exhibition opened on 17 January and continues until 21 January.

Here’s a look at all six designers and studios featured:

Natacha & Sacha

Paris-based duo Natacha Poutoux and Sacha Hourcade try to bring a softer aesthetic to domestic products that are not typically seen as design objects, like a kettle or the cable of a light fitting.

Their designs include an air humidifier that looks more like a glass vase, a ceramic data server designed to be on display and a radiator made up of suspended columns.

“We want to bring design to fields where it’s not necessarily expected today,” said Poutoux.

Laureline Galliot

Unusual forms and bold colours characterise the work of Laureline Galliot, who trained as both a dancer and a colourist before moving into design.

Either drawing with her fingers on an iPad or working with virtual reality devices, Galliot develops designs for objects that are completely unique, from patterned rugs to ceramics.

“My works reflects my exploration of merging color with structure, integrating it into design instead of layering it over the top at the end,” she explained.

Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini

Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini plays with different geometries in his designs. Projects include a hanging partition made of rope and ceramics, called Mur de Sèvres, and the Elephant Mirror he produced for Galerie Kreo.

Alongside his design process, Ghilini often produces large-scale artworks showing his creations.

“I’m a designer, but I do a lot of paintings,” he told Dezeen. “They feed one another.”

Wendy Andreu

Materials are the central focus of Wendy Andreu‘s work. Objects she is presenting at Rising Talents include a rough-textured bookshelf, a stool comprising eight steel tubes, and seats made out of cotton rope and silicone.

“At the end of the day, what I do is for human beings with senses, who want to see something, feel something, touch something,” she said. “My work expresses a sort of reality and humanity.”

Julie Richoz

The most established of the Rising Ralents, Paris-based designer Julie Richoz has created designs for brands including Tectona, Alessi, Louis Poulsen and Louis Vuitton.

She typically works with a single material at a time, whether that’s coloured glass or a textile. Examples include her Oreilles vases and the raffia Binaire rug she designed for Manufacture de Cogolin.

“I like the idea of repetition, but with subtile variations,” she said.

Adrien Garcia

Studio Adret founder Adrien Garcia divides his time between Paris and a 17th-century castle near Nantes. This grand setting inspires his designs, which are typically also grand in scale and ambition.

“I need its empty, rundown spaces in order to imagine new creations,” he said.

Garcia is working on his first furniture collection, which will reference the work of land artists like Andy Goldsworthy. At Maison&Objet, he presented a modular furniture system contained within a huge pink cuboid.

The post Six bright young French designers showcased in Rising Talents exhibition at Maison&Objet appeared first on Dezeen.

LA-based singer/producer Empress Of (aka Lorely Rodriguez) has contributed the ’90s-tinted song “Call Me” to Floria Sigismondi’s The Turning soundtrack. Rodriguez wrote the tune with Lawrence and Yves Rothman (who produced the soundtrack, which also includes music by Courtney Love, Mitski, Kali Uchis and others). She says that the lustrous piece of dream-pop was created to be the film’s swan song.

Is it a lamp? Or a sculpture? Or both? The Guilin is most appropriately described as a ‘lampscape’. With etched acrylic mountains that sit on an illuminated base, the multiple award-winning Guilin lamp lights up your room with an ambient glow, while also adding sculptural beauty to one’s space.

The Guilin lampscape is a good example of how design awards can catalyze a business. After securing an A’ Design Award, a Red Dot Design Award, and a Lexus Design Award, designer Kevin Chu took the idea from concept to prototype and finally brought it to Kickstarter. Principally, the Guilin lampscape comes with a base that uses edge-lit acrylic mountains to disperse light around the room. The abstractly designed edge-lit mountains come made from glass-reinforced acrylic and sit within slots in a metallic base fitted with a low-voltage 2700K warm LED light. The light shines through the base and the clear mountains, bouncing off the lines etched into the acrylic. You can shift and orient the mountains to create a landscape that gives you calm or complements your space. You can even cleverly add more mountains to diffuse more light, much like a physical, interactive dimmer mechanism. Designed as an ode to nature and the tranquility of mother earth, the Guilin lamp’s base comes coated in environmentally friendly paint, while the acrylic mountains themselves are made from 40% recycled plastic. Place the Guilin lampscape on a glossy reflective surface and it mimics the feeling of staring at the mountains sitting right behind a lake!

Designer: Kevin Chu

Click Here to Buy Now: $193 $320 (40% off). Hurry, only 27/40 left!

Guilin Lamp – Customizable By You Anytime You Want

A new category in lighting design. With etched acrylic mountains that sit on an illuminated base, the Guilin lamp lights up your room with an ambient glow while also adding sculptural beauty to one’s space. Designed as an ode to nature, Guilin is a living design and lighting element and you can transform it infinitely. You give shape to your own glowing landscape.

You can slot as many mountains as you like in the 3 grooves located at the base and change their position whenever you like. Thus, the lamp puts you into the role of a creator.

The number of mountains you slot and their position can create different lighting effects:

– The more mountains that are placed on the lamp the brighter it becomes.
– The reflection between the layering of mountains will increase the brightness.

Unleash your creativity and Combine, Layer or Joint Horizontally several Guilin into an ever-changing rolling Lampscape.

The Guilin Dawn uses their World Exclusive Italian nano-tech acrylic material that changes to a beautiful orange/yellow tint when the lamp is on and magically becomes near transparent when the lamp is off.

Inspiration & Story

When you think of China and its fabled mountains in ancient mythology, you are thinking of the famous Guilin Mountains.

Founders Kevin Chu and Giulia Di Bonaventura went on an adventure trip to Guilin Mountains and there they were mesmerized by the mythical scenery and always thought one day on using the mist-filled mountainous elements to create a design paying tribute to this region. In the beginning Kevin drew up a few criteria for the design to create a lamp that is:

– Unique and Revolutionary
– A Functional Illuminating sculpture
– With Infinite Customization Possibilities to extend its design longevity made with Sustainable Materials
– Simple and Elegant as abstracted visualization of the inspired elements and after 883 days of hard work, Guilin Lamp was born:

Sustainable Materials

Made of Sustainable High Quality Materials and Components, GUILIN consists of a rectangular steel base that is embedded with low voltage warm white (2700K) LED lighting. 5mm thick Glass Fiber Reinforced Acrylic Panels can be placed inside the 3 slots in the base. When the light is switched on the acrylic mountains will absorb the vertical illumination into its Surgical Grade laser engraved lines.

Click Here to Buy Now: $193 $320 (40% off). Hurry, only 27/40 left!

Opened today, the Radiohead Public Library is a huge online archive of the beloved British band’s albums, music videos, live concert footage, television clips, merch, artwork and more. Members can even create (and print out) their membership cards. The Twitter announcement reads, “Radiohead.com has always been infuriatingly uninformative and unpredictable. We have now, predictably, made it incredibly informative.” Every day this week, a band member will take users on a curated (albeit personal) tour through some of their favorite pieces of ephemera. Today, bassist Colin Greenwood shows viewers various videos, one being a performance in Ireland, which he captions: “Dublin 2000. It was in tents. I think I bounced on top of it during the day. A big blue bouncy castle. Think I broke some working at height rules.” See more at the new Radiohead.com.