Hasta La Ideas

Every great party is followed by a great cleanup. The holidays are a shiny, tinsel-strewn example of this. While I love the holidays, I also recognize that it’s an invitation to mess. First of all, you bring new stuff into your house. There are also get-togethers, lots of newly-emptied boxes, paper all over the place, decorations, and so on. But there’s hope! The following suggestions are a few things you can do to keep the cleanup stress to a minimum.

For many, the holidays include the accumulation of stuff. What’s the best way to handle the influx without creating new piles of clutter? Try the one-in-two-out method. It’s pretty simple: for each new item you received and want to keep, you get rid (donate, recycle, sell) of two items you previously owned. For example, if the kids got new PJs, pass on two older pairs to younger cousins. If new books arrived, pull two from the library to give to loved ones or friends who might like them. Perhaps a local preschool could benefit.

I mentioned the influx of new toys briefly. The one-in-two-out rule works well, but you can expand on it. You can donate older toys that are still in good condition. Consider seeking out a toy drive. Ask your local chamber of commerce for help if you don’t know of any in your area. Police stations and fire stations often take donated toys, too. Stuffed Animals for Emergencies, Inc. looks for stuffed animals in particular.

You can re-purpose old toys, too. For example, these wooden block wall hangings and this animal head coat rack are two great recycling ideas.

I’d be remiss if I neglected addressing ornaments and lights. Storing each can be a real challenge. On one hand, many ornaments are precious and carry much sentimental value. On the other, it’s as if Christmas lights were made to tangle themselves into a frustrating rat’s nest between January 1 and December 1.

Durable Christmas ornament storage boxes are super for organizing what you have, protecting your ornaments, and keeping out pests. They’re made of thick plastic, stackable, and feature a single compartment of each ornament. Here’s a tip: take some of that crumpled-up, leftover wrapping paper and stuff it inside the compartments for jiggle-free storage of your smaller ornaments.

As for the lights, don’t end up like this. To store your lights, first make sure all the bulbs are working. Next, keep the spare bulb with their parent strands. Finally, employ the awesome cloths hanger trick. The idea is to wrap a strand around a coat hanger, tape the end pieces down and then stack them in a plastic bin. I love it. Housekeeping has a few good ideas, too, like the Pringles can trick. Remove the lid, cut out the bottom and wrap the lights around the tube.

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

This movie shows shoppers walking under and sitting beneath the Christmas lights installed above public crossings and squares in central Berlin by German studio Brut Deluxe.

Brut Deluxe created a series of three festive light installations to hang along the shopping avenue of Kurfürstendamm.

“Rather than typical decorations that represent Christmas through objects or symbols contemplated from the outside, we wanted to create a space that can be entered and experienced,” said the design studio.

One of the installations features five illuminated cubes hanging at different angles in the middle of a traffic crossing.

A patterned dome comprising segments of wavy lights and spanning 7.5 metres appears to hover over Joachimstaler Platz.

At the traffic crossing at Knesebeckstrasse, a dense collection of 50 wavy light strings are suspended vertically above pedestrians.

The installations will be in place until 6 January. Photography and movie are by Miguel de Guzmán.

Here is some information from the designer:

Weihnachtsbeleuchtung Kurfürstendamm, Berlin 2013
christmas lights, Berlin 2013

Three light installations were realised on Kurfürstendamm: the first, a huge light dome with a diameter of 7.5m, at Joachimstaler Platz, the second consisting of five big three-dimensional light cubes at the crossing with Uhlandstrasse, and the third, an artificial landscape build of 50 light shrubs, at the crossing with Knesebeckstrasse.

What all three installations have in common is that we want to achieve an atmospheric effect with them. Rather than typical decorations that represent Christmas through objects or symbols that are contemplated from the outside, we want to create a space that can be entered and experienced.

We imagine this artificial space in the city as a place of retreat, similar to an imaginary clearance in a forest.

The atmosphere surrounding the spectator is produced only with light that alters its density and intensity constantly through the visitor’s movement and changing perspective.

The realised landscapes of light are inspired by images and situations recalled from our memory that we associate with Christmas and abstractly convert to light.

The post Berlin Christmas lights
by Brut Deluxe appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Music Project: a choir of outdated computer equipment and games consoles performs a rendition of Carol of the Bells in this music video by Glasgow filmmaker James Houston.

Houston created the video as a Christmas e-card from The Glasgow School of Art, from which he graduated in 2008. “I thought it would be wise to do a song or a track,” Houston told Dezeen. “Music is the best way to get festive.”

He used speech synthesis on some of the machines to make them sing while the other consoles sound the four repeated notes from the tune of Carol of the Bells, a Christmas carol composed in the early twentieth century.

Houston wanted to continue his work using old technology to create sounds and images, and combine it with showcasing his old Christmas gifts: “The idea was to get a collection of old Christmas presents, stuff that I’ve been given over the years and try to make music out of that.”

All the machines are his own apart from a couple of items he sourced via Twitter. Old Apple Mac computers, a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum + 1 and a SEGA Mega Drive are among the choir. The ensemble sings lyrics by writers Robert Florence and Philip Larkin about gaming at Christmas, which Houston did a lot as a child.

“Christmas for me is mostly about gaming,” he explained. “Each Christmas is delineated with whatever game I was playing at the time.” The video was filmed in The Glasgow School of Art school’s Mackintosh Library, where the machines were unpacked and arranged on a table among Christmas decorations before playing the festive song.

The post Vintage computers sing
a Christmas carol appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen promotion: design show designjunction and online retailer Clippings.com have teamed up to bring a Christmas pop-up shop to London‘s Covent Garden.

The temporary shop in the Seven Dials area of Covent Garden is stocking Christmas gifts from stocking fillers and greeting cards to glassware, cushions and decorative lighting, as well as our Dezeen Book of Ideas.

A stackable tea set by VW+BS, diamond-shaped light bulbs by Eric Thurner and wooden shelves in the form of a deer’s head by BEdesign are among the products for sale.

Also included are designs by Lovely Pigeon, Vitamin and 1882, plus many more brands. All the items can also be purchased from Clippings’ online store until Christmas.

The pop-up shop is open at 53 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9DG, until 5 January.

Designjunction sent us the following text:

Designjunction Curates Clippings.com Christmas Pop-up Shop

4 December 2013 – 5 January 2014
53 Monmouth Street, Seven Dials, Covent Garden London WC2H 9DG

London’s leading design show designjunction and online retail market place clippings.com have joined forces to create the ultimate Christmas shop in time for the festive season. Located in the heart of Covent Garden, in a prime retail space on the Seven Dials, this vibrant new pop-up shop is set to open later this week.

Curated by designjunction, shoppers can expect to find a range of products from an eclectic mix of emerging labels alongside selected established design brands.

1882, Kangon Arora, VW+BS, HAM, Natasha Lawless, Kaymet, Lane, Lovely Pigeon, Vitamin and BEdesign are just some of the brands that have joined this exciting line-up.

Customers can expect to find the perfect festive gifts from small stocking fillers, watches, ceramics, greeting cards to glassware, cushions and decorative lighting.

As part of the Seven Dials late-night shopping evening on Thursday 5 December from 5–9pm, shoppers can take advantage of a 20% discount on all purchases made on the night – don’t miss this opportunity to buy the latest trends at unbeatable prices!

You can shop in-store from Wednesday 4 December or buy online up until Christmas.

See you in store!

Opening Hours

Monday – Saturday: 10am – 7pm
Thursday late-night shopping: 6pm – 9pm
Sunday: 12am – 6pm

The post Designjunction and Clippings curate
Christmas pop-up shop in London appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: Sam Jacob argues that as climate change pushes the reality of winter further from the idealised version that appears in Christmas decorations, they begin to represent “a hangover of a vanishing idea remade through other technologies.”

Picture the scene. Well, actually, it’s harder not to now that Christmas adverts have been “premiered” and are on the kind of constant rotation that bores into your mind’s eye like an augewurm. These scenes have been pre-pictured for you with the kind of luminous intensity that only million pound budgets and the most expensive of heartwarming celebrities provide. There are tables as big as airfields piled high with hams, cakes and turkeys, there are Disneyfied animals acting anthropomorphic sentiments, jumpers seen through Super 8 vision and snow falling over everything.

Out in the streets, council cherry pickers are draping trees in strings of lights, attaching stars to lamp posts and strapping pine trees to buildings. Shop windows have become landscapes of abstract wintriness: a silver birch forest has grown up in the window of Top Shop, there are drifts of cotton wool in Accessorize and glistering electric ice in La Senza.

Pubs spray a polystyrene porridge of fake snow into the corners of their windows: instant graffitied Dickensification. Strange fruits of platonic metallic spheres have sprouted on trees uprooted from their plantations.

There’s a flurry of white balls frozen above the grey morass of Oxford Street and giant frozen boughs arc across Regent Street, sparkling with electricity. Almost everywhere there are super-scaled outlines of snow crystals, laser cut from Day-Glo perspex or vinyled onto plate glass, shrinking us to microscopic size.

This trail of decoration is an alternate landscape, a continuous environment bleeding from our own decked-out-homes, through a city transformed with temporal forests and artificial constellations blinking above. It’s a 1:1 replica of a winter that never existed in all its synthetic, scenographic glory.

Piles of beautifully wrapped empty cardboard boxes are piled under corporate trees – a gesture of empty generosity as to fulfil our need to know that our contemporary Christmassy symbolism is entirely hollowed out.

All these decorative tools and devices have their roots in misty Pagan prehistory. The symbols and customs we use even now come from an ancient and superstitious relationship with nature. They were ritualistic acts ushering the sun back into ascent from the depths of the winter solstice, there to welcome the return of light and warmth. Evergreens, berries and fire were fertility rites concerned with renewal and rebirth. In even the most tawdry strings of tinsel are echoes of these long forgotten ancient magics. These symbols have been processed through thousands of years of culture so that their real roots are obscured, bent into countless other shapes by other belief systems, ideologies and practices.

Christmas decorations are the ultimate floating signifiers dangling off the boughs of harvested evergreens. Cut loose from their original meanings and myths, they are a semiological ding dong where bells, angels wings, holly and snow are packed together into a fabric as dense as Christmas cake, covering everything like wrapping paper. Denuded of their original meaning, decorations become a simple statement of fact: signs that denote winter, erected slap bang in the middle of real winter.

Our modern selves might feel entirely sophisticated, shed of superstition and primitive ritual. We might feel far removed from the pagan roots of this decorative urge, but perhaps there is something within us that drives our fervour for winter decorations, something driving us to these extraordinary ends – especially a society otherwise so cynical and resistant to forced entertainment and group sentiment.

It was science that assuaged our ancient pagan fear of a sunless never-ending Narnia, but it’s science, too, that raises contemporary fears for the future of our environment. As study after study shows, winter itself is threatened.

Climate change studies see the growing season extending as though it were an ink blot bleeding across the calendar. Winter season in the arctic is almost two weeks shorter than it was a few decades ago. Measuring the growth of plants reveals British spring occurring ten days earlier than the 1970s. This season creep is estimated to have been advancing spring by two to three days and delaying autumn by 0.3–1.6 days per decade over the past 30 to 80 years.

These are our modern fears for the environment, as deeply troubling as any ancient superstition, perhaps even more so given their foundation in fact. They have consequences for just the same things that the Pagans feared: a total disruption of the Earth’s ecosystem causing loss of the northern permafrost, rises in sea levels, decoupling of breeding and feeding patterns, disruption of migration and so much more that we have yet to fully appreciate.

Climate change means the apparent natural pattern of winter, the one depicted with such certainty by all of our Christmassy imagery is (if it ever was) an imaginary scene. Perhaps it’s more: a ritual that unconsciously reverses our old Pagan desire and makes a superstitious plea for winter to stay. Perhaps it’s even worse than this: maybe it’s winter as skeuomorphism, a hangover of a vanishing idea remade through other technologies. Perhaps a trip down Oxford Street’s commercially manufactured, abstracted visions of winter is nothing less than a salve to our latent environmental nightmares.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

The post “Christmas decorations are winter
as skeuomorphism” appeared first on Dezeen.