Hasta La Ideas

This past week, in a 10,000 square-foot salvage warehouse, DesignPhiladelphia hosted an evening of design exhibitions, fashion showcases, and outdoor revelry to kick off the eighth year of this nationally recognized design festival. This citywide festival features five days of non-stop design programming showcasing the work of over 400 designers and creative thinkers in more than 120 public events.

Set on the fringe of Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood at Provenance Architecturals, guests were treated to a cocktail party amid the many treasures one can find in an architectural salvage shop—Corinthian columns, retro globes, Victorian streetlamps, modern furniture and home decor, monumental church stained glass, slate slabs, stacks of reclaimed wood, 19th-century milling tools and more.

Unlike many design festivals around the world, DesignPhiladelphia aims to demystify design for the general public and make it experiential. They’re focused on educating the public—beyond the professional design community—about the importance of good design, and the way design effects our daily lives. As Hilary Jay, Founding Director of DesignPhiladelphia, stated in her opening remarks Wednesday evening, they “envision a future where innovative design is strongly associated with Philadelphia’s story, beyond the lore of soft pretzels, cheesesteaks, Rocky movies, and the Liberty Bell.”

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Within the Passionswege (“pilgrimage ways”) craft and design project of Vienna Design Week, Vienna-based designer Valentin Vodev was asked to collaborate with J. L. Lobmeyr, the renowned Viennese glassware manufacturer, now run by the sixth generation.

Vodev developed a series of pictograms to reveal “secret” information about the long-standing Lobmeyr product portfolio—information about the glassware that is never communicated to the buyer, yet passed on verbally from generation to generation to distributors and within the company.

These inside stories are based on technical as well as socio-cultural properties that have been discovered over the past 150 years of the Lobmeyr business. Vodev has brought these attributes to the surface to make them visible. Even though the unobtrusive symbol engravings are not clearly marked at first sight, the delight of discovering them at a second glance is part of the experience when looking through the Lobmeyr glasses.

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Mostlikely, a Viennese design collective, reproduced the Vienna Basilisk during Vienna Design Week. According to a Viennese legend from the 13th century, this mythological creature comes to life “when a rooster lays an egg which is hatched by a toad, and the offspring is reared by a snake”. It was eventually forced to explode by being confronted with its own ugliness in a mirror that was held up in front of it by a brave young man.

Mostlikely rebuilt the Basilisk as a five metres tall paper structure—constructed from 360 single pieces, consisting of 3,780 different two-dimensional paper shapes, assembled with 22,680 joints. In order to produce this high number of technically complex forms rapidly themselves, the designers used low polygon modeling. This 3D computer technology, usually implemented for filmic visual effects, was put into manifestation with what they refer to as “low tech prototyping”.

The 360 individual components were for sale at the finissage, the exhibition closing, to find a new life as lamp or whatever other function a buyer can imagine for their very own paper monster puzzle piece.

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An unusual liaison of material and function: pan and brush made from horn and pig hair by bespoke craftsmen.

The concept of the Passionswege (“pilgrimage ways”) program—an integral part of Vienna Design Week—is to connect designers with local Viennese producers and businesses in order to enforce the exchange of expertise, the preservation and further development of knowledge and the virtuosity in craftsmanship and manufacturing.

The brush manufacturer Norbert Meier is one of the last of his trade (here holding up an untreated buffalo horn from Thomas Petz, the last Viennese producer of horn ware).

This particular Passionswege project deals with the work of two handicrafts that hardly exist anymore: the brush manufacturer Norbert Meier is one of the last of his trade still possessing a master craftsman’s diploma. In contrast, Thomas Petz, only 26 years of age, is the last Viennese producer of horn ware.

An intriguing and incredibly soft make-up powder brush was one of the results of this project.

Polish-born designer, curator, scenographer and design blogger Matylda Krzykowski was invited to work with both manufactories to design a series of products to be produced with these two handicrafts that are at the brink of disappearance.

The hair for the brushes is imported from China. It used to be locally sourced—until literally over night China dropped the prices for the material to a fraction of the local price, which put all local businesses out of business.

The outcome are timeless pieces that compel through their formal simplicity. Krzykowski kept the horn as much as possible in its naturally grown shape, only treated the surface to reveal the intrinsic beauty of the material. The fascination lies in experiencing how well these natural shapes work—not only aesthetically, but also ergonomically and functionally.

Ana Berlin, the VDW Lady of Press, enjoying the softness of the horn powder brush.

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Field Guide is a loose collective of designers, artists, technologists, musicians and journalists engaged with projects that focus on “the materiality of things that are immaterial, such as electricity, sound, light, emotions and the Internet.” Often times these projects are ongoing works in progress or open-ended experiments that are, admittedly, sometimes a bit too conceptual to fully understand. Still, their showroom at Brompton Design District during London Design Festival was set up a like science fair with exciting, interactive gadgetry and liquid-filled glass vials that invited visitors to engage with the different projects and try them out for themselves to get a better sense of their intentions.

The most accessible project is The Happiness Machine, a device that randomly collects happy or sad Tweets and blog posts and prints them out on a thermal paper feed that runs like a ticker tape machine. Created by Brendan Dawes, a digital artist and maker, the paper printed by The Happiness Machine is designed to remind us that behind every Twitter name or Tumblr account is a real person whom we’ve never met, and that the Internet “isn’t a network of machines but a network of people.”

The Happiness Machine is connected to the web via an Arduino compatible micro controller called a Nanode, which has a built-in Ethernet connection so it can connect to the Internet without any other accessories. Two capacitive touch buttons created using Bare Conductive‘s Bare Paint trigger the Nanode to retrieve either happy or sad thoughts from Jonathan Harris‘s crowd sourced emotional collection website, wefeelfine.org.

“The future of connected objects isn’t just about screens,” Dawes said. “In many ways paper is actually less of a throwaway than the display of pixels. Combine paper with a network such as the Internet and you have a lightweight, flexible, connected ‘display’ that you can carry anywhere, share, keep, scribble or even reuse.”

See more of the Field Guide projects or submit your own.

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