Hasta La Ideas

Cologne 2014: the colour temperature of this series of LED lamps by Rotterdam designer Arnout Meijer can be adjusted to create different moods throughout the day (+ movie).

Meijer presented the project as part of the [D3] Design Talents exhibition at imm cologne trade fair last week.

He designed the Thanks for the Sun series in response to the need for light that fulfils different roles – providing bright white light for working and aiding concentration, and a warmer, more soothing hue to help people relax before bed.

“When you think about a lamp design, you design everything but the light: you design the shade, construction, base, etc but in the end you just screw the light in,” Meijer told Dezeen. “I wanted to turn that around and let light play the main character. So I wanted to make a lamp series where the design and the shape was about the light.”

Each of the acrylic lamps incorporates an inner and outer strip of LEDs that can be adjusted using a dial or slider to change the colour of the light from a bright white to a warmer red or yellow.

Light from the LEDs spreads across the surface and catches lines that have been milled into the transparent acrylic.

The patterns feature wavy lines that transition into smooth shapes as they radiate from the inner form to the outer edge.

“When I decided that I wanted to change between warm and cool light I thought it was important that when the character of the light changes, the character of the lamp changes as well,” explained Meijer.

“When you see a drawing of a light bulb from the end of the nineteenth century there is always a sort of wave-like pattern, which mimics glowing,” the designer added. “Whereas cool white light is more modern and straight, like the hard line of a fluorescent tube.”

The collection comprises a narrow table lamp, a round table table and a larger wall lamp.

Meijer originally designed the lamps during his studies at Design Academy Eindhoven and is now using them as the basis for experiments on a larger scale, which he says will eventually result in a series of limited edition light sculptures.

Photography is by Femke Rijerman.

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by Arnout Meijer appeared first on Dezeen.

Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Annemiek van der Beek has designed a collection of makeup that’s packaged to appeal to men (+ slideshow).

Called Primal Skin, Annemiek van der Beek‘s collection is designed to camouflage small imperfections in the complexion and accentuate the eyes.

“These days men are using more cosmetic products than before and even makeup is a more common topic,” the designer told Dezeen. “For women wearing makeup is a daily ritual and for them it’s much easier to use and buy it because of the big range of products. This new branding experience makes makeup accessible for the modern man.”

The set includes foundation in five colours, powder in five colours, eye pencil in stone black or coal black and eyeshadow in three shades of grey.

The cosmetics are made up of natural ingredients such as coal, clay and mineral stones, and must be applied with specially designed tools that van der Beek says give the experience “a rough and sturdy touch.”

Compacts and brushes are made of black anodised aluminium. “I chose aluminium because the weight and the temperature of the material feels more manly to hold,” she explained.

They come packaged in minimal boxes with rounded corners, made of black-pigmented MDF that van der Beek chose “because it looks like stone, but it is very lightweight.”

“Makeup products are always focused on the female user, but I think a guy wants to experience makeup in a different way,” she added.

Annemiek van der Beek presented the project as part of her graduation show at the Design Academy Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week.

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for men by Annemiek van der Beek appeared first on Dezeen.

Eindhoven designer Erez Nevi Pana has developed a dough made from soil and fungus that can be baked in an oven to create stools and chairs strong enough to sit on.

Influenced by childhood memories of playing in his parents’ greenhouse, Erez Nevi Pana began experimenting with soil as an accessible material for producing affordable, environmentally-friendly products during his studies at Design Academy Eindhoven.

By combining it with fungi and other natural materials, the designer developed a mixture that rises like a dough due to a biochemical reaction and can then be shaped using plaster or wooden moulds.

The resulting objects are baked so that the mixture hardens, becoming robust enough to carry the weight of a person or to be sanded, sawn and drilled.

“At first, I started with a flat surfaces, just as an experiment to test the strength and durability of the material,” the designer told Dezeen. “I was curious to know how strong is it? Can the mixture hold human weight?”

Following a process of refinement involving trialling different amounts of the various ingredients in his kitchen, a suitable combination was identified and a series of simply moulded items of furniture were produced.

“There is a fine line between the state where the mixture is strong or delicate – either not baked enough or burned,” explained the designer. “So the baking time has to be strict and every chair has its own period of time that it is baked in an oven.”

As well as furniture, Nevi Pana has experimented with moulding cups using the material, which he claimed was capable of holding the water but gave it an unwanted flavour.

“The recipe is not perfect – there’s some things that I still need to understand but I feel I am on the right track,” added the designer. “If the material is impermeable, many choices are possible and it opens the gate for many routes in which I design any object I desire.”

The project is on show at an exhibition called Biodesign at The New Institute in Rotterdam, alongside plants that could grow lace from their roots and tiles made from snail poo, which runs until 5 January 2014.

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like bread by Erez Nevi Pana appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our second movie from Eindhoven, Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens explains his concept for a modular mobile phone made of detachable blocks, an idea that looks set to become a reality now he has teamed up with Motorola.

Phonebloks is a concept for a mobile phone made of swappable components that fit together like blocks of Lego.

“It is basically made to be upgraded and repaired,” explains Hakkens, who was speaking at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show during Dutch Design Week last week, before his collaboration with Motorola was revealed.

“Usually we throw [a mobile phone] away after a couple of years, but this one is made to last.”

He continues: “You throw away a lot of good components [when you throw away a phone], because usually it’s only one item that is broken. With this phone you can only throw away components that are actually broken, or need repairing or upgrading.”

“If it’s getting slow you only upgrade the speed component, if you need a better camera you only upgrade the camera component. In this way you can keep the good stuff and the bad stuff you upgrade.”

The video of the concept Hakkens posted on YouTube quickly went viral, attracting over 16 million views.

“I’m just one guy at the Design Academy, I can’t make this phone myself,” says Hakkens. “So I put this video online and in the first 24 hours I had one million views on YouTube. I got a lot of nice emails from companies and people who want to work on this.”

Hakkens also put the project on Thunderclap, a crowdspeaking site where supporters donate their social reach rather than money.

His Phonebloks Thunderclap campaign closed yesterday, having gained 979,280 supporters. On closing, an automatic message about Phonebloks was sent out to all of his supporters’ social media contacts, reaching over 380 million people.

The approach has been successful in getting the attention of major players in the mobile phone industry.

Yesterday he posted a new video on his Phonebloks website, announcing that he has teamed up with American communications giant Motorola, which has been working on its own modular mobile phone concept called Project Ara for the last year.

“The whole point was to generate a lot of buzz,” says Hakkens. “So companies see that there’s a huge market and they need to make a phone like this.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “With Phonebloks you only throw away
components that are broken” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.

“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”

It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”

Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.

The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.

Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.

One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.

“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”

An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.

Former students include Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Tord Boontje and many graduates, such as Piet Hein Eek plus Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farrasin of Formafantasma, choose to stay in the city.

Van der Lubbe, herself a Design Academy Eindhoven alumni, shares a studio in nearby Geldrop with fellow academy graduate Niels van Eijk.

“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.

“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”

There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.

Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.

“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “Eindhoven has design, it has science
and it has industry” appeared first on Dezeen.