Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen launched five years ago this week and we’re celebrating our birthday by looking back at our favourite stories, parties and projects over the last five years. We’ve travelled all over since launching in 2006 and here we’ve compiled the most memorable design weeks and festivals we’ve attended. 

One: Design Miami, December 2006

This was the first design event I attended after starting Dezeen (writes Marcus Fairs). I booked a cheap hotel, got on a plane and ended up at the second Design Miami collectors’ fair. Then I lost my passport. And had to move hotel. But it was still a fantastically exciting event – the whole “design art” thing was just starting up and rich people were beating down the doors to get into the fair and spend dollars (they actually were beating down the doors – it was surreal).

Designers used to wintering in cold Europe suddenly discovered they could instead flock to a December event with sunshine and an attendant art fair (Art Basel Miami Beach) to provide the necessary glamour complete with pool parties, limousines and penthouse cocktail soirees.

Design Miami set the benchmark that other fairs have struggled to compete with ever since and even though the fizz has largely gone out of the collectors’ market, it’s still about the most fun you can have at a design event.

Two: International Design Forum, May 2007 

These were still the boom years and when Dubai decided to throw a design event, it did it in typical Dubai fashion. We were all put up at the lavish Madinat Jumeirah – an Arabian Nights fantasy of a hotel with electric chauffeur-driven abras (traditional Arab boats) running on a network of artificial canals to whisk us to our rooms.

The International Design Forum was a conference rather than a fair, pulling in celebrity speakers including Rem Koolhaas, Marcel Wanders, Michael Young, Karim Rashid and many more to discuss how the Middle East could start to develop a design identity and economy of its own. The weirdness was enhanced by the conference venue: a fake Arab-style fortress with a fake galleon moored outside. Most bizarre of all was the alcohol-free VIP party, which featured possibly the worst DJ set I’ve ever experienced courtssy of DJ Kreemy (AKA Karim Rashid).

At night we sat on (artificial) palm logs on the (artificial) beach and watched the construction lights out at sea as workers built Dubai’s (artificial) offshore resorts including The Palm and The World. The conference was exhilarating, the discussions fascinating, but within a just over a year the crash brought the Dubai party to an end.

Three: Milan, April 2007

This was the penultimate Milan before the crash and the design world, buoyed by the influx of money from the art world, was full of confidence. “Limited edition” was the buzz-word and everything was getting enormous: a super-sized silver tea service by Studio Job, a gigantic Pinocchio figure covered in mosaic tiles by Jaime Hayon and great big mushrooms, eggs and nests at Dilmos. Established & Sons – who taught the Italians that there was more to an opening than warm white wine and a bit of Parmesan – were at the height of their party-throwing period.

It was great fun but it couldn’t last – by Milan 2008, things had got out of hand (example: Jaime Hayon presented a mosaic-clad aeroplane) and the excess became grotesque. In many ways the crash that followed came as a relief.

Four: Vienna Design Week, October 2010

Vienna Design Week is such a lovely festival that we keep going back (writes Rose Etherington), but last year’s fair was one of our favourites. We interviewed rock-and-roll designer Stefan Sagmeister in a deserted cinema, where he told us all about his diary. The week kicked off with a party at the impossibly grand Lietchenstein Museum, where Studio Makkink & Bey took so long to pipe their research project about sugar in icing all over the floor that one of them got locked inside.

The festival was compact and carefully curated, with thoughtful collaborations between traditional Viennese companies and young designers like Mischer’Traxler, Philippe Malouin and Mark Braun taking centre stage.

Above photo is by Patrik Engström

Five: Stockholm Design Week, February 2011

Stockholm Design Week is a Dezeen favourite due to its manageable scale, sense of community and hospitality, but the most delightful discovery of this year’s event had already been there for over 100 years. Emma Marga Blanche, Fredrik Färg and eighteen of their designer friends had stalked among dried grasses and stuffed animals to install their work in the 360 degree diorama of the Biologiska on the city’s museum island. Guests at the opening party wandered the creaking staircases wide-eyed, spotting clocks, chairs and lamps nestled next to wolves, sea birds and an enormous walrus looming out of the undergrowth.

We spent the next day trudging through driving snow then caught the last plane back to London before the runway sweepers gave up.

As Dezeen’s fifth birthday falls this week, we’ve been digging through the archives collating the most memorable stories, events, parties and so on since we launched in November 2006. Today we present the five most memorable experimental projects we’ve been involved in – regardless of whether they worked. They include an exhibition about rubbish, a gallery full of speakers and cars covered in flowers… 

One: Trash Luxe at Liberty, London, September 2007

Venerable London emporium Liberty asked us to propose an exhibition during 2007 London Design Festival and we came up with the idea of celebrating the then-new trend of designers using cheap or unwanted materials to create luxury items. We ended up filling the top floor of the store with rubbish, basically.

Trash Luxe, which included Max Lamb’s polystyrene furniture and Stuart Haygarth’s chandelier made of discarded spectacle lenses, was our first experience of exhibition curation but, we’re happy to say, was a great success.

However the series of video interviews we painstakingly conducted with all the designers was not such a triumph, as Liberty belatedly told us we couldn’t have audio playing in the store… we must dig them out and publish them one day.

Two: Flower Cars, Milan, April 2008

The Flower Council of Holland wanted a dynamic idea to showcase their blooms during the furniture fair in Milan, so we contacted five of our designer friends and asked them to design floral liveries for a fleet of Fiat 500s.

Studio Job, Arik Levy, Arne Quinze, FredriksonStallard and Karim Rashid rose to the task and created spectacular flower jackets for the cars but unfortunately the Milanese police didn’t think they were safe enough to drive around the city, meaning we had to abandon our plan to provide a VIP shuttle service to our friends. They looked great all the same though.

Three: Jamscape, Milan, April 2011

We collaborated with Yves Behar of fuseproject on a major installation in Ventura Lambrate, Milan, designed to showcase the wireless Jambox speaker he designed for Jawbone. We put out a call to our musically minded readers to submit audio tracks to play on monolithic assemblies of Jamboxes and curated the sounds that pumped out during the furniture fair. We also used the tunes as soundtracks to the movies we shot in Milan.

The project was great fun and got shortlisted for an Elita music festival award… and we still can’t get our readers’ tunes out of our heads.

Four: Milanuncut, Milan, April 2011

This April we also got involved in an experimental media project that brought together design journalists and bloggers from around the world. Milanuncut was triggered by a Twitter conversation between architecture critic Kieran Long and design curator Max Fraser about the royalty system that pays (or doesn’t pay) the bills for a huge percentage of designers.

The discussion quickly went viral and, thanks in no small part to the logo and website created by our graphic design neighbours Zerofee, became a hugely influential trigger for debate in the design media and beyond. In his Guardian column, Justin McGuirk described the discussion as the biggest story to come out of Milan this year.

Five: Dezeen Platform, September-October 2011

This is the project we’re most proud of. As part of our Dezeen Space installation in Shoreditch during the London Design Festival and Frieze Art Fair, we offered a 1 x 1 metre space for free to any designer who could come up with a good proposal. We also volunteered to make a video interview with each designer.

The response was amazing – we got around 300 submissions, which we had to whittle down to 30. We nearly killed ourselves with the volume of work it involved and we still haven’t finished editing most of the videos, but we’re pleased to have been able to give a free platform to so many talented designers. We doubt we’ll have the energy to do it again for while though…

Watch the videos we have completed here.

Dezeen is five years old this week!  In the first of a series of stories celebrating our anniversary, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs selects his five most memorable stories of the past five years:

1. Design Museum drops Designer of Year show, 17 November 2006

This was the first ever story published on Dezeen: a bit of minor industry gossip about the Design Museum in London. A few days previously I’d been fired from my job as a magazine editor and I thought this might be a good time to launch a design blog. I went round to the home of a friend, Alex Wiltshire, and he showed me how to install WordPress and post stories.

The site looked a mess and my first effort hardly set the design world alight – and there weren’t even any pictures! But it was a start.

2. Sneak preview: Kanye West’s apartment, 18 January 2007

This was our first story to go properly viral: the renderings of Kanye West’s Claudio Silvestrin-designed apartment were a huge hit on Stumble Upon and got picked up by music blogs around the world, giving us a lot of link kudos.

It was also our first story to spark controversy due to the number (111 to date!) and nature of the comments posted by readers – something that was to happen with increasing regularity until we started to moderate comments more vigorously to counter trolling.

And it was our first genuine scoop: I met Kanye West at a party during Design Miami and he told me about his passion for design (he collects the Campana Brothers and Maarten Baas among others) and mentioned that he’d commissioned Claudio Silvestrin to design his New York apartment. I asked if I could publish it and a few weeks later his publicist emailed me the renderings.

Looking back it appears that I milked the story by publishing more images in a second post but the truth is I was laboriously extracting each image from a PDF by taking screenshots, which took hours. I had to stop halfway through and go to bed.

3. Eiffel DNA by Serero Architects, 25 March 2008

We got had on this one, good and proper. I saw on the Guardian website that French architects Serero had won an international competition to fix a temporary Kevlar platform to the top of the Eiffel Tower to mark its 120th birthday.

It seemed odd that the Eiffel Tower’s own website made no mention of this but, trusting the Guardian, I published the story. A couple of days later the New York Times exposed the story as a fake: there was no competition, and no winner; Serero produced the design speculatively.

The story is a reminder of how rumour and untruth can spread unchecked on the internet. We’ve been much more careful since. But I also admire the architects for their enterprise: it was a good design, a great story, and a fantastic publicity stunt.

4. Food and Design: a report by Dezeen for Scholtès, 22 November 2010

This was a labour of love; the biggest, hardest, longest story we’ve ever published. We were commissioned by luxury kitchen appliance brand Scholtès to write a major report on the increasing overlap between the worlds of food and design to coincide with the brand’s relaunch in the UK market. We spent around six months working on the report, which also included around a dozen video interviews filmed in Milan.

The response to the report was astonishing – Treehugger.com kindly wrote that it had “redefined blogging” – and it reinforced our belief that Dezeen can be a place for serious, in-depth analysis as well as high-speed cut-and-paste reportage.

A project like this is labour intensive and expensive to produce but as we grow we definitely have ambitions to raise our game journalistically. There’s no reason why the web should be the poor cousin of TV and print when it comes to editorial quality. We hope we can grow to fill the void left by the demise of so many architecture and design print titles.

5. Interview: Rem Koolhaas on OMA/Progress, 7 October 2011

Rem Koolhaas gave us a private tour of the OMA/Progress show at the Barbican press preview and we filmed it on the little Sony A1 camera we had with us – we weren’t expecting to get time with Rem as we’d already had our official interview request turned down. But the tour was exhilarating and despite the dodgy picture quality I love the sense of Rem’s intensity and intelligence that comes across in the video. He spoke to the camera for over 20 minutes non-stop while dashing around the exhibition and he never missed a beat.

It’s also great for a site like Dezeen to scoop the TV channels and national newspapers with a better Rem interview than any of them got! Video is going to be a really important part of Dezeen’s future as a media company: video allows you to capture a moment in history in a more compelling way that still images and text allow, I think.