Hasta La Ideas

Each of these resin pots by east London designer Phil Cuttance is embellished with a unique iridescent sheen on its lid.

Phil Cuttance hand-cast each simple Aurora Pot with a rounded bottom and flat lid from a water-based resin.

He submerged the lid under water and drops a small amount of polish onto the surface to form an oily slick. He then lifted the lid up, catching the colourful pattern on its top.

“I have always liked the visual effect of oil or polish slicks on water,” Cuttance told Dezeen. “I wanted to simply find a way to transfer a polish slick from the water’s surface and preserve it on an object.”

The slick created by the polish is different each time, so every pot in the set is one of a kind.

Photography is by Petr Krejčí.

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by Phil Cuttance appeared first on Dezeen.

London designers Studio Swine built a mobile foundry and used it to cast aluminium stools from drinks cans they collected on the streets of São Paulo (+ movie).

Over 80 percent of the city’s recycling is collected informally on carts pulled by independent waste collectors known as catadores. Studio Swine wanted to create a system that would help them recycle the rubbish they collect into products they can sell.

The pair collected discarded cans from a street vendor and used cooking oil for fuel to smelt the aluminium on site, turning the street into an improvised manufacturing line. They made moulds by pressing objects they found locally into sand collected from construction sites in the area.

The resulting stools have tops that bear the impressions of ventilation bricks, a palm leaf, the base of a basket, a hub cap and plastic tubing.

“Unlike the conventional aluminum furniture, they’re each unique and expressive,” said the designers. “Manufactured on the spot, they transform ephemeral street materials into metal objects, providing a portrait of the street.”

The resulting stools were donated to the vendor who provided the cooking oil and the furnace remains in São Paulo, where the project will continue with a new series of products and furniture made in a favela.

“Mining the city for materials, the perception of the city changes,” said the designers. “Where once you saw rubbish, now you can see resources to be transformed into new products.”

The project was commissioned by Coletivo Amor de Madre Gallery in São Paulo and involved working with several catadore co-operatives to find both the materials to make the furnace, and the oil and cans to use it.

“Each stool takes around 60 cans, but catadores collecting cans around a football stadium on a match day bring in many thousands of cans,” Studio Swine told us. “The idea is that catadores will share a furnace and greatly increase the amount of money they can get for the materials they collect.”

They suggest that the furnace can be used to cast anything to sell, including small items like souvenirs for the 2014 World Cup or 2016 Olympic Games. “However, the potential of open sand casting lends itself very well to larger pieces and we are interested in how this can be incorporated into small scale architecture,” they added.

Finding ways to enhance local industries by making products from waste on-site is familiar ground for Studio Swine, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011 with a project that proposed making stools from waste plastic picked up by fishing trawlers, melting the material down and moulding it into furniture onboard the boat.

They’re also no strangers to making and selling in the streets, having designed a mobile food stall for cooking and selling pig heads the year before.

Here’s some more information from Studio Swine:

In nature, everything is interconnected and there is no concept of waste, but in cities there are lots of loose connections.
The city has so much potential, there’s a strong culture of improvisation here. The streets are busy with people looking to make a living in ingenious ways, ever flexible to emerging opportunities.

In a city with some 20 million residents the waste is on a massive scale, however over 80% of the recycling is collected by an informal system of independent Catadores, pulling their handmade carts around the streets.

We looked at the way they worked, the materials they collected, and how we could learn from them to create a new model of manufacturing – taking waste materials that could be readily found, to manufacture goods on the street, with the potential to make livelihoods extend beyond rubbish collection.

The world is becoming increasingly more globalised, something that we are interested in is how design can help retain a strong regional identity.

We wanted to tap into this existing street culture – to turn a public space into a manufacturing line. We went around the streets collecting things we can cast. Mining the city for materials, the perception of the city changes, where once you saw rubbish, now you can see resources to be transformed into new products. The city consumes a lot of fried food so we collected used cooking oil for free and plentiful fuel.

Then we needed to make moulds which are cheap and adaptable. As Sao Paulo is under constant development, construction sand can be found all over the city.

What is the future of manufacturing? Where the industrial revolution was built on the concept of making the same thing thousands of times, will future manufacturing incorporate individual characteristics or even chance?

There is something magical about the moment cold hard metal becomes a hot liquid – the moment it’s quickened and given life. We wanted the surface to reverberate with the texture of the sand and the metal’s molten state, to bear clearly the impression left by the objects we found that day.

We made stools for the food vendor that provided the waste cans & oil. Unlike the conventional aluminum furniture they’re each unique and expressive. Manufactured on the spot, they transform ephemeral street materials into metal objects, providing a portrait of the street.

Where the majority of carbon cost is in the transportation of goods rather than their production – we could see manufacturing returning to our cities, adaptable to customisations and able to ‘cast on demand’.

The potential of mobile sand casting is endless, offering another way to produce. From small items to architectural elements, it can change the face of the city.

The project was made possible with the generous support of Heineken.

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by Studio Swine appeared first on Dezeen.

The pieces in this chess set by American designer Stefan Gougherty are formed from voids drilled into transparent acrylic blocks (+ slideshow).

Pieces in Gougherty‘s Negative Space Chess Set are made from transparent acrylic cubes with different negative spaces cut into them. The voids are then painted. “After researching various methods of fabricating something clear,” Gougherty told Dezeen, “I realised that drilling cavities inside acrylic blocks using a milling machine would produce a new expression, especially when exaggerated with paint.”

The central voids are shaped to look like paired-down versions of traditional chessmen. “The challenge was [to translate] the classic chess pieces we are familiar with into distilled geometric cousins,” said Gougherty.

Each shape refers to the way the piece moves around the board. For example, the knight is L-shaped to indicate that it can move two squares in one direction and one in another. “Before this project I knew very little about chess,” Gougherty revealed. “It was fascinating to learn how the game evolved and why the pieces are styled the way they are.”

The bishop is represented as an angled line because it travels across the board diagonally. Other pieces are simplified versions of their standard counterparts.

The chessmen can be strung together using the centre holes and cube shapes allow the pieces to stack for storage. The sets were commissioned by American interiors firm Geremia Design and come in either yellow, white or red with black.

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by Stefan Gougherty appeared first on Dezeen.

As essentially the only company making OLED applications available to the consumer market,Blackbody—a sub-brand of innovative Italian-French lighting developer Astron Fiamm—is leading the charge to bring the versatile lighting option to a wider audience. We’ve seen…

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Opinion: in his latest Opinion column, Sam Jacob argues that objects tell us more about ourselves than literature or imagery and sets out his manifesto for “a culture of design informed by archeology and anthropology”.

My last column talked about new stuff, about how digital culture is changing our relationship to objects. Now, I’d like to think about old stuff. I’d like to do this as a way of forming a kind of manifesto for understanding objects, whether they might be new or old. A manifesto, in other words, for our relationship with objects – a relationship of very long standing that goes back to the very origins of humanity.

We have a longer relationship with objects than any other cultural form. Things emerged before language and before image making. This fact – along with their propensity to survive in the archaeological record – means we could convincingly argue that the history of human culture is written not in text but in objects.

That objects are themselves a form of language is suggested by the idea that language developed out of the kind of complex, sequential, abstract thinking that object-making required. Design, in other words, preceded and enabled the development of language. We could – and should – think of the record of things as a central plank of the library of human experience that only later includes images and writing. Things, in other words, are a form of literature too.

Like literature, objects are containers of human experience. They are embodiments of thought and knowledge made into material form. We might not know, for example, what Stonehenge was used for, but we can trace the outlines of the intelligence that brought it into the world. Its substance and arrangement are a record of the technologies necessary to build it, the organisation of a society necessary to implement it and the imaginative capability needed to conceive it.

Objects occur at the intersection of spheres of knowledge: at the overlap between science, technology, culture and desire. Even the most mundane of objects acts as a roll call of forms of knowledge and intelligence necessary for it to come into the world – even (or especially) the novelty section of the Argos catalogue talks of mining, processing, transportation, engineering and economics, as well as desire and imagination. Each contributes to the possibility of that particular thing being in the world.

It was this kind of imaginative and intellectual capability emerging in early human culture that brought objects into the world for the very first time. The stuff formed by cosmology, geology and biology became, in the hands of someone, somewhere, the first primitive thing. As this first object came into existence so did a new kind of humanity.

When, say, a lump of stone was struck by another to create a sharper edge, it was also an act that projected our imagination into the world. The newly formed edge was an abstract idea materially formed. Things, in other words, are also concepts.

Once formed, that very same stone tool amplified the ways in which we could act. Even in its most primitive form, design gave us the ability to extend our own body’s reach into the world by allowing us to cut in ways our own hands couldn’t. At the other end of the technological spectrum, philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan described electronic communications as extending our nervous systems around the globe (and now, even beyond the edge of the solar system). Design produces things that act as bridges and interfaces between our human state and the environment around us.

Once born into the world, objects helped us transform our natural environment. They began a process that shaped nature into synthetic human habitats. Cutting stone, wood or flesh was the first step that eventually created the synthetic worlds of Tokyo, London, Munich, Paris and so on (and, of course, the equally synthetic places that are preserved as a form of nature: Yosemite, the Lake District, Antarctica even: places that are now just as defined by ideology, law and politics as any city).

The world after objects was no longer a given quantity but something constructed. Design – even the design of the smallest of things – is the act of constructing new worlds.

Our relationship with objects might be even more profoundly linked. Just as we make things, things also make us. A human with a stone tool is an entirely different creature to one without – or rather the human capable of conceiving of an object is an entirely different proposition. The act of designing and making is a two-way street. Intention might shape the way we make something, but once made the made-thing acts on us too. The moment the first transformation of rock to object occurred, the possibilities of being human also changed. If design precipitated language, perhaps it brought something else into the world too. Perhaps objects make us human.

The history of humans and things, intertwined as completely as it is, suggests definitions of design which I’ll set out here:

We’ve come a long way since the first object. The sheer quantity of stuff that now surrounds us is overwhelming. Contemporary material culture seems often to be shallow, marked by excessive consumption, over-infused by marketing, inauthentic and exploitative.

Yet these objects and the design cultures that create them are still part of a continuous culture that spirals back into pre history. Judgements of value – monetary, aesthetic, taste or whatever – are only one way of viewing design. In many ways, these kinds of judgements only serve to narrow the definition of design as a fundamental human activity.

Instead we should argue for a culture of design informed by archeology and anthropology, one that recognises its embedded intelligence, its philosophical and radically propositional nature. Even – or perhaps especially – when it’s something as seemingly debased as a Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza.

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.

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not in text but in objects” appeared first on Dezeen.