Hasta La Ideas

It’s shot and edited like a European film of the variety one spouse drags another to see, but the following vid is a great look at how a bentwood chair is made. And not just any chair, the Arne-Jacobsen-designed Series 7 made by Republic of Fritz Hansen. It starts off with sheets of veneer, then you get to see which parts humans do and which parts the machines do:

The thing we’d love to see: Footage of how they made the Series 7 back in 1955 when it was first designed, pre-triple-CNC router.

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If the company Modular Robotics existed years ago, and if my memory of grammar school serves me correctly, here’s what would have happened: Most of us would be playing with Legos; one kid would be playing with the Cubelets seen in the video below; then we would all beat that one kid up, out of some primal sense of inferiority or insecurity. And we probably wouldn’t even take his toy, but just break it.

Cubelets are modular, robotic little bricks that perform different mechanical and sensorial tasks. You snap them together and the Sense Blocks become the “input”–i.e. detecting proximity, responding to physical stimuli–and the Action Blocks provide the output, i.e. moving, rotating, making noise.

Retail Cubelets will be produced in colors, but the prototypes seen in the video are monochrome. They are all black. To mirror the darkness that lurks within the hearts of children.

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America is back.

At this year’s North American International Auto Show, Ford and Chrysler stole the show with their exhibits and products. As they say in America, “Bigger is Better” and their exhibits were on-par with the Germans (the krauts always set the bar for exhibit design,) but much, much bigger. Besides exhibition design, both Ford and Chrysler are rolling out great new product after great new product. They both killed it; I can’t emphasize enough how well they showed.

With the exception of the vintage Corvette, the GM booth, on the other hand, wasn’t very interesting. I later realized that I didn’t take many shots of their exhibit — not to mention that there has been more than enough pictures of a hybrid disguising itself as an electric car. It has one-sixth the range of a 4-year-old Tesla Roadster and none of the beautiful proportions that made the 2007 concept car penned by Nigerian-born designer Jelani Aliyu so exciting.

Speaking of American car companies and Tesla, Tesla didn’t have a prototype Model S on the stand, but they did have an Alpha build body and powertrain in glorious raw aluminum und schteel exploded view. To fully appreciate how awesome the design engineering of this car is, watch the Vimeo films with Peter Rawlinson (formerly of Lotus and chief engineer of some of the best cars in the world) below.

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Young Belgian designer Corentin Dombrecht, showing off his work at the “101% Designed in Brussels” stand, told us that he was inspired to create his “Megaphones” speakers by the wave of protest and activism currently sweeping the globe—”just like Egypt, no?”.

So far, Corentin is producing these awesome pieces himself, but has been working hard at the fair to try and get some manufacturers interested.

More from “101% Designed in Brussels” and the rest of the fair in our gallery coming soon.

More from the Stockholm Furniture Fair
+ Charlie Heyward and Peter Bingham’s “Something” Nuts and Bolts Stool
+ oOo Design Lab’s “Book of Light”
+ SHE Studio’s “Myk” Clock
+ Clara Sjodin’s Shoe Lamp
+ Marta Mattson’s Laser-Cut Jewelry
+ Jaeuk Jung’s Amber Bottle

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