Hasta La Ideas

The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) announced today, that the City of Cape Town (South Africa) has been designated the World Design Capital (WDC) 2014.

Cape Town is the fourth city (after Torino, Seoul and Helsinki) to hold this biennial appointment and marks the first for the African continent.

For Cape Town, the WDC appointment comes exactly two decades after reaching democracy. Cape Town’s vision of design is based on socially responsible design, sustainability and innovation, with a focus on enhancing the city’s infrastructure to make it a more liveable African City.

Cape Town won the nomination in a short list that also included candidate cities Bilbao (Spain) and Dublin (Ireland).

> press release

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When professor Ezri Tazari isn’t busy teaching at Bezalel Academy for Art & Design, he’s doing… industrial design, the domain of his expertise. For his latest design, he starts with a few perforated metal sheets that have been folded a trapezoidal volume and ends up with a chair that he calls “Free Falling.” Anyone care to venture any guesses as to how Tarazi arrived at the final form?

Just one more hint before the production video (after the jump):

Incidentally, it’s yet another clip set to a potentially objectionable soundtrack—and frankly, the typography is questionable as well)—so don’t say I didn’t warn you…

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Earlier this year, we had a look at ten “could-potentially-see-the-light-of-day” chair designs from Austrian designer Thomas Feichtner. It’s been an exciting seven months at Feichtner’s studio: while the Salone only saw a 1:5 scale model of the “M3” chair, the designer saw fit to unveil the final product in his hometown during Vienna Design Week. (In the meantime, he’d also found time to design a rather timely chandelier for Lobmeyr.)

Liberated from the demands normally made on a mass-produced item, this design experiments with functionality, structural engineering and material. Both its back and its armrests are mere tangents of the construction, the functions of which are only discovered via actual use. With a seating surface floating within the construction and legs extending far to the sides, the M3 is most assuredly not a chair that saves space—it is much rather one which creates a space [of exactly one cubic meter; hence the name of the piece].

Although the thickness of the bars has proportionally increased from the rapid-prototyped model to the end result, the element of space remains its defining characteristic. Indeed, I was initially struck by the form’s resemblance to the tesseract, the “fourth-dimensional analog of the cube”—a concept that I recalled from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. (Seriously, try not to be mesmerized by this GIF.)

Nevertheless, Feichtner design also alludes to craftsmanship through his choice of material:

The chair is made of one and only one material: oak. This is a conscious choice of materials, hearkening back to the woodworking tradition upheld by furniture workshops of yore. The wood renders the chair’s light construction a static experiment which could only succeed in a handmade, unique item. Like many works by Feichtner, the M3 is to be understood as an artistic and experimental examination of design removed from industry and mass-production, as art and design placed in interdisciplinary dialog with one another. The M3 experiment is particularly well-suited to showing that design can free itself from the doctrine of the purely objective and is not automatically obligated to serve industrial utility. It represents a catalyst for the discussion of various positions.

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Photos by Jamie Newkirk

DesignPhiladelphia 2011 has officially arrived! DesignPhiladelphia is a week-long celebration of design that not only offers great lectures, exhibitions, street installations and workshops—but also allows creative individuals to network and collaborate across a breadth of design disciplines. Philadelphia is quickly proving itself to be one of the up-and-coming design capitals of the world. DesignPhiladelphia helps showcase the role that design has played historically in Philadelphia, the “workshop of the world,” but—most importantly—showcases the city as a hub for innovation and design.

To begin the festivities, DesignPhiladelphia hosted a benefit kick-off party Thursday evening at the Liao Collection, an Asian antique emporium located in a large brick-exposed showroom on the first floor of an old warehouse building. While the house band snared their drums and plucked the bass, guests in their best dress sipped on margaritas and picked at gourmet finger-foods, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the evening’s most notable guest—Mayor Michael Nutter. Not a stranger to the public eye and known for his late arrivals, Mayor Nutter arrived surprisingly on time—perhaps eager to accept the first annual Design Champion Award from DesignPhiladelphia.

“Design matters,” says Mayor Nutter. “The industry is growing in Philadelphia. It is open in Philadelphia. It’s creating jobs and economic opportunity. It’s actually drawing people to this city; it’s a part of the reason why our population actually went up for the first time in 60 years.” Mayor Nutter humbly accepted his award; a curious shadowbox with a painted bird and LED lights, presented to him by DesignPhiladelphia’s founder & executive director Hilary Jay, exclaiming that Mayor Nutter has helped Philadelphia’s design community “soar.”

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A seat with a found typewriter provided a lot of fun, particularly for the kids of the digital age, who never had used one of those before…

Anybody who has ever been to the Salone in Milan, will be familiar with the work of the Esterni collective, known for their public design projects (as well as their parties). This year they were invited by Vienna Design Week to participate in the Carte Blanche program of the festival in the Austrian capital.

Together with members of the community living around Volkertplatz street, Esterni created a whole series of ad hoc public furniture, made from pieces of old furniture that they found on the junk yard. Following the motto “Volkertplatz is a great place to be” they developed ideas that would enhance some moments of public life in the community—such as waiting for the bus or sitting on a wall. When the weather got really bad towards the end of the festival, the exhibits were shown in one of the Carte Blanche inside locations.

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