Hasta La Ideas

Bethany Koby and Daniel Hirshmann of Technology Will Save Us explain how their DIY technology kits and workshops help people “understand what goes into the stuff in our lives” in the penultimate movie filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day.

Technology Will Save Us design kits that contain all the parts and tools needed to build objects such as simple speakers or musical instruments. “A lot of the time it’s hard to navigate online resources in order to find all the things you need to make things with technology,” says Koby.

Other kits include conductive playdough and programmable bike lights, all sold both online and at small pop-up kiosks they call Haberdasheries for Technology. “These are shops within shops where we can give people information about our kits,” she says.

Created with designer Yuri Suzuki, their Radio Kit includes small circuits that fit together like a puzzle to form a working radio. “It contains PCB boards that you can piece together to create connections for a radio,” Koby says.

Hirshmann then describes the workshops run by the studio in the local area, which include teaching groups how to wire a plug, solder and create small circuits. “We’re interested in creating these workshop experiences where people can come in and join us as a community,” he says.

They also arrange “meetings with experts” where they ask people in the community about specific needs that could be solved using simple technologies. “We had a gentleman called Mr Lewis who couldn’t hear his doorbell and he wanted to see it,” says Hirshmann. The solution was to hook up LEDs from their musical instrument kit to his doorbell so they flashed when it rang. “The key thing to remember is that he was one member in a community that potentially had a similar need, it’s possible that this solution could help a lot of people,” he says.

The studio also organises technology demonstrations and live “teardowns” of products. “We get an expert to rip apart something that’s everyday in our lives, like a toaster, and explain what goes into this thing that makes it so good at making toast,” says Hirshmann. “It’s really fascinating to understand what goes into the stuff in our lives.”

To conclude, he demonstrates light glasses built from their Bright Eyes Kit, which are sunglasses with LED video screens instead of lenses.

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices. Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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Jay Gort from Hackney studio Gort Scott Architects argues that the beleaguered British high street is actually a thriving location of “collision and conflict” in this talk filmed by Dezeen at our Designed in Hackney Day last year.

Gort begins his presentation with an image by documentary photographer Mishka Henner showing onlookers at a gay pride parade in the English town of Oldham (above). “I’ve put this in here because I think it’s a really priceless photograph,” says Gort, who has worked with Henner on a number of projects.

“He uses the camera to strike up conversations with people, and to try and capture the places as well,” explains Gort. “That’s something that’s really important about our work, that whole idea of valuing what exists to start with.”

He goes on to show two drawings of London high streets (above and below) made by Fiona Scott, the architect with whom he founded Gort Scott Architects in 2007.

“I think these drawings start to show some of the amazing characterfulness and juxtapositions of different uses and building types that exist [on London’s high streets],” he says.

“A lot of people say the high street is dead,” he continues, “[but] nearly 60% of all London’s employment goes on near high streets, and there’s an amazing richness and vitality that is far from dead, actually. If you go down to Tooting, or up to Cricklewood, you’ll find a high street that isn’t about shopping – it’s about the representation of local communities in that area.”

The high street is a “physical device” where communities meet and where “collisions and conflicts happen”, he adds.

Introducing the Tottenham Public Room project (above) in north London, he says: “It’s a public space that can be used to try and encourage a trading of skills. Volunteers from the Tottenham area are trying to help a disenfranchised community, which was really splintered after the riots [in 2011].”

“We want to do buildings that have an impact, but we realise we have to operate a little bit by stealth in terms of getting into different areas,” he notes.

He goes on to introduce two very different forms of architecture that have inspired his practice, noting that he is most of all interested in atmosphere.

“Atmosphere is dictated by the structure, the scale, the light, the materiality, the orientation – where you’re placed within the city itself – and how all those things start to combine to have an impact on the kind of space,” he says, comparing a grand palace in Genoa (above) with a room of scaffolding props (below).

He finishes by introducing his firm’s most challenging project to date, a house on the Isle of Man (below). “Whereas Tottenham Public Room was going to be built for a temporary setting, this is going to hopefully last in a really harsh climate on the southern tip of the Isle of Man for a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years,” he says.

After experimenting with lots of different materials, the architects realised that the most successful buildings on the island were made out of traditional stone. “We thought, why not just build this thing out of stone [and] use a Welsh slate roof,” he says. “To just work with that palette of materials was really rewarding.”

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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and conflict” – Jay Gort appeared first on Dezeen.

Seed-dispersing robots and file-sharing drones are among proposals to fuse technology and the natural world by Liam Young of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, presented at our Designed in Hackney Day last summer (+ movie).

Above: Young’s Unknown Fields project with Kate Davies

In the movie, Liam Young looks back at his work with Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, the studio he runs with Darryl Chen, and Unknown Fields, an experimental project with designer and writer Kate Davies. Young explains his work is influenced by the history of futurology and how the “diverse visions of yesterday’s tomorrows” can explore the consequences of emerging technologies.

Above: deforestation reveals an ancient town in the rainforest

For one Unknown Fields project, Young travelled to the Amazon rainforest and discovered that an area we think of as an untouched wilderness was once a cultivated landscape.

Above: “CO2 scrubbers” for the Amazon

“Instead of a jungle, what we actually find is a large garden,” he says, explaining how deforestation has revealed ditches in the rainforest floor left behind by an ancient village whose residents cultivated the local flora.

Above: “migrating forests” for the Amazon

The studio then invented fantastical creatures that might find a home in the deforested areas of the Amazon, such as “CO2 scrubbers” that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen more efficiently than the trees that once stood there and “migrating forests” that can travel as the climate changes.

Above: rat poison spread across the Galapagos Islands

He also visited the Galapagos Islands where he encountered “an absurd fight for an idealised nature”, with rat poison dumped from helicopters and an “eco sniper” killing goats that destroy the habitats of endangered turtles.

Above: seed dispersal robot

Exploring this use of technology to maintain a “natural” environment, Young came up with a seed dispersal robot that floats like a plant spore in the wind, dropping native Galapagos seeds on the ground.

Above: poison cloud robot

He also designed a machine that sprays poisonous clouds to kill invasive rodent populations, guided by a “Judas rodent” that herds the rats into packs before the poison is released.

Above: “Judas rodent” to guide the poison cloud robot

In Australia, Young visited an enormous gold mine where he discovered that it takes 200 trucks of excavated rock to produce just one gold bar.

Above: Kalgoorlie Super Pit in Western Australia

A 3D computer image of the mine is connected to real-time information about the price of gold, dictating how much is excavated each day.

Above: computer image of Kalgoorlie Super Pit

He finishes with Electronic Countermeasures, a Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today project that saw a flock of flying robots create temporary file-sharing networks above the city.

Above: a gold bar being weighed

“It’s kind of like an aerial Napster, he says. “They perform this balletic aerial choreography, drifting through the sky, part nomadic infrastructure and part nomadic swarm.”

Above: Electronic Countermeasures

“What we’ve realised is that there’s no nature anymore – at least not in the sense that we culturally define it,” he concludes. “What there is, is technology. Engineered networks, augmented environments, invisible fields – infrastructure has exploded into bits, to roam the earth in an architecture of everywhere.”

Above: Electronic Countermeasures

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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Troika founding partner Eva Rucki explains the studio’s large-scale immersive light installations in this movie filmed by Dezeen at our Designed in Hackney Day.

Above: one of Troika’s Trixotrope pieces when spinning and illuminated

Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel founded Troika in 2003 after graduating from the Royal College of Art and have set up a flexible workshop space under a large railway arch in Hackney, east London.

Above: Trixotrope frame when still

The first of the studio’s installations she describes is Thixotropes, a series of rotating frames covered in LED strips. The light pieces hung in the atrium of London department store Selfridges for three months last year. “One of the most magic points for me in this installation is when the structure starts spinning and hits a point where it spins so fast that it becomes a solid volume,” says Rucki.

Above: detail of the LED strips used on the Trixotrope pieces

Four different designs were suspended in two columns and alternated on and off so shoppers on all five floors of the store could experience the way the pieces looked at different speeds from various vantage points.

Above: Trixotrope piece when spinning and illuminated

Rucki then describes Troika’s Light Rain project, first created for Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo then refined for crystal company Swarovski and displayed at the V&A museum as part of an exhibition of British design. “The way this device works is that you have a lens, a light and when the light comes closer to the lens and further apart and it has an animation written into the mechanism, which is a raindrop,” she says.

Above: Trixotrope pieces spinning and illuminated while hung in the atrium of Selfridges

“It contrasts technology, which is perceived as something often artificial and man made, with something like an innate memory of nature you has as a kid watching raindrops on the ground,” she says.

Above: The Weather Yesterday installation in Hoxton Square

Troika’s commission for Hoxton Square in east London was a light installation linked to yesterday’s weather forecast. “The slightly retro look wasn’t really a stylistic choice, but it’s based on the components the sign is built with: LED strips in modules of five,” Rucki says.

Above: LED strips used for The Weather Yesterday installation

“Quite a lot of our work uses software programming controls as well as typical physical design,” she summarises at the end of the talk.

Above: The Weather Yesterday assembled in Troika’s studio

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Above: the back of The Weather Yesterday showing the wires and circuitry

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney. See all our stories about design by Troika »

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as well as physical design” – Troika appeared first on Dezeen.

Suzanne O’Connell of Hackney studio The Decorators introduces a temporary restaurant in a local market and a community event on top of a multi-storey car park in this movie filmed by Dezeen at our Designed in Hackney Day.

Above: Ridley’s Temporary Restaurant

O’Connell looked back at The Decorators’ work over the past year as part of the day’s Pecha Kucha talks, a presentation format where 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each.

Above: the site of the temporary restaurant

“A lot of what we’ve done over the past year, because we’re a new practice, is about rehearsals and testing public space,” says O’Connell as she introduces a temporary restaurant in east London’s Ridley Road market. “It’s not just about designing the space, but about designing the programme for that space.”

Above: constructing the restaurant

Collaborating with London studio Atelier ChanChan, The Decorators set up a restaurant that encouraged visitors and locals to exchange raw ingredients for a cooked meal.

Above: section showing the restaurant’s moving table attached to a pulley

“We didn’t really have a brief, so we spent two or three months doing research on the market, speaking to the traders, our core collaborators, and trying to figure out what existed there,” says O’Connell.

“We wanted to find a mechanism where we could bring people together and bring an alternative economy to the market.”

The Decorators came up with a system where diners could look over the shopping list on the restaurant’s blackboard, purchase an ingredient from the market and swap it for their lunch, with enough left over for the restaurant to serve an evening meal.

“With the design, we wanted to highlight the process of what was happening,” says O’Connell, explaining that the studio came up with a table that could be winched up from the ground floor kitchen to the first floor dining room.

“We were playing with the normal etiquette of how you share a meal,” she says, “and we also played with the way the knives and forks were placed, and glasses, so it was a way of having a shared collective experience.”

Above: the first floor of the restaurant with the table seen on the floor below

The second project O’Connell introduces is a collaboration with Croydon Council and Kinnear Landscape Architects to make use of Croydon’s empty car parks before they’re eventually demolished.

Above: kitchen staff prepare plates on the ground floor

“On first investigation of Croydon, all the places seem quite empty,” she explains, “but on further investigation you see there’s actually a buzz of activity – you’ve got Croydon College, you’ve got Fairfield Halls, you’ve got the skaters; so the car park becomes a great opportunity to bring all these people into the public space together.”

Above: the table is winched up to the first floor dining room

The Decorators planned an event for the roof of the multi-storey car park to include a cook-out by a local barbecue chef, five-minute speeches from locals outlining their visions for the town, and a football game. “All of the teams are from various stakeholders and they’re playing for this future idea of what Croydon can be,” explains O’Connell.

Above: Croydon, south London

“This is an experiment, we don’t really know how it’s going to go, but we hope that the results from this event will inform the architectural interventions over the next year,” she concludes. The car park event took place in October last year.

Above: diagram for an open event on top of a multi-storey car park

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Above: plan for a social space in Croydon

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

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space”– Suzanne O’Connell of The Decorators appeared first on Dezeen.