Hasta La Ideas

Image courtesy Schon Magazine

Though Swarovski may first call to mind bedazzling rather than design, their sponsorship of and collaboration with artists and designers over the past decade have allowed people like Maarten Baas and Paul Cocksedge to work with materials and resources that have “served as an experimental platform for leading figures in design to conceptualize, develop and share their most radical ideas.” This year Swarovski partnered with Design Museum London on “Digital Crystal,” a new exhibition for which they asked 13 artists, designers and design studios to use cut crystal in projects and installations that “explore the meaning of memory in the digital age,” specifically how our intangible digital database of images and video have replaced more permanent methods of memory-saving like diaries, printed photographs and scrap books, and how that shift might impact that way we remember our past.

Image courtesy Mocoloco

You can Tweet a fleeting moment to “Lolita,” Ron Arad’s spiral chandelier (#DigitalCrystal or text +44 (0) 78 6002 1492) and watch your message swirl around and down its form, lasting only for seconds, or the lifespan of a typical Tweet. Yves Behar lights a black room with “Amplify,” a cluster of faceted paper shades lit from within by a single crystal. The lanterns create a darker and moodier space than Arad’s more ebullient crowd sourced installation. Nearby, Anton Alvarez made a high-speed spinning machine that wraps Swarovski crystal yarn at random around its clunky wooden body.

One the smallest yet strongest pieces comes from Hye-Yeon Park, whose “Unfamiliar Mass” takes an unintelligible circular swirl of solid crystal and slices through it to reveal the hidden silhouette of a polar bear.

(more…)

You might remember, about this time last year, gawking at the mesmerizing Troika illuminated signage erected in the V&A museum’s tunnel entrance.

Well this year, Dutch electronics giant Philips have added to the lighting display with an interactive installation in the same tunnel—and another hidden away in one of the lesser know gallery spaces of the vast Victorian edifice.

“Walk The Light,” a collaboration with Domonic Harris and his Cinimod studio, illuminates unwitting V&A visitors with a trail of bright white light and a spectrum of colour that transitions from a cool blue to a intense red as they approach the museums door.

(more…)

In recent years, the ubiquity of design events and festivals have been met with quiet grumbling from some members of the design industry, criticising the inevitable focus on chairs and the more exhibition friendly facets of design.

It is, perhaps, this tension that design duo Nendo chose to play when commission to produce a piece in the glorious surroundings of the V&A for London Design Festival 2012. Entitled “Mimicry Chairs,” the installation spans the length and breadth of the museum, with these strange, fragile and ethereal (completely non-functioning) archetypal chairs, sprouting up everywhere.

The ghost-like objects—crawling up stairs, suspended from ceilings, swarming in gallery spaces—reflecting the museums interior, take on the characteristics of their surroundings—arranging themselves like the regimented paintings on the walls to give just one example.

(more…)

With few exceptions the products on exhibition at Designjunction have already made the rounds in New York and Milan. Some, like the Designers in Residence ICFF award-winning exhibition, “Tools for Everyday Life,” are worth a quick revisit. A group of designers working and studying in the open-ended residency at Northumbia University created a range of products in response to a brief to explore traditional craft manufacturing of helpful objects for, as the exhibition title notes, everyday living. [Editor’s Note: They presented several of these projects as well as several new ones at this year’s ICFF.]

(more…)

Inspired by the cabinets of curiosity, or wonder cabinets that once traveled around Europe as the first iteration of what later become the modern day museum, curators Livia Lauber and Maria Jeglinska invited eight designers from five European countries to create their own personal cabinet of curiosities for the Wonder Cabinets of Europe exhibition on view at Brompton Design District during London Design Festival. The eight resulting raw plywood cabinets provide a look into each designer’s methodology—their work in process as opposed to their work in progress. “Each cabinet is conceived as an exhibition within the exhibition—an atomized gallery space.”

The cabinets are both intimate and clinical. Though each designer has allowed us a glimpse of their personal approach to the design process, the displays are a precise, calculated display of what Jeglinska and Lauber call designer DNA. “We could have called this exhibition “The Way We Work,” but that would have restricted it to the perimeter of our studios. It was important for us to place it within a larger context, to take another step back.” Jeglinska and Lauber went on to discuss how their circle of designer friends are the first generation to benefit from the possibilities of the EU, and how much of their design work is a result of studying and working in cities they didn’t grow up in. Even the most casual of festivalgoers will notice an ‘internationalization’ of design—a mix of modernism, minimalism, craft and materials that draws influence from a variety of Scandinavian and European countries.

On a personal note, the idea of creating a personal cabinet of wonder seems like an ideal studio project for design students, forcing them to focus on their own process and discover what’s most important and meaningful to them. Jeglinska and Lauber agreed, adding “We hope that the cabinets provided the designers with an opportunity for introspection, stimulating them to reflect upon their own praxis and the driving elements behind their approaches.”

(more…)