If COVID-19 outbreaks persist and masks become seasonal, I’m guessing folks will get tired of wearing cut-up T-shirts and Etsy projects on their faces. And a subset of people will want something designey, so there’s an opportunity here. What might they look like?
These AirWaves concepts are entries from a 2013 internal design competition at frog’s Shanghai office, according to CNET. They’re meant to contain technology that monitors pollution levels and shares the data with other wearers. If these were real, I could see the tech crowd picking these up.
These are industrial designer Michael Soleo‘s take on the DHH Mask Project, which aims to make masks that allow lip reading by the hearing impaired. And a side benefit of the design is that people’s facial expressions become intelligible. If Soleo was producing these, I’d buy one.
Of course, all it might take is for an existing mask manufacturer to start expanding their market. This Pitta Mask by Arax is a currently available pollution mask from Japan, aimed at the fashion-minded set.
What I’m not looking forward to seeing, is when the luxury fashion brands start coming out with theirs. I can already picture what the LV one will look like.
The Sidewalk Toronto smart city was scuppered by a combination of local opposition, excessive secrecy and the prioritisation of profit and technology over sustainability and community, according to architect Ben van Berkel.
“That project in Toronto, of course, we studied endlessly,” said van Berkel, who is developing Brainport Smart District, a smart neighbourhood in Helmond in the Netherlands.
“It was all about the commercial use”
“And we’ve talked to the parties who were involved there,” he said. “The problem there was that it was too much oriented towards efficiency, such as who is shopping where in the neighbourhood.”
“It was all about the commercial use,” he added. “It was not dealing with the real important, urgent topics of today like sustainability and community-building.”
Launched in 2017, the Sidewalk Toronto project initially aimed to transform a 324-hectare site into a high-tech urban district. The project was subsequently scaled down to just 4.8 hectares.
“Sidewalk Toronto will combine forward-thinking urban design and new digital technology to create people-centred neighbourhoods that achieve precedent-setting levels of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity,” said Sidewalk Labs at the time.
Architects involved in the project included Heatherwick Studio and Snøhetta, who developed timber buildings for the site, and Partisans, which worked on a “raincoat” concept to shield pedestrians from the elements.
Project failure blamed on pandemic
Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced last week that the project had been scrapped, blaming uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“As unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world and in the Toronto real estate market, it has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan we had developed together with Waterfront Toronto to build a truly inclusive, sustainable community,” Doctoroff wrote.
“And so, after a great deal of deliberation, we concluded that it no longer made sense to proceed with the Quayside project, and let Waterfront Toronto know yesterday.”
“They had problems particularly with the neighbours,” van Berkel said. “The people really hated it. You know, this was already the case a year ago, two years ago, that they started to complain.”
Sidewalk Toronto architects contracted to secrecy
Van Berkel said that architects involved in Sidewalk Toronto were not allowed to speak publicly about the project, which he said was unusual for a large urban regeneration project that requires openness and community engagement.
“I know some of the architects… I’m not allowed to mention them because they were assigned all kinds of complex contracts,” van Berkel said. “But I already felt then that it was weird that they had, you know, 10 architects working on it who were not allowed to talk about it. It didn’t feel good.”
Work has already started on the 150-hectare Brainport Smart District site, which will eventually feature 1,500 homes set amid shared gardens where food will be grown. Designed along circular principles, the development will feature advanced technology to monitor everything from energy use to waste management.
UNStudio smart neighbourhood will be about “community-building and people”
UNStudio has worked with data-security specialists to ensure the information is secure and cannot be exploited by third parties, van Berkel said.
“We worked endlessly with specialists, even cyber-technology specialists who gave us the security. There are endless reports to make sure that the data shared there is kept within the owners of the neighbourhood so that it is not shared with any large company outside that neighbourhood.”
“And, of course, people can decide to be part of that digital community [or not].”
As the first development of its kind in the Netherlands, Brainport Smart District required careful community consultation, van Berkel said. “We had major questions and front-page criticism in the beginning,” he said.
“It’s about community-building and people,” van Berkel concluded. “It’s not about technology. It’s about the way we can improve the future neighbourhoods with the support of technology. It’s not the other way around.”
VDF studio profiles: scientific research meets design at Studio ThusThat, a multidisciplinary practice whose work exposes the hidden potential in the material world.
Based in London and Amsterdam, Studio ThusThat is led by three Innovation Design Engineering graduates from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.
It exists to improve the understanding of materials in a world of finite resources and demonstrate the potential of waste materials.
Studio ThusThat is a design practice whose work seeks to unearth the full potential of the material world
“The materials in our everyday lives are much more complex than they initially seem,” explained the studio. “Each one has myriad places of origin, complex processes, and many different uses that make up its narrative.”
“But every material comes at a cost; vast quantities of byproducts and wastes are left in its wake before it ever reaches your hands,” the studio added.
“Studio ThusThat aims to overturn how we understand our material world by uncovering their hidden backstories, digging into their origins, and exploring that which was left behind as waste.”
Red is a collection of ceramics made using Bauxite Residue, a waste product from the alumina industry
The key to Studio ThusThat’s design process is immersive research, which it conducts through collaborating with scientists and various material experts from around the world. This enables it to work with many unknown materials that are often limited to scientific study.
“It’s important to not stay confined to the design bubble,” explained said Kevin Rouff, a member of Studio ThusThat. “We need to get out of the lab, away from the desk, and out of the workshop to move more fluidly.”
A project by the studio that demonstrates this concept is the From Wasteland to Living Room series, which explores the potential of industrial waste from the mining and metallurgical sectors.
The first part of the series, Red, investigates the potential of bauxite residue, which is a byproduct of the aluminium industry otherwise known as red mud.
Another collection is called This is Copper that comprises furniture made from slag
As part of the investigation, the studio worked with factories and research labs to use red mud to create a collection of ceramics and glazes. The aim was to invite people to question the notion of waste and demonstrate the value of secondary materials by providing them with a new aesthetic.
It is now continuing its exploration of red mud and collaborating with mining companies such as Rio Tinto to find real world applications for the material.
The second part of the From Wasteland to Living Room series is This is Copper, which explores the transformation of slag – a waste product of copper mining – into a cement alternative called a geopolymer. Geopolymers have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than standard cement but offer the same structural performance.
The project was conducted by Studio ThusThat in collaboration with a copper recycling factory and material scientists from KU Leuven in Belgium and resulted in a collection of chairs, tables, lamps, tiles that showcase the limits of the medium.
This is Copper seeks to highlighter the potential of geopolymers as a cement alternative
“In a way, we are constantly reinterpreting the designer’s role within the systems that already exist around a material,” said Studio ThusThat’s Paco Böckelmann.
Rouff concluded: “Ultimately, we try to balance between revealing a hidden story and telling a new one through the objects we make. It’s as much about critiquing, as it is about suggesting a possible alternative.”
Virtual Design Festival is the world’s first online design festival, taking place from 15 April to 30 June. For more information, or to be added to the mailing list, contact us at vdf@dezeen.com.
A studio profile on Virtual Design Festival could expose your work to Dezeen’s three million monthly website visitors. Each studio profile will be featured on the VDF homepage and included in Dezeen’s daily newsletter, which has 170,000 subscribers.
Vitra Design Museum is temporarily making their “Chair Times” documentary available for free streaming. The film, shot in 2018 by Swizerland’s HOOK Film & Kultur Produktion, is presented in German with English subtitles.
“Chair Times” charts a course through an ocean of chairs. In the focus are 125 objects from the Collection of the Vitra Design Museum. Arranged according to their year of production, they illustrate development from 1807 to the very latest designs straight off the 3D printer, forming a timeline to modern seating design.
The trailer–which is really a teaser, if you ask me–is below:
As a kid, I thought the fun of building a couch fort came from figuring out the engineering yourself. Russian marketing agency Instinct, of whom Ikea is a client, disagrees. According to AdWeek, Instinct put together this quarantine-time campaign for Ikea Russia:
The fact that the copy at the bottom of each “plan” is in English (why isn’t it in Russian?), and with typos, makes me suspicious it came from a marketing agency at all. But maybe someone with clumsy fingers translated it from Russian. “Who knows. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about that. Could be fake news. We can do a lot of things. We’ll see what happens.”
Dezeen promotion: UK manufacturer Forbo has released its Tessera Earthscape carpet tile collection, which takes design cues from colours and textures found in nature in a bid to promote wellbeing.
Fresh and earthy hues including forest green, sage and terracotta feature across the loop pile carpet tile collection, as part of a colour palette that was inspired by various elements in nature.
The Tessera Earthscape series, which is particularly suited to commercial office environments, was driven by the desire to incorporate biophilic design into interior spaces, which Forbo believes promotes employee wellbeing.
Each design in the Tessera Earthscape collection has a heavily textured composition designed to emulate natural surfaces such as soil and rock.
This is composed of a mixture of light and dark tones that complement and contrast to one another, to create a “seemingly infinite” surface design.
According to the UK manufacturer, neutral tones remain the most used in flooring design, but warmer hues like honey, bronze and pale rust shades are being increasingly utilised.
Colours inspired by nature have also extended past the sole use of green shades, Forbo explained, to include colours associated with earth, soil, ore, rocks, leather, fruit, moss, heathers and lichens.
“These hues are all being introduced to help to build on this notion of ‘bringing the outside in’,” said the company. “As a result, patterns have followed suit with organic designs that are softer and more fluid, as shapes are becoming less defined.”
In line with its nature-derived theme, the tiles are made using 57 per cent recycled content.
They also have a heavy 978 grams-per-square-metre pile weight – and a pile height of four millimetres – giving them a plush texture and making them comfortable underfoot.
This thickness also offers 26 decibels of impact sound reduction to offer minimal noise transmission for better indoor environments.
Measuring at 50 by 50 centimetres, the Tessera Earthscape tiles can be laid directly next to each other to create a seamless finish.
They can also be combined with Forbo’s Allura Flex Luxury Vinyl tiles using the same tackifier – the type of adhesive used to install carpet tiles – without the need for transition strips, additional profiles or the build-up of a subfloor.
This makes the collection an “ideal solution” for refurbishments that include integrated flooring schemes, said Forbo.
More information on Forbo’s new Tessera Earthscape collection can be found on the manufacturer’s website.
Bugatti is not known for their restraint on style, lavishing what some would say is excessive design and engineering attention on their supercars. Turns out the same goes for their factory–sorry, atelier, as they refer to it–in France, where they used to build the now-defunct Veyron. Bugatti’s engineers devised an elaborate system whereby the car is built in three parts, front, middle, rear, all on lifts just a few feet away from each other:
Once assembled, the front and rear parts are pushed over to mate with the middle part:
This is possible because their lifts aren’t actually floor-mounted stationary lifts, but trolleys with concealed wheels that roll in a track. Look at the track-concealing mechanism they came up with to eliminate the potential trip hazard:
I understand that you can’t have a technician rolling their ankle in an exposed track, but I mean, holy cow. It’s like if Santiago Calatrava had a degree in mechanical engineering.
The relevant clip explaining the car’s assembly process is below.
Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton, of Berlin architecture practice Sauerbruch Hutton, will speak to Dezeen in this live Screentime conversation sponsored by Enscape as part of Virtual Design Festival. Watch above from 2:00pm UK time.
Sauerbruch and Hutton will speak to Dezeen’s founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs live from Berlin.
Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton are the founders of Berlin architecture practice Sauerbruch Hutton
This Screentime conversation is sponsored by Enscape, a virtual reality and real-time rendering plugin for architectural design programme Autodesk Revit.
Held in the artists’ studio in London in 2017, Hybrideae featured a range of large-scale bronze planters developed through a process that combined hand-crafting with digital technology.
Hybrideae is an exhibition by artist duo Fredrikson Stallard
Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard initially sculpted rough forms by hand-shaping red terracotta. They then scanned the objects, scaled them up and used CNC machines to cut the enlargened forms from blocks of foam.
The foam was then used to create a mould from which the final pieces were cast in bronze.
Artworks “needed a classical platform”
In the video, the Fredrikson and Stallard explain how they invited Chan, a longstanding friend, to perform at the vernissage of the Hybrideae show. “When we saw these finished bronzes, it felt like they needed to sit on a classical platform,” said Fredrikson.
“The first thing that sprung to mind was Bach’s Cello Suites,” said Stallard, although the designers felt that the famous pieces, written between 1717 and 1723 for an unaccompanied cello, needed contemporary input to make them more relevant to their Hybrideae pieces.
“That’s when we called up Rosey,” said Fredrikson.
“The starting point was Bach’s Cello Suites as that was the element that Fredrikson Stallard were very keen on,” said Chan.
Live cello combined with pre-recorded digital sounds
“As their project involved the relationship between digital and analogue, I decided to explore combing pure live analogue sound of the cello, with a pre-recorded grid of digital sounds, and then in the live environment, giving myself enough digital material to improvise around the live cello, in a 25-minute performance,” said Chan.
“The work of creating this grid of digital sounds was very long and involved and consisted of me using elements like the human voice, but treated digitally,” she added, explaining that she incorporated “abstract sounds, music concrète, an arpeggiator, and various synthesisers, creating enough choice so that in the live performance I could do something completely original and spontaneous.”
Musician Rosey Chan performed a live accompaniment to the exhibition
Chan studied piano and composition at the Royal College of Music in London and now performs, composes and collaborates with artists and designers.
Are you ready for the weekend? I know it may not feel like ‘weekend’ weekend because we have all been home for two months and we really could use a change of scenery. The closest way to that is playing around with our furniture and that could mean either rearranging it to give our space a new look or using IKEA’s 6 furniture fort idea. We all know which one is more fun!
To stay safe from the pandemic, we are holding the fort and staying home. But to make quarantine better, IKEA has given us 6 illustrations in their iconic style to build some cozy forts! These are all without screws so there is no assembly-anxiety. The options are Castle, Fortress, Wigwam, House, Campingtent, and Cave. Each of these forms resonates with a memory we have had either indoors or outdoors. Castle will make you nostalgic because it is the fort we built during our childhood with four chairs, a lamp and a sheet – classic! Fortress makes me feel like it is the business class of forts with its cabin-like build. Wigwam is also another childhood reminiscent of the tipi tent, it does have a smaller capacity compared to the others. House is the easiest one, I used to make it with my siblings all the time! Campingtent like the name suggests is all about bringing the outdoors in – get your smores ready on the stove and put on some nature sounds to really create that ambiance. The Cave is basically for all of us quarantining with parents, no matter the age. It is nice to end conversations with “Alright, I am going back into my cave now!”.
IKEA has always been a happy place, you could really spend the whole day there and end it with their famous meatballs. Since we can’t go to what is Disneyland for adults, they are bringing some of that magic back home to us.
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.
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