Hasta La Ideas

In this movie we filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day, Sugru founder Jane ní Dhulchaointigh shares her journey through inventing and launching a “space-age rubber” that lets people customise their belongings and endorses the idea that “you don’t have to be an expert to do amazing things”.

Ní Dhulchaointigh talks about the big plans she had for the air-curing rubber when she left college, but after struggling for years to sell the idea to large adhesive companies she took advice from a friend to “start small and make things good” – an ethos she now recommends to anyone starting their own business.

Her story of self-empowerment shares a likeness with the product, which is all about tailoring things to suit your life and needs so that they “mean more to you”, and she encourages both designers and consumers to “start to see ourselves as experts”.

See more talks filmed at Designed in Hackney Day here, and see all of our stories about Sugru here.

Taking place at Hackney House in the heart of Shoreditch during the Olympics, Designed in Hackney Day celebrated the incredible diversity of design talent in the borough as well as providing a platform to discuss both the opportunities and threats to creative businesses in this fast-changing part of London. We’ll be publishing more talks from the day on Dezeen over the coming weeks but in the meantime you can find out more about the other discussions from Designed in Hackney Day in our highlights reported here.

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created 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.

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amazing things” – Sugru founder appeared first on Dezeen.

In this second movie from our series filmed at the Designed in Hackney Day of talks and discussions we hosted in August, technologist James Bridle talks about his recent projects including a series of animations on top of bus shelters that were designed to look “like the internet has escaped out into the street”.

The Bus Tops project displayed animations devised by anyone around the world and submitted via the website to be viewed from the top deck of a double-decker bus.

“What I most love about it is that you could be on the night bus at 3am and you’d suddenly get this pulsing animated gif coming at you out of the night,” Bridle says, adding that it’s a great way to “reach weird audiences that are not expecting you”.

In the movie he also talks about his Ship Adrift project, where he installed a weather station on top of the Southbank Centre in London and used the data generated, including wind speed and air pressure, to determine the path of an “imaginary mad airship”.

The program logs its theoretical position on Google Maps and gathers streams of information from the internet that are tagged with that location, using them to generate tweets and a log that combine a selection of words it picks up.

“Occasionally this becomes terrifyingly prescient,” Bridle says, going on to recount how it picked up the names of rivers over the Balkans then started “talking about genocide,” or picked up mentions of “drone attacks and the war on terror” close to the border of Pakistan. “When a robot picks up these kind of weird echoes of stuff that we’re leaving on the network, something odd happens. I’m interested in those intersection points,” he says.

Taking place at Hackney House in the heart of Shoreditch during the Olympics, Designed in Hackney Day celebrated the incredible diversity of design talent in the borough as well as providing a platform to discuss both the opportunities and threats to creative businesses in this fast-changing part of London.

Bridle concluded his talk by saying that the cross-disciplinary discussion that east London fosters is key to his work. Talking about the building he shares with internet startups, design companies, book binders and artists, he said: “We have this shared pool of experience and we’re not scared of talking to each other about what interests us in each others work all the time. That’s how, for me, London works.”

We’ll be publishing movies of the talks over the coming days and you can watch architects Studio Weave talk about how architects should be wary of “thinking that they know how to do everything” here.

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created 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.

To find out more about the other discussions from Designed in Hackney Day, see our highlights reported here. See more stories about design and architecture from Hackney here.

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says James Bridle at Designed in Hackney Day appeared first on Dezeen.

London Design Festival: designer-makers East London Furniture have temporarily fitted out the interior of London bar DreamBags-JaguarShoes using nothing but scrap materials found on the local streets.

The fit-out is the latest in a string of installations at the venue by artists and designers. ”Normally it involves mostly the walls and perhaps some lighting,” East London Furniture’s Christian Dillon told Dezeen. ”We wanted to take over the whole bar.”

The team removed all the furniture and replaced it with tables made from pallets and ceiling joists, plus benches inspired by nineteenth century Shaker furniture.

“We created all of the free-standing seating, tables and lighting in our workshop, but left the inbuilt elements to be created in situ,” said Dillon. “So much of the inbuilt seating, especially the booth or ‘pulpit’, were conceived in the space from materials we had to hand.”

The team have lined the walls and front of the counter with wooden panels, while the throne-like seating booth is made from old skirting boards and fills the recess beside a staircase.

The cube-shaped lights hanging above the bar were created from the offcuts of other furniture made by the team and the wall-mounted lighting was produced from recycled wooden blocks.

Friend and regular collaborator Alessandro Mistrulli has decorated many of the surfaces with illustrations showing severed arms and wood-working tools. “I think I saw him reading a book on Russian prison tattoos the night before he delivered the main graphic,” said Dillon.

The installation will remain in place for two months, but was completed to coincide with the London Design Festival last week.

“For us to have a show in the festival, where people are actually using the furniture to have a nice meal, a nice beer or chatting to a nice girl or guy is so much more interesting than a static display of our furniture,” explained Dillon.

Dillon and team mates Ben Green and Reuben Le Prevost founded the Hackney-based furniture company in 2011 – see our earlier story about them here.

A past installation we’ve featured at DreamBags-JaguarShoes featured wallpaper that changes under different lighting conditions.

See more stories about the London Design Festival »

Photography is by Jeff Metal, courtesy of JaguarShoes Collective.

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at DreamBags JaguarShoes appeared first on Dezeen.

London designer Paul Cocksedge has made a giant chocolate QR code that visitors to The Dock during the London Design Festival can scan to get a free gift (or you could just scan the image in the bottom of this story).

Cocksedge worked with Hotel Chocolat to create the installation as part of Designs on Chocolate, a project pairing five designers with five chocolatiers. Following a visit to the company’s factory, he decided to use nearly of their 1000 chocolates to make an interactive mosaic.

“I wanted to leave these beautiful pieces of chocolate as they were, instead of creating an object simply to be looked at, and so losing the whole idea of taste,” Cocksedge says. “The true art of the chocolatier appeals to your palate as well as your eyes, and through the process of placing these exquisite pieces in various patterns, the project started to grow.”

Scanning the QR code on a smartphone or tablet leads visitors to the Hotel Chocolat website where they are rewarded with a voucher, to be exchanged at the company’s flagship store in Covent Garden for a limited edition chocolate box that’s been specially made for the London Design Festival’s tenth anniversary.

“The idea is to create a pattern which is seemingly random but which, through the subtle introduction of technology, becomes something altogether new, the start of a journey,” explains Cocksedge.

Designs on Chocolate will be on display at The Dock, Portobello Dock, 344 Ladbroke Grove, London, W10 5BU until 23 September. Photographs are by Mark Cocksedge.

Dezeen reader offer: 

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If you’re in London but can’t make it to The Dock, Hotel Chocolat and Paul Cocksedge would like to share the experience with Dezeen readers, so you can scan the image above to claim your voucher.

While in Covent garden, pop into Dezeen Super Store at 38 Monmouth Street, Seven Dials, London WC2H 9EP where you can get 10% discount in store and enter our competition to win a designer watch worth £150 by downloading this flyer and presenting it at the shop.

Dezeen’s London Design Festival map

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The map above is taken from Dezeen’s guide to the London Design Festival, which lists all the events going on across the city this week. We’ll be updating it over the coming days with extra information on our highlights so keep checking back. Explore the larger version of this map here.

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for Hotel Chocolat appeared first on Dezeen.

Shoe designer Tracey Neuls and product designer Tord Boontje have teamed up to design a range of shoes featuring autumn leaves.

Made of laser-cut and etched leather, the designs include a court shoe that looks as though fallen leaves have blown around the edge, a lace-up with red oak leaves hanging down below the laces and a brown etched pair with delicate patterns of leaves and acorns.

The limited collection will be available at Selfridges department store from August 27 – September 16, taking in the London Design Festival period.

See more stories about Tracey Neuls »
See more stories about Tord Boontje »
See more stories about shoes »

Here’s some more information from Tracey Neuls:

Tracey Neuls and Tord Boontje footwear collaboration for London’s biggest design week of the year – exclusively for Selfridges.

The meeting between Tracey Neuls and Tord Boontje was one of those moments when the world felt very small despite one being Canadian and the other one Dutch. They found their approach to design to be uniquely similar despite Tracey being a footwear designer and Tord being a product designer.

Previously in 2010, their like-mindedness resulted in a special edition shoe where Tracey used a printed fabric of Tord’s – normally seen on furniture. This playful approach to design has brought them back together in 2012 celebrating… Squirrels! As it turns out, both Tracey and Tord have a great liking for these inquisitive, clever, little town and country creatures. Known for inventive laser cutting, Tord uses this iconic critter and its autumnal surroundings to play with print and leather cut-aways. Chosen from the spectrum of Neuls’ designs; both a sculptural heeled pump and her classic rubber soled derby have been manipulated by Boontje. Neon red, turquoise blue, black and natural will be the available colours.

When Tracey moulds her footwear shapes, she begins with plasticine; the smell and feel reminding her of being a child.

“Emotion plays a big part in design. The shoe should at first be beautiful, but it is more the long lasting feeling that I am interested in. Like a pet, the attachment to your footwear should grow stronger with time. ” – Tracey Neuls

Tord’s work draws from a belief that modernism does not mean minimalism, that contemporary does not forsake tradition, and that technology does not abandon people and senses. He often takes inspiration from nature and employs a décor of forms to entice the observer’s imagination.

“I like my pieces to tell stories, or at least provide a beginning and you can make up your own narrative” – Tord Boontje

Together these two designers have created footwear where time is suspended and there are no rules of play. The shoes are like unique collectors items and this limited edition collection is available exclusively at Selfridges from August 27 – September 16, 2012.

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for Selfridges appeared first on Dezeen.