Hasta La Ideas

Movie: Katrin Schön of garden trade fair Spoga+Gafa shows Dezeen around the Garden Unique section of this year’s show and discusses the growing trend for outdoor cooking in this movie filmed in Cologne.

Garden Unique is a showcase of premium garden furniture at the Spoga+Gafa trade fair, which took place at Koelnmesse in Cologne earlier in September.

“We do this area especially for the furniture traders,” explains Schön, project manager of this year’s show. “In Germany outdoor living is very popular.”

Schön says that the market for cooking and eating outside is growing rapidly and there is now a demand not just for grills and barbecues, but full outdoor kitchens.

“The Germans love grilling, the grilling market is the fastest growing market in recent years,” she says. “It’s a trend to have an outdoor kitchen.”

“Not only the Germans, I think the Europeans like to be outside and here at the fair you have a whole range of products for it.”

One of the brands showing a range of outdoor kitchens at this year’s show was German company OCQ. Nadine Pollex of OCQ says the trend is due to the increasing size and importance of outdoor spaces.

“Outdoor spaces continue to grow, people have big lounges and big tables,” she says. “There are guests and guests like to eat, so you need an outdoor kitchen.”

There were many garden products besides kitchens at Garden Unique, including an array of chairs, tables and daybeds.

One of the more unusual products on show was a shower that you connect to a garden hose by Swedish company Röshults. Tobias Lindberg of Röshults agrees that outdoor living is becoming more and more popular.

“Our experience is that people want to be more outside,” he says. “We see all these new types of modern architectural houses and we want to do products for those types of houses.”

See all our stories about garden furniture »
See all our stories about parks and gardens »

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an outdoor kitchen” appeared first on Dezeen.

This photo booth detects when subjects kiss, fires a high-tech OLED flash and captures the moment on a low-fi thermal print-out (+ movie).

Visitors to the Thermobooth, by Vienna designers taliaYstudio, stand on a “smart carpet” connected to a MaKey MaKey circuit board.

When subjects make skin contact by touching or kissing, an electrical circuit is completed. This triggers the camera and causes an array of circular OLED lights to provide a flash of light. A thermal printer then prints a photo.

OLEDs – organic light-emitting diodes – emit light across a surface rather than from a point, as explained in this movie we made last year.

The Thermobooth will debut at Vienna Design Week in the Austrian capital this week.

“We wanted to create a booth where when two people touched each other a photo would be taken and two copies of the picture would print out in a quick and dirty manner,” says Talia Radford of taliaYstudio, who created Thermobooth in collaboration with digital designer Jonas Bohatsch.

“We built the processing unit using a computer and its camera, an Arduino, a MaKey Makey, a flash and a thermal printer.”

The first version of Thermobooth was housed in a found Ikea chest of drawers and presented at a party in Vienna earlier this year. “It was really ugly but did the trick and the guests went quite mad about it.”

The studio then approached lighting brand OSRAM, who provided circular OLEDs to power the flash. “We really like the light the OLED gives out, even when we lower the resistance so that they give out more light,” says Radford. “They don’t blind you and they have this beautiful soft illuminating quality about them.”

The studio decided to stick with thermal printouts since “thermal printing is quick and dirty in its look and it holds some of the nostalgia of instant analogue photography,” Radford explains.

The final version of the project features an irregular cloud of circular, mirror-fronted OLEDs mounted on painted steel poles. A thermal printer is housed in a triangular orange box set atop further steel poles.

Thermobooth will be premiered at Argentinierstrasse 11, Vienna from 27 September to 6 October as part of Vienna Design Week.

Here’s some more info from the designers:

Thermobooth puts a new spin on the photo booth experience by combining a more human based interaction with electronics, a high-tech OLED mirror that acts as a flash and display, a camera, conductive plates and thermal printing technology into a photo studio setting.

The Thermobooth features a new shutter release system in which skin contact between two people triggers a set of processes that result in a glorious lo-fi instant thermal-printed picture.

Yes, it takes a picture when you touch each other! We are opening a stage for playfulness and the unexpected.

The idea originated over a coffee between Talia Radford and media artist Jonas Bohatsch whilst planning the studio´s 2-year party. Talia wanted to create a playful environment that continued exploring the studio´s ongoing theme into more emotional interactions with electronics, and Jonas wanted to continue experimenting with thermal printing technology. The thermobooth idea was born and the beta version tried and tested.

The studio cheeckily pitched the idea to Osram, thus introducing an innovation in the use of OLED-mirror technology as a flash. The project will launch during the Vienna Design Week 2013.

The Thermobooth is the first of a group of collaborative projects between taliaYstudio and Osram´s OLED technology.

The project was made possible by departure and the collaboration project “Illuminating Technology” with Osram Opto Semiconductors GmbH.

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by taliaYstudio appeared first on Dezeen.

Angular cutaways create apertures through the walls, floors and ceilings of this house in the Bousou Peninsula mountains of Japan by architect Yuusuke Karasawa (+ slideshow).

Divided into eight equal portions, the wooden house was designed by Yuusuke Karasawa as a perfect cube with four rooms on each of its two floors.

Three-dimensional holes cut through the structure at the points where spaces meet one another, allowing views across different rooms as well as between storeys.

“The partition walls and ceilings of these eight spaces are interrupted by six small cubes that create gaps in the walls and ceilings, providing visual connections between the various rooms,” said Karasawa.

“Although I spaced the cubes out, the interrelatedness of their angles of inclination connect them, creating a sense of continuity,” he added.

The cutaway sections also help to distribute light through the house. “Beams of sunlight come from unexpected directions and crisscross within the interior, bringing out more layers of complexity to the already diverse interior condition,” Karasawa said.

Positioned on the eastern edge of Tokyo Bay, the house provides a weekend retreat for a family who play golf at nearby country clubs.

The four ground floor rooms comprise a kitchen, a living room, a studio and an entrance lobby, each with white walls and timber flooring.

A steel staircase winds up to the level above, where a large hallway and two bedrooms are accompanied by a glazed bathroom.

The timber-clad facade features lopsided square windows on each side, offering views out towards the surrounding mountainous landscape.

Other Japanese residences we’ve featured this week include one that brings light in through the roof, one with a series of small attic spaces and a narrow timber house with paper thin shutters folding out from its walls. See more Japanese houses »

Here’s some more information from the architects:

Villa Kanousan

This is a weekend cottage situated within the deep mountains area of midland of Bousou Peninsula. The site is located on Kanou Mountain, Kimitsu city. Traditional Japanese painting artist, Kaii Higashiyama(1909-99) once mentioned that he was awakened to a landscape painting by the majestic ravine scenery of this site-this cottage is sitting on the slope looking down this ravine.

The exterior shape of this building appears to be a simple cube. However, the interior consists of two layers of the traditional square plan, while a cubic volume is inserted to the points of intersection produced by the wall surfaces, the floor surfaces and the ceiling that divide the space.

The intersecting angle of each cube is defined by the rule of an algorithm, producing the most prominent character of this project – that adjacent cubes are tilted in a definite angle against each other.

The rotation angle of the cubes defined by algorithmic rule dissects the interior volume into various spaces according to the header forms of the cutting plane, providing diverse spatial conditions as each individual room.

The interior produced by this method have diverse characteristics for each space although the certain sense of order is given to the whole building since the setting of the cube angle is not random.

This condition allows to experience the coexistence of the order and the diversity as antinomy based on the physical sensation of the space. It can be said that such coexistence of order and diversity is the most significant characteristic of the architectural space produced by an algorithmic rule.

The toplight on the ceiling brings in the sunlight and filled up the room during the daytime. Beams of the sunlight come from unexpected direction and crisscrosses within the interior, bringing out more layers of complexity to the already diverse interior condition.

The initial rotation angle of the cube is fixed according to the slope angle of the site, therefore the magnificent natural scenery is reflected and articulated to the spatial conditions of the interior space. The occupants of the space can feel the sense of unity to the scenery visible outside of the windows.

This weekend cottage was completed under the unique methodology of configuring the spaces – while it exists within the grand nature, and its surrounding scenery is taken into the space. The result would be the new and original physical sensation and experience of the space.

Project name: Villa Kanousan
Location: Kimitsu, Chiba, Japan
Design: 2007-2008
Construction: 2009
Architects: Yuusuke Karasawa Architects (principal in charge: Yuusuke Karasawa)
Consultants: gh9 Co Ltd., mechanical (air conditioning)
General contractor: Eiger Co Ltd – Noriaki Fujii,Yousuke Ozaki
Structural system: timber
Materials used: rose mahogany, exterior: plaster board (emulsion paint finish. Flooring and carpet , interior.
Site area: 459.03 square metres
Built area: 51.83 square metres
Total floor: 87.69 square metres

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Yuusuke Karasawa appeared first on Dezeen.

Interview: Bradford Shellhammer, founder and chief design officer of Fab, explains why the company dropped the “flash sales” model to become both a manufacturer and online retailer of design. In an interview with Dezeen he discusses how Fab is disrupting the industry, how it can help designers and how it “absolutely” wants to open physical stores.

“Some design retailers see us as a threat,” he said, but argued that Fab is raising the profile of design. “The more people talk about it, the more awareness there is, the bigger the pie is for everyone.”

Some people will always want to walk into a physical store to buy furniture, he said, adding that younger customers are increasingly comfortable shopping on their smartphones – and want to buy cheaper, less elitist products.

“We’re talking to people who’ve never heard of the Conran Shop before, let alone heard of Charles and Ray Eames, Jasper Morrison, Knoll, Vitra, Moooi,” he said. “They don’t know what any of that stuff is. These are people who live on their phones and they just know if it’s cool or not. They’re a group of people who would be intimidated by walking into a Conran Shop.”

Shellhammer spoke to Dezeen at the Conran Shop Marylebone in London, where Fab held its latest Disrupting Design event. This saw young designers presenting their products to a jury in the hope that Fab will put them into production.

“I have dozens, if not hundreds, of stories of designers whose lives have changed through selling on Fab,” he said, explaining that Fab offers young designers an alternative to self-production or royalties.

Fab would like to open its own physical stores, he admitted. “A Fab store would have to have fashion, have design, have some kind of food and cultural element, and it would have diffuse technology – it couldn’t just be a store, because what’s the point?” he said.

Together with Jason Goldberg, Shellhammer launched Fab in 2011 as a flash-sale site for designer goods and has grown in just two years into a $1 billion dollar company with sales in around 30 countries and 600 employees. Acquisitions along the way included UK flash-sales start-up Llustre and German site Casacanda.

However in July it announced it was switching its strategy away from flash sales – which involved selling discounted products for a limited time – and towards the more traditional retail approach of developing original products and holding inventory. Over 100 employees at its European headquarters in Berlin were laid off as it centralised its global operations in New York.

“[Fab] definitely is disruptive to the design retail and supply chain,” said Shellhammer. “But I think we’re also disrupting a lot of people’s perceptions of what design is. I think there are still a lot of people within the design world who turn their nose up at Fab, but more and more we’re winning them over.”

Shellhammer admitted that Fab’s reputation suffered during its spectacular growth. “For the sake of putting more and more products on the site, a bit of the curation was lost,” he said. “I do think that looking back, one of the things I’d like to take back is that, for a while, Fab did rely too heavily on kitsch and gimmick.”

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview:

Marcus Fairs: Tell us how Fab’s business model has changed.

Bradford Shellhammer: Fab is now in the process of pivoting its business once again. Previously we launched as a marketplace for designers: emerging younger talents who could not get into traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and those whose products would be shunned by big-box retailers from Amazon to Walmart to whatever.

Over the evolution we realised that wasn’t necessarily a sustainable business because we weren’t actually taking inventory. So although our buyers were taking really spectacular and wonderful products and uncovering designers and telling their stories, there was also the whole back side of operating a retail business, which is the inventory side and shipping things quickly and fast. And in a world of Amazon that is the expectation: regardless of how special or unique the product is, people need to get it quickly.

So previously we had a business model which was called “sell first,” which is where we would find something great, we would vet it, take photography and present it to the world. Then we’d buy it from the designers and ship it to the customer. That could make for a 20-day lead time. And people don’t want to wait that long, especially for a bag or a glass or a pair of shoes.

So what we’re doing now is moving our business to an inventory-planning model, which is like a traditional store. And also we’re moving to developing and manufacturing our own products, which is why we’re here today. So that’s a big shift in our business too.

Marcus Fairs: What difference will it make to designers?

Bradford Shellhammer: Previously we were simply buying other people’s products, but we realised pretty quickly that a lot of designers whose products we were selling weren’t scaling their businesses effectively because they were often buying their raw materials at retail [prices]. Like they were going into a hardware shop. They had no scale, they could not leverage, they did not have the capital to go any buy mass amounts of wood to bring the price down on their products.

So what we were realising was that we had this really unique opportunity to tap into this designer group that we have worked with, who have not only designed things but who have up until now made things, who really don’t want to be makers. They want to be designers. And all the stuff that goes along with that – the manufacturing, the marketing, the sales, the inventorying.

We are now in the process of going to those people and saying: “we can take that part of the process away from you; you can carry on designing. We’re not going to knock you off like other big retailers, but we’ll pay you and put your name up there and say this was your idea and that you designed it, and you’ll come along with us on the manufacturing and design process so that the quality is to your liking”. But because we have such a larger audience and we ship to 30 countries, we can get it at a much better price.

Marcus Fairs: So in some ways you’re acting like a traditional producer or manufacturer, and a traditional store, at the same time.

Bradford Shellhammer: Yeah! And I’m trying to think who else do that. I guess a lot of big American companies like Target and the like do that. But not many people; they usually do one or the other.

Marcus Fairs: When you talk about design, what do you mean? We’re here in Conran, which sells high European design, quite expensive, very well made. And then there’s the cheaper, more gimmicky stuff. You seem to have both.

Bradford Shellhammer: It’s not about the price point for me; it’s about whether there’s something special or cool about it. But I think Fab has sometimes gone too gimmicky. That’s something that we’ve learned over the past two years: that for the sake of putting more and more products on the site, a bit of the curation was lost.

But I don’t think I’d ever want to give up the more humorous things, the quirky things. The world of serious design is really boring to me. I want to have some fun; I want to laugh. I like humour and I like kitsch. But kitsch needs to come in dribs and drabs rather than overload. And I do think that looking back, one of the things I’d like to take back is that, for a while, Fab did rely too heavily on kitsch and gimmick.

Marcus Fairs: I was told the best-selling product at one stage was a cardboard cat scratcher or something.

Bradford Shellhammer: Yeah. At one time it was a cardboard cat scratcher! That was actually a pretty basic item. It was really just a simple block of corrugated cardboard with no decals, no colour, nothing. It’s actually a very pretty object; a functional, affordable object that people needed. Shockingly! I think we sold three or four thousand of them last holiday season.

Marcus Fairs: Is design popular enough to sustain a business of your size?

Bradford Shellhammer: It can be! You’re recording me on an iPhone so I’d say yes probably. I think so. There are lots of businesses who have proven that design does matter. That’s one of the things a lot of people ask, especially when we started: is design too niche, is it too small a world? And I’m like, no. Maybe what they define as design is too small.

In an article about us recently, Murray Moss – who is the highest of the high in design – said Fab is broadening the definition of what design could be. I’m not being so grand as to say our store is forcing people to think differently about what design is, but I do think maybe we’re enticing people to talk about and understand design more than they did before. And we’re not coming along and saying that in a serious way, although a lot of the things we sell are very serious.

Marcus Fairs: You called this event Disrupting Design. How disruptive is your business to design retail and design supply chains?

Bradford Shellhammer: I think it’s more than just disruptive to design retail and supply chains. It definitely is disruptive to design retail and supply chain but we’re not the first company to come along and disrupt traditional retail. But I think we’re also disrupting a lot of people’s perceptions of what design is. I think there are still a lot of people within the design world who turn their nose up at Fab, but more and more we’re winning them over.

Casper Vissers from Moooi has been a big fan. He calls it “turbulence”. We’re getting people to think about what design is. I don’t want design to be something that’s kept in a glass case or put in a museum; something that’s elitist. Design and luxury don’t have to be the same thing. Especially in the United States, design is confused for something that’s elitist and out of reach.

So a big part of the mission of Fab is to say there is an alternative to buying things that are mass-produced, that are from your limited retail choices at the mall on the corner. If it’s a piece of jewellery or a backpack or a sofa, there should be something that’s an option for more people. At a better price than what’s available now.

The idea of a $10,000 sofa just doesn’t seem right to me. I just don’t understand it. Why can’t the people who can’t afford a $10,000 sofa have something a little more special too? That’s what we’re trying to do at Fab.

Marcus Fairs: We’re here at Conran… but aren’t you a threat to their business model?

Bradford Shellhammer: Yes and no. Jasper Conran and I met and we hit it off and this is something that two friends decided to do together. I have great respect for what his father did. It’s very much alive in what Fab is all about. It’s this mixture of things found all over the world with icons of design so it’s a big honour to be here.

Marcus Fairs: Jasper doesn’t see you as a threat?

Bradford Shellhammer: I know for a fact that some design retailers see us as a threat but the more people talk about it, the more awareness there is, the bigger the pie is for everyone. There’s always going to be the person that wants to walk into a shop, sit down on a sofa and touch something.

But the products of the world are endless. I don’t have to sell the same things as the Conran shop or other retailers. We sell some of the same brands as Conran, but we’re not speaking to the same customer. Our customers are much younger, they’re buying things at a much lower price point. The Conran customer is an older customer with a bit more money.

We’re talking to people who’ve never heard of The Conran Shop before, let alone heard of Charles and Ray Eames, Jasper Morrison, Knoll, Vitra, Moooi. They don’t know what any of that stuff is. These are people who live on their phones and they just know if it’s cool or not. They’re a group of people who would be intimidated by walking into a Conran shop.

The whole point of Fab is that I don’t want a world where everyone buys things in the same place … I would hate it if other retailers shrivel up and die. But that’s what was happening in New York and America. Design companies were going out of business and a lot of people who were making things just didn’t have a place to sell their stuff. So part of the inspiration for Fab was to give them a platform. And the people that were here today, they couldn’t just walk into the buying office of the Conran shop, or the MoMA shop or whoever.

Marcus Fairs: It’s tough for designers. They can pitch to an established brand and more than likely receive terrible royalties or they can produce themselves and have to worry about manufacturing, marketing, selling and shipping.

Bradford Shellhammer: Or you can make something for a retailer that has scale; that can sell a lot of products. That’s the beauty of what we have. Designers can make more money than they would at one of these old-school design manufacturing brands licencing their products, because we have an audience.

Marcus Fairs: And do you have those success stories? Are designers making a living from sales on Fab?

Bradford Shellhammer: I have dozens, if not hundreds, of stories of designers whose lives have changed through selling on Fab. Who have quit their day jobs, hired assistants and focussed 100% of their energy and attention to their craft because of Fab. I don’t yet have stories where the people whose products we manufactured are doing that, because we’re just starting down that road. I’m hoping we can soon start doing that.

But yeah, I get letters all the time saying “I got out of credit card debt because of Fab” or “I quit my day job”, “I hired my first assistant”, “We leased an office space”, “Our business is growing” There’s a woman in Delaware who designs jewellery; she actually designed this earring for me. She bought a house. She put a down payment on a house from the money she made selling jewellery on Fab.

I’ve been showered with really unique gifts from Marcus Kirby of Future Maps – who was here today – because of the amount of sales of his maps. It’s not just a nice order for a few hundred pieces; it’s helping them sustain their business.

The flip-side is there are also people on Fab who are not seeing a difference. More and more though those are the more established brands. We do best with things people haven’t seen before. I’m not making a difference to Vitra’s bottom line.

Marcus Fairs: How many designers have taken part in the Disrupting Design callout and how many will get their products into production?

Bradford Shellhammer: We did it in Milan first [in April] and we had 250 people show up and it was crazy. We did it in New York next [in May] and we had less than 100 people. It was still crazy. And we’ve done it again today and I felt like today was the best.

But I think the calibre of the stuff is improving too. In Milan we shortlisted about 10 items and we have about four or five things that are going into production. They will be launched at least in time for Milan next year. In New York we had more things shortlisted; we had less stuff but better stuff. We have about ten things in production right now.

Even outside of these orchestrated meetings we’ve done a really good job of letting people contact Fab with ideas. We’ve taken a lot of chances on people that nobody else would take a chance on, and over and over again those have been the hits.

Marcus Fairs: Can you envisage a time when you have physical stores?

Bradford Shellhammer: Absolutely! Of course! But I don’t think it’s necessary. A lot of people, even within our company, say “we need to have physical retail eventually because people want to touch and feel things” and I’m like, actually, no. That’s an old way of thinking. Young people actually don’t. If it’s not in here [waving iPhone] they’re not going to engage with it. But the idea of bringing Fab to life in a setting and capturing some of the energy you saw here today would be really wonderful.

Marcus Fairs: So it’s something that appeals to you; it’s not something you’re actually planning?

Bradford Shellhammer: We do have one showroom now. We acquired a company in Germany called Massive Concept and it’s now been called Fab Designed By You. It’s our custom furniture website, which is separate from Fab currently. Where you can go and make a wood table to any specification you want; it’s made by hand in Poland and ships directly to your door, and it’s a lot less than any other custom furniture you can get in the world and it’s amazing quality.

So we have this small showroom in Hamburg. So we’re tiptoeing into showroom space and playing around with retail there. And we’ll probably grow that concept too. But in terms of a Fab store: a Fab store would have to have fashion, have design, have some kind of food and cultural element, and it would have diffuse technology – it couldn’t just be a store, because what’s the point? We’re not actively solving that problem but we talk about it all the time. It’s definitely something we want to do. But there’s a million things we want to do! So it’s deciding which way to go. You can’t do everything at once.

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co-founder Bradford Shellhammer appeared first on Dezeen.

News: rapper Kanye West has revealed he is frustrated he’s not taken seriously as a “real designer” and that he plans to move into architecture.

In an interview on BBC Radio 1 last night, West spoke to DJ Zane Lowe about how he wants to expand his creative field beyond music and fashion.

“I want to do product, I am a product person,” said West. “Not just clothing but water bottle design, architecture… I make music but I shouldn’t be limited to once place of creativity.”

The interview was originally intended to be about his latest album Yeezus but West spoke about his creative passions and ambition throughout: “I hang around architects mostly,” he said. “People that wanna make things as dope as possible.”

“I’m learning what I want,” he said. “This is the reason why I’m working with five architects at a time. The time spent in a bad apartment, I can’t get that back. But the education I can get from working on it is priceless.”

West has already established himself as a fashion designer, having released his Air Yeezy trainers for Nike in 2009 and showed his DW Kanye West womenswear collections at Paris Fashion Week. “I spend 80% of my time on [fashion design] and 20% of my time on music,” he explained.

He said he started designing trainers at the age of five: “I’ve got a very particular specific take on men’s footwear. No one can say I can’t design or don’t know how to design a guy’s sneaker.”

However, West was disappointed Nike didn’t extend his trainer line after 2011 even though pairs of his Air Yeezy trainers “eBayed for $90,000”. He also claimed to be knocked back by Fendi after taking his designs for tight leather trousers to the Italian fashion house.

West vented his frustration that as a musician he is not taken seriously in the fashion world. “I’m so frustrated,” he said. “I’ve got ideas on colour palettes, I’ve got ideas on silhouettes. I’ve got a million people telling me why I can’t do it, that I’m not a real designer.”

He spoke of his resentment that musicians’ forays into fashion design are limited to tour paraphernalia. “We’re making product with chitlin’. T-shirts, that’s the most we can make. T-shirts. We can have our best perspective on T-shirts but anything else and your Truman Show boat is hitting the wall.”

Design collaborations he mentioned included his Watch the Throne tour set design with production designer Es Devlin and the pyramid-shaped cinema by architects OMA, where his first short film was screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

Last week graphic designer Peter Saville disclosed he is working on a new visual identity for West, saying the rapper “wants me to do a YSL”.

West announced he was to launch his own design company named DONDA early last year and hoped to assemble a team of architects, designers and directors to work with him.

Dezeen featured renderings of West’s New York apartment designed by architect Claudio Silverstrin in 2007. See all our stories about Kanye West »

Main image of Kanye West is courtesy of Shutterstock.

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at a time” – Kanye West appeared first on Dezeen.