Hasta La Ideas

Compact Microlino EV gets the off-roading capable treatment courtesy of this concept which is tailored for adventurers who need a compact car for their camping to the trails.

A few months back we saw the cool Microlino Camper that’s one of the most compact and lightweight campers one can think of. Unlike other conventional campers or trailers, the Microlino is unique in its own rights with a small footprint and the capability to provide cozy shelter for two people to sleep on their short adventure trip. Now designers Dejan Hristov and Vladimir Matijasevic have envisioned another avatar for the all-electric Microlino originally created by Micro Mobility Systems.

Meet this robust version of the compact electric vehicle, ready to take on the treacherous trails for boundless adventure. The Microlino off-road modification brings with it the assurance of a robust chassis and reinforced exterior body frame to take on the harsh road conditions, as well as inclement weather. The solid metal framing on all sides provides protection from accidental bumps into rocks or trees, and also doubles as a platform for keeping essential tools or accessories. This brings freedom to pack in more stuff for the journey. Secondly, there is a rack on top to keep things like surfboards or extra luggage.

Tires, suspension, and underbody also get the off-roading capable treatment as the ride height understandably gets a boost. Since the vehicle is meant for dusty roads and difficult road conditions, there are extra fog lamps on the reinforced metal protection. The rear section can be either used to carry a couple of bicycles or an extra set of tires. The size of this modified Microlino off-roading vehicle is the core advantage here, and ideal for ones who always wanted a small hatchback to suffice their needs for adventure trips.

Designer: Dejan Hristov and Vladimir Matijasevic

Dezeen turns 15 next month and to celebrate, we’ve commissioned 15 creatives including Es Devlin, Winy Maas and Neri Oxman to propose ideas that could make the world a better place over the next 15 years.

Other contributors include Space Popular, Superflux, Joseph Grima and Jalila Essaidi.

Called Dezeen 15, the festival looks forwards rather than backwards and explore what the world could look like in 2036.

Coinciding with the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, it aims to showcase how creativity and design can offer bold, imaginative solutions to the world’s problems.

“Rather than celebrate what we’ve already done, we want to look ahead”

Each contributor has prepared a written manifesto and we’ll publish one of these each day for the 15-day duration of the festival.

In addition, we’ll conduct a live interview with each contributor, in which they’ll present their idea and discuss it with Dezeen founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs. Most of the live interviews will take place at 3pm UK time.

All the content will be published on Dezeen’s home page and on the special Dezeen 15 section of the site.

“Dezeen turns 15 this year but rather than celebrate what we’ve already done, we want to look ahead and see what’s possible over the next 15 years,” said Fairs.

“The world is facing so many challenges but we believe that architects and designers have so much to offer in terms of solutions,” he continued.

“So we’ve selected 15 incredible creatives and ask them to propose an idea that could make the world a better place over the coming decade and a half.”

Here is the schedule:

Es Devlin
Monday 1 November

Es Devlin is a British set designer, artist and director best known for creating large-scale performance environments for the likes of Beyoncé, Kanye West and U2.

She was artistic director of this year’s London Design Biennale, for which she filled the courtyard of Somerset House with 400 trees.

Read more about Es Devlin ›

Winy Maas of MVRDV
Tuesday 2 November

Dutch architect Winy Maas is co-founder and director of Rotterdam studio MVRDV and head of The Why Factory, a research laboratory and think tank he co-founded with the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology.

Find out more about Winy Maas ›

Amber Slooten of The Fabricant
Wednesday 3 November

Amber Jae Slooten is the co-founder of the digital fashion house The Fabricant, which she established in 2018 with Kerry Murphy to create clothes that only exist in digital spaces.

She studied at Amsterdam Fashion Institute and became the first-ever fashion student to graduate with an entirely digital collection.

Read more about The Fabricant ›

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau
Thursday 4 November

Cave_bureau is a Nairobi-based architecture and research practice. It was founded by architects and “spelunkers” Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja in 2014 to lead geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature.

It is currently presenting an installation called Obsidian Rain in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Read Cave_bureau’s opinion column about the Venice Architecture Biennale ›

Yasmeen Lari
Friday 5 November

Yasmeen Lari was the first Pakistani woman to qualify as an architect. Though she closed her practice in 2000, she continues to advocate “barefoot social architecture” and has built thousands of low-cost homes through the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, a non-profit organisation she cofounded.

Find out more about Yasmeen Lari ›

Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular
Monday 8 November

Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research studio founded by architects Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg. The duo has pioneered the development of virtual architecture, designing the world’s first virtual-reality architecture conference.

Find out more about Space Popular ›

Francesca Sarti of Arabeschi di Latte
Tuesday 9 November

Interdisciplinary designer Sarti is the founder and creative director of the experimental food design studio Arabeschi di Latte. She established the Italian studio in 2001 to blur the boundaries between design, architecture, art and food.

Her work takes the form of exhibition curation and set design through to interior architecture, art direction and styling.

Find out more about Arabeschi di Latte ›

Beatrice Galilee of The World Around
Wednesday 10 November

Beatrice Galilee is a New York-based critic and curator. She is the founder and executive director of the architecture conference The World Around and author of Radical Architecture of the Future, which was published by Phaidon earlier this year.

Read more about Beatrice Galilee ›

Jalila Essaidi
Thursday 11 November

Jalila Essaïdi is a Dutch artist and inventor based in Eindhoven. She specialises in designing with bio-based materials such as recycled cow dung, which she used to create a fashion collection that explored how to turn waste into valuable products.

She is also the CEO of biotech company Inspidere BV and founder of the BioArt Laboratories arts foundation in Eindhoven that provides entrepreneurs access to a biotech laboratory.

Read more about Jalila Essaïdi ›

Henna Burney of Luma Foundation
Friday 12 November

Henna Burney is a product designer at the design and research laboratory Atelier Luma in Arles, France. Her research involves developing new types of biomaterials and recently developed salt panels for use as cladding inside Frank Gehry’s tower for Luma Foundation.

Read more about Atelier Luma ›

Aric Chen of Het Nieuwe Instituut
Monday 15 November

Aric Chen is an architecture and design curator and a professor at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University.

In 2018, he was named the first curatorial director of Design Miami. He recently became the general and artistic director of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

Read more about Aric Chen ›

Natsai Audrey Chieza of Faber Futures
Tuesday 16 November

Natsai Audrey Chieza is founder and CEO at Faber Futures, a design agency that explores the intersection between design and biotechnology. Her work focuses on biofabrication and examines how natural processes such as microbial action can be harnessed to create sustainable products.

Find out more about Natsai Audrey Chieza ›

Joseph Grima of Space Caviar
Wednesday 17 November

Writer, curator and architect Joseph Grima is the creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven and co-founder of research studio Space Caviar. He recently authored a manifesto calling for a new type of non-extractive architecture.

Before founding the studio, he curated installations for events including the Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Istanbul Design Biennial.

Read more about Joseph Grima ›

Anab Jain and Jon Ardern of Superflux
Thursday 18 November

London design and film studio Superflux was founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009 to explore technology, politics, culture and the environment. Its work is currently on show at both the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Vienna Biennale.

It was one of the first studios to imagine drones being used in cities for surveillance, traffic control and advertising in a project called Drone Aviary, which was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Find out more about Superflux ›

Neri Oxman
Friday 19 November

Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli architect and designer. She is the founder and a former professor at The Mediated Matter Group at MIT. She now runs her own studio, called Oxman, in New York City.

Find out more about Neri Oxman ›

The post Dezeen 15 digital festival will present 15 manifestos for the future starting next Monday appeared first on Dezeen.

Rich illustrations by 24 different artists combine with dayglo graphic design to make The Complete Short Stories: Philip K. Dick, a limited-edition box set of books by The Folio Society and La Boca.

The four-volume hardback set brings together all 118 of the revered science-fiction author’s short stories and features illustrations by 24 artists, as well as neon book bindings and a presentation box designed by UK studio La Boca.

The project was art directed by The Folio Society‘s Sheri Gee and Raquel Leis Allion. The duo decided that, because of the breadth of the stories, they wanted to go beyond the usual approach of commissioning a single artist.

To create a contrast from the illustrations they brought in design studio La Boca, which tends to work in a bold and graphic style, for the books and packaging design.

La Boca’s approach for The Complete Short Stories is based on colours, symbols and codes.

“Primarily La Boca wanted the books to feel slightly mind-bending when seen in the flesh,” Allion told Dezeen. “Initially it was thought that the neon palette wouldn’t reproduce well on screen, but we were surprised that it worked and when the books are viewed in the flesh, they have that extra level of sensory stimulation.”

La Boca’s design has the books’ bindings, cover illustrations, page edges and ribbon markers rendered in a four-colour palette of highlighter pink, yellow, green and blue, but arranged differently on each volume.

While the first volume is yellow with green page-edges and a pink ribbon bookmarker, the next volume is green with blue pages and a yellow ribbon marker, and so on.

The covers are printed with graphic symbols designed to reference the Zener cards designed by US psychologist Karl E. Zener in 1930.

These were used to test for extrasensory perception (ESP) and chosen for the book covers because telepathy is a recurring theme in some of the short stories.

The symbols are screen-printed with fluorescent inks on the Duchesse cloth bindings. The same symbols are echoed on the relevant title page and spot-varnished on one side of the box.

Illustrations also feature on the inside of the box on two specially designed papers. There is a glitch-style grid pattern in the same four neon colours on the top part of the box, and a black night sky sparkling with silver stars inside the bottom part, both reflecting the science fiction themes in the texts.

“The inside of the box could become a forgotten void of space, which made La Boca think it would probably be exactly the type of place Philip K. Dick would explore,” said Allion.

“The illustration is designed to be a kind of pixel camouflage that is in stark contrast to the solid colours on the outer side of the box,” Allion continued. “La Boca wanted the inside to hold a surprise after lifting the lid, like gazing into a fathomless digital world.”

The outside of the box is yellow and silver and is deliberately quite heavy, so that the lid needs to be lifted off with both hands.

“The illustration on top of the box is a sort of diving point; the reader is looking down on it whilst lifting the lid,” said Allion. “It’s designed to act as a signifier that you are in the process of entering the cosmic world of Philip K. Dick.”

There are six illustrations per volume, representing a wide spectrum of styles and mediums. The set includes works by famous artists, such as Dave McKean and Georgia Hill, as well as creations by emerging practitioners.

The Complete Short Stories: Philip K. Dick was published in a limited run of 750 numbered copies and sold out in three days.

The author is best known for the novels The Man in the High Castle and short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into the movie Blade Runner.

The Minority Report, which was adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg, is one of the 118 short stories included in this collection.

The Complete Short Stories: Philip K. Dick was the public vote winner for graphic design of the year at the Dezeen Awards.

Other shortlisted designs include the Norwegian passport by Neue Design Studio and the Magic Canvas, a children’s psychotherapy tool by Magpie Studio.

The Folio Society is a UK publisher that produces illustrated hardback editions of classic fiction and non-fiction.

The design studio La Boca was founded in 2002, and its past work includes an illustrated film poster for the movie Parasite.

The post The Folio Society creates bold neon-coloured Philip K. Dick box set appeared first on Dezeen.

‘Living Big in a Tiny House,’ met up with New Zealand couple Russel and Leah to tour their tiny home built to escape the high stress of the city for the high hills of the countryside.

Over the span of three years, our worlds have seemed to downsize. The pandemic transformed our lifestyles and prompted many of us to escape the rat races of city living and find respite in nature. Garnering attention from city residents eager to get out, tiny homes have become our one-way tickets.

‘Living Big in a Tiny House,’ a YouTube channel that covers a variety of tiny homes, met up with Russel and Leah, a police detective and social worker, who swapped the stress of urban life for an original tiny home on their friend’s plot of farmland in New Zealand.

In New Zealand, the views are aplenty. No matter where your gaze goes, different views of sloping, grassy hillsides, golden hour sunsets, and towering trees seem to follow. For Russel and Leah, their tiny home was designed especially to bring the outdoors and all of its wonder inside. “Almost every wall,” Leah describes, “has got a window or a door and that, of course, makes the house feel bigger, bringing the outdoors in and keeping the house cool during the summer.”

While many tiny house builders coat their home’s interior walls in white paint to enlargen the living space, the windows that punctuate almost every wall in Russel and Leah’s house provide an open-air feel and allow room for moodier interior design elements.

Walking through the tiny home’s spacious french doors, the lounge area welcomes guests with a black and white cowhide rug to hearken the wildlife right outside and set the tone for the rest of the home. Just behind the rug, a plush, emerald corner sofa provides plenty of resting space and storage beneath its cushions.

From the living room, the dining area and kitchen are well within sight. A breakfast counter merges the two rooms together and doubles as a workspace. In stark contrast to the living room’s optic white walls, the kitchen features matte black walls and robust wooden accents that might come from cedar or cherry timber.

Beneath the all-black storage units, emerald tilework is illuminated with soft, warm under-cabinet lighting. Just next door to the living room is the couple’s bedroom and bathroom, where an incinerator toilet, laundry machines, and a foldout ironing board can be found.

When designing their tiny home, which measures out to 34x10ft, Russel and Leah were focused on council consent. While the home is prepared for off-grid living, with solar panels and water treatment plumbing intact and ready for use, Russel and Leah do not regularly live off-grid, opting instead for conventional electricity and plumbing.

Designers: Russel and Leah x Living Big in a Tiny House

Design Studio PriestmanGoode, along with Flying Disabled and SWS Certification, has unveiled Air 4 All, a system that aims to revolutionize and democratize air travel for passengers with reduced mobility (PRM) by enabling powered wheelchair users to remain in their own wheelchair for the entire air journey. The aircraft seat features a folding design that allows the seat to conceal itself within the backrest, while a rail and lock on the floor lets powered wheelchairs slide in and lock into place, fitting in the area where the seat once was. The launch coincides with the 35th anniversary of the Air Carriers Access Act, passed by US Congress in 1986 to guarantee that people with disabilities would receive consistent and nondiscriminatory treatment when traveling by air.

Designer: PriestmanGoode for Flying Disabled and SWS Certification

PriestmanGoode mentions that the Air 4 All system is designed to be compatible with a wide range of airline seats and powered wheelchair types. Currently, the system has been designed keeping the narrowbody 2+2 configuration in mind, giving flights the ability to convert front row seats and install a wheelchair guidance and locking system to the aircraft. This configuration allows for up to two wheelchairs per row to travel on a single flight. A consortium formed by PriestmanGoodde, Flying Disabled, and SWS Certification will also be working alongside Sunrise Medical to establish those powerchairs that would be fit to fly, as well as to retrofit and create new standards for powered wheelchairs, thus enabling passengers with the most challenging disabilities to travel. Chris Wood MBE, Founder of Flying Disabled mentioned that “Air 4 All is the first system that has been developed jointly by a design agency, a certification body and with input from the disabled community. With a leading global wheelchair manufacturer as well as the subsidiary of a major airline on board to develop the product, it’s a truly collaborative project.”

In a press release, Paul Priestman, designer and Chairman of PriestmanGoode said “Air 4 All will usher in a step-change in the industry and finally offer equal access to comfort, safety, and dignity for all passengers. The biggest barrier in the past has been that giving greater space to passengers in wheelchairs would have reduced seat count and resulted in a loss of revenue for airlines. Air 4 All solves this problem and has the added benefit of enabling airlines to retain the design of their cabin on every seat, ensuring brand consistency and a cohesive brand experience for all passengers. Air 4 All will facilitate a smoother boarding and disembarking experience for PRMs and will also significantly reduce the number of wheelchairs that are damaged through poor handling.”

The Air 4 All seating system forms just one of many innovations by PriestmanGoode in the aviation industry. In 2019, the studio unveiled an eco-friendly in-flight meal tray made from non-plastic elements that were “either partially edible, reusable, soluble or biodegradable.” The studio has also extensively worked with Airbus as strategic design and innovation partners for over 20 years.

The Air 4 All has been granted a patent, and the first prototype of the Air 4 All system is expected in December 2021. The patent covers all types of wheelchairs across every mode of public transport. The consortium is looking for partners across the transport sector to develop the system for other modes of travel like rail and metro.

Designer: PriestmanGoode for Flying Disabled and SWS Certification