Hasta La Ideas

We’ve seen a fair share of Salone previews of European firms and a couple of Japan’s big names, but let’s not forget that it’s an international affair—the multi-venue design show is as much a launchpad for emerging designers as it is a platform for established ones.

Singapore’s Creativeans, for one, is proud to present Treasures of the Little Red Dot at Salone Satellite 2011:

Singapore is a sunny island off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. With just over 5 million multicultural inhabitants and a very brief historical presence, art and design in Singapore take their inspirations from the immediate realities and its closely knitted society… from the treasures of the little red dot.

(more…)

Macro Cubes by Bente Skjøttgaard

The essential, defining character of Danish design lies in ‘intangibles’ such as superior craftsmanship and practical value—in a word, quality. MINDCRAFT11 highlights these fundamental attributes, both in terms of the exhibition’s depth and breadth, where “a new generation of Danish craftspeople interpret and challenge these traditional values in a manner that is intelligent, playful and serious.”

The Outsider / The Insider by benandsebastian

Function is the guiding principle of the exhibition, yet artisanship and artistry also remain paramount, where a strong sense of form and materials yield the overarching aesthetic.

Mother of Pearl by Louise Sass

(more…)

With the Salone less than two weeks away, we’re pleased to present a preview of Milan’s own Studio Fabio Novembre, a pair of new designs for Casamania.

First up, we have “Strip,” a rather voluptuous molded chair. The curious organic form suggests everything from a “bloomed flower” to (in the words of the designer) a “woman skirt slit that opens to new visions.” Alternately, it’s like a magnified, simplified cross-section… but of what?

(more…)

Viennese designer Thomas Feichtner will be exhibiting One to Five as part of the Design Vision Austria Exhibition during Salone 2011 in Milan’s Zona Tortona. The installation is comprised of ten previously unreleased chair designs by Feichtner, presented as 1:5 scale models—hence, the title of the exhibition. For those with a particular interest in material design, the chairs are made of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) using FDM rapid prototyping.

In fact, the exhibition is also intended to be a comment on advances in 3D modeling technology:

Developing a design all the way from a sketch to a functioning product is typically a long process which sometimes even goes on for years. The models allow the sketches to become three-dimensional objects, but their small scale entails that they remain very much in the design phase. New rapid prototyping technologies also allow concepts to surface for which no concrete approach to realization has yet been developed. In such cases, production techniques, materials and colors remain completely open. This is an experiment which seeks to present designs not as finished projects but rather as processes which have yet to be concluded. Producers can then take up designs and continue their development, thus themselves becoming part of the process almost from the very beginning. This is Feichtner’s open way of working with ideas which, at this stage, typically remain somewhat hidden.

Larger images after the jump…

(more…)

Living Room Concept for Tron Designs Corian

Disney + Corian + Lago + Us + lots of pizza = A living room concept for Milan 2011

It’s a long and (slightly) complicated story, full of unusual partnerships and unanticipated outcomes…Disney and Dupont have teamed up to exhibit in Milan this year. They decided to use two of their innovative products as the foundation the show—for Disney that was Tron: Legacy and Dupont wanted to take their well known material, Corian, into a new dimension.

The idea was to recreate the virtual world of Tron using Corian as the primary material and invite a selection of designers to propose furniture for each area of the ‘safe house’ (Kevin Flynns virtual home in the film). Invited designers and companies include Cappelini, Ernesto Meda and Lago.

Background

Domestic furniture company Lago, is known for their interior ‘systems’ and unusual take on product communication, overseen inhouse by Diego Paccagnella. Paccagnella had the idea to create ‘Apartmentos‘ to showcase the company’s products in real-life situations—inviting people to live with the furniture and configure it to their individual needs as a convincing way to show the products in action. It was at the Apartmento in Zona Tortona two years ago that we first met Diego. My collaborator, Andrew Haythorntwaite and Jordi Canudas worked on a project (Buon Apettito) that needed some ‘unauthorised’ places to exhibit and Paccagnella (who knew Canudas previously) allowed the project to be shown at the Apartmento.

When Lago was approached to design the ‘living room concept’ for the Tron/Corian project, Paccagnella invited Canudas to particpate, and as the project was quite a large one—Jordi in turn extended the invitation to Haythorthwaite and I (the three of us had collaborated several times before). Which explains the ‘us’ in the equation—myself, Andrew Hathornthwaite and Jordi Canudas—three designers who enjoy working together and share an appreciation for the process of making as a kind of ‘performance’ of design.

Andrew, Shai, Jordi

(more…)