Hasta La Ideas

The awards-gala season is in full swing, and Creative Time is cooking up a night to remember at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory. The arts organization, which recently trotted out Nick Cave‘s soundsuited steeds in Grand Central terminal, will cap off the month with an April 30 benefit to honor the multitalented Julian Schnabel. Mario Batali is handling the food, daughter Lola is crafting the playlist, and the likes of Laurie Anderson and Al Pacino are lining up to praise the man of the moment in charming yet succinct video tributes. As you prepare to fetch your credit card to buy a ticket (after all, gala proceeds provide nearly a third of Creative Time’s annual budget), watch Anderson’s salute to Schnabel:

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Jólan van der Wiel‘s “Gravity” stools, tables, candleholders, and bowls appear ripped from an enchanted sea floor–or are they Magic Rocks run amok? At once otherworldly and organic, these moody forms are in fact the products of the Amsterdam-based designer’s “Gravity Tool,” an innovation that earned him top honors at last year’s DMY International Design Festival Berlin. “I admire objects that show an experimental discovery, translated to a functional design,” explains van der Wiel. “It is my belief that developing new ‘tools’ is an important means of inspiration and allows new forms to take shape.” Now, just two years out of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy designLAB, he has a “Gravity stool” at London’s Design Museum, as part of the “Designs of the Year 2013” show that opens today. This short film by Miranda Stet provides a luscious look at van der Wiel’s unique process, which is something of a team effort among opposing magnetic fields, the forces of gravity, two-component plastics, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.

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Fashion designers are unusually skilled at deploying their creativity in non-sartorial realms: Tom Ford directed one of the best films ever made, Ralph Rucci‘s transcendent works on canvas rival those he shows on the runway, and Hedi Slimane is an accomplished photographer (meanwhile, have you heard Oscar de la Renta sing?). Marc Jacobs is giving acting a go. He appears in Disconnect, a thriller directed by Henry Alex Rubin (Murderball) that arrives in theaters on April 12 and stars the likes of Jason Bateman and Alexander Skarsgård.

“My character is Harvey and I run a house for minor [in age] Internet porn. It’s all virtual. People go online and they talk to these kids about their fantasies or whatever. I’m the sort of father of them in the house—the Fagan of all these wayward kids who come stay in this house,” Jacobs told Entertainment Weekly. “In the end, I’m really not a bad character. I’m actually the one who is protecting them in a way. I’ve taken them off the streets, and they don’t get harmed. They’re doing something that is virtual, though they are talking about sex. But you can look at it two ways. Harvey isn’t a pimp, having them meet up like street hookers or giving them drugs. He provided a home for the kids. But it is sleazy.” Here’s the freshly released trailer:

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Ring! ring! It’s the future calling. With NYC’s current payphone contracts set to expire in 2014, the city is scouting for ways to modernize payphone infrastructure across the five boroughs and put all of that public space to the best possible use. Hence Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s appearance (via video link) at a December meeting of the New York Tech Meetup, where he announced the “Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge,” a competition to rally urban designers, planners, technologists, and policy experts to create physical and virtual prototypes that imagine the future of NYC’s public pay telephones. Frog Design hopped to it, and while the list of semi-finalists who will present their concepts at next Tuesday’s Demo Day has yet to be announced, something tells us Frog will be among them. In a talk on Saturday at Parsons’ Aftertaste symposium, Frog creative director Jonas Damon offered a sneak peek at the firm’s vision for payphones of the future:

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Friends, colleagues, family members, and fans of Bill Moggridge gathered recently in New York City to remember and celebrate the life of the pioneering yet playful designer, teacher, and Cooper-Hewitt director, who died last fall at the age of 69. After a moving introduction by acting director Caroline Baumann (the museum committee tasked with selecting a worthy successor to Moggridge need not look further than his longtime deputy), Smithsonian secretary Wayne Clough took to the podium, describing the man of the evening as “a perpetual pin to deflate our pomposity” and marveling at Moggridge’s take on dressing up: “He could pull off wearing a t-shirt, and I never could.”

A charming video tribute created by one of Moggridge’s two sons was followed by a discussion with Bill Buxton, David Kelley, Bruce Nussbaum, Ellen Lupton, and moderator Helen Walters. “He really knew what the future was going to bring,” said Kelley, who joined up with Moggridge and Mike Nuttall in 1991 to form IDEO and credited Moggridge with instilling an enduring openness in the global design consultancy. “He was just this kind of teacher person,” added Kelley. “I never had an interaction with him where I didn’t feel better afterwards.” Enjoy more Moggridge memories in the below video of the event.

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