There’s no denying that the past 12 months have seen Volvo shake its former stereotype as a reflection of Sweden itself (safe, reliable, unremarkable perhaps) and replace it with a whole new appearance; one that now reflects…
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Sur les terres cultivées de Victoria en Australie, la firme australienne Branch Studio Architects a converti une vieille cabane en maison viable minimaliste et moderne faite de bois. La maison appelée « The Pump House » se situe près d’un lac et possède un intérieur charmant et chaleureux. Une cabane singulière à découvrir.
Working with skilled local craftspeople is both a duty and an opportunity for Indian designers, says Prateek Jain of lighting design company Klove, in the third and final movie from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi.
“It’s the biggest job of a designer to make sure that they work with handicrafts people,” says Prateek Jain, co-founder of Klove. “Whether it’s a fashion designer who works with an embroiderer or whether it’s us working with wood carvers or stone cutters.”
Both sides benefit when designers work with traditional craft producers, says Jain, and can help bring craftsmen’s work to new markets. “It’s very important to apply a more contemporary design aesthetic to these handicraft [skills]” he says.
Jain’s chosen medium is glass, thanks to an encounter he had with craftsmen in Ambala, a town in northern India. When he saw local glass-blowers creating intricate glassware for laboratories, he knew he had spotted an opportunity.
“We saw that they were doing these beautiful, flawless bowls of silica glass,” he says. “The blowers had been making beakers, flasks and test tubes for generations. We realised that [we could use] this skill set to explore home decor.”
Together with his partner Gautam Seth he took these techniques used for creating lab-ware into unexpected contexts: creating luxury lighting installations for an international client base.
Klove now creates large, ornate custom-made lighting installations working in a palette of blown glass, brass, steel and copper.
Klove was participating in the Made In… India Samskara exhibition. Curated by Fashion Design Council of India president Sunil Sethi and creative think tank BE OPEN, the show celebrates collaborations between contemporary Indian designers and skilled Indian craftsmen.
For the show Klove used blown glass and beaten metal to create a large lighting installation in the shape of a peacock, India’s national bird.
“We knew that [the curators] wanted to represent India in a modern way. Instantly the idea of a peacock came into our head because it’s the national bird,” says Jain. “We wanted to represent the peacock in a contemporary manner but at the same time have a strong Indian aesthetic to it”.
The feathers that make up the peacock’s fanned tail are represented by 48 slender glass stems, similar in form to elongated laboratory flasks.
“The great part about being in this country is that you have great access to a great resource of talent. You have craftsmen who have been doing this work for many centuries” says Jain.
Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.
The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.
The post Work with Indian craftsmen to keep handcrafting
skills alive, says designer Prateek Jain appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: Nao Tamura drew on experiences from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami to create an installation of suspended mobiles, intended to evoke a sense of fragility and harmony with nature.
Japanese designer Nao Tamura told Dezeen that her sculptural work was influenced by the earthquake that struck Japan in 2011.
“We lost a lot of people and I thought life is so fragile, people are so fragile,” said Tamura. “But also because of the tragedy, we learned to accept the nature and live in harmony with it.”
“I wanted to make something very fragile and very delicate, but everything is keeping the balance,” Tamura explained. “It creates this kind of sculptural piece and it’s about light, the piece, the shadow, the air and yourself. When you interact with the piece it creates this motion and the whole thing changes.”
Unique discs of acrylic resin with a coloured coating were fixed to a framework of thin rods representing the interconnected systems existing in nature.
Thin wires attached to the rods and held in tension by transparent plastic discs gave the piece structure and enabled the carefully balanced branches to pivot.
The movement of people in the space caused the delicate structures to move gently, causing a corresponding movement in the overlapping shadows cast on the ground.
“Through this piece, I wanted people to think about what we have now; the air, the sun and the nature and keeping good harmony with the nature and to realise that no matter how small your action is, you will have an effect that is larger than yourself,” Tamura added.
Tamura developed the concept for the Interconnection installation in response to a brief from Lexus that asked designers to explore the theme Amazing in Motion.
Tamura’s multidisciplinary studio has previously worked with designers and brands including Artek, Issey Miyake, Nike and Wonderglass on projects that frequently incorporate motifs and influences from nature.
Interconnection was presented by Lexus during Milan’s design week alongside works developed around the same theme by Italian designer Fabio Novembre and MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group.
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Interconnection by Nao Tamura appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: a teaspoon that follows a cup around a table and a clock that mimics the actions of the person in front of it were among projects presented by students from Swiss university ECAL in Milan (+ movie).
Based around the title Delirious Home, ECAL‘s Bachelor of Industrial Design and Media & Interaction Design students explored alternatives to the idea of the electronically connected smart home by creating products with more tangible behaviours.
“Technology has become smart but without a sense of humour, let alone quirky unexpected behaviour,” explained the project’s leaders Alain Bellet and Chris Kabel in a statement.
“This lack of humanness became the starting point to imagine a home where reality takes a different turn, where objects behave in an uncanny way,” they added.
The projects employ sensor-based technology to enhance the interaction between user and product, encouraging people to touch them, listen to them, blow on them or move in front of them to see how they react.
Guillaume Markwalder and Aurélia von Allmen’s Broken Mirror features a round surface made from a sheet of wrinkled reflective material that is pulled taught to show a clear reflection when someone approaches it.
Mr Time by Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz is a clock that shows the correct time until someone stands in front of it, at which point the hands follow the position of the user’s arms.
Bonnie & Clyde by Romain Cazier, Anna Heck and Leon Laskowski produces a playful interaction between a coffee cup and teaspoon.
The cup has a blue interior surface that is tracked by a camera suspended above the table, which sends a signal to a magnet mounted to a mechanism under the table surface. When the cup is moved, the magnet also moves to the same spot and causes the spoon to follow it.
Il Portinaio by Anne-Sophie Bazard, Tristan Caré and Léonard Golay is a curtain of suspended threads that reacts to the presence of someone standing in front of it. A disembodied hand moves along a raised track to their location and draws back a section of the curtain so they can walk through.
Voodoo by Megan Elisabeth Dinius, Timothée Fuchs, Antoine Furstein and Bastien Girschig facilitates a tactile interaction between people sitting in two armchairs by making one of the chairs shudder and vibrate when someone moves in the other one.
Iris Andreadis, Nicolas Nahornyj and Jérôme Rütsche designed a series of containers called Ostinati that can be tipped over and spin on the edges of their bases thanks to embedded gyroscopes.
The Delicious Bells by Caroline Buttet, Louisa Carmona, Margaux De Giovannini and Antonio Quirarte turn dining into an aural experience by projecting noise from speakers embedded in the handles of glass cloches when the cloches are raised.
Touching the shadows of lamp shades projected onto a wall in Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz’s Chairoscuro installation causes the corresponding light to turn on and off.
Victor Férier, Ludovica Gianoni and Daniele Walker designed a fan attached to a smaller version that users blow on to start the device.
Cactunes by Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig and Pauline Lemberger invites people to touch a series of cacti that each emit a different sound on contact.
The project was presented at Spazio Orso 16 in Milan’s Brera district during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile last week.
Photography is by Axel Crettenand and Sylvain Aebischer.
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address “lack of humanness” in electronics appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: Japanese designer Jun Murakoshi’s tableware features patterned thread tops that create a geometric lattice for supporting flowers.
Tokyo-based Jun Murakoshi has created a collection of vases and fruit bowls called Bloom. The blown-glass tableware pieces feature small grooves on their edges, which allow thread to be criss-crossed over the tops in a geometric pattern.
“Blown glass has a feeling of both warmth and tension that looks like conflicting image,” said the designer. The glass was hand-blown by three young glass artists: Shunji Sasaki, Takeyoshi Mitsui and Emi Hirose in Toyama, Japan.
“The narrow lines create unlimited patterns, the transparency and exquisiteness that each materials possess make foil each other,” said the designer.
Flower stems can be threaded through the small gaps between the strings or rested in the larger hole in the centre of each piece.
Different coloured threads are used in combination to creating variations in the rings across the tops of the pieces, which are available in a range of sizes.
The tableware was exhibited in the Ventura Lambrate district of Milan last week. Photography is by Kota Sugawara.
The post Thread patterns cover blown-glass
tableware by Jun Murakoshi appeared first on Dezeen.
Vinay Venkatraman may not be your typical Danish product and interaction designer, but he’s an influential one. A quick glance at his CV shows that he was educated in India and Italy, co-founded the Copenhagen Institute…
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Le site Kind Of Normal a imaginé des infographies amusantes appelées « TruthFacts » qui livrent des petites vérités sur notre quotidien, notre époque (digitale) et nos diverses habitudes ; des anecdotes dans lesquelles tout le monde peut se reconnaitre. Une sélection des différentes infographies est disponible dans la suite.
When Mike Natenshon’s girlfriend accidentally threw out his favorite T-shirt—perfectly soft from years of wash and wear—he underwent a long series of experiments to replicate that worn-in comfiness right off the rack. And, while the former investment banking…
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La marque Schwartz (Herb & Spice) a fait appel à Print Tech, Novalia et l’agence créative Grey London pour concevoir un poster interactif sur lequel chaque couleur d’épices possède un son quand on la touche grâce une encre spéciale. L’illustrateur Billie Jean est derrière l’illustration de toutes ces saveurs qui se transforment en sons.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
