Hasta La Ideas

Icelandic designer Katrin Olina describes how she translates characters from her imagination into drawings, animations, products and interiors in this movie we filmed at Dezeen Live at 100% Design.

Above: “The Wanderer” ink drawing

The first of five images Olina presents is an ink drawing of one of her creations, a character with an intriguing back story about journeying named ”The Wanderer”. “My culture is based a lot around story telling and I think it is something we carry within us,” she explains.

From hand drawing, she moves on to show a digitally-illustrated animation. ”When I started to use a computer in the nineties it completely revolutionised my life,” she says. “I saw it as a window into the extended mind.”

Above: digitally-illustrated animation

Olina proceeds to show her designs for Cristal Bar in Hong Kong, a bar where every surface is patterned, to demonstrate how she applies her illustrations to interior projects. ”By galvanising the space in this imagery it feels like an extension of the architecture, extending your mind into another space.”

She then explains how her characters inspired a collection of bent-steel furniture. ”With these creatures I see them as letters in an alphabet, they’re like nuances, they’re colours,” she explains, listing examples such as her “book dogs” which she describes as “little shelves that carry your books, never happier than at your feet”.

Above: Cristal Bar interior, Hong Kong

Finally, she shows a short teaser animation of characters from her forthcoming book, which she hopes to publish next year. “It’s about a girl from the old world who goes on a journey into the new world to find a lost dream and she meets different kinds of characters,” she says. ”I see all these creatures moving in my mind’s eye when I’m drawing them and I wish technology was just more advanced so all these things could be moving.”

Dezeen Live was a series of discussions between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a number of designers and critics that took place as part of the talks programme at design exhibition 100% Design during this year’s London Design Festival.

Above: Friends of Steel and Miklimeir furniture collection

Each of the four one-hour shows, recorded live in front of an audience, featured three interviews plus music from Dezeen Music Project featuring a new act each day. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting all the movies we filmed during the talks.

We’ve already published a couple of movies from the series so far: in the first IDEO UK design director Tom Hulme encourages designers to be more entrepreneurial and in the second architect and writer Sam Jacob questions whether we could be human without objects.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Don’t Go by east London band Strong Asian Mothers. You can listen to more of their music on Dezeen Music Project.

Above: teaser animation featuring characters from Olina’s forthcoming book

See all our stories about Katrin Olina »
See all our stories about Dezeen Live »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

The post “I use my imagination to create story spaces”
– Katrin Olina at Dezeen Live appeared first on Dezeen.

This weather-forecasting lamp creates an indoor cloud to warn of grey skies outside (+ movie).

The Nebula 12 by Swiss design studio Micasa LAB combines liquid nitrogen and hot water to create a billowing cloud of steam, which is kept in circulation around the lamp by vacuum suction.

The form the cloud takes and the colour of the lamp depend on the weather forecast for the next 48 hours.

A grey cloud appears on an overcast day, while a patch of low pressure is signalled by a red light seeping through the cloud. On sunny days the cloud disappears, leaving a warm yellow light, and at sunset the light turns warm orange.

The weather forecast is sent to the lamp via a WiFi connection with a Nokia Lumia 920 mobile phone –the only phone the lamp works with so far.

Micasa LAB is the design studio attached to Micasa, a German furniture and interiors brand.

Above: movie by Micasa LAB showing the Nebula 12 in operation

We’ve featured a few cloud-generating projects on Dezeen, including a house in Kuwait with a courtyard concealed by mist and a water feature in London that erupts in misty clouds.

See all our stories about weather »

Here’s some more information from the designers:

The Nebula 12 is a concept developed by Micasa LAB, Zürich. Using meterological data from MetOff, the Nebula forms to represent outside weather: wake up to a flooding yellow light on a sunny day, or below a real cloud on that overcast winter morning. The cloud involves some peculiar techniques, liquid nitrogen, WiFi, and high power vacuum suction.

In the standard mode, Nebula 12 predicts the weather for the next 48 hours. A threatening low-pressure area is announced by a red cloud, and sunshine is shown in yellow. At the same time, the user can adjust the settings and define the source of information themselves. And the best is: regardless of how dark the cloud is, Nebula 12 never brings rain. At least, not within one’s own four walls.

The light but stable creation can be used in many ways: Nebula 12 can, like a natural cloud, change in colour and brightness and thus can be used as a variable source of light for romantic evening meals, when doing homework, when reading or just chatting.

The cloud is easily connected by WIFI to your Nokia Lumia 920.

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by Micasa LAB appeared first on Dezeen.

These delicate bowls by Japanese design studio Nendo are so thin they quiver in the wind (+ movie).

Nendo created Shivering Bowls for the KAMA. Sex & Design exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Eight designers were asked to produce a piece that explores the idea of eros, the Greek term for erotic love, and Nendo responded by creating an extremely thin bowl from silicon.

“We wanted to express eros through a design that invokes desire – a design that viewers simply can’t bear not to touch,” said the designers.

The bowl changes shape when touched by a finger or buffeted by a breeze, as the movie shows.

The KAMA. Sex & Design exhibition runs from 5 December until 10 March 2013 at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan.

Other projects by Nendo we’ve featured recently include a collection of glass bowls that look like the bottom half of a Coca-Cola bottle and a chair that’s wrapped in fishing line rather than varnished.

See all our stories about Nendo »
See all our stories about bowls »

The movie is by Takahisa Araki and photographs are by Hiroshi Iwasaki.

Here’s some more information from Nendo:

Shivering Bowls

A set of bowls for the KAMA. Sex & Design exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. The curators asked eight designers to create an object, in conjunction with an exhibition that explored ideas of eros in design from ancient times to the present, from a cultural anthropology and mythical perspective.

We located the intersection of eros and design in the spiritual pleasure provided by an object’s touch, and decided to make an extremely thin bowl out of silicon for our contribution. The bowl resembles a ceramic one, but with a tension to this perception, generated by the extreme thinness that would be impossible to achieve with clay. The bowl changes shape as easily as liquid when it is touched, and continues to quiver momentarily in response to the outside force. We wanted to express eros through a design that invokes desire – a design that viewers simply can’t bear not to touch.

KAMA. Sex and Design
Date : 5th Dec 2012 –10th March 2013
Place : Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy

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by Nendo appeared first on Dezeen.

In this movie filmed by Dezeen, east London designer Paul Cocksedge describes his discovery of the interesting forms created when polystyrene cups are heated and how he used the process to create a pendant lamp.

Cocksedge first experimented with polystyrene cups ten years ago at the Royal College of Art as part of a project set by Ron Arad, who asked students to “grow a product”.

Above: image by Mark Cocksedge

“I placed the cup inside [the oven] and something really beautiful happened,” he explains. Heat distorts the shape of polystyrene while strengthening it, and Cocksedge made a movie of the process in reverse that looked like the cups were growing.

Above: image by Mark Cocksedge

He then built a large number of deformed cups into a sphere to create his Styrene lamp. ”As a designer we always search for form and interesting aesthetics, but this was like a dream come true because the heat was doing it for me,” he continues.

Above: image by Mark Cocksedge

The custom lamp he contributed to the Stepney Green Design Collection is 90cm in diameter – almost twice the size of the designs sold commercially – and was previously on display at the V&A Museum in London as part of an exhibition on British Design. Cocksedge has a studio in London Fields, east London, not far from Stepney Green.

The Stepney Green Design Collection consists of 10 products selected by Marcus Fairs of Dezeen from creatives who live near to VIVO, a new housing development in the east London district. The project also includes objects chosen by east London bloggers Pete Stean of Londoneer and Kate Antoniou of Run Riot.

Above: Styrene on display at the British Design 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age exhibition at the V&A, 2012

The collection is on show at the Genesis Cinema, 93-95 Mile End Road, Whitechapel, London E1 4UJ, from 10am to 10pm every day until January. After this, the objects will be given to VIVO residents.

See all the items in the Stepney Green Design Collection here and watch the movies we’ve featured so far here. The music featured in the movies is by American designer and musician Glen Lib. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “Heat-shrinking the polystyrene cups created
beautiful shapes” – Paul Cocksedge appeared first on Dezeen.