Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie filmed during London Design Festival, leading figures from London and abroad explore the pros and cons of working in the city and discuss the threats to its status as one of the major design centres of the world.

“London is the most international and vibrant city there is, probably worldwide,” says Spanish designer Jaime Hayon, who lived in London for three years.

Eero Koivisto of Swedish studio Claesson Koivisto Rune agrees. “It’s truly multicultural in the same way New York is,” he says.

Patrizia Moroso, creative director of Italian brand Moroso, describes the city as “a sort of belly of the world.”

She explains: “Many young people, people from all over the world, are attracted [to the city] because London is open.”

Being an open city is one of the key reasons for its success, argues Kieran Long, senior curator at the V&A Museum.

“London has always been a place that is incredibly tolerant of new things,” he says. “The city is based on immigration.”

Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic agrees. “London is a remarkably successful place for attracting really smart, bright, gifted young designers,” he claims.

However, Sudjic warns that it can also be a difficult place for young designers to start up: “London is a very expensive place to be. You might find yourself migrating right out to the external edges of the city.”

“Production is not the most amazing,” adds Hayon. “You’ve got to travel a lot when you’re based in London and that’s costly and it’s complicated if you’re setting up a business.”

“Many young, fresh designers come from London, but you don’t have many strong brands,” observes Mimi Lindau of Swedish furniture brand Blå Station.

Sudjic agrees: “London has based its success on 150 years of having great art schools,” he says. “[Designers] come to study here and lots of them stay and build a practice, not necessarily based on clients here, but on clients around the world.”

London’s schools are one of the major reasons for the proliferation of architects based in the city, claims Alex de Rijke, co-founder of architects de Rijke Marsh Morgan and dean of architecture at the Royal College of Art.

“We’re spoilt for good schools for architecture here,” he says. “The overly large proportion of architects in London is obviously because the education system has been strong here.”

However, he adds a note of warning: “Schools are coming under threat from a lack of government funding.”

In September, the UK government announced changes to immigration rules that make it more difficult for international students to extend their leave to remain in the country once their course ends.

Long claims the move could endanger London’s status as one of the world’s leading design centres.

“Any political agenda that tries to limit the influx of international students to the UK is a disaster,” he says. “It’s a disaster for the schools, it’s a disaster for design culture here because, let’s face it, there’s no manufacturing here, there’s nothing else. What we are is a crossroads for great creative people.”

He continues: “We should keep London as open a city as it can be.”

See our earlier story on how the UK’s new immigration laws will affect design »

Sudjic agrees that London should not take its position in the design world for granted. “Design is a very competitive process, lot’s of places want to be the design capital of the world,” he says.

“London is a great place to be, but it can’t be complacent. It has to go on being interesting and attracting new people, smart people, and getting them to stay.”

We travelled around London in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.

See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »

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great creative people” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from the UK capital, senior curator at the V&A Kieran Long explains why the London museum has controversially acquired the world’s first 3D-printed gun.

As revealed first by Dezeen, earlier this month the V&A acquired two prototype 3D-printed guns developed and successfully fired by Texan law student Cody Wilson, displaying a copy of one of them during London Design Festival.

“I’m really passionate about this acquisition,” says Long, who is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A and was heavily involved in acquiring the gun.

“It has caused a lot of fuss in the press, that the V&A would acquire something like this. But what I’ve been pleased about is that most people have seen it not as something deliberately shocking but as a really good signpost to where manufacturing might be going and the implications of new technology.”

Long is also one of Dezeen’s new Opinion columnists and his first piece for us set out his guidelines for modern museum curation, where he asserted that “ugly and sinister objects demand the museum’s attention just as much as beautiful and beneficial ones do.”

The original prototypes did not arrive at the museum in time for London Design Festival, so the museum printed out a copy in London based on Wilson’s blueprints.

“We have guns in the collection; we have all the relevant licences to import firearms,” Long explains. “The only problem we have is getting an export licence. We’ve had the Department for Culture and Media here involved, we’ve had all of our technical services people involved. It’s been an immense bureaucratic effort.”

Wilson, a self-proclaimed anarchist, made the blueprints for the weapon available online through his Defence Distributed website, before the US government ordered them to be taken down. Long says that the politics of Wilson’s gun is what gets him excited.

“Something that I’m really passionate about at the V&A is to show the political backgrounds of things, even when they might not be palatable,” he says.

“I don’t believe everyone should be carrying guns and that’s not what we’re advocating here. What we are saying is this is possible and we might have to do something about it if we don’t want these things to happen.”

He continues: “The design of the gun and its distribution online is an act of politics as much as an act of design and that’s when I get really excited because I think design is something that can tell us about the world.”

Long believes the weapon has also turned the conversation about the future implications of 3D printing on its head.

“There’s been a lot of technocratic optimism around 3D printing, particularly in the design world,” he says.

“But when Cody Wilson released [the digital files for his 3D-printed gun online] it really transformed that conversation. It changed it into ethical issues around how we want to live together, how new technologies affect our relationships with one another. This gun, just sitting there, is pregnant with all of those questions.”

He continues: “Design for me is the thing that really focusses those questions. And when you see this thing for real you think: ‘All these things, can they go together and kill someone?’ The answer, simply, is yes.”

We drove to the V&A in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.

See all our stories about 3D printing »
See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »

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kill someone? The answer is yes.” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the next stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour is our home town of London. In our first report, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs takes a trip through the east of the city and explains why the area has become such a hotbed for design and technology.

Starting off in Stoke Newington, a former village in the north-east of the city where Dezeen is based, Fairs follows the route of an old Roman road called Ermine Street to the city centre, passing through Dalston, Shoreditch and the City of London before ending up at the River Thames.

“These areas have come to symbolise the new creative economy of London,” says Fairs as he passes through Shoreditch, a former industrial district bordering the City of London where a proliferation of architects, designers and, increasingly, technology companies are based.

“They’re stuffed full of digital companies, technology companies, design companies; [there’s] a real focus of new types of creativity.”

Last year, Dezeen celebrated the rich diversity of design talent in the area as part of our Designed in Hackney initiative, which culminated in a day of talks and workshops with many of the borough’s upcoming creative companies.

“We plotted on a map all of the design studios in the area,” Fairs explains. “We found that the pins on the map were so dense you couldn’t see the map behind. It really felt that we’d discovered a critical mass of design talent that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world.”

There are a number of reasons why so many designers set up in London, says Fairs, despite the city being “really expensive, really competitive, really unfriendly to newcomers.”

“London is full of really amazing design schools, I think that’s a really important point,” he explains. “People from all around the world come to London to get their design qualifications; they make friends, they enjoy the culture and they stay and set up studios.”

Another major factor is money, Fairs claims: “There’s lots of money in London. That’s created problems – the property market has been going up non-stop – but it also creates wealth and wealth is the thing that turns the gears of creativity in many ways.”

The wealth of the city is most visible in the new skyscrapers being built to the south of Shoreditch in the City of London, where projects like Richard Rogers’ Leadenhall Building and Raphael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street, dubbed “The Cheesegrater” and “The Walkie-Talkie” respectively, are transforming London’s skyline.

“London used to be a place where world-class architects didn’t really feel like they could get any decent work” Fairs says. “But now London is really coming into its own.”

Of course, one of the main attractions of Shoreditch for the creative industries was that rents were comparatively cheap. Fairs says it is inevitable that young designers are now being priced out of the area, but is optimistic for the future of designers in the city.

“London is a big city,” he says. “People are already moving further to the east, to the south, crossing the river. London, I think, will always be able to regenerate itself.”

We travelled through east London in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.

See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »

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new creative economy of London” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: San Francisco designer Yves Behar, who recently launched a keyless lock controlled by a smartphone, discusses his vision for how technology can be successfully integrated into the home in this movie filmed in Milan. 

Speaking at our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio at the MINI Paceman Garage during Milan design week, Behar says that design for the home has been slow to embrace technology.

“What we see here [in Milan] from the Italian manufacturers is very safe,” he explains. “On the other hand, you have a world of technology that’s very dynamic. What I’m missing is for those two worlds to come together more.”

“It’s not about putting a speaker in a chair, or putting a TV in a bed. That’s not how technology and the home intersect. For me, it’s about sensors, about the home knowing where you are.”

In May this year, shortly after we filmed this interview, Behar launched a new company and product called August Smart Lock, which replaces physical keys with a smartphone app and opens automatically as you approach the door.

“Cars have been like this for years,” Behar says in the movie. “Keyless entry in a car is something that we’re used to. Somehow, the home has been very resistant to this. Some of it has to do with security, but today we know that technology, when things are invisible, is actually safer than physical artefacts.”

Looking to the future, Behar believes that wearable technologies, such as the Up wristband he designed for San Fransisco company Jawbone, provide an exciting opportunity for integrating technology into the home.

“The next step for me with the Up is how it talks with the rest of the home,” he says. “It’s an object that can tell the home where I am and what I’m doing. Am I tired from a long day so the lighting should be really mellow and calm, or do I need to be energised so the ambience is going to be rocking? Am I about to get home, so maybe the temperature should go up?”

He concludes: “There are all kinds of new intuitive ways that these technologies that we’re wearing can interface with the technologies in our home. For reasons of efficiency, but also for having a home that responds to you in ways that are going to be magical.”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured is a track called Divisive by We Have Band, a UK-based electronic act who played at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan on Friday. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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where you are” – Yves Behar appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from New York, design journalist Monica Khemsurov takes us to exhibitions around the Noho Design District and imparts an optimistic outlook for young designers in the city.

Khemsurov, along with her online design magazine Sight Unseen co-founder Jill Singer, set up the Noho Design District in 2010, aiming to provide an alternative platform to the ICFF trade fair.

“The idea was to be an offsite show for New York design week, in which young designers could show their work,” she says. “We wanted to make a neighbourhood that felt more intimate and had more of a fun, experimental feel than what has been shown at New York design week in the past.”

Noho is named after its location north of Houston Street in Manhattan, bounded by Broadway to the west and Bowery to the east. On the first stop of our tour, Khemsurov takes us to the district’s hub exhibition Noho Next, curated by Sight Unseen and featuring new work by twelve American designers.

Next up is the Here & There of design for travel at the showroom of design studio Various Projects, which features a canoe made from Dacron, kevlar and wood by designers  Colgate Searle and Matthias Pliessnig that Khensurov assures us is “fully functional, water safe and can be floated on a lake.”

A braided textile piece woven by New York artist Dana Barnes is picked out at the preserved 19th Century Merchant’s House Museum. “Sight Unseen invited seven American designers to install their work made with modern craft techniques,” Khensurov explains.

We then go beneath the Standard East Village hotel to the Chez Andre nightclub to see the American Design Club’s exhibition titled Trophy. “This show is about everyday trophies or objects that are momentos or that commemorate moments of your life,” Khemsurov says.

Finally, she shares her thoughts on New York design scene’s current status: “In the past five years, a lot of young designers have gone out on their own and started their own studios.

“A lot of people are producing their own work, which gives them more freedom to express themselves and make interesting and exciting design, so I think there’s never been a better time for the New York design scene.”

We drove around New York in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called You Go To My Head by Kobi Glas. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

In our previous reports from New York, Willy Wong introduces the NYCxDesign festival and Stephen Burks takes us on a tour of the city’s High Line park.

See all our coverage of New York 2013 »

The post “There’s never been a better
time for New York design” appeared first on Dezeen.