Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our penultimate movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan, New York designer Stephen Burks discusses the importance of having a design identity and journalist Henrietta Thompson explains why designers are starting to expand into retail.

Stephen Burks of Readymade Projects was one of the guest speakers at the series of workshops that were hosted in the MINI Paceman Garage during Milan design week.

“I really impressed upon the students that it was important to understand their own identity before choosing manufacturers to work with, before running off and making something,” he says of his talk. “I think now they have a better sense of what that identity can be.”

Henrietta Thompson, editor-at-large at Wallpaper magazine, believes that changes in manufacturing are enabling more and more designers to produce and sell their own products.

“There’s certainly a shift happening in the way that designers are taking much more control over exhibiting their own work and also selling their own work,” she says. “So you’ve actually got a new dynamic opening up and a lot of the galleries and the shows that you go to are actually retail environments as well.”

“You have a lot more designer-makers, so they’re making things in limited editions, which they’re then able to sell,” she adds.

“Because of all these new technologies coming in, which enable the way things are made to change dramatically, things can be made much cheaper. You’ve got 3D printing, which is completely changing the landscape as well. [A designer] can sell things online and actually distribute [their own work] fairly easily now.”

It’s not just designers that are moving into retail, Thompson suggests. “Magazines are getting into retail, exhibitions are getting into retail,” she says.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be as cut-and-dry as ‘I’m a producer’, ‘I’m a designer’, ‘I’m a retailer’, ‘I’m a magazine’. Now everybody is doing all of those things all together.”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “It’s easy for designers today to
produce and sell their own work” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our first movie from the German capital, DMY Berlin founder Joerg Suermann shows us around his favourite neighbourhood of Kreuzberg and tells us why he believes the relaxed atmosphere and low cost of living that attracts many designers to the city can also trap them there. 

“Berlin is a never-finished city. The living cost is not so high here, which means the people have time to think and time to make experiments,” says Suermann. “This is quite a comfortable situation for the designers.”

“But we have also problems,” he continues. “We have not so much industry in Berlin, we have not so many companies that need design. But we have a lot of creative people and so the competition is really hard here.”

Suermann moved to the city in 1993, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city for nearly 30 years. Ten year’s later, in 2003, he founded DMY International Design Festival Berlin.

He says the lifestyle of Berliners has only recently started to change. “I think now, after 20 years [living in Berlin], it’s changed a bit. Now the money is also coming to Berlin, we can feel it. The rent is going much more expensive. But it has also a positive side: for the designers they get more contracts here, they have more work.”

However, there are still many areas of the city where the cost of living is still low compared to other cities, Suermann says. One such example is Kreuzberg, the central Berlin neighbourhood where he lives and works, which was formerly bordered by the Berlin Wall. “Nobody wanted to live in Kreuzberg, so a lot of foreigners moved here because the rent was really, really cheap,” he says.

“Now a lot of creative people also come into this area [and] the mix is really interesting. It’s quite lazy – it’s really nice that you can have this easy neighbourhood so near to the centre [of the city].”

“We have a lot of galleries here, studios, clubs, bars, cafes,” Suermann continues, pointing out SO36, one of the first German punk clubs to emerge in the 1970s, as well as Burgermeister, a burger restaurant located under a railway bridge in a former public toilet.

“You can start on Friday evening with your party and then continue until Monday morning,” he says. “For Berlin it’s typical; there are a lot of people going out after breakfast.”

But Suermann sounds a note of caution to those young designers expecting an easy ride once they arrive in the city. “A lot of young people come to Berlin and they think, ‘okay, I’m now in the hotspot and I [will] get successful here.”’ he says. “But after a while they find out it’s a really hard fight here.”

“If you don’t go outside [of Berlin] you will [get] stuck here. You can have a nice life here, but you have a low income and you’re stuck. And then it’s really complicated to come out of this situation.”

“Most of the successful designers have their studios here, they live here, but they’re working with companies outside from Berlin. I think that’s really important.”

We’ll be posting more Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from Berlin over the coming days.

We drove around Berlin in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Reso Dream by Simplex. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

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to get stuck in Berlin” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our second movie from New York, designer Stephen Burks takes us to the High Line and explains how the elevated park is helping to transform the surrounding areas of the city.

Designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations along with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and garden designer Piet Oudolf, the High Line park runs through New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood along the lower west side of Manhattan on 1.5 miles of repurposed elevated railway.

“For decades [the High Line] was an overgrown railroad track, left over from an era when elevated trains roared through Manhattan,” says Burks. “Today it’s a multi-million dollar park that’s welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors a day.”

The park was completed in 2009 and Burks believes the project has been the catalyst for the regeneration of the Chelsea area and the Meatpacking District next to it.

“The High Line is really connecting the dots of the city’s best upcoming architecture,” he says, pointing out Jean Nouvel‘s 2010 apartment block 100 11th Avenue and Shigeru Ban‘s Metal Shutter House, completed in 2011, both of which cluster around an earlier Frank Gehry office building.

A little further along the park is HL23, a new apartment building by Niel Denari, which Burks explains is the American architect’s “first multi-story building in America”.

Further north again is Hôtel Americano, designed by Mexican architect Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos, which features a new bar in the basement by German artist Tobias Rehberger.

At the southern end of the park, construction is underway on Renzo Piano‘s new building for The Whitney Museum of American Art, which is moving across town to the Meatpacking District from it’s current location on Madison Avenue on the upper east side of Manhattan.

“All of these new contemporary projects probably wouldn’t have been placed here had it not been for the High Line,” says Burks.

Burks is also a big fan of the High Line itself. “Some of the things that I love about the High Line in terms of design is the way that they’ve seamlessly integrated the design elements with nature and with elements that look like it just kind of happened,” he goes on to say.

“[It’s] almost as if this very beautiful paved surface with finger-like projections into the lawns just landed here amongst the wild grasses, amongst the trees. It’s a great work of landscape architecture.”

We drove to the High Line 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.

The post “The High Line’s responsible for New
York’s best upcoming architecture” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan last month, MINI head of design Anders Warming discusses the design of the new MINI Paceman and design journalist and curator Kieran Long gives us his thoughts on how the current generation of designers compares to the great masters. 

Warming explains that the idea behind the design of the MINI Paceman was to combine the signature styling of the classic MINI with new features such as four-wheel drive and horizontal tail lights. “When you look at [the car] you feel and you see MINI, but you realise there is so much new to it,” he says.

He also stresses that a lot of the design of the car was done by hand. “People say cars are just [designed] by computers today,” he says. “A car is really done by hand. It’s designed with sketches, we choose the lines that we like and we also spend a [lot of] time forming the shapes in clay and then from that make the tooling.”

The guest in our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio is Kieran Long, senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A museum in London. He believes the work of the current generation of designers lacks the boldness of the post-modern design Italy became famous for in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I sense a sort of tentative nature in the design that you see – even [work by] the younger designers, students and so on,” he says. “There’s not much boldness either in formal or colour terms, but also philosophical and ideas terms.

“It really struck me visiting the exhibition at the Triennale on Italian design, what a big contrast that is from the grand era of Italian design. You see the boldness of those forms and remind yourself of what Italian design was known for and you see now a sort of pastel-y sort of invisible feeling to design.”

Despite this, Long says there are detectable trends that young designers are exploring. “We’ve had this fixing, repairing, ad hocism thing now for a couple of years,” he says. “This year it’s really identifiable that young designers work is occupied by new materials, often sustainable materials, new organic materials in the kind of Formafantasma mould. If somebody would just capture that and make a manifesto about it, it would seem like a real movement.

“I think the big problem is that they have no grasp of design history,” he continues. “They have no idea of where they sit in relation to anything. It’s my observation that most of those designers wish they were taught a formal didactic history of design alongside the freedom that the art school education gives them.”

More generally, Long believes that design needs to be less introspective to remain relevant. “I think we’ve overrated what designers do as the thing that’s interesting about design,” he says. “What’s really interesting is the problem solved, or the relationship made, or the fashion trend started or ended – those cultural currents that design contributes to.

“I think they could learn something from architecture in that sense; when you’re an architect, when you write about architecture, you can also write about the city, and the city is everything in it. Design needs to find a category like that. They need to relax and say: ‘what I do is not the interesting thing about design, it’s what happens after it leaves my office.'”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “Young designers have no grasp
of design history” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: as digital technology changes the way we work and relax, Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa discusses its impact on furniture design in this movie filmed in Milan last month.

Speaking to us at the B&B Italia showroom in Via Durini, Fukasawa shows us how he designed the Papilio range of armchairs, sofas and beds – which all feature wide, butterfly-like backs – in response to the way people use their mobile phones and tablet computers.

“In your life, everything is integrated,” he says. “So you lie down on the bed, watching TV, calling on your mobile, working, eating food. That’s why I designed these chairs and the bed with a back.”

Shrinking technology is changing the types of furniture people use at home, he says. “Why do we need such a big table to work at, or a huge screen?”

But Fukasawa rejects suggestions that furniture itself will become embedded with technology. Instead, he strives to create high-quality, iconic pieces of furniture that will last for years. “I don’t like to put any kind of technology in a lounge chair,” he says. “Hi-tech should be smaller but life doesn’t change much. Just keep the quality.”

Fukasawa also demonstrates the Infobar A02 mobile phone, which he designed in conjunction with legendary interface designer Yugo Nakamura. The phone’s interface features icons that behave like bubbles that can be dragged around on the screen.

The designer established the Infobar brand for Japanese manufacturer KDDI and has designed a number of devices including the Infobar 2, which have been extremely popular in Japan but have never been made available abroad.

Among Fukasawa’s other clients is MUJI, the Japanese homeware company for which he has anonymously designed numerous products, including the iconic wall-mounted CD player.  “I’ve designed a big number of products for them but they never give out the designer’s name,” he says.

“I’m really trying to design iconic products,” says Fukasawa, who was born in 1956 and is based in Tokyo. “I’m always using the same minimalistic, simple design. And people like it.”

Products featured in the movie include Fukasawa’s Meteo barometer, thermometer and hygrometer for Magis, his Blocco stool for Plank and his Trapezoid watch for Issey Miyake.

Also featured is his AWA side table for B&B Italia and a range of products designed for PlusMinusZero, the consumer electronics brand he founded. See all our stories about Naoto Fukasawa.

Transport was provided by our MINI Cooper S Paceman and the music featured is a track called Where are Your People? by We Have Band. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project. Watch all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour video reports from Milan here.

The post “In your life, everything
is integrated” appeared first on Dezeen.