Hasta La Ideas

Product news: industrial designer Yves Behar has added a pocket-sized version to Jawbone‘s range of Jambox wireless speakers (+ slideshow).

San Francisco electronics brand Jawbone released the Mini Jambox as the smallest in its range of speakers, which can wirelessly connect with phones, laptops and other bluetooth devices to play music.

Jawbone’s creative director Yves Behar told Dezeen that the latest speaker was developed to make listening to music on the go a more communal activity.

“People’s experience of music is pretty selfish and very much focused on earphones,” said Behar. “I think now we expect speakers to be used everywhere, from underground to office settings.”

The speakers are made from extruded aluminium, reinventing the manufacturing process from the original Jambox to reduce the number of parts and assembly steps.

“You really have to develop some manufacturing techniques that are very, very advanced in order to make a product that is affordable,” Behar said.

A CNC machine was used to create five textured patterns on the front of the speaker and users can chose between nine different metallic colours.

The speaker is managed through an app, where Mini Jamboxes in range appear as icons in their colour and texture. Many users can connect to one Mini Jambox at a time, so everyone can contribute to the music they’re listening to.

“We play the game ‘who’s music is this?’,” said Behar. “Essentially [the Mini Jambox] becomes something that allows people to jump in and play their own music.”

In Milan two year ago, tracks submitted by Dezeen readers were played through an installation of Jamboxes called Jamscape. Earlier this year Jawbone released the UP activity-tracking wristband, which monitors how you move, sleep and eat.

We’ve also featured a gadget that plays music wirelessly through vintage speakers and a wireless speaker that you wear over your sneakers.

See more design by Yves Behar »
See more speaker design »
See more products by Jawbone »

Here is some additional information sent to us by Behar:

The Making of the Mini Jambox

The Mini Jambox is the latest entry in the category-leading family of Jawbone speakers. The original Jambox design ushered in the era of the wireless speaker with critical and commercial success. When we first explored what the Mini Jambox could be we dreamed of a very small and pocketable size, of an experience so simple and yet game changing, and of materials and processes so refined they had previously only been used in top-end audio products. Jawbone design goals are to seamlessly integrate technology and everyday life. Mini Jambox is built on the foundation that life is constantly moving; with Mini Jambox you can pick up and bring your sound environment with you. We call it pocketable sound.

The design explorations for Mini Jambox started with a blank sheet and the idea to completely re-invent the wireless speaker, as we knew it. “It’s a strange moment when everyone loves your last product, and yet you realise the next one will have to be conceived and re-invented as if we were designing it for the first time,” says Yves Behar, CCO of Jawbone.

The user-centred insight and starting point for Mini is that people love the small Jambox size, and yet they want to take the product with them without hesitation about size or weight, from a jacket pocket to a small handbag. Delivering clear, high quality sound in a small space requires a very rigid enclosure with inherent structural integrity. To fulfil this need we explored many roads. Eventually aluminium extrusions combined with a very advanced and patented assembly method became the clear winner. This new approach enabled us to achieve the most efficient use of space, as outer skin and structural skeleton are one and the same. Form and function are truly intersected, as the overall size is the smallest, yet the rigid acoustic cavity affords maximum volume for the sound chamber. The extrusion and material also confers Mini with the strength and robustness needed in a physical object made for portability.

“In order to innovate, we have to take a process and push it somewhere entirely new,” says Yves. The demanding pursuit of refining the aluminium extrusion into an entirely new construction and aesthetic took twelve months, flexing what might be possible with a mechanical engineering assembly that requires fewer parts and assembly steps, stewarding major leaps in production capabilities at scale. “The result is that the Mini exterior skin is also the internal skeleton, in one fluid gesture; we are not just wrapping internal components with a sexy package, the package is the sound chamber.”

The Jawbone design language has always pursued minimal construction and geometry, made personal through the integral use of relief textures that are both personal and tactile. On Mini, we are pushing the boundary of rough and fast CNC, typically used to machine mechanical internal details. We flip the use of this usually hidden process, employing it externally to reveal beautiful capabilities for textures. We used large CNC cutting bits programmed to sculpt a few marks in the aluminium at high speed; the resulting intersections create new unexpected patterns. The beautiful reliefs, enhanced by reflecting light on Mini, are the result of a craft methodology developed with small machine shop partners, requiring a deep collaboration between designers, machinists, and engineers.

The CNC process innovation has transformed what’s both possible and efficient in using aluminium. We turned CNC, an industrial process, into a brush we can paint with. Mini Jambox speakers’ highly specialised perforations and unique framework channel sound for clear, elegantly routed sound. Functionally driven design that is also expressive.

The five textures and nine anodised colours allow people to make Mini into their own personality. The textures also provide a tactile grip, and each of them is carefully matched to an anodised colour that shows aluminium relief best.

From the design to the user interface and packaging, we believe Mini Jambox is our crown jewel of Jawbone design and craft. “Every element goes back to the purest expression of simplicity, performance, and elegance,” says Yves. Mini combines beautiful design and experience at the most minimal size. Providing unparalleled and uncompromised listening in a breakthrough highly portable mini package, Mini Jambox blasts rich sounds at high volume. The integrity of the Mini materials and craft enhances our music experience in ways we could only have dreamed off.

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Jawbone appeared first on Dezeen.

News: industrial designer Tom Dixon has handed over the MOST design show he founded in Milan two years ago to former employee Will Sorrell, who plans to expand the brand to Istanbul and New York in 2014.

Tom Dixon, who instigated MOST in 2012 as a new epicentre for design during the annual Milan design week, has now passed the brand to Will Sorrell, son of London Design Festival chairman and co-founder Sir John Sorrell.

“I’ve taken over the running of the show – they’ve handed the brand over to me,” said Sorrell, who previously managed the show as a member of Dixon’s team. “Obviously [Tom Dixon] is not an events company, it’s a design and manufacturing company, so we were always talking about what would happen after the first couple of years.”

Dixon will stay closely involved with the brand and will exhibit at next year’s show in Milan. “They are also putting in a large contribution in terms of giving me support and advice,” said Sorrell.

He plans to expand MOST in 2014 to host events coinciding with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York and Istanbul Design Week.

“I thought there was room for a bigger satellite show [in New York] that’s a little more concise and more focussed on European brands,” he explained, adding that he’d like to see the city come together under a more coherent umbrella like the London Design Festival – which was conceived by his father with Ben Evans in 2003.

“New York design week is a very disjointed thing, not to say there’s not good design there but there’re a lot of events,” Will Sorrell said. “I’d love to see the New York events come together and create a solid design week or design festival.”

Istanbul, meanwhile, represents the meeting of east and west in design for the company. “It might be a good opportunity for brands who are looking at Western Europe more, to explore internationally,” he told us. “I think we’ve got to stop thinking of design as being in Western Europe and North America – it’s a completely global profession with people and ideas moving all around the place, so I think it’s time for people in the western world to take other designers more seriously.”

MOST has been located among the steam trains, planes and ships of Milan’s Museum of Science and Technology in a former monastery for the past two years, and Sorrell says he wants MOST to continue to present design in unexpected venues. “It’s great to combine a mix of selling design shows and creative projects – like Dezeen Studio and Faye Toogood’s installation – in a non trade-show environment,” he said. “The last thing you want to do is go to another trade show.”

Will Sorrell studied at New York University and University of the Arts London, before working for The British Council and his parents’ charity The Sorrell Foundation. He joined Tom Dixon as project manager for MOST in 2009.

Read more about MOST on Dezeen »
See our series of movies filmed as part of Dezeen Studio at MOST 2012 »
Read more about architecture and design by Tom Dixon »

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Designer and TV presenter Naomi Cleaver included a map of flight paths over Heathrow and a stuffed deer in the shared facilities at this student housing development in Shoreditch, east London (+ slideshow).

Naomi Cleaver was tasked with creating different identities for all 24 public spaces and common areas at iQ Shoreditch, which is housed in a new building designed by London firm Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands close to Old Street station.

Cleaver mixed antique furniture with contemporary designs to give each of the common rooms a unique character. “With competitors’ projects having a particularly corporate feel I chose to characterise the spaces by drawing on the locale, while aiming to create a comforting home from home for an international community,” she told Dezeen.

The flight paths across London during a 24-hour period are depicted using black string on the wall of the twelfth-floor common room. TV rooms filled with beanbags have giant murals of football players or Pop Art graphics on the walls.

The dining areas are furnished with brightly coloured chairs to accompany long wooden tables and each room has different pedant lights over the surfaces.

A taxidermy deer set amongst ferns and a barbed wire fence is mounted in a box above the bar in the conservatory. In the reception, computers are housed in brass cages and a tree protrudes from the centre of a circular seat.

Earlier this year a student housing project in London with a fake facade was voted the worst building in the UK. We’ve recently featured a wooden house for students that has a floor area of just ten square metres.

See more student housing design »
See more architecture and design in London »

Read on for more information sent to us by the designer:

Developer raises the bar on London student accommodation with a flagship £120m development given a first-class celebrity makeover.

From the stuffed deer in the conservatory to a copper studded, Northern Lights-inspired rooftop lounge and old school desks surrounded by walls pasted with Shakespeare quotes, it’s clear iQ Shoreditch is student accommodation like no other.

Not only have the 24 common rooms and public spaces here been intelligently created by celebrity interior designer, Naomi Cleaver, this state-of-the-art development is the first of its kind for developer, Quintain.

The company, behind the nationwide iQ student accommodation provider, are aiming to set a new standard of student quarters in the capital, driven by fierce competition in the sector and demands from increasingly discerning international students.

“We are setting a new baseline for quality student accommodation within central London,” said developer James Crow. And to do so, he drafted in the help of Naomi, made famous for presenting many of Channel 4’s ratings-busting, home interest shows such as “Honey, I Ruined the House” and “Grand Designs: Trade Secrets”.

“There have been numerous new entrants into the student accommodation market in recent years, with the quality of the products now available increasing with the greater levels of competition, but this is also being driven by students’ expectations and the willingness for some students to pay for higher levels of quality and amenity, particularly the international market,” he said.

To give the development that extra edge in the market, Naomi was commissioned to bring a “fresh” take to the development, maximising a “blank canvas brief” to draw the trendy Shoreditch factor from the outside in.

“Naomi demonstrated genuine enthusiasm and excitement for the project and maximised the blank canvas brief we gave her to capture the ‘Shoreditch factor’ within the building,” said James.

The location remains key here, including the peculiarly maverick spirit of Shoreditch and its associations with celebrated “YBAs”. The building also sits in the thick of the city in Zone 1 with excellent transport links, including Old Street tube station and several bus routes on the doorstep; a location which played an important role in inspiring Naomi’s designs.

“Our strategy was to celebrate the famously vibrant character of the location as well as creating a sense of home for a community of students from across the world,” said Naomi.

Naomi was involved in deciding on the use, as well as the look and feel of the rooms and commissioned young designers and artists to realise some of her ideas, which were inspired by flight paths above London, traditional Oxbridge colleges, the confessional and the shed to astronomy and primitivism.

“We were briefed, I made a series of presentations for sign off, and then we organised ourselves to complete works in a limited timescale which meant ordering everything and putting it into storage in one of my buildings in Devon.

“When the time came we shipped everything up and I have a brilliant project manager who oversaw the bulk of the implementation while I actually moved into the building during the last week to oversee final details,” she said.

Naomi had only five weeks on-site to implement her schemes. But her experience as a Channel 4 presenter equipped her well for the challenge.

“Working to the limited budgets and crazy time schedules of the television shows I have worked on certainly gave me an edge in this project and it was one of the most satisfying projects for me to do because, while the budget was limited and the timescale even more so, my client gave me the liberty to be very conceptual. I like design that makes sense of ideas.”

Examples of where the context provided inspiration for Naomi abound here at iQ Shoreditch. The 12th floor common room, the Star Lounge, features a depiction of the accumulation of flight paths across London during 24 hours in string art, where what you see out of the window at that height is brought inside.

The “visual anarchy” of Shoreditch inspired the scheme for the main common room, a subverted Oxbridge or Ivy League University Common Room, while the “pavementscape” designed by local architects Tonkin Lui was the reference point for the Reception area, which neatly ties into some of the motifs designed by the architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, such as green walls in the adjacent courtyard.

“As the brief required the location of computer monitors in the Reception I designed pods made out of brass grille, the type that sits in front of radiators, inspired by the privacy of the confessional and the phone booth.

“I was also keen to develop both the language of learning and the idea of just being young. The Study Rooms for example are furnished with desks and chairs reclaimed from a Manchester college and papered with misprinted sheets of a Shakespeare play,” said Naomi.

The television rooms are papered with murals and furnished with bean bags. “And then there is the role of whimsy,” added Naomi. “For the Games Rooms I conceived an inside out shed, lining the walls with waney-edged boards. And for what’s called The

Link, a space adjacent to the Main Common Room, I continued the idea of the subversion of tradition as well as inside-outside space to create a modern conservatory, complete with hanging baskets and a stuffed deer.”

From antique leather sofas and chairs, layered Persian carpets and dining tables made out of reclaimed scaffolding planks, plus computer counters made from reclaimed lab tops and table-tops made from recycled yoghurt pots, 100% of the materials used in implementing Naomi’s designs at iQ Shoreditch were either reclaimed or environmentally sustainable.

“Resourcefulness is key to my practice, as is UK manufacture, where possible,” said Naomi, who commissioned Stuart Scott in Wiltshire to make the circular leather seating in the Reception; British design team Hendzel and Hunt to produce panelling and fireplaces in the main common room from reclaimed hardwoods; Debbie Smyth to make string art; Oval Workshops to build the zinc and hazel bar in The Link; and in the meeting room Naomi designed a table which could be split apart to create individual “stations” or wheeled together to make one large table, which was made in the Cotswolds by Forgeability, with the tops made out of recycled yoghurt pots.

The concept of “home” also played an important part in Naomi’s designs: “Student Accommodation is as much an expression of home as anywhere else but much of the student accommodation I had researched looked corporate to me. While security and efficiency are important so is nurture and play.

“And so is the fact that students study very different subjects. I designed an Art Room with large tables for art, fashion and design students to work on, with the walls lined with pinboard material and a music room which one music student has told us is the best practice room in any educational building in London.”

For Naomi, what really sets iQ Shoreditch apart however is the 12th floor common room and its specially commission original wall art: “I love the chance to commission art from a young artist. It is a cherished opportunity,” said Naomi.

For the developer: “If I were a student, I’d be drawn to live here by the location, combined with the quality of product and service in a fun and exciting setting,” said James.

“The variety and quantum of common and social spaces for the students to congregate and socialise in is also unusual for student accommodation.”

For student, Amani Soboh: “I love the television lounge on my floor. When my friends come here I take them to every single common room and we go up to the 12th floor and come down the stairs. They are always shocked and say “it’s pretty much the best student accommodation I think I’ve seen.”

From developer: “iQ’s reputation is largely built on customer service, we offer an enhanced level of service to most of our competitors, e.g. we have the reception & office open 7 days a week, a 24/7 presence on site with security all through the night, on site maintenance team, parcel collection etc. that all differentiate us from our competitors.

iQ Shoreditch is a 100% studios (self-contained unit with kitchen), which is only really viable in London. As before, it offers greater variety of common spaces – but that has been driven by the 100% studios as the more typical model of student accommodation has student bedrooms arranged around a shared kitchen/living space that provide the social function.

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Naomi Cleaver appeared first on Dezeen.

Graphic designer Cristina Vanko has been writing out all the SMS messages she sends by hand with a calligraphy pen.

Calling the project Modern Day Snail Mail, Cristina Vanko began to answer friends’ text messages with photographs of handwritten replies after finding her father’s old calligraphy pen.

“Basically, calligraphy is something that people just don’t get enough of today,” Vanko said in a post about the project on her blog, explaining that the soft gold tip of the pen allows for different thicknesses of stroke.

“The harder you press down on the pen’s nib, the thicker the line. When less pressure is given, the thinner the line,” she explained.

“I quickly began creating illustrious letterforms with the perfect balance of thick and thin strokes,” she continued. “I wrote out the alphabet, popular phrases, curse words (that looked beautiful might I add) and then I sent doodle-filled text messages to a couple of my design-y friends notifying them about the magic of this pen.”

“After texting some doodles, I decided to send handwritten messages to people for that next week,” she said.

Some friends responded with their own hand-written messages and the designer concluded that “people feel more ‘special’ when they received handwritten messages.”

She also noted that accuracy in spelling and grammar matter much more in a handwritten note and that modern culture relies heavily on emoticons for communication.

Cristina Vanko graduated in graphic design and Spanish from Indiana University in 2011 and now works as a multidisciplinary designer in Chicago.

Other stories about lettering on Dezeen include a typeface with strands of human hair, a font made of impossible 3D shapes and another font made of sugar.

See more stories about typography »

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by Cristina Vanko appeared first on Dezeen.

News: London firm Allford Hall Monaghan Morris has won a competition to design the new Scotland Yard headquarters for the London Metropolitan Police.

Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), who are currently also working on Google’s new London headquarters, will renovate the riverside Curtis Green building in Whitehall – a former police station – to replace the existing New Scotland Yard building in Westminster.

The architects propose “a police headquarters that will be more open and accessible, and will help the Met reconnect with the public.” It will feature a new public entrance pavilion, extensions to the existing building and a series of public spaces, designed in collaboration with specialist architects Haverstock.

The well-known revolving sign will be retained and relocated, as will the Eternal Flame and Roll of Honour.

Paul Monaghan, a director at AHMM, said: “This is a very important project for AHMM with the opportunity to work with one of the most significant and longest established law enforcement bodies in the world. We look forward to working with the Metropolitan Police Service to develop a building that supports them in their changing role within the city.”

The police will move into the new building in 2015, while the old building will be sold to raise funds that will be reinvested in frontline policing.

AHMM saw off four other shortlisted practices including Foster + Partners and Allies and Morrison to win the competition, which was organised by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

“Through the careful extension of the public realm across the site and consideration of its neighbours in massing and materiality terms, these proposals will serve to strengthen this cohesion,” said RIBA competitions adviser Bill Taylor.

“Weaving the heritage and culture of the Metropolitan Police into the fabric of the building and the spaces that surround it, the proposals strike a balance between respect for what already exists and the desire of the client to present a new, open and progressive face to the community they serve,” he added.

AHMM presented proposals for a Google campus in London’s King’s Cross earlier this year and also recently completed a London hospice designed to look like an oversized house.

See more architecture in London »

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police headquarters appeared first on Dezeen.