Dutch Design Week 2013: graphic designer Kok Pistolet painted over sections of 40 posters around Utrecht to turn them into directions from each location to a venue for a music festival (+ slideshow).
The Ekko music club was one of the hosts for Le Guess Who? festival in November 2012. Pistolet‘s poster design promoting the venue incorporated drawings of hands that point right and left.
The A0 posters were printed in monochrome and put up in various places across the city. The streets and turns from these locations to Ekko were then mapped by the designer.
Pistolet visited each poster and painted over some of the directions with bright colours.
The right and left turns that remained in black and white became a route that led the visitor to the venue. As they got closer, more directions were painted out.
“The concept was based on the basic function of a promotional campaign; getting people to visit the venue,” Pistolet told Dezeen. “We translated this basic given into a map-like system so people would be able to find Ekko from any place they encountered the poster.”
Dutch Design Week 2013: graphic design graduate Evelien Crooy has made her own ink from insects and used it to screen-print the cover of a book about the creatures.
Evelien Crooy produced the ink from cochineal, a small insect native to tropical and sub-tropical regions including parts of South America.
The bodies of female cochineal have been used for centuries to produce a crimson dye called carmine, which is commonly found in food and cosmetics as a colouring agent.
Having discovered that the colour was also used by Rembrandt in his painting, The Jewish Bride, Crooy set about researching other products containing cochineal and compiled them in a pocket-sized book.
“Because I’m not a painter but a graphic designer I wanted to use the colour to silkscreen and develop an ink,” Crooy told Dezeen. “I also think there is a dark side to the whole idea of using an insect but I wanted to show her beauty and all the colours she can produce.”
By mixing the colour with salt and natural acids such as lime, Crooy was able to produce different shades and a consistency that is suitable for silkscreen printing.
She used the ink to print a cover for her book and plans to produce further experiments including silkscreened posters.
“Right now it’s an expensive material but who knows, maybe it can be used for industry in the future,” said Crooy, who recently graduated from Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands.
Dutch Design Week 2013: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans developed a technique similar to glass blowing to create these plastic lighting installations (+ slideshow).
Pieke Bergmans experimented with heating and rapidly inflating the PVC plastic so the final form is partly left open to chance.
“I don’t like to design as a designer and be very precise about how things should look,” Bergmans told Dezeen. “I prefer that shapes grow into their natural environment, so the only thing I decide is to add more or less air or maybe a few colours, time or material.”
One group of objects have been extruded into twisting, rippled pipes with a light bulb illuminating them from within.
Another series is made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretches into a delicate, translucent tube at one end.
Bergmans explained that the collection is called VAPOR because “the lighting objects fade away into nothing, like a gas that seems to dissolve.”
VAPOR was presented in an old pump house in Eindhoven as part of Dutch Design Week, with the first series displayed nestled amongst the pipes and the billowing second series suspended in the central double-height space.
Here’s a brief project description from Pieke Bergmans:
Vapor
This time Bergmans did not blow glass but plastic instead! As usual she has been exploring new techniques and it resulted again in a stunning body of work. Something that we have never seen. Six meters high, fragile mystical lighting-objects, hanging down from the ceiling. A translucent and solid body that fades away to almost no substance. Illuminated with light.
VAPOR refers to a liquid or solid state where the same substance at a high temperature turns into a gas phase. It’s beautiful, magical and seems almost from a different planet. Either angles or ghosts, I am not sure, but this time for sure they exist. They are real and can be touched.
Name: VAPOR Designer: Pieke Bergmans Year: 2013 Edition: Installation of 6 objects – Unique objects Material: PVC, electric bulb
Aagje Hoekstra took the armour of dead Darkling Beetles, which grow from larvae known as mealworms, to create the Coleoptera bioplastic that she showed at the Klokgebouw building during Dutch Design Week earlier this month.
“In the Netherlands mealworms are bred for the animal food industry but they transform into beetles,” Hoekstra told Dezeen at the show in Eindhoven. “After laying its eggs the beetle dies, so insect farms in the Netherlands are throwing away 30 kilograms of dead beetles every week.”
Before the beetles are disposed of, Hoekstra peels them so she is left with just the shells, which are made of a natural polymer called chitin that is also found in crab and lobster shells.
She uses a chemical process to transform the chitin into chitosan, which bonds better due to a variation in the molecular composition.
The material is then heat-pressed to create a plastic, with the oval-shaped shells still visible. “I wanted to keep the structure of the beetle in the plastic so you know where it has come from,” said Hoekstra.
She claims the plastic is waterproof and heat resistant up to 200 degrees centigrade.
Items Hoekstra has already produced from the material include jewellery and decorative pieces, but she hopes to develop the plastic for more practical applications. “In the future I want to make functional products such as plastic spoons and cups,” she said.
She is one a number of graduates experimenting with ways to create bioplastics from animal products that are normally thrown away. Other examples include a
“Usually we throw [a mobile phone] away after a couple of years, but this one is made to last.”
He continues: “You throw away a lot of good components [when you throw away a phone], because usually it’s only one item that is broken. With this phone you can only throw away components that are actually broken, or need repairing or upgrading.”
“If it’s getting slow you only upgrade the speed component, if you need a better camera you only upgrade the camera component. In this way you can keep the good stuff and the bad stuff you upgrade.”
“I’m just one guy at the Design Academy, I can’t make this phone myself,” says Hakkens. “So I put this video online and in the first 24 hours I had one million views on YouTube. I got a lot of nice emails from companies and people who want to work on this.”
Hakkens also put the project on Thunderclap, a crowdspeaking site where supporters donate their social reach rather than money.
His Phonebloks Thunderclap campaign closed yesterday, having gained 979,280 supporters. On closing, an automatic message about Phonebloks was sent out to all of his supporters’ social media contacts, reaching over 380 million people.
The approach has been successful in getting the attention of major players in the mobile phone industry.
“The whole point was to generate a lot of buzz,” says Hakkens. “So companies see that there’s a huge market and they need to make a phone like this.”
Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
To drive the vehicle, users wear an electroencephalography (EEG) headset that measures electrical activity within the neurones of the brain and converts these fluctuations into signals that control the toy car. “As you try to focus, the increased light intensity of the vehicle indicates the level of attention you have reached,” explained Bernal. “Once the maximum level is achieved and retained for seven seconds, the vehicle starts moving forward.”
Bernal developed his project to help users train themselves in overcoming concentration problems associated with attention deficit disorders. “This project helps users to develop deeper, longer concentration by exercising the brain,” the designer told Dezeen. “It is possible for people to train or treat their minds through their own effort, and not necessarily using strong medicines such as ritalin.”
His design uses the fluctuating light levels to visualise the level of attention a user achieves in real time and rewards above-average concentration when the car moves. “I call this an empiric neuro-feedback exercise that people can do at home,” he says. “The user can’t feel anything tactile, but he will be able to visualise the behaviour of the brain.”
As part of his research for the project, Bernal visited the Dutch Neurofeedback Institute, where EEG is already used for the treatment of attention disorders, and found that “they tend to use software and digital interfaces as feedback, even-though ADHD patients are the most likely individuals to develop addictions to TV, video games and computers.”
“My project is basically a new way of employing the EEG technology in an analog way because from my personal experience, that’s more relevant for the people who can actually benefit from this technology,” he added.
The working prototype comprises a commercially available headset developed by American firm Neurosky, which has one dry electrode on the forehead and a ground on the earlobe, and the toy car that he developed and designed himself.
“The headsets are available to the public for €100 and I find the accessibility very positive, but at the moment the only way to work with them is by using a computer and performing a digital task or game,” he said.
The toy car itself is made of aluminium with a body in semi-transparent acrylic so the lights show through from the inside. “The shape is inspired by a brain synapse,” said Bernal. “I wanted to achieve a fragile-looking toy, something you have to take care of that’s complex but understandable. At the end of the day it’s not a toy but a tool to train your brain.”
Bernal has just graduated from the Man and Leisure department at Design Academy Eindhoven and showed his project at the graduation show as part of Dutch Design Week this month.
Dutch Design Week 2013: Dutch creative agency …,staat has designed the interior and branding for this alternative supermarket in Amsterdam, where ingredients are grouped together as recipes rather than food types (+ slideshow).
The interior for Bilder & De Clercq by …,staat includes a cafe area, which has a counter decorated with handmade turquoise tiles.
Wooden panels are hung across the ceiling and merge into shelves behind the bar to display bread.
Sections of the counter are cut out to accommodate freestanding wooden units with glass shelves.
Instead of traditional supermarket aisles, the store features bespoke white tiered frames with wooden surfaces for displaying food. The steel frames are grouped according to the ingredients of each dish, which is pictured and described above the produce.
The graphic identity, packaging and kitchenware for Bilder & De Clercq was also designed by …,staat.
The black, grey and turquoise colour scheme is applied to take-away coffee cups, printed recipes and store cards.
The range of kitchenware includes chopping boards, vegetables peelers and spatulas, all of which come in wood or metal.
Dutch Design Week 2013: architecture studio Onix has inserted a wooden staircase inside a medieval Dutch church to provide access to the apex of the bell tower (+ slideshow).
Onix created the route to allow visitors to explore a previously inaccessible part of Uitwierde church, which is located in the Dutch province of Groningen.
Visitors are led past original building features, such as the clock and bells, while information boards tell the story of the tower’s history.
The angular bannister of the staircase changes height as it ascends, framing different views of the thirteenth-century building, and interior windows reveal details of the historic stonework.
The architects slotted the modern structure around the wooden beams that frame the tower, allowing them to jut through in some places.
A seating area is located on the uppermost section of the route and leads out a balcony offering views of the surrounding countryside.
Toren van Uitwierde, which translates as Tower of Uitwierde, won the Spatial category at last week’s Dutch Design Awards, where the selection committee said: “The design directs the gaze of the visitor in a surprising way. You move and you are guided by the design.”
On the northern edge of Delfzijl stands the tower of Uitwierde. For this tower, we have made a design so that the tower can be used as a viewpoint. The path to the viewpoint is designed as an experience path that shows the specific characteristics of the tower.
Concept diagram
The tower consists of three distinctive areas: the dark basement (entrance), the vertical tower space and the space under the hood. These spaces are connected by the experience path in the form of a staircase. The closed railing of the stairs constantly changes height and thus leads the sight of the visitor. The path leads the visitor along specific points, such as the clock, the bells and the old construction, but also along information points that tell something about the history of the tower and its location. At the end of the route the path is also visible on the outside of the tower. Here is the viewpoint overlooking the surrounding countryside and in the distance, behind the dike, the water of the Ems.
Dutch Design Week 2013:Dutch firm Bierman Henket architecten has added an extension shaped like a rugby ball on top of a neo-classical museum in the city of Zwolle (+ slideshow).
Bierman Henket architecten created the extension for The Museum De Fundatie, which is housed in a former courthouse designed in 1838 that now contains a collection of international art, sculpture and curiosities.
Located on the edge of a market square that links the medieval city centre to an area of nineteenth-century parkland, a shortage of space around the museum and the technical complexity of extending underground led the architects to propose placing the extension on top of the existing building.
The architects explained that their design “couples the classical, static building with the fluid dynamics of a contemporary extension in a vertical direction.”
Eight steel columns pierce the original building and support the two-storey extension, making it structurally independent.
The extension’s exterior is covered in 55,000 three-dimensional tiles produced by Royal Tichelaar Makkum with a blue and white glaze that helps the structure match the colour of the sky.
The curving, open spaces inside the extension contrast with the typical arrangement of adjoining exhibition halls found in the old building.
A large window on the northern side fills the interior with daylight and provides visitors with a panoramic view of the city.
The project won the Spatial Exterior category at the Dutch Design Awards last week, with the selection committee commenting that: “the project generates a huge impact in the city” and “has an incredible presence”. The top prize at the awards went to fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s collection featuring 3D-printed garments.
The architects sent us this project description:
Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle Extension: 2010-2013
Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle, situated on the border between the mediaeval city centre and the open 19th century parkland with its canals, has been extended with a spectacular volume on the roof of the former Palace of Justice.
The courthouse on Blijmarkt was designed by the architect Eduard Louis de Coninck in 1938 in the neo-classical style. De Coninck intended this style of architecture to symbolise the unity in the legislation of the new kingdom. The building has a double symmetry with a monumental entrance and a central entrance hall extending over two floors.
On the city side the free-standing building is slightly recessed in relation to the unbroken, mediaeval façade of Blijmarkt. Together with the classical façade structure of a tympanum on Corinthian columns, this gives the building a solitary character.
The building is also free-standing on the canal side, in the green zone of Potgietersingel. The canals were laid out as a public park in the English landscape style in the second half of the 19th century, following the demolition of the city walls.
Due to its location the building became a link between two distinct worlds: one an inward-orientated, mediaeval, fortified city with a compact and static character and the other a 19th century park with an outward-orientated, dynamic character.
In 1977 the building ceased to function as a Palace of Justice and it was converted into offices for the Rijksplanologische Dienst, the government planning department. A mezzanine was constructed in the two high court rooms. Since 2005, following internal renovation by architect Gunnar Daan, the building has been the home of Museum De Fundatie.
The museum has an extraordinary collection including works by Rembrandt, Saenredam, Turner, Monet, Rodin, Van Gogh, Mondrian and Van der Leck. In addition, the museum organises modest, but much discussed exhibitions. Under Ralph Keuning’s directorship these temporary exhibitions became so successful that extension of the museum became unavoidable. Despite the inherent problems of extending the palace in the historical city centre, the museum resisted the temptation to abandon this national monument and opted to extend it.
Bierman Henket architecten designed the extension of the former courthouse in 2010. Architect Hubert-Jan Henket succeeded in persuading the client not to add an extension next to the existing building: this would have destroyed its solitary and symmetrical character. An underground extension proved spatially too complicated. Instead Henket designed an extension with an autonomous volume on top of the monumental building.
In the same way that the Palace of Justice links two worlds in a horizontal direction, Henket couples the classical, static building with the fluid dynamics of a contemporary extension in a vertical direction.
The superstructure, just like the substructure, is symmetrical in two directions, but the shape rather resembles a rugby ball. Together, the two totally-different volumes form a new urban entity. There are also two contrasting interpretations in the interior: the classical succession of rectangular museum halls below versus the fluid, open spaces in the elliptical volume above.
Right from the outset, both the Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed, the department responsible for the preservation of monuments and historical buildings, and local conservation societies were enthusiastic about the radical concept for the expansion. Under the motto preservation through development the customary debates and public inquiry procedures were considerably shortened. Planning permission was granted in record time.
Straight through the existing building, eight steel columns stand on eight individual foundations. The columns support the new extension – with two exhibition floors that total 1,000 m2. So, structurally and architecturally, the extension is independent of the old building.
The extension – also called the Art Cloud – is clad with 55,000 three-dimensional ceramic elements produced by Koninklijke Tichelaar in Makkum. Together, the mixed blue-and-white glazed tiles measuring 20×20 cm and 10×10 cm, form a subtle surface which, depending on the weather, merges into the heavens. On the northern side daylight floods into the two, new exhibition floors through a large, glazed pane in the tiled superstructure. Inside, visitors have a panoramic view of the city.
With the extension, the original central entrance hall has been carried through as an atrium where the two museological worlds converge. A glass lift in the atrium conveys visitors to the various floors. The stairways are located on the outer part of the floors. In the old building they are stately and straight, in the new development they are flowingly curved.
A glass passageway runs between the existing building and the extension − where new and old meet. On the one side visitors look into the atrium and on the other they have a view of the city and the underside of the tiled extension. With its aim of presenting contemporary and old art in one building – Museum De Fundatie now has a new, truly-unique identity.
Dutch Design Week 2013: designer Christien Meindertsma has compiled photographs of hundreds of jumpers knitted by an elderly woman into a book and organised a flashmob in her honour (+ movie).
Christien Meindertsma‘s book celebrates the creations of Rotterdam resident Loes Veenstra, who has knitted more than 500 jumpers since 1955.
Museum Rotterdam and visual arts studio Wandschappen asked Meindertsma to create “something new” with the jumpers that Loes Veenstra had knitted, mostly using yarns donated to her over the years.
“In the book I tried to categorise the sweaters so that you can see the same yarn or pattern return in different pieces,” said Meindertsma. “What is quite special is that almost all pieces were knitted without a pre-made pattern; she just improvised and used what she had at the time.”
The jumpers are photographed against a neutral backdrop that enhances the patterns and the use of different yarns and threads that have become available since the 1950s.
When Meindertsma discovered that the jumpers had never been worn she organised a surprise flashmob of people wearing them on Mrs Veenstra’s street.
Groups of dancers, a marching band, a choir, baton twirlers and hundreds of volunteers wearing the sweaters appeared on the street, where Mrs Veenstra was able to view her entire output for the first time.
The project won Best Autonomous Design in the Product category at last week’s Dutch Design Awards, whose selection committee described it as “a good translation of a special story into a carefully designed book,” adding: “the flashmob puts a smile on your face.”
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