Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: developing “living architecture” could help humanity survive, claims senior University of Greenwich lecturer Rachel Armstrong, who is investigating how we could grow a city in space.

“The world in which our cities are situated is lively,” says Armstrong. “A living city could confer survival strategies and some form of adaptation to our buildings.”

Living buildings could “absorb pollutants and carbon dioxide,” she claims, and even offer better protection against natural disasters.

“In an age when we’re faced with repeated flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, I think that to design for instability is a really powerful thing.”

Armstrong, who is also a senior TED fellow and founder of research group Black Sky Thinking, is currently investigating how we would grow cities from soils as part of a project called Persephone. Led by the Icarus Interstellar foundation, the ambition of the project is to achieve interstellar space travel by the year 2100.

“Persephone is the design and engineering of the living interior of a starship,” Armstrong explains. “This is a world ship. It contains human inhabitants and therefore the interior of this space needs to support these peoples for the duration of their journey, and that could be hundreds, potentially thousands of years.”

She continues: “The architectures within this space will be grown from the bottom up, using the soils. The soils themselves will not be made inert like they are on earth – like bricks. In Persephone the culture would be to keep the liveliness of everything. So we will be extruding structures from soils. In some ways I can think of them being like the caves in Cappadocia in Turkey.”

While Armstrong admits the realisation of such a “world ship” is far off, she believes research into biological buildings and construction methods is important for life on earth.

“This might seem quite esoteric and ‘out there’,” she says. “But Persephone is essential for us because it asks us questions about what survivability and sustainability is on our planet right now.”

The music featured in the movie is a track called Everything Everywhere Once Was by UK producer 800xL. You can listen to more original music on Dezeen Music Project.

The movie features additional footage from Dan Tassell’s The Battersea Experiment.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post “Growing a city from the bottom up”
could save the human race appeared first on Dezeen.

Working with skilled local craftspeople is both a duty and an opportunity for Indian designers, says Prateek Jain of lighting design company Klove, in the third and final movie from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi.

“It’s the biggest job of a designer to make sure that they work with handicrafts people,” says Prateek Jain, co-founder of Klove. “Whether it’s a fashion designer who works with an embroiderer or whether it’s us working with wood carvers or stone cutters.”

Both sides benefit when designers work with traditional craft producers, says Jain, and can help bring craftsmen’s work to new markets. “It’s very important to apply a more contemporary design aesthetic to these handicraft [skills]” he says.

Jain’s chosen medium is glass, thanks to an encounter he had with craftsmen in Ambala, a town in northern India. When he saw local glass-blowers creating intricate glassware for laboratories, he knew he had spotted an opportunity.

“We saw that they were doing these beautiful, flawless bowls of silica glass,” he says. “The blowers had been making beakers, flasks and test tubes for generations. We realised that [we could use] this skill set to explore home decor.”

Together with his partner Gautam Seth he took these techniques used for creating lab-ware into unexpected contexts: creating luxury lighting installations for an international client base.

Klove now creates large, ornate custom-made lighting installations working in a palette of blown glass, brass, steel and copper.

Klove was participating in the Made In… India Samskara exhibition. Curated by Fashion Design Council of India president Sunil Sethi and creative think tank BE OPEN, the show celebrates collaborations between contemporary Indian designers and skilled Indian craftsmen.

For the show Klove used blown glass and beaten metal to create a large lighting installation in the shape of a peacock, India’s national bird.

“We knew that [the curators] wanted to represent India in a modern way. Instantly the idea of a peacock came into our head because it’s the national bird,” says Jain. “We wanted to represent the peacock in a contemporary manner but at the same time have a strong Indian aesthetic to it”.

The feathers that make up the peacock’s fanned tail are represented by 48 slender glass stems, similar in form to elongated laboratory flasks.

“The great part about being in this country is that you have great access to a great resource of talent. You have craftsmen who have been doing this work for many centuries” says Jain.

Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.

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skills alive, says designer Prateek Jain appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2014: designers including Maarten Baas, Arik Levy and Maxim Velčovský introduce their new pieces for Lasvit in this movie filmed at the Czech lighting company’s Emotions show in Milan earlier this week.

Lasvit launched nine new collections at its Emotions show in Milan, including designs by a host of international designers as well as a series of kinetic sculptures by the company’s in-house team.

Czech designer Maxim Velčovský, who is also the company’s art director, created a series of hanging glass lamps called Frozen, which are created by pouring molten glass over a dome-shaped mould and left to cool.

“I was very much inspired by nature, when water becomes ice,” he says of the lamps, which are displayed in a cluster with drops of water running down them. “People are not sure whether they are looking at ice or glass, so they they knock on the lamp trying to figure it out.”

Dutch designer Maarten Baas created a modular chandelier called Das Pop using his signature Clay method in which a synthetic clay is moulded around a metal frame.

“It’s made all by hand and with Lasvit’s craftsman we also made hand-blown lightbulbs,” he explains. “Das Pop is one of my favourite Belgian bands, which is where the name comes from.”

Arik Levy designed a series of simple crystal-shaped pendants, which are available in a variety of different colours and opacities.

“We get reflections off the facets, even when the light is off,” he says. “When it’s on and when it’s off it always stays beautiful.”

The show also features the first glass chandelier by Daniel Libeskind. Called Ice, the piece is made up of clear glass cells blown into angular moulds, creating sharp, icicle-like forms.

“When you blow crystal, it’s typically bubbly and round,” says the American architect’s son, Lev Libeskind. “Our language has always been more angular and sharp. So we said, “What would happen if we took our sharpness and impose it on the glass?” The result provides a really interesting counterpoint between material and form.”

Lasvit’s Emotions show also features two moving glass sculptures, including a hanging lotus flower designed by Petra Krausová, which opens and closes in time to music and is controlled by an iPhone app.

Visual artist Jakub Nepraš also created a sculpture made from shards of glass shaped like a tree, onto which  a series of digital images are projected.

“There is craftsmanship, there is poetry behind each collection and this year there is also a lot of technology on show,” explains Lasvit founder and president Leon Jakimič. “I believe we are the first company to combine glass art with really advanced technology.”

Lasvit’s Emotions show, which also features designs by Michael Young and Czech designers Jan Plechac and Henry Wielgus, is at Office Stendhal on Via Stendhal in Milan and is open from 10am to 8pm until 13 April.

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craftsmanship with advanced technology” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in this exclusive video interview, musician Imogen Heap demonstrates the electronic gloves that allow people to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures.

The interview was filmed at Heap‘s home studio outside London, shortly before she launched her Kickstarter campaign to produce a limited production run of the open-source Mi.Mu gloves.

“These beautiful gloves help me gesturally interact with my computer,” says Heap, explaining how the wearable technology allows her to perform without having to interact with keyboards or control panels.

Pushing buttons and twiddling dials “is not very exciting for me or the audience,” she says. “[Now] I can make music on the move, in the flow and more humanly, [and] more naturally engage with my computer software and technology.”

Working with a team of developers and musicians, Heap has mapped movements made with the gloves to musical functions such as drum sounds or bass notes, changes of pitch, arpeggios and filters.

“What this glove enables me to do is access mappings inside my computer so that I don’t have to go to a keyboard or a fader or a button,” she says.

For example, instead of using a finger to push a fader on a mixing desk, Heap can raise her arm to achieve the same affect. By raising her hand, she can move through a scale of notes, or through pinching together her thumb, middle and forefinger and rotating it, she can apply filters to the sound.

Each gesture-control glove contains a wifi-enabled x-IMU board developed by x-IO Technologies containing an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope.

These work together with a series of motion sensors incorporated into the fingers of each glove that track the degree of bend and the spread of the fingers. The gloves can also understand postures such as an open palm, a finger-point or a closed fist.

The latest version of the gloves feature e-textile technology, where sensors and wiring are integrated into fabric. Heap is now exploring how to make further use of electronically conducting textiles, to reduce the number of hard components in the gloves.

Heap says they will not just change performance, but the production of music too: “We really feel that they are going to change the way we make music.”

Heap’s Kickstarter campaign aims to raise £200,000 to develop and produce a limited production run of Mi.Mu gloves. If successful, she will make both the hardware and software open source, allowing people to develop their own uses for the technology. “It’s really exciting to see what people might do by hacking them,” said Heap. The Kickstarter campaign closes on 3 May 2014.

The music featured in this movie is Me, the Machine, a track that Heap wrote specifically to be performed using the gloves.

for more information about the technology in the gloves, read the edited transcript of our interview with Heap.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The post These gloves will “change the way we
make music,” says Imogen Heap appeared first on Dezeen.

In the first of a series of movies from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi, exhibiting designers and co-curator Sunil Sethi discuss the importance of Indian craft and its significance in the modern world.

Fashion Design Council of India president Sunil Sethi, who curated the exhibition with creative think tank BE OPEN, explains that the aim of the show was to highlight the quality of products that are both designed and produced in India.

“BE OPEN has given a very nice platform to the Indian designer, in different disciplines, to be able to show their best,” he says. “Traditional craftsmen – when they team up with an Indian designer – the product can be truly of an international quality.”

Sethi believes there is a demand for high-quality, hand-made products, which, with its rich craft tradition, India needs to take advantage of.

“I feel that, in the international market, the customer wants to take home something special,” he says. “India needs to cash in on its handicrafts. That is the key thing to take from this exhibition.”

Products on show at the exhibition included homeware, lighting, clothes and textiles, as well as contemporary furniture, all made using traditional techniques.

Delhi-based designer Gunjan Gupta presented a range of chairs made from everyday Indian objects, including laundry sacks and traditional Indian masand cushions.

“I’m bringing craft back into the design vocabulary,” she claims.”It’s important for us as a rapidly modernising culture [not to lose traditional craft skills]. It’s also something that has extremely unique artisanal value around the world.”

Fashion designer Rahul Mishra, who had a range of intricately-embroidered dresses on show, says that using traditional craft techniques is a way of boosting the economy in India’s countryside at a time when more and more people are flocking to overcrowded cities.

“The beauty of craft is that it allows a rural Indian – who has never been to a city, who has never been outside of his village – it gives him power to execute his artistry,” he says. “I am here to create jobs in villages. Rather than just designing a product, if you can create a nice system, I think that is a job well done.”

Prateek Jain of design studio Klove presented a peacock-shaped lighting installation made from glass produced by glass-blowers who usually make laboratory equipment.

“We use skilled blowers to make our products who make scientific equipment for labs,” he explains. “It’s a new way of applying a skill set that has been available to us for many years.”

Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.

The post “India needs to cash in on its handicrafts”
says Made in… India exhibition co-curator appeared first on Dezeen.