Dezeen Music Project: discoloured images from children’s science journals have been collaged together by videographer Ewan Jones Morris to create this music video for London band Fanfarlo’s Cell Song (+ movie).
Fanfarlo approached Ewan Jones Morris to create the video for their latest album after seeing his previous work, and offered him the choice of which song to create the visuals.
“They were exploring a lot of sci-fi concepts with their new album,” Jones Morris told Dezeen. “I chose Cell Song as much for the subject as anything else and the story of the video grew from that.”
Imagery zooms in and out, showing sections of life forms from microscopic detail, through cellular and tissue levels up to a more familiar, human scale.
During the video, figures and objects transform into strange creatures and the singers’ faces pop-up in bubbles and on screens of vintage TVs.
The director created the animation from images of children’s science magazines from the 1960s.
“I collect a few different ‘knowledge’ magazines aimed at children, most of them printed in the 1960s – back when kids were into science, cross sections of fungus or who invented the sewing machine,” Jones Morris told Dezeen.
“There’s never a shortage of cell diagrams in biology text books,” he added.
“I used to spend hours looking through these kinds of books as a kid, and I always imagined something beyond what was actually happening in the pictures, made connections between completely different images,” said Jones Morris. “That’s what I’m recreating, that process of collaging with my brain as I scanned through those books.”
The visuals were assembled in Photoshop and each frame – 12 per second – was printed out onto paper using an “unreliable” inkjet machine.
“I try and avoid more complicated software because I want to keep everything 2D and a bit wonky,” said Jones Morris.
He tampered with the ink cartridges so the print becomes uneven, then each page was photographed slightly crumpled or wet to distort the pictures.
Cell Song features on Fanfarlo’s album Let’s Go Extinct released in February 2014.
Milan 2014: a product designed by Dutch designer Pepe Heykoop to be made in an Indian slum has been a runaway success, creating employment for 80 families within a year of launch (+ movie + interview).
Speaking to Dezeen in Milan last week, Heykoop said workers making his Paper Vase earned the equivalent of eight Euros per day, which is eight times the average wage in the Mumbai slum.
“The ambition is to have 700 people out of poverty in ten years time,” said Heykoop. “We are pretty much half way”.
Initially launched in February last year, Heykoop presented the vase at Ventura Lambrate in Milan this year along with a range of other products he designed as part of a project organised by charity the Tiny Miracles Foundation to lift people out of poverty in Mumbai.
Online orders for the vase are averaging around 100 per day, allowing the foundation to keep 80 families in regular employment.
However the other products proved unsuitable to the project, which struggled for the first couple of years.
“In 2012 we never thought this was actually happening and now there’s light at the end of the tunnel and there’s a really good vibe going,” Heykoop said.
The success of the flat-pack vase – which is made of paper and sewn together – has led Heykoop to develop another folded paper product. Prototypes of his flatpack Paper Lamp were on show at Ventura Lambrate.
“The paper vase was the breakthrough and for 2014 I have this paper folded light, which has the same principal and has been flat-packed in an envelope,” said Heykoop.
Prototypes of Heykoop’s Paper Lamps
After they’re made, the products are shipped from Mumbai to Heykoop’s studio in Amsterdam then distributed to consumers worldwide. However, if the buyers live east of India then the designs are shipped straight from there to save them travelling all the way around the world.
The Tiny Miracles Foundation, set up in 2010, is half way towards its goal for 2020 to provide 150 families with a wage of ten euros a day – the UNICEF standard for a middle class wage – in return for their production skills.
Heykoop’s original ideas for the project were lampshades from lambskin, transforming traditional water carriers into leathery vases, but the products proved difficult for the community to produce and too expensive for consumers to purchase.
“I started off with leather lampshades; they’re like 550 Euros in the shop,” he said. “It’s nice when you sell a bunch of them but you have work and then you don’t have work for a few weeks. These ladies were coming to me and asking ‘can I work next month’, and I wanted to say yes but I couldn’t, because the products were not selling on a daily basis.”
Women from Tiny Miracles assembling vases
Heykoop hopes to train the families in Mumbai to manage the distribution themselves, so the process becomes contained within the community after the programme finishes in six years time.
“This foundation stops in 2020 but it doesn’t mean that this workshop stops in 2020,” Heykoop explained. “If we stop the workshop in 2020, it will all collapse again. If the foundation stops providing the information, then they should be self sustainable.”
Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Pepe Heykoop:
Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the project that you’re showing in Milan.
Pepe Heykoop: I’ve been a collaborator for four years with Tiny Miracles Foundation, which has been set up by my cousin. This community group that we’re aiming at lives in a slum in Mumbai and they used to be basketry weavers. They earned one euro a day for the whole family.
Most of them were illiterate, couldn’t count to ten it was like hardcore surviving on the streets. Then my cousin started the foundation and she asked me: “Pepe can you design some items that we can produce with them because we want to bring education, we want to bring healthcare but we also want to provide jobs so they can eventually pay for the healthcare and education themselves.”
So I went there and for me it was the second time in India, and it’s such a different world. When I started designing things, it was really heard to blend in with their way of thinking and their world and my world. It took two and a half years to find something that really worked.
Women from Tiny Miracles assembling vases
Marcus Fairs: What’s the ambition of the Tiny Miracles Foundation? To employ people?
Pepe Heykoop: The ambition is to have 700 people out of poverty in ten years time. I’m only working on the creating jobs pillar and Laurien [Meuter] was taking care of the healthcare and education, other pillars.
Marcus Fairs: So the idea was for you to come up with some products that they could manufacture?
Pepe Heykoop: Well all of them can do basketry weaving with their eyes closed but I said I don’t want to do something with weaving or bamboo, because it has this ethnic look and this fair-trade image and I think we should focus on something new. That a product should sell itself. You want it because you like it, you buy it and then the story is a plus, an extra.
Pepe Heykoop helping with vase assembly
Marcus Fairs: You don’t buy it because you feel guilty, or feel sorry for people.
Pepe Heykoop: No, there’s a lot of good initiatives. You want to support them and then you get an ugly basket, you know what I mean. So these products don’t look like they’ve been made by these people living on the street and that’s where I wanted to go.
But it’s hard. It’s hard when people cannot count to ten to work with them but luckily there was this force within me to not give up and act like a pit bull, hanging on. We found something with the folded paper vase covering to be put around an empty bottle and shipped in an envelope. It comes as a gift and it works out really well. We’ve sold like 100 pieces a day at the moment and that’s why now, starting off with seven people in 2011, now we have over 80 people employed in 2014. We’e heading towards a goal of a group of 700 people, equal to about 150 families.
Marcus Fairs: So that’s the target?
Pepe Heykoop: This is half way. The project takes until 2020, so in four years we are pretty much halfway. In 2012 we never thought this was actually happening and now there’s light at the end of the tunnel and there’s a really good vibe going on since about one and a half years ago.
Group of women from Tiny Miracles assembling vases
Marcus Fairs: Tell us briefly about the other two products.
Pepe Heykoop: The paper vase was the breakthrough and for 2014 I have this paper folded light, which has the same principal and has been flat packed in an envelope. The weight’s really low.
These samples I’ve been making during the last week in the studio are prototypes, and I’m testing colours now and colours of the treads and we’ll see which one it’s going to be. This paper should be coated and then within three seconds you just pop it up and there’s a certain tension in the paper, which gives it shape. So then we’re going to sell this separately, the electricity and separately the shade, if you want to change it for a different colour.
It should also be a low price range. The Paper Vase is 19 euros in the shop and this one we want to have 35, 39 euros for the other. Everybody can buy it, because that’s the only way we can have these women working on a daily basis.
I started off with leather lampshades; they’re like 550 euros in the shop. It’s nice when you sell a bunch of them but you have work and then you don’t have work for a few weeks and then there’s work and then there’s not work. These ladies were coming to me and asking “can I work next month”, and I wanted to say yes but I couldn’t, because the products were not selling on a daily basis.
Group of women from Tiny Miracles
Marcus Fairs: So what techniques do they use to manufacture these?
Pepe Heykoop: There’s paper and sewing. Actually I started off in 2011 with the welding and way too complex techniques, and I had failure after failure. Then at a certain moment, I said I’ll get a folding class and I invited 30 women to come and fold a sheet of paper in half. None of them could do this correctly and then I was shocked because I thought “this is the final try” if folding a sheet of paper doesn’t work.
So then of course after some training, I made something like a game out of it, because I want this workshop to have a really positive vibe and I hate production in China where you’re not allowed to see how stuff is done. If you know where your T-shirt is coming from in these factories in Bangladesh, you don’t want to wear it. So I said we can do, of course we can do production in such a nice way as I can do it in Amsterdam. We can do it there as well and we don’t just take something but we also give something back. That’s the whole.
Pepe Heykoop and women from Tiny Miracles
Marcus Fairs: Do they work from home or is there a workshop they go to?
Pepe Heykoop: We started off with a really dark crappy spot near the street; there were rats running round and cockroaches and rain was coming in, but you should start from something. Then in 2012, we changed into a bigger room and now we have a big room, a proper room that’s clean and light. There’s no rain coming in.
Marcus Fairs: And you said that people get paid to eat, one euro a day. Do you pay them the same, or do you pay them more than the average?
Pepe Heykoop: No no no, they used to earn one euro a day with basketry weaving for the whole family and we go up to ten euros a day, which is the UNICEF standard for middle class. Now it’s eight euros but by 2020, it will be something around ten. If you increase the salary ten times more, you will only ruin the system over there because they will hate each other; who can work with us and who can’t. So we integrate this amount in education and doctor visits. So now behind the scenes we are paying that and every year they should pay 10 percent more for education and doctor visits. So within ten years, they are paying this themselves gradually.
Marcus Fairs: And finally, do they make the products and also ship the products to the customers, or do they put them in a big crate and send them to you in the Netherlands and then you do it from there?
Pepe Heykoop: For the moment, we have everything sent to Holland. Except for orders that go to Japan or Australia, like the other way round, then we ship them directly. But it involves a lot of training, because there should be final checks, so we do some final checking in Holland but we want to train them to do that.
This foundation stops in 2020 but it doesn’t mean that this workshop stops in 2020. So the foundation helps with understanding how it works, with the doctor visits and the schooling and whenever they make the money. If we stop the workshop in 2020, it will all collapse again. If the foundation stops providing the information, then they should be self sustainable.
Milan 2014: designers from MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have created a shape-shifting table that reacts to human presence with a series of 1,000 tiny motors built into the frame (+ movie).
Named Transform, the table is divided into three separate surfaces, where more than 1,000 small squares attached to individual motors that are hidden from view.
When a user passes their hand across the surface, the individual squares rise up in sequence and create a ripple effect.
The table can also create abstract shapes on its own, and transfer objects across the surface, thanks to a series of pre-programmed animation sequences.
Transform was created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer and overseen by their professor Hiroshi Ishii.
“A pixel is intangible,” Ishii told Dezeen. “You can only use it through mediating and remote control, like a mouse or a touchscreen. We decided to physically embody computation and information.”
Hiroshi Ishii, head of concept design for Transform
According to the team, the concept is a look at how furniture could evolve in future. It forms part of the MIT Tangible Media Group’s Radical Atoms project, which explores human interaction with materials that are reconfigurable by computer.
“We don’t want the furniture to become more important than the motion. We want to make it feel like it’s a unified design and they are not separate,” said Amit Zoran, one of the product designers on the project.
Transform changes shape by a series of sensors that detect movement above the surface. However, the table could change according to the emotions of people around it, and create a melody to soothe those around the table, said its creators.
“Imagine, this is equivalent of the invention of a new medium. Painting, plastic, and computer graphics. It has infinite possibilities,” said Ishii.
A year after establishing their architectural practice, Canadian architects David and Susan Scott have created a timber-lined studio for themselves in a converted butcher and grocery shop in Vancouver (+ movie).
The husband-and-wife team co-founded Scott & Scott Architects at the start of 2013 but until now have been without a dedicated studio, so they set about creating one in the former shop premises below their home – a building dating back to 1911.
The architects stripped back the interior of the 70-square-metre space to create a simple rectangular studio at the front, a workshop at the back and a wall of concealed storage in between.
Douglas fir planks were sourced from a local sawmill to line the walls, floor and ceiling of the main room. These were treated with a traditional beeswax, mixed with a solvent of Canadian Whiskey to produce a gleaming surface.
The former shopfront was fully glazed, helping to bring as much light as possible into the space, but also allowing neighbours to see what’s going on inside.
“The priorities were to maximise the use of natural light, enhance the connection to the neighbourhood, use regional materials which have a known providence and acknowledge the lumber-based building culture of the Pacific Northwest,” explained David Scott.
The couple enlisted the help of local carpenters to help them build the space themselves. Wooden cupboards were constructed from plywood and stained in black, creating a contrast with the lighter wood elsewhere.
The space is completed by glass pendant lights and a series of bespoke desks, which the architects designed and made with galvanised steel frames and hand-stitched leather surfaces.
Movie is by Odette Visual, with a score by Joel RL Phelps. Photography is by the architects.
Here’s a project description from Scott & Scott Studio:
Scott & Scott Studio
A year after the launch of their practice architects Susan and David Scott have completed the refurbishment of the historic commercial space in their 1911 East Vancouver residence. Once a butcher shop and a long running grocery store, the space has been stripped back to a simple volume lined with Douglas fir boards and completed with black stained fir plywood millwork.
Using familiar materials from their region, the architects built the space themselves with a couple of carpenters. The fir was supplied from a sawyer on Vancouver Island with whom they have worked for several years. Three fir logs were selected, milled and cut to suit the width and height of the space. The work was completed in a manner rooted in traditional methodology while utilising the availability of modern tooling. The unsalvageable south-facing storefront had been infilled by a previous owner and was restored to an area of glass consistent with the original size using a single high performance unit.
Informed by a desire to create work which is fundamental in its architecture and supportive of a variety of uses over time, the priorities were to maximise the use of natural light, enhance the connection to the neighbourhood, use regional materials which have a known providence, and acknowledge the lumber-based building culture of the Pacific Northwest.
Floor plan
The architects favour materials and approaches that wear in and appreciate over time, taking on warmth with maintenance. The interior fir boards are finished with a variant of a warm applied 19th century beeswax floor finish with the solvent replaced with Canadian Whiskey.
The tables (a first of their self-produced furniture designs) are hand-stitched finished leather tops on blackened galvanised steel bases.
Milan 2014: London studio Poetic Lab has revealed a new iteration of Ripple – a lighting collection that imitates movement on water – at Milan design week (+ movie).
The concept design for Ripple was originally shown by Poetic Lab last year in Milan, but has since been developed further into two different sizes and put into production with Austrian crystal brand J. & L. Lobmeyr.
Each style consists of two unevenly hand-blown glass domes sitting on brass bases. A G4 halogen light shines from within the smaller dome through the larger dome as it slowly rotates. This creates a constantly changing mix of light and shadow to create a ripple effect on the surfaces around the lights.
“When I first saw Ripple I was totally struck by this effect and I had to sit down for about 30 minutes and watch it,” said Lobmeyr’s co-owner Leonid Rath. “It was really an emotional decision to take it into a range.”
“It’s not about designing a lamp, it’s about the experience and the emotion that is created by this moving light,” Poetic Lab co-founder and designer Hanhsi Chen told Dezeen.
Firing the glass in the furnace
“The inspiration of the collection comes from the nature beauty of light and fluid matters. We try to capture the essence of light through its gentle movements, just as all the nature light do,” said Chen.
The molten glass out of the furnace
“The process starts with the hot molten glass and as it interacts with the air, gravity and the breeze of the blower it gradually takes shape into a mysterious bubble,” added Chen.
Blowing air into the molten glass
Ripple is on show at the Spazio Rosanna Orlandi, Via Matteo Bandello 14-16, Milan.
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.
Frozen by Maxim Velcovsky for Lasvit
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.”
Das Pop by Maarten Baas for Lasvit
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.”
Crystal Rock by Arik Levy for Lasvit
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.”
“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.”
Alice by Petra Krausova for Lasvit
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.
Magnetic by Libor Sostak for Lasvit
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.
Kora by Jakub Nepras for Lasvit
“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.”
Moluds by Plechac and Wielgus for Lasvit
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.
Milan 2014: Dutch designer David Derksen is showing his collection of Moiré Jewellery at Ventura Lambrate in Milan this week (+ movie).
Each pendant is made from a piece of chemically etched brass, overlaid with a piece of etched stainless steel.
Moving either piece creates the Moiré effect. “If you have two layers of patterns, for example stripes or dots, and they rotate, you create a new pattern,” said Derksen.
There are five pendants in the collection. One features two discs, both perforated with circular dots.
When the front disc is rotated from the centre, a series of expanding and contracting rings appears. A similar design, when rotated from the top, creates a series of larger dots.
Two square discs pierced with square holes create a grid pattern. “When I started the project, I didn’t know what I wanted to make. I usually start my design process from a principle like gravity, or in this case the Moiré effect, and research it, and only afterwards do I think about how to apply it,” says Derksen.
“I had a couple of small samples on my desk and I was playing with them constantly. It was then that I thought, ‘We have to make something that you can play with.’ I decided that if we made a pendant, it would add something to your outfit, but you could also look at it and play with it yourself. We wanted to make playful objects.”
Moiré Jewellery is on show alongside Derksen’s Oscillation Plates and Table Architecture as part of the 010 – 020 Collective at the Prometeo Gallery, Via Ventura 3, 20134 Milan Tuesday 8 April – Saturday 12 April 2014.
Located at the Milan Fairgrounds, the Where Architects Live exhibition entails a series of spaces based on the domestic environments of nine eminent designers, based in eight different cities.
Daniel Libeskind
The installations, which also feature Mario Bellini, Marcio Kogan, Bijoy Jain, and Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, focus on one detail from each home to create a multimedia representation of both that building and its surroundings.
Daniel Libeskind
“A house is not really private,” said Daniel Libeskind at the exhibition launch. “I have no secrets, so all the secrets are shown and of course my house is not just about furniture and light.”
Shigeru Ban
In Libeskind’s space, sliced openings and recesses frame a series of views of artworks. “The domestic environment is no longer seen as some mechanical functionalistic machine to live in, in my view, and it is something that has stood with the global memory with where we are, where we are coming from and where we are going,” he said.
Shigeru Ban
The home of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, was built around existing trees and features a series of elliptical windows and openings. Here, these shapes become projection screens displaying views of Tokyo.
David Chipperfield
“The problem with my house was that there were so many trees, and I didn’t want to cut any trees; that was the main problem. So we are living in between the trees,” said Ban, explaining how the design first came about.
Marcio Kogan
The space belonging to Italian architect Mario Bellini replicates the combined staircase and bookshelf that reveals the architect’s love of reading, while David Chipperfield‘s installtion is dominated by a concrete wall that reflects the stark interior of his Berlin home.
Marcio Kogan
Venetian blinds line one side of the installation for Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan, allowing light to filter gently into the space, contrasting with the spectrum of light and colour that patterns the walls of the room based on Zaha Hadid‘s London studio.
Zaha Hadid
Antique warriors stand guard at the Paris home of Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, and reappear here, while the final space is based on the reading room of Studio Mumbai principal Bijoy Jain.
Doriana Fuksas
Where Architects Live was curated by Francesca Molteni and Davide Pizzigoni, and can be found in Pavilion 9 at the Rho Milan Fairgrounds from 8 to 13 April. The exhibition also includes film interviews with each architect and scale models of all eight spaces featured.
A wearable 3D-printed eyeglass that monitors breathing and pupil size to measure what people find interesting online has been developed by students at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College (+ movie).
Developed by Sanya Rai, Carine Collé and Florian Peuch, students of the RCA and Imperial College‘s joint Innovation Design Engineering course, the Amoeba is equipped with sensors designed to monitor three instinctive responses that indicate a person’s interest in what they see.
This sensory data is collated to create an intuitive alternative to bookmarking and other systems for keeping track of digital content.
“We believe that with the advent of wearable technologies, where devices will be constantly mapping every moment of our lives, organising our personal data will be a monumental task,” explained the team.
“Amoeba can help ease this process by bringing only the most interesting stuff to the forefront, making sure we never miss out on the important stuff and saving us a lot of time and effort.”
Designed in CAD and manufactured on a 3D printer, the design is, according to Sanya Rai, “a statement piece to let the world know that the wearer is immersed in research.”
The Amoeba records breathing rates using heat sensitive receptors near the wearers mouth. It has a camera embedded into the lens to measure pupil size and sensors on an arm that measure the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies with moisture levels generated by sweat.
These three elements combined create a snapshot of data about the emotional response of the wearer when they look at content.
The data is then converted into a digital signal which creates a visual map that can be viewed with Google’s Chrome browser.
According to the development team, the Amoeba has several applications including measuring the impact advertising has on potential customers.
Image showing the design process
“Amoeba reveals the true underlying changes in a user’s bio-data in order to get an honest and unbiased feedback to product developers and the industry.”
Another potential area of use is in measuring student engagement in online education. “The drop out rate from online courses is over 90 percent,” the team said. “Amoeba will help to tailor learning platforms according to the subconscious reactions of the user and thus keep him motivated and engaged on the learning platform.”
The students are currently developing the Amoeba to be able to measure interest in all digital content such as music and film, not just websites.
“Our final vision would be to have Amoeba as an embedded feature in all wearable devices so that it can help streamline all content for the user, bringing to the forefront only the most interesting stuff rather than the entire daily log of data,” said Rai.
Milan 2014: brushed steel frames surround monochrome shirts at this installation that Japanese studio Nendo has created for fashion brand COS, unveiled in Milan today (+ movie).
The COS x Nendo installation comprises a series of white shirts, which are displayed on stands and hung from the ceiling at different heights throughout the space.
Geometric brushed-steel frames in a variety of heights and widths surround the clothes, and the parts of the shirts that sit inside them are dyed with different shades of grey.
“I feel that Nendo and Cos have a lot in common with how we see things, simplicity, purity and focusing on the small details,” said Nendo founder Oki Sato. “When you look at a white shirt from COS it explains so much, so I decided to let the shirt do the talking.”
At the front of the space are five metal frames that incrementally increase in size. These surround a series of shirts, which gradually change colour from white to dark grey according to the scale of the surrounding stand.
“The white shirt is the cornerstone of our design philosophy; we love to reinvent them every season and so we were really excited that Nendo picked the shirt as a centrepiece for the installation, as it is such an important part of our collection,” said Martin Andersson, head of menswear design at COS.
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