Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the first of a series of films recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan last month, MINI head of design Anders Warming explains the thinking behind the brand’s presentation during the furniture fair while Johanna Agerman Ross, editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine, gives her opinion on the highlights of the world’s most important design week.

“The MINI Paceman Garage is centred around how people act within a MINI community,” says Warming (above), explaining why the presentation – set up inside a car repair garage on Via Tortona – included features such as a record store, a coffee shop, a barber and a cinema. “They end up talking about anything that involves their life. And that’s why we have these different stations. It’s sort of like the extended life around the MINI.”

As part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour, we set up a video studio within the garage, where we conducted interviews with some of the world’s leading design authorities to get their thoughts on the week.

Agerman Ross of Disegno, our first interviewee, believes a key theme this year was the renewed focus on the official fair, the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, at the expense of the independent exhibitions that take place around the city.

“I have found in the last few years that going to the city and going to the independent exhibitions have been where things have been really happening and interesting,”she says. “But I feel there’s a return to the reason why we’re all here – the commerce of the fair, the wheeling and dealing and the showing off of new products by the bigger brands.”

“Milan this year was more subdued that previous years, with the ongoing economic crisis clearly affecting many companies. This has led to a more pared-back and business-like week without the frivolity of previous years,” says Agerman Ross.

“I think so. After all if the industry doesn’t work, the other things can’t happen either. There needs to be an economy and a network for these things to function. The designers and the brands need to make money in order to exist, and without a healthy commercial branch of design, the other things won’t exist either. One supports the other.”

“Everyone’s taking a step back, trying to be quite precise in what they’re putting out and trying to show products that seem quite close to hitting the market, rather than being just a product for show that won’t go into production,” she says. “It’s a tighter output altogether.”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie filmed in Milan earlier this month, leading designers and manufacturers discuss the phenomenon of copying and how they are responding. “It’s become an increasingly big problem for us,” says Tom Dixon. “People can steal ideas and produce them almost faster than we can now.”

“An original design product will have a cost higher than its copy,” says designer Marcel Wanders (above). “It’s very simple. Stealing most of the time is more cheap than buying.”

Unscrupulous manufacturers visit Milan to photograph new prototypes and then rush out copies before the original products reach the market, according to Casper Vissers (below), CEO of furniture and lighting brand Moooi.

“It’s very sour if you have presented a product in April and it’s in the shops in September, but a bloody copier has it already in August,” says Vissers, speaking at Moooi’s spectacular Unexpected Welcome show in Milan (below). “This is what happens at the moment.”

Vissers adds that legal action against copiers in Asia is expensive and, even if it’s successful in the short term, it does little to stem the tide: “You need huge amounts of money [to launch a law suit in the Far East] and if you win – if – a new limited company in China will start production [of copies]”.

Copiers are increasingly shameless about their intentions, says Tom Dixon, speaking at his presentation at MOST in Milan. “People feel very confident copying things. Some people come around with spy glasses photographing things but other people are more overt and come in with iPads or film crews.”

Dixon says the problem is getting worse, with markets around the world and even the UK market increasingly flooded with copies. “Everywhere we go in Australia or Singapore or India we’ll see many, many copies, and that’s also hitting more and more the UK as well.”

Gregg Buchbinder (above), CEO of furniture company Emeco, says the solution is for designers to push manufacturers to make more sophisticated products that are harder to copy. The furniture collection Emeco developed with designer Konstantin Grcic for the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island (below), for example, “was a very difficult project to do. Although the chair looks simple, there’s nothing skipped.”

“The more difficult it is, the more difficult it is for people to knock it off,” Buchbinder adds.

Emeco aggressively pursues copyists through the courts and earlier this year won a case against fellow US manufacturer Restoration Hardware, which had copied the iconic Navy chair.

But outside Europe and the US, copyright law is less robust and harder to enforce. “It’s very, very difficult to protect yourself legally,” says Dixon.

Dixon’s company is directly responding to the problem of copying by developing a range of new products designed to make life more difficult for counterfeiters.

“What you’ll see [at our Milan presentation] is a number of coping strategies,” Dixon explains. “We’ve been trying as much as possible to invest in tooling and slightly more advanced technology. We’re working on adaptive models where we make specific things for clients. A new bespoke division where we make things for people, so we adapt our products to suit a client’s needs. So there’s ways of dealing with it. We’ve just got to be faster and smarter.”

See all our stories about copying in design ».

Milan is the second stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour. See all our reports from our first destination, Cape Town. This movie features a MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured is a track called Divisive by We Are 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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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: designers including Marcel Wanders, Yves Behar, Tom Dixon and Konstantin Grcic discuss the importance of Milan design week, which ended in the city yesterday, and whether it can retain its title as the world’s leading event.

Each April, the world’s leading designers descend on the city for the fair still regarded as the most important in the world. “I come to Milan every year,” says Yves Behar. “It’s the obligatory stop.”

“It’s a moment I can’t miss,” agrees Stephen Burks. “It’s the most important week in the design calendar.”

They are joined by hundreds of thousands of international visitors including students, journalists, buyers and younger designers trying to get their work noticed.

“It gives lots of young designers a great thrill to come here and get discovered,” says Ron Arad. “My entire design team comes here to suck up new ideas and ensure they’re seeing the latest and the greatest,” says Anders Warming, head of design at MINI.

The fair owes its importance to the emergence of Milan as the world’s key centre for the design and manufacture of both furniture and products after the devastation of the Second World War, playing a key role in Italy’s economic recovery. “All of the important history of post-war furniture design happened here,” says Konstantin Grcic.

The official fair, the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, as well as the Fuori Salone events around the city, grew over the years into the sprawling citywide festival it is today. “There was a lot of excitement around [the fair], starting in the early eighties with Memphis and [Studio] Alchimia,” says Arad, citing two of the most influential Milanese design studios of the last century.

However the economic crisis of recent years and the emergence of rival design centres combined to make this year’s fair a more sober affair than recent years. “I feel like there’s a return to the reason why we are all here, which is the actual commerce of the fair,” says Johanna Agerman Ross, editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine.

“It’s certainly got much, much more competition these days,” says journalist and curator Henrietta Thompson. “The London Design Festival is fantastic these days but also Stockholm and Paris.”

Milan-based designer Fabio Novembre touches on the reasons why the city might be losing its edge: “It’s hard to take a group of Italians and make them all go in one direction,” he says. “That explains why we’re in a big crisis and why we are almost losing the importance of Salone del Mobile.”

Joseph Grima, editor-in-chief of Milanese design magazine Domus, agrees. “The city is really in need of someone who’s going to have a vision for the future,” he says.

“Milan remains the only place where you can still see everybody in one go,” says Tom Dixon. “Whether it can maintain that top spot … is hard to tell. It becomes impossible to navigate the city, you can’t get a taxi, you can’t get a hotel room and you can’t afford space to show your goods.”

Look out for more reports from Milan as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour in the coming days. The car featured in the movie is the MINI Paceman.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explains the design principles behind the new Gov.uk website, which combines all the UK Government’s websites into a single site.

“There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one,” says Terrett. “The reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn’t have to understand government to find something out. They just go to one place and it’s there. They don’t have to know which department has what information.”

Terrett explains that the core idea behind it was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user. “People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing,” he says. “So people shouldn’t spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focussing on user need.”

Terrett sought advice from Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer who, along with Jock Kinneir, designed the UK’s road signs, which have been imitated around the world. Terrett cites her work as one of the iconic pieces of British design he took inspiration from: “There is this huge catalogue or canon of projects that have got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work,” he says, also citing the London Underground tube map and Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network. “The more you look at it the more they were trying to do a very similar sort of thing to what we’re doing.”

The Gov.uk site only uses a single font and has been stripped of any graphical flourishes. “Something we’re trying to do in particular is let design get out of the way and let the user get to what they want,” Terrett says. “You shouldn’t come to the website and go: ‘wow, look at the graphic design’. We haven’t yet achieved that in most web interfaces; they’re still getting in the way [and] you can see the graphic design everywhere. We need to get past that.”

Terrett believes that, with new technology like Google Glass simplifying or even removing the user interface altogether, websites will eventually catch up. “Google Glass and other things that we don’t know about yet will prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff,” he says. “But there’s a long way to go and I think it’s a fascinating challenge, a really exciting challenge.”

The Gov.uk website is shortlisted for this year’s Designs of the Year award, alongside high-profile projects such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and the Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick.

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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out of the way” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Google Creative Lab creative director Alexander Chen explains how he created a digital string you can pluck like a viola and discusses Google Glass and the future of user interface design in this movie we filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town last month. 

Chen presented a number of his personal projects at Design Indaba, which involve novel ways of making music on a computer. “I grew up playing the viola and I’ve always written and recorded my own music,” he explains. “I was learning that alongside computer programming and visual design [so] I always wanted to combine the things together.”

For a project called Mta.me, Chen created a virtual stringed instrument based on the New York subway system (above). “I’d just moved to New York and I started to think ‘what if the lines on the subway map could be a musical instrument?'” he says.

In Chen’s map, the different subway routes become strings, which vibrate at different frequencies based on their length. Chen then animated the map so that the strings are plucked by other subway lines that intersect them. “I took it one step further,” he says. “I looked up the subway schedule and using computer code had the subway performing itself.”

Chen then goes on to talk about his work at Google Creative Lab, where he helped to produce the original concept video for Google Glass, as well as the final movie demonstrating the new user interface, which Google released in February.

He believes that wearable technology like Google Glass demonstrates how digital technology in future will be more integrated into our lives. “Technology continues to disappear more and more,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to make any strong predictions, but I hope that technology disappears more and more from my life and you forget that you’re using it all the time instead of feeling like you’re burdened [by it].

“I hope it becomes more like the water running in our house and the electricity running through our buildings: we use it when we need it and then we forget about it for the rest of the day and just enjoy being people.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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continue to disappear” appeared first on Dezeen.