At this year’s Paris Design Week, CH hit now! Le Off at The Docks to catch an intriguing collection of creative furniture…
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Lisbon Architecture Triennale: these prototypical structures by London studio Cohen Van Balen are designed to sustain genetically modified plants that could prevent wolves from contracting rabies (+ movie).
Entitled And Nowhere a Shadow, the structures were installed by Cohen Van Balen in the woodland district of Future Perfect – an exhibition of a futuristic city on show as part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013.
“We were inspired by the idea of symbiosis, the relationships between plants and animals, and the beautifully complex systems in nature where an animal and a plant keep each other alive” Revital Cohen told Dezeen. “We wanted to design a plant to keep a wolf alive from extinction.”
The metal structures would feed biologically engineered nutrients to the blueberry plants, while metal prongs at the base would stimulate the wolves’ as they brush past, encouraging them to stop and eat the fruits.
“Wolves in the wild, can only touch each other at one point,” Tuur Van Balen explained. “As a human being, you can grab the wolf at two points. So we added these massagers that touch the animal at two points and the wolves really like it.”
The movement of the wolves would also generate electricity for the devices, powering surveillance cameras that stream footage of the animals across the internet.
“Maybe a way for the animal to keep itself from extinction is to become a form of entertainment,” said Cohen. “If there were cameras in the forest, maybe there would be people willing to watch and pay to watch it.”
Although the technology to embed anti-rabies vaccine in plants is not yet developed, the designers say it could be done with five years of research.
To test the concept, they attached regular blueberry plants to the structures and allowed a wolf to explore the exhibition, capturing the results on film.
“Many Native Americans believe that men and wolves were brothers, but then western culture invented these mythologies of the big bad wolf as symbolising everything’s thats wild and dangerous in nature,” Van Balen told Dezeen.
“But it is only when the wolf has rabies that it becomes the big bad wolf from the stories. It’s the only time when it becomes dangerous to humans and violent,” he added.
The Future Perfect exhibition was curated by architect Liam Young as an exploration into how technology will shape the cities of the future. The show also includes sculptural dresses made by dunking people into wax.
The Lisbon Architecture Triennale continues until 15 December. Follow Dezeen’s coverage of the event »
Here’s a project description from the exhibition organisers:
The Wilds – And Nowhere a Shadow There is no nature anymore. We are wandering a new kind of wilderness, where the line between biology and technology is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Through genetic modification, engineered meat, cosmetic surgery and geo-engineering we are remaking our world from the scale of cells to the scale of continents.
The woods, wild and mysterious from afar, appear as a stage on which every element is considered. Genetically engineered plants, artificially sustained, are hanging from the trees, embedded in the ecology yet detached from it. Their scaffolding systems of gleaming steel and neon light sway in the wind, waiting.
Grey wolves approach the structures during the night to scratch their body on the steel branches. In an intricate arrangement of devised symbiosis, the contraption takes on the role of host organism. The wolf’s movements generate electricity for the system, while the blueberries are engineered to contain rabies vaccine in its fruit to protect the animal from self-destruction. Cameras transmit footage of the wolf’s presence around the globe, adorned in invisible garlands of electric display, to be enjoyed by those whose passion for the spectacle of wilderness sustains its survival.
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at Future Perfect appeared first on Dezeen.
Le « eleMMent Palazzo » est le camping-car le plus cher au monde. Mis à la vente pour le prix de 3,1 millions de dollars à Dubai, cet objet incroyable de Marchi Mobile propose une grande chambre, un bar mais aussi une terrasse située sur le toit. Une accumulation d’éléments à découvrir en images dans la suite.
London Design Festival 2013: Dezeen Watch Store will be popping up at designjunction in central London from tomorrow. The store will debut a selection of men’s watches from the new Nixon S13-3 collection.
We’ve partnered with lifestyle brand Nixon to debut its new S13-3 collection during the event. The range will feature four new watches, including a military-inspired timepiece called The Corporal, and The 51-30 Leather Chronograph, a large timepiece with a 51mm face and a unidirectional rotating bezel made from stainless steel with a countdown timer and pushers.
Opening tomorrow, our Dezeen Watch Store pop-up will also include a selection of our bestselling watches including Uniform Wares, NAVA and ODM.
You can find us at stand G2, on the ground floor.
Opening hours:
Wednesday 18 September: 4pm–9pm (preview)
Thursday 19 September: 10am–8pm
Friday 20 September: 10am–7pm
Saturday 21 September: 10am–6pm
Sunday 22 September: 10am–4pm
The Sorting Office
21-31 New Oxford Street
London WC1A 1BA
See all our stories about London Design Festival »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to the London Design Festival 2013 »
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at designjunction appeared first on Dezeen.
London Design Festival 2013: design brand SCP is launching its latest collection of products and furniture at its two London stores this week.
The new products presented by SCP include first-time collaborations with emerging UK designer Lucy Kurrein (main image), American illustrator Mark McGinnis, and Stoke-On-Trent-based ceramicist Reiko Kaneko.
Lucy Kurrein has developed a low oak table and a taller steel side table with complimentary organic shapes that can be used separately or together.
London designer Peter Marigold has created a book holder in the shape of a bricklayer’s hod made from oak and powder-coated steel.
Longterm SCP collaborator Donna Wilson has designed a new textile collection of throws, blankets and cushions, and knitted wool bean bags decorated with her signature playful patterns.
East London studio Faudet-Harrison‘s Crosscut coat hooks are made from sheet steel with laser-cut holes into which cylindrical wooden hooks slot and sit flush against the wall.
The Crosscut table and trestles use the same principle as the coat hooks to create a sturdy tripod base.
Devon-based designer Andrea Stemmer has created a bar stool with a tripod base made from steel rod and a crescent-shaped wooden seat with a slight indentation to make it more comfortable.
Hertfordshire designer Alex Hellum‘s coffee table kinks towards one end to make it fit better next to a sofa or armchair.
East London designer Sarah Kay‘s stool has an A-shaped profile and a step that can be accessed from either side.
These and other new products will be on display at SCP’s stores in Shoreditch and Westbourne Grove as part of the London Design Festival, which continues until 22 September.
Danish furniture brand Hay is also launching a new furniture collection curated by British designer Sebastian Wrong at LDF, while designer Benjamin Hubert has designed a lightweight timber table and London studio Industrial Facility has created a range of stacking containers for desktop items.
See more stories about SCP »
See all our London Design Festival 2013 coverage »
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collection 2013 appeared first on Dezeen.
Braving a late summer heatwave in Southern California, the international team of Hermès gathered on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to reveal their newest boutique. Architect Denis Montel of
News: a water-filtration system that uses plants to extract arsenic from water supplies and allows the user to sell the poisonous substance at a profit has been voted the “Idea that will change the world” at the Global Design Forum in London today (+ interview).
Clean Water, developed by Oxford University MSc student Stephen Goodwin Honan, was voted the best of five world-changing ideas presented at the forum, held today at the Southbank Centre.
Arsenic poisoning from contaminated water has been described as the “largest mass-poisoning in history” by the World Health Organisation, causing cancers that kill an estimated 1.2 million people in the developing world each year.
Clean Water uses special, arsenic-absorbing plants, which are grown in a container. Water is pumped through the container and arsenic is trapped in a filter, and then absorbed by the plants where it poses no danger.
The filtered water is then safe to drink while the plant can be harvested each year and the arsenic chemically extracted. The plants are a naturally occurring species selected for their ability to remove arsenic from the soil they grow in.
The system costs just $10 (£6) to set up but can produce arsenic – which is widely used in industries including the semi-conductor and mobile phone industries – worth $85 (£53) per year. All parts of the system, apart from the filter and the plants, can be sourced locally from everyday materials such as plastic tubs and bamboo.
There are no running costs and no specialist expertise required to maintain the system. “Eighty percent of people in Bangladesh [where the system has been trialled] are subsistence farmers,” said Honan. “They understand how to look after plants.”
The session at Global Design Forum as part of the London Design Festival was judged by designer Ilse Crawford, advertising guru Sir John Hegarty, digital entrepreneur Brent Hoberman and futurologist Christopher Sanderson.
“It seems that the design works and the economics work,” Hoberman asked Honan during a question-and-answer session. “What’s holding you back?”
“As soon as we can sign an agreement with a semi-conductor company that wants to buy ethical arsenic, that will make the difference,” Honan replied.
The panel then gave Clean Water the highest vote of the five ideas pitched and the decision was ratified by an audience vote.
Honan is a FitzGerald Scholar studying an MSc in water science, policy and management at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford in England.
Other projects pitching to win the accolade of “Idea that will change the world” included Daniel Charny’s Fixperts concept, Fairphone by Bas van Abel, Smart Citizen by Tomas Diez and SCANurse by Anil Vaidya.
Today’s conference was the second part of the Global Design Forum, following last night’s event featuring graphic designer Peter Saville in conversation with journalist Paul Morley.
Here’s an interview Dezeen editor-in-chief conducted with Stephen Goodwin Honan after the presentation:
Marcus Fairs: What is Clean Water?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: The product is an environmentally friendly, low-cost, easy-to-use filtration system that rapidly accumulates arsenic from drinking water. The arsenic is able to then be recycled for productive purposes such as semi-conductors, solar panels, cellphones, computer electronics.
The system itself employs a natural mechanism for filtration. It uses a naturally occurring plant that grows directly in the water and directly removes the arsenic from the water prior to consumption. It requires zero electricity and is fully modular and scalable for varying levels of demand.
Marcus Fairs: How much does it cost and how much can the user earn from selling the arsenic?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: It costs $10, which primarily goes towards the distribution of the [young] plants. The users then grow the plants themselves and they can use any sort of products they have lying around, buckets and pipes and things, bamboo for the stands and so on.
$85 is the raw value of the high-purity arsenic that we’re able to produce from the waste of the plant itself [per year]. The costs of the chemicals [used to extract the arsenic from the plants] is very minimal. The difficultly is the economy of scale – we need to have the right type of facilities in order to do this type of production. So ideally we’d have the recycling scheme occur in a semi-conductor fabrication lab, because they already have all the clean rooms and everything else. Currently Bangladesh has an emerging market for semi-conductor fabrication, so we’re hoping to pair those two parallel paths – the arsenic contamination and the semi-conductor industry that’s emerging.
Marcus Fairs: What type of plants are used? Are they bio-engineered?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: There’s no bio-engineering involved. They’re naturally occurring plants that already have an affinity towards arsenic. The transport mechanisms in the plant are tailored specifically towards arsenic so they don’t compete with other plants for other minerals in the water, such as iron or nitrates. So the plan itself doesn’t need any bio-engineering.
Marcus Fairs: How many people are affected by arsenic contamination of drinking water?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: There are over 150 million people worldwide who are exposed to arsenic contamination. Specifically in Bangladesh it’s anything between 35 million and 88 million people [affected] out of a total population of 156 million.
We have over 1.2 million cases of hyper-pigmentation, which is an early stage of cancer [caused by arsenic poisoning]. It’s very difficult to get accurate figures for the numbers of deaths attributable to arsenic, because they don’t do autopsies. But those are the ballpark figures. It’s a massive proportion of the population that are affected.
Marcus Fairs: You’ve completed trials in Bangladesh; what happens next?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: So we’re post-pilot project and we’re looking to scale up. We already have 500 people who’ve signed up for the next iteration of the pilot project. They actually approached us to do the next phase. We’re then looking to partner with a semi-conductor company and hopefully we can close that gap and do the recycling in plants that are on the ground [in Bangladesh] and produce the first batch of “responsible arsenic”.
Marcus Fairs: $85 is a lot of money for a family in Bangladesh.
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Yeah. The average income in Bangladesh is roughly a dollar a day. It’s subsistence-level farming. The paradigm shift is that people will be able to earn money from producing their own clean water as opposed to paying to have clean water.
That’s a really big stickiness factor for the design itself. It can appeal to the farmers because this can be a real potential revenue source for them. Ideally we’ll have a dividend scheme where we buy the filters off them after they’ve been used.
Marcus Fairs: Have you set up a company to take this forward?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: I’m still a doctoral student at the University of Oxford. I worked with a couple of MBAs at the Said Business School and I’m looking to figure out the best way to implement this. I think that having open-source access to the design of the filter is the best way forward, but controlling the recycling scheme so the collection and processing happens under a watchful eye is going to be really important. I envision a non-profit organisation that delivers the filters and a social enterprise that would then run the recycling scheme.
Marcus Fairs: So the filter is a bit of technology that sits in the tub and the plants then absorb the arsenic that’s caught in the filter?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Yes absolutely. The filter technology should be accessible to everyone but the recycling process should be separate. Right now we don’t have a company incorporated to do that be we do have a team that’s looking at other problems such as going into old landfills and recycling metalloids that are wastefully thrown away and could be upcycled.
Marcus Fairs: So this idea could be spread laterally to recycle different types of pollutants?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Oh yeah. The idea itself can be used in many applications. The landfills are what we’re looking at next. We’re looking at value chains, how you can add value to recycling different supplies that are in demand by industry.
The post Plant-based water-purifying system named
“Idea that will change the world” appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the next stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour is our home town of London. In our first report, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs takes a trip through the east of the city and explains why the area has become such a hotbed for design and technology.
Starting off in Stoke Newington, a former village in the north-east of the city where Dezeen is based, Fairs follows the route of an old Roman road called Ermine Street to the city centre, passing through Dalston, Shoreditch and the City of London before ending up at the River Thames.
“These areas have come to symbolise the new creative economy of London,” says Fairs as he passes through Shoreditch, a former industrial district bordering the City of London where a proliferation of architects, designers and, increasingly, technology companies are based.
“They’re stuffed full of digital companies, technology companies, design companies; [there’s] a real focus of new types of creativity.”
Last year, Dezeen celebrated the rich diversity of design talent in the area as part of our Designed in Hackney initiative, which culminated in a day of talks and workshops with many of the borough’s upcoming creative companies.
“We plotted on a map all of the design studios in the area,” Fairs explains. “We found that the pins on the map were so dense you couldn’t see the map behind. It really felt that we’d discovered a critical mass of design talent that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world.”
There are a number of reasons why so many designers set up in London, says Fairs, despite the city being “really expensive, really competitive, really unfriendly to newcomers.”
“London is full of really amazing design schools, I think that’s a really important point,” he explains. “People from all around the world come to London to get their design qualifications; they make friends, they enjoy the culture and they stay and set up studios.”
Another major factor is money, Fairs claims: “There’s lots of money in London. That’s created problems – the property market has been going up non-stop – but it also creates wealth and wealth is the thing that turns the gears of creativity in many ways.”
The wealth of the city is most visible in the new skyscrapers being built to the south of Shoreditch in the City of London, where projects like Richard Rogers’ Leadenhall Building and Raphael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street, dubbed “The Cheesegrater” and “The Walkie-Talkie” respectively, are transforming London’s skyline.
“London used to be a place where world-class architects didn’t really feel like they could get any decent work” Fairs says. “But now London is really coming into its own.”
Of course, one of the main attractions of Shoreditch for the creative industries was that rents were comparatively cheap. Fairs says it is inevitable that young designers are now being priced out of the area, but is optimistic for the future of designers in the city.
“London is a big city,” he says. “People are already moving further to the east, to the south, crossing the river. London, I think, will always be able to regenerate itself.”
We travelled through east London in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.
See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »
The post “Shoreditch has come to symbolise the
new creative economy of London” appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the next stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour is our home town of London. In our first report, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs takes a trip through the east of the city and explains why the area has become such a hotbed for design and technology.
Starting off in Stoke Newington, a former village in the north-east of the city where Dezeen is based, Fairs follows the route of an old Roman road called Ermine Street to the city centre, passing through Dalston, Shoreditch and the City of London before ending up at the River Thames.
“These areas have come to symbolise the new creative economy of London,” says Fairs as he passes through Shoreditch, a former industrial district bordering the City of London where a proliferation of architects, designers and, increasingly, technology companies are based.
“They’re stuffed full of digital companies, technology companies, design companies; [there’s] a real focus of new types of creativity.”
Last year, Dezeen celebrated the rich diversity of design talent in the area as part of our Designed in Hackney initiative, which culminated in a day of talks and workshops with many of the borough’s upcoming creative companies.
“We plotted on a map all of the design studios in the area,” Fairs explains. “We found that the pins on the map were so dense you couldn’t see the map behind. It really felt that we’d discovered a critical mass of design talent that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world.”
There are a number of reasons why so many designers set up in London, says Fairs, despite the city being “really expensive, really competitive, really unfriendly to newcomers.”
“London is full of really amazing design schools, I think that’s a really important point,” he explains. “People from all around the world come to London to get their design qualifications; they make friends, they enjoy the culture and they stay and set up studios.”
Another major factor is money, Fairs claims: “There’s lots of money in London. That’s created problems – the property market has been going up non-stop – but it also creates wealth and wealth is the thing that turns the gears of creativity in many ways.”
The wealth of the city is most visible in the new skyscrapers being built to the south of Shoreditch in the City of London, where projects like Richard Rogers’ Leadenhall Building and Raphael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street, dubbed “The Cheesegrater” and “The Walkie-Talkie” respectively, are transforming London’s skyline.
“London used to be a place where world-class architects didn’t really feel like they could get any decent work” Fairs says. “But now London is really coming into its own.”
Of course, one of the main attractions of Shoreditch for the creative industries was that rents were comparatively cheap. Fairs says it is inevitable that young designers are now being priced out of the area, but is optimistic for the future of designers in the city.
“London is a big city,” he says. “People are already moving further to the east, to the south, crossing the river. London, I think, will always be able to regenerate itself.”
We travelled through east London in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.
See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »
The post “Shoreditch symbolises the new
creative economy of London” appeared first on Dezeen.
London Design Festival 2013: experimental surfaces covered in patterns created by magnetism are on show at Dutch designer Tord Boontje‘s studio this week (+ slideshow).
Boontje mixed metallised pigments into liquid resin and painted a thin layer of the coating onto aluminium composite panels.
He then used magnetic fields generated by permanent magnets or by passing an electric current through a wire to align the pigments. The resulting patterns were captured as the resin set.
Sharp lines of pigment trace the position of the magnetic fields and gradually blur in the gaps between, creating swirling shapes and holographic visual effects.
“When you bring together two magnets they either attract or push each other away – if you have more magnets then something more complex starts to happen,” Boontje told Dezeen.
The collection is part of an ongoing process of investigation that Boontje told Dezeen first began when he was a student at Design Academy Eindhoven. “I was interested in exploring something that’s invisible, that’s part of nature,” he said.
Some of the surfaces have been combined with steel frames to create tables and chairs. Boontje chose steel “because it attracts magnets,” and because he admires the steel sculptures created by minimalist artist Richard Serra.
New pieces will be added to the collection for a future gallery show, and Boontje believes the process could be industrialised and applied to products as diverse as clothing and architectural cladding. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “The surfaces can be used in many different ways.”
Magnetic Fields is being exhibited at Boontje’s studio and shop in Shoreditch as part of the London Design Festival, and will remain on show until 8 December 2012.
Other projects by Studio Tord Boontje include a series of lamps that are counterbalanced by filling their bases with objects like stones, books or apples, and a doorbell made from bent metal rods that support a random assortment of noisy everyday objects.
Boontje is due to leave his post as head of the Royal College of Art Design Products course at the end of this month after four years in charge, in order to focus on his own design studio.
See more design by Tord Bootje »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »
Here’s a brief description of the project from Studio Tord Boontje:
Magnetic Fields: Studio Tord Boontje
In his latest collection of work, Tord Boontje has created patterns through magnetism. This is an ongoing investigation into magnetism, pigments and holographic effects. These studio experiments have taken place over the last three years.
This collection of resin coated surfaces has an eerie depth in their embedded 3-dimensional patterns of electro magnetic movement, which allude to a dark sci-fi atmosphere.
The principle can potentially be applied to create bags, shoes, to interior and exterior architectural cladding, to spaceships…
“I use complex magnetic fields to orientate pigment particles in a very thin layer of resin. The magnetic fields are sometimes created through magnets and sometimes they use the magnetic field created by running an electric current through a wire” – Tord Boontje.
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Studio Tord Boontje appeared first on Dezeen.
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