The Bloated Shelf by Damien Gernay comprises an ash wood frame and four shelves made from sheets of leather filled with expanded foam. One side of the leather is glued to a wooden board to create the flat surface.
“The idea originates from the image of a prominent belly, constrained by a belt,” said Gernay. “The leather inflates in a natural way, making each piece unique,” he added.
The unit stands at 175 centimetres tall and is 85 centimetres wide.
The shelf forms part of the designer’s range of furniture using leather and foam, which includes a stool with a black leather seat. Gernay said the collection intends to “create a dialogue between a rigid structure and a flexible skin.”
The Bloated Shelf and Bloated Stool are on display at the Cabinets of Curiosity exhibition at Mint shop, 2 North Terrace, Alexander Square, London, SW3 2BA until 30 September 2013.
“Materials that are biting and fighting, delicate detailing and dramatic tension,” are, according to young Swedish jeweler, Malin Henningsson the hallmarks of her work. It’s an exciting and bold description…
Nendo ha collaborato con la prestigiosa azienda giapponese Gen-Emon per questa serie di ceramiche decorate con tradizionali motivi tutti in tonalità blu su fondo bianco. Semplicemente bellissime.
Scandinavians have long been highly regarded when it comes to furniture, fashion and food, and some of the region’s finest children’s labels are ensuring the next generation grows up with that seemingly inherent sense of understated style. CH met with three of the best during last month’s Copenhagen International Fashion…
Focus sur le studio Mikili Design qui nous propose ce projet et concept de rangement de vélo au design simple, malin et minimaliste. Un objet très réussi intitulé « Slit Bike Rack » que l’on peut aussi trouver en version noir à découvrir en images et en détails dans la suite de l’article.
London Design Festival 2013: new studio Brose~Fogale has launched a valet stand, dresser and set of mirrors, which were installed in an east London boutique last week (+ slideshow).
Brose~Fogale‘s Camerino Collection includes a valet stand that balances on a horizontal bar and props up against the wall.
Clothing can hang from poles that stick out from the central stem.
It also has two shelves for shoes or accessories in front and a circular mirror to one side near the top.
The dresser has legs at each end that match a circular copper-tinted mirror, which sits atop a third stand protruding through the surface of the table.
The mirror is also available in a hand-held version, shaped like a table tennis bat with a wooden handle, or as a tabletop model with a small tray at its base.
Separate trays for loose change and other small objects also feature in the range, as well as angled coat pegs with rounded ends.
All are available in natural wood or painted in bright colours.
Here’s some more information from the designers about the installation:
The Artist’s Dressing Room
Start London joins forces with up and coming design studio, Brose~Fogale to celebrate the London Design Festival 2013.
Brose~Fogale, a partnership between designers Matteo Fogale and Joscha Brose will take over Start’s store windows from 14 to 22 September, showcasing their new Camerino Collection and reinterpreting the idea of an artist’s dressing room with their modern, contemporary furniture.
The installation is titled “The Artist’s Dressing Room”, which translates to Camerino in Spanish and Italian. Kate Moss before a fashion show, Marilyn Monroe preparing for her next hollywood shoot – the name instantly evokes images of glamour and excitement. It is this special place, and the five minutes before the curtain gets lifted that are magical, full of concentration, excitement and glamour.
Brose~Fogale, through their inspiring and original display will be recreating this scene in the Start Womenswear boutique located at 42 – 44 Rivington Street, and allowing the public to catch a glimpse of this intimate and never before seen moment.
Mario Martins a imaginé l’architecture de cette superbe « Villa Escarpa » située dans le village de Praia Da Luz, dans le sud du Portugal. Une demeure splendide, proposant plusieurs chambres à coucher, mais surtout une longue piscine extérieur, très appréciable compte tenu de la vue. A découvrir en images dans la suite.
Opinion:Justin McGuirk‘s inaugural Opinion column for Dezeen is in two parts – in this first instalment he examines what cheap tablet computers developed for emerging markets like India will mean for high-end tech giants like Apple and Samsung. Tomorrow he’ll ask why design critics are writing about technology in the first place.
Apple’s launch of a cut-price iPhone last week – complete with blanket media coverage and the requisite 5am queuing by obsessives – was a reminder of what an insular world the tech industry is. With a starting price of £469, even the budget version of the iPhone is well beyond the means of most people on the planet. This fact hit home a few days later when I went to hear Indian entrepreneur Suneet Singh Tuli speak at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. Tuli is the man behind the Aakash tablet computer. The Aakash 4 launches soon and, though it has greater processing power than an iPad, it is ten times cheaper with a price tag of just £40.
Given Silicon Valley’s self-professed faith in the socially transformative power of technology, why does it show so little interest in trying to reach those who are most socially disadvantaged? The obvious answer is because the socially disadvantaged have no money. Yet, if you imagine reaching a market of a billion people who may be able to muster £40 for a tablet that will connect them to the internet – “the most powerful medium society has ever seen,” as Tuli puts it – you’d think there would be enough of a financial, let alone social, incentive.
Tuli, the Punjab-born and Canadian-educated CEO of Datawind, headquartered in London’s North Acton, can see the potential. He has his sights on the three billion people who have cell phones but no access to the internet. The barrier to entry, as he sees it, is not network coverage but price. Smartphones and tablet computers are out of their league. And yet, even in the US, personal computers only became commonplace once their price had dropped to roughly one week’s salary, which happened in the 1990s. That fact made Tuli realise that in order to reach the billion people living on less than £150 a month, he would need to create a tablet that retailed for about £30.
The way Datawind approached that goal was by embracing the concept of making something “good enough”. “Inexpensive and good beats expensive and great,” says Tuli. If that sounds like he’s damning his own product with faint praise, let’s remind ourselves of just how much we have all bought into the concept of “good enough”. We abandoned CDs for MP3 files, we watch pixellated videos on YouTube, we snap away with our phones even though we have digital cameras and we arrange Skype meetings knowing full well that the phrase “I’ve lost you” will feature prominently. In short, we favour convenience and instant gratification over high fidelity.
So, having briefly handled an Aakash 4 – or an Ubislate as it’s known in western markets – I can tell you that its shell is not as finely wrought as an iPad’s and its interface not as graceful. It does, however, have a 1.5 GHz processor that is more powerful than the latest iPad’s. Tuli abandoned some common tablet features, like an HDMI port, “because my customers don’t need to be able to hook up to a big plasma screen, so there’s no point spending an extra 11 cents on that port,” he says. Big deal.
The question you’re probably asking yourself is, why does India’s largely rural population need of one of these things? Tuli’s answer is education. Of the 360 million children in India, only 219 million of them are in education. That’s twice the population of the UK not receiving any schooling, and many millions more are being taught to a substandard level. India has a shortage of qualified teachers and the qualified ones are not desperate to work in rural villages.
I’ll confess that I was sceptical at first. I do not believe that a tablet computer replaces a teacher. Connect a child to the internet and you offer her a wonderful support system, but who’s to say what that child is actually doing online? “We need to connect them to the power of the MOOC [massive open online course],” says Tuli, not altogether convincingly. However, when he pointed out that the Indian government can supply Aakash tablets for less than it costs to print the necessary schoolbooks, I started to get the message. Indeed, Tuli claims the government is working on plans to distribute 220 million tablets – one for every student in the country.
But is the Aakash just another false promise? Yves Behar’s One Laptop Per Child programme seemed to offer the same potential, was feted by a wide-eyed media and scooped up awards, but ultimately failed to live up to expectations. Part of the problem was that it never actually reached its targeted $100 price tag, but there were also frankly discouraging tales of Cambodian villagers using the OLPC as a lamp. “It turns out the killer app was light,” says Tuli, with no little schadenfreude. It turns out that he may well end up collaborating with OLPC on the educational programme, though.
So what makes the Aakash different? Is Tuli just another techno-determinist who’s imbibed too much of the Silicone Valley Kool-Aid? Worse, is the social agenda a convenient cover for what is ultimately an entrepreneurial venture? Now that I come to think of it, how does he make these tablets so cheap in the first place? The Kindle Fire sells at £129, which is £30 less than it costs to manufacture – money Amazon can afford to lose because what it’s really selling is not hardware but content. Yes, Tuli cut out the unnecessary ports and features, and he negotiated a good deal on the touchscreens (the most expensive part of any tablet) but the Aakash still seems to do most of what an iPad can do, so there is presumably some very cheap labour going on that he has failed to mention.
Let’s put that aside for now, along with any qualms about the environmental impact of a billion tablets, which Tuli calls “a necessary evil” in comparison to battling illiteracy and ignorance (which I think he may be right about). Looking at the big picture, we see a massive emerging market for devices that will connect people to the knowledge resource that is the internet. India, where 800 million people use cell phones but can’t go online, is such a market. In 2011 Indians bought 250,000 tablets (mainly Apple and Samsung). The following year it was more than 3 million (mainly Aakash). In fact, Datawind fell far short of being able to keep up with demand.
Apple and Samsung may not have time for this market but they should be worried by it, because Indians are not the only ones interested in a £40 tablet. In fact, Tuli was swamped after his lecture. It’s customary at these things for a few keen audience members to mill around with an extra-time question, but this was fully half the lecture theatre. People were crowding round for a glimpse of this gadget. It was not their social consciences that drove them forward but pure consumer instinct. The air was heavy with musk.
Soon, Canadians will be able to buy an Ubislate for 37 Canadian dollars. If it’s “good enough” for them, then companies like Apple and Samsung will have to change their game rather fast. It will also suggest that India is now the place to look for disruptive innovation. The warning signs are already here. Last week Microsoft bought back £24 billion of its own shares. Earlier this year, Apple bought back £62 billion of shares. Instead of investing their cash in research, they’re giving it away to their shareholders. That, according to business thinkers like Clay Christensen, is the beginning of the end. As he said on the BBC‘s Newsnight programme last week, “Nokia is essentially gone, Blackberry is essentially gone and now Apple is next.”
For once, those catering to the so-called “other 90%” stand to gain. “Three billion users should be a big enough market but the big companies don’t want to go near it,” says Tuli. “That’s why disruption happens.”
“I’m really passionate about this acquisition,” says Long, who is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A and was heavily involved in acquiring the gun.
“It has caused a lot of fuss in the press, that the V&A would acquire something like this. But what I’ve been pleased about is that most people have seen it not as something deliberately shocking but as a really good signpost to where manufacturing might be going and the implications of new technology.”
The original prototypes did not arrive at the museum in time for London Design Festival, so the museum printed out a copy in London based on Wilson’s blueprints.
“We have guns in the collection; we have all the relevant licences to import firearms,” Long explains. “The only problem we have is getting an export licence. We’ve had the Department for Culture and Media here involved, we’ve had all of our technical services people involved. It’s been an immense bureaucratic effort.”
Wilson, a self-proclaimed anarchist, made the blueprints for the weapon available online through his Defence Distributed website, before the US government ordered them to be taken down. Long says that the politics of Wilson’s gun is what gets him excited.
“Something that I’m really passionate about at the V&A is to show the political backgrounds of things, even when they might not be palatable,” he says.
“I don’t believe everyone should be carrying guns and that’s not what we’re advocating here. What we are saying is this is possible and we might have to do something about it if we don’t want these things to happen.”
He continues: “The design of the gun and its distribution online is an act of politics as much as an act of design and that’s when I get really excited because I think design is something that can tell us about the world.”
Long believes the weapon has also turned the conversation about the future implications of 3D printing on its head.
“There’s been a lot of technocratic optimism around 3D printing, particularly in the design world,” he says.
“But when Cody Wilson released [the digital files for his 3D-printed gun online] it really transformed that conversation. It changed it into ethical issues around how we want to live together, how new technologies affect our relationships with one another. This gun, just sitting there, is pregnant with all of those questions.”
He continues: “Design for me is the thing that really focusses those questions. And when you see this thing for real you think: ‘All these things, can they go together and kill someone?’ The answer, simply, is yes.”
Kieran Long
We drove to the V&A in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.
Non possiedo un cane, ma diversamente desidererei comprargli qualcuno dei prodotti in vendita su Cloud 7, un web store tedesco specializzato in accessori per cani, e padroni, hipster. I prodotti non sono moltissimi, ma il design è semplice e raffinato e tutti i pezzi sono disponibili in diverse colorazioni per consentire gli abbinamenti cromatici migliori con il colore dell’animale e dell’arredo di casa.
Immagino che i creatori di Cloud 7 siano entusiasti padroni di cani, e allo stesso tempo cultori del buon design e di un certo tipo di eleganza, proprio come quei clienti che si mostrano soddisfatti dell’acquisto fatto nel loro ambiente domestico.
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.
