Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: design critic Alice Rawsthorn writes about design that balances desirability with ethical credibility for the New York Times, citing Mathieu Lehanneur’s Wi-Fi stations across Paris and Something & Son’s temporary spa the Barking Bathhouse as good examples to follow – New York Times

The post “The proper blend of beauty and ethics”
– New York Times appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Wire: design critic Alice Rawsthorn describes how the famous Arco lamp by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni has become a cliché for precisely the reasons that made it great – New York Times

A replica of the iconic design caused a furor last autumn when it emerged that the UK prime minister’s wife had purchased a reproduction for her home, prompting a scathing attack from Elle Decoration UK editor Michelle Ogundehin and the start of her Equal Rights for Design design campaign that culminated in changes to UK copyright law. Read the full story here.

More about Alice Rawsthorn on Dezeen »

Dezeen Wire: design critic Alice Rawsthorn interviews Japanese designer Oki Sato of Nendo about how the company got its name, the humour and stories behind their work and his current preoccupation with glass-blowing – New York Times

Nendo presented two exhibitions of their work in Paris last week: furniture that’s only stable when objects are placed on it and another  collection at Carpernters Workshop Gallery that includes containers made of agricultural netting, tables with glass tops that have been allowed to flow outside their frames and huge blown-glass bubbles trapped in steel coffee tables.

See all our stories about Nendo here and watch our interview with Oki Sato on Dezeen Screen.

Dezeen Wire: in her latest article for The New York Times, design critic Alice Rawsthorn examines the symbols and slogans adopted by the Occupy protest movement in cities around the world.

Rawsthorn explains that the name ‘Occupy’, which originated at the Occupy Wall Street protest against the banking and democratic system, “is a stellar example of both what is known in marketing as an umbrella brand name and what the anti-corporatists in the movement could call beating them at their own game.” She adds that the use of hashtags and slogans short enough to send on social networks such as Twitter have helped the movement spread globally and could represent a new protocol for protesters involving “the repeated use of a few carefully chosen words,” rather than images.

Dezeen Wire: in her latest article for The New York Times design critic Alice Rawsthorn strikes a blow against the current trend for naming products with confusing, forgettable or misleading monikers.

The issue was raised by a new housing development near Rawsthorn’s residence in London entitled the ‘Avant-garde Tower,’ that Rawsthorn claims has “nothing original about it, nor radical, provocative, subversive or any of the other qualities associated with the avant-garde.”

In a brief summary of the history of product naming, Rawsthorn describes the rationale behind memorable titles such as Concorde and laments the bizarre use of punctuation in product names such as the Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Th!nk electric vehicles.

See links to more articles by Alice Rawsthorn here.

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