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Product news: Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek has produced a wallpaper collection that mimics weathered wood textures.

Piet Hein Eek‘s second collaboration with Dutch wallpaper company NLXL comprises eight designs.

His original Scrapwood collection was launched with the brand in 2010. This new range expands on the previous designs based on “waste furniture” to include patterns of realistic wood cross sections, beams and planks.

The wall coverings have a matte finish to make them look more convincing. “We chose a new, super luxurious matte finish so the wallpaper looks even more realistic than before,” said the designer.

First shown at trade show ICFF in New York earlier this year, the collection will be on display during Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, later this month.

We’ve also featured wallpaper that reveals images of leafy forests and palatial interiors under different coloured lights, plus a jagged wall decorated with patterned graphics.

See more design by Piet Hein Eek »
See more wallpaper design »

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by Piet Hein Eek for NLXL appeared first on Dezeen.

Prévu pour 2016, ce projet d’hôtel Me by Melia à Dubaï sera logé au sein de la Tour Opus, proposée par Zaha Hadid Architects. Premier hôtel de l’architecte irako-britannique, cette structure originale de plus de 95 mètres de haut proposera plus de 100 chambres. A découvrir dans la suite.

Mineral crystals grown on thin threads form the shape of a chair in this installation by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka.

Tokujin Yoshioka created the Spider’s Thread sculpture of a chair by suspending just seven filaments within a frame that was sat in a pool of mineral solution.

The solution was drawn up the threads and gradually formed into crystals around them, fleshing out into the shape of a piece of furniture.

The project is a development of Yoshioka’s earlier Venus chair, where crystals were grown on a sponge-like substrate.

“Spider’s Thread applies the structure of natural crystals in an advanced way aiming to produce a form even closer to the natural form,” said Yoshioka.

The designer says this iteration references a traditional story by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. “The Buddha takes a thread of a spider in Heaven and lowers it down to Hell so that the criminal can climb up from Hell to Paradise,” explains Yoshioka. “In the story, the thread of a spider is a symbol of slight hope and fragility.”

The piece is on show as part of a solo exhibition called Tokujin Yoshioka_Crystallize at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo until 19 Janueary 2014.

There are three crystal chairs in the exhibition to show the different stages of growth.

Yoshioka is known for his barely-there designs, and past work includes transparent plastic furniture that resembles cut-crystal glasses, a watch with a see-through strap and a tank of flying feathers.

See more design by Tokujin Yoshioka »
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Tokujin Yoshioka appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in his latest column, Kieran Long argues that product designers should learn from architects and tackle civic issues like surveillance and security rather than “hide in their studios making something lovely.”

When was the last time you met a designer whose work is about justice or love, or truth? Universal values, ones that bear on the meaning of our lives, seem to be beyond the creative register of most designers of objects and things. In product design, I’m struck by how small the concerns of its practitioners tend to be.

I began thinking about this while teaching at the Royal College of Art in the Design Products department in 2011/12 with the designer Sofia Lagerkvist from Front Design. Our students were great and we loved working there, but when we set a brief that asked our students to work in north-east London libraries after the riots, there was noticeable resistance. There was a sense of some (not all) students imagining that this was not what they came to the RCA to do, and that it was not what they wanted their careers to be.

The conflict was certainly my fault. I found it difficult to have this conversation with them, because I’d never encountered this line of thinking in many years of teaching in architecture schools. It seemed self evident to me that such a brief was valuable. Architects do actually spend time thinking about a higher meaning for their work beyond the commercial and outside the simple “I like/I don’t” like paradigm of individual taste.

For architects, their education (ideally) gives students a sense of certain (yet often very vague) responsibility to the city itself and therefore that the citizen is important.

Architects will almost always speak about their higher role if given the chance: about their responsibility to provide a setting for civic life, to make a place meaningful for people and so on. Our cities might not be better because of it, but the conversation is there.

I’m not saying architects are uniquely civic minded in their work, either. We can think of plenty of works of digital design (games, websites, even interfaces) that take as their themes issues of access, citizenship, or even life or death. Graphic design does, too, through political posters and publications and many practitioners’ interest in the graphic culture of the streets.

In product design, however, sometimes it feels that its most important practitioners just want to be left alone to whittle away in their studios making something lovely, periodically being wheeled out to tell the story of their whittling.

The obvious retort to this is probably that product design is indeed the field most in bed with fast-moving consumer capitalism. The Ron Arads and so on of this world give salesmen new, beautiful and desirable things to sell, and that machine is necessary. Also, the media around design – with its systems of awards and juries and the institutions (like mine) that honour the good and great – are not all that interested in the world of design beyond the decorative. Honourable exceptions include the work of people like Justin McGuirk in the Domus of recent years. In the main, the role models we promote are those engaged with consumer products.

I know many designers whose work articulates our everyday experience in ways that are meaningful, that help us to understand and enjoy our daily lives. It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities. I mean, I hate the yellow plastic pad that I have to slide my Oyster Card up against when I get on the tube in the morning, and the ugly yellow system of handles and railings on London buses. I hate the incompetent way that cathedrals integrate gift shops into their lobbies and the excessive bulk of the common-or-garden wheelie bin.

More important, though, is whether there are any Dezeen readers whose work involves designing bits of the Ring of Steel terrorist defences around the City of London, or truckproof bollards, crowd-management barriers, riot-police shields, the casings for CCTV cameras, or the plastic spikes that they stick on top of the CCTV cameras to stop birds shitting on them.

The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens.

Architects are often thought of as terrible snobs, but loads of them spend their days thanklessly trying to redesign low-cost housing for grasping, couldn’t-care-less developers or vainly trying to improve the standard of big-shed retail. Perhaps product designers dislike getting their hands dirty.

If the best we can say of a designed object is that they people can either buy it or not buy it, then the piece is nothing. It is worse than nothing, it just exists to make the wheels of a corporation turn, to encourage consumption and so on. Let’s be honest about that. I know that we all depend on this system working, it pays most of our wages etc etc, but let’s not pretend it’s why we get out of bed in the morning. Design could be so much more important than that. I just wonder if designers have the passion and desire to go out and design the things that define our lives as citizens and human beings.

Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.

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than encourage consumption” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Watch Store: Italian designer Denis Guidone has designed a watch based on smooth, flat pebbles – and the Stone watch is now available to purchase from Dezeen Watch Store.

Stone, designed for Italian brand Nava, comes with three interchangeable leather straps, allowing the wearer to easily customise the look of the watch.

The distinctive, irregular shape of the dial is inspired by the smooth contours of weather-worn stones and pebbles and is complemented by a minimal face that is designed to be read at a glance.

The asymmetric dial and off-centre hands reference Guidone’s playful approach to time telling, a concept the designer first explored in the Ora Unica watch, which won the Aam O’Eva Creations international design prize in 2008.

Stone is available with a black or white face, and three straps: black, ash grey and taupe. Other features include a stainless steel case topped with a scratch-resistant mineral lens and Miyota 2025 movement. The dial and all three straps come in a presentation box. Buy Stone by Denis Guidone for £150.

Dezeen Watch Store also stocks the Ora Unica, Orra Lattea and Sometimes. See all watches from Denis Guidone.

You can buy all of our watches online and you can also visit our watch shop in Stoke Newington, north London – contact us to book an appointment.

www.dezeenwatchstore.com

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at Dezeen Watch Store appeared first on Dezeen.