Hasta La Ideas

British designer Benjamin Hubert has developed a more stable version of his lightweight Ripple table, which features on the shortlist for Designs of the Year 2014 (+ slideshow).

Hubert launched the original Ripple table during last year’s London Design Festival to demonstrate the structural capabilities of a lightweight laminated plywood material called Corelam.

The nine kilogram product was described as the world’s lightest table, but attracted criticism from Dezeen readers who wondered whether it was robust enough for practical use.

“I can’t imagine this is very sturdy – at 2.5 metres long it looks and feels too flimsy,” said one reader, while another suggested: “You should prove stability, not lightness.”

In reaction to doubts over the product’s practicality, Hubert and his team performed a series of strength and stability tests before overhauling the design to improve its structural properties. It is now strong enough to hold the weight of a person.

“I think it’s important to make products that really work,” Hubert told Dezeen. “A concept always needs to be proven, and we enjoy healthy criticism as it pushes us to go further.”

The updated version features a curve across the underside of the table surface that increases its tensile strength, as well as a new leg design with a triangulated cross section.

A brace attaching the legs to the tabletop is also made from Corelam. This has been pressed to produce an undulating profile that creates a transition between the corrugated surface and the flat area to which the legs are fixed.

Up to ten people people can be seated around the 2.5 by 1 metre table, which uses 80 percent less material than a standard timber table and still weighs just 10.5 kilograms

In direct response to comments suggesting that the original table should have been shown with someone standing on it to demonstrate its strength, Hubert has done just that with the new version.

The Ripple table is on show as part of the Designs of the Year exhibition at London’s Design Museum, which opens today and runs until 25 August.

Here’s a press release from Benjamin Hubert:

Ripple 2.0
Held by 1. Holds 1. Seats 10.

Ahead of the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2014, Benjamin Hubert Ltd has launched the production-ready version of the nominated Ripple table, which is now also available for purchase through Benjamin Hubert Ltd. The table can still be assembled and manoeuvred by a single person but can now easily support the equivalent of a person’s weight, further demonstrating the properties of the lightweight construction.

Following a series of rigorous strength and stability tests undertaken by the studio, the underside of the table’s surface now curves gently across its length and width, adding tensile strength to the structure. The improved leg design now employs a hollow triangular profile that offers increased strength and rigidity in two directions. The brace between the legs has a curved cross section to increase the strength of the connection between the leg and the table surface. As the corrugated plywood meets the legs, it gradually transitions to a flat surface, providing a smooth intersection.

Ripple uses 80% less material than a standard timber table, and at 2.5 metres long and 1 metre wide, it now offers ample space for ten place sittings. The table’s impressive strength to weight ratio is enabled by an innovative production process of corrugating plywood for furniture through pressure lamination, which was developed by Benjamin Hubert Ltd in collaboration with Canadian manufacturer Corelam.

Ripple is made entirely from 3 ply 0.8mm sitka spruce, a timber sourced only in Canada, where the table is manufactured. The engineered timber was also used in construction of the Hughes H-4 Hercules – popularly known as the “Spruce Goose” – the world’s largest all-timber airplane. The strength of the material in combination with a unique lamination process means the edge of Ripple measures just 3.5mm.

Ripple was designed as part of an internal studio research project into lightweight constructions, and was first launched at Aram Store during London Design Festival last year. Ripple will be exhibited as part of the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2014.

Material: Sitka Spruce 0.8mm aircraft plywood
Dimensions: L 2.5m x W 0.95m x H 0.74m

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is now strong enough to stand on appeared first on Dezeen.

La série « The Ice Typography » de Nicole Dextras, une artiste environnementale canadienne, regroupe un éventail de mots 3D en glace que l’artiste a faits à l’aide d’attelles en bois. De la ville de Toronto à la rivière Yukon, ces installations poétiques montrent les mots comme étant éphémères et en constante évolution.

Opinion: as the market for design education explodes and schools struggle to keep up, we need to work out what a designer actually is and what they need to learn says Lucas Verweij.

Design has expanded in all imaginable directions, but the world of education doesn’t know how to respond to the new situation. What on earth should you teach future designers? For what profession are we actually educating them? Will they be entrepreneurs? Or artists? Engineers? Writers? Innovators? Researchers? There’s no time to reflect on the answer, because courses and programmes must be developed quickly in response to the crazy growth in the market for design education.

Design has expanded. In the digital domain we’ve seen the emergence of interaction design, game design and app design. Managerial tools now include design thinking and business model design. In the humanitarian domain we now have service design, human-centred design and social design. None of these new directions bear much relation to the roots of the profession in industrial or product design. Instead, we are increasingly coming to view design more as a mentality than a skill. And while education struggles with this shift, the market for education keeps on growing.

Half a century ago, universities established courses in design largely as offshoots of mechanical engineering. In addition to technology, designers received academic instruction in design methods. Design freedom was therefore limited. Academies of art established courses grounded in ceramic and graphic design, which were both practical and artistic in orientation. For decades just two professional profiles existed alongside each other: a designer was either a creative engineer or a practitioner of an applied art.

The design explosion disrupts education. Teachers and administrators in the field of education disagree about what to teach designers. In Eindhoven the battle even culminated in a personal shootout among the academy’s management. While individual teachers and administrators harbour explicit, personal opinions, there is no shared vision about what to teach designers.

Is collaboration with other disciplines the most important aspect? Or is it still creative ability? Should programming be a compulsory subject? Or understanding of production processes? Is a knowledge of materials still important? Which entrepreneurial, journalistic and research skills should students learn? And should they be instructed in a more didactic setting than has been the case up to now?

While schools are driven to desperation, the market for design education is growing explosively. Århus, Bern and Amsterdam have all seen the emergence of creative business schools boasting names like Kaospilots and Knowmads, with a clear vision of creative and social entrepreneurship. Students are capable of writing business plans, learn about management strategies for online start-ups, and are blessed with a mentality of engagement. Leadership skills are also on the syllabus. Businessweek rates them as “top design schools”.

Start-up schools and bootcamps have come up with new learning formats for prototyping commercial ideas. Courses are internal and last about half a year. Students pay for their tuition with shares in the business they plan to set up. Admission is determined on the basis of ideas proposed by prospective students, and courses focus entirely on the elaboration of one single idea.

Hasso Plattner has initiated schools for design thinking and design innovation known as the Institute of Design and the School of Design Thinking. This is where one of the best-selling apps of 2010 – Pulse Reader – was created. In addition, over 80 courses in interaction design have emerged, usually through the addition of a design component to an existing course in technology.

Even though most designers think that service design “has nothing to do with design”, the Royal College of Art in London recently established a course in this field. Similarly, Domus Academy, the birthplace of Memphis, is doing its bit by offering a course in business design. In New York courses in design criticism were established recently, and a course in curating and writing will launch this year in Eindhoven. Design thinking is offered as a subject at many American universities. So although fundamental questions remain unanswered, new courses are popping up everywhere like mushrooms. It makes you wonder just how good all those courses really are.

Now that the education market is totally globalised, schools are recruiting students all over the world. Everybody who pays is welcome. In Europe, European students bring in less money than real foreigners, so students from further afield are more lucrative. Tuition fees for a masters course at Domus costs €17,000 for students from Europe, but €25,000 for students from everywhere else. That’s cheap compared to design criticism, where you’ll pay $18,000 per semester.

The multicultural make-up of the student population is often seen as a criterion for quality. But is learning in a class with lots of nationalities really better? I don’t think so. Something else is expected of designers in Seoul or Dubai than in Paris. Around the world there are vast differences in levels of professional freedom, in the role of clients, in how critical a design can be.

You don’t go to school in Hong Kong if you want to become a chef in Montpellier. But that’s precisely what’s happening in design. And the upshot is the globalisation of masters courses, which are churning out jetlag designers who lack a cultural framework.

Academies of art educate students to master specific skills such as game design, interaction design, business design, social design or service design. Graduates become practitioners of applied arts in the old sense of the term. Universities turn out managers and engineers, who have never quite been able to master the unpredictability of design and creativity.

It would be better to leave design thinking to schools of management, and leave interaction and game design to schools of computer science.

Design criticism could be instructed at schools of journalism, and social design at teacher-training colleges. A creative and design dimension to these professions can develop or evolve organically in such places. Design has become a mentality that can be applied in courses structured to impart specific skills. That is better than the reverse, which is now the case.

Design no longer belongs to anybody. Design no longer belongs to the people, places of education or lobby groups that have represented and tutored it for decades. Let it go. The time has come to give design away.

Lucas Verweij has been teaching at schools of design and architecture around Europe for over 20 years. He was director of a master’s programme in architecture and initiated a masters course in design. He is currently professor at the Kunsthochschile Weißensee and teaches master’s students at Design Academy Eindhoven. He has initiated and moderated various seminars devoted to designing design education.

The post “We are coming to view design
more as a mentality than a skill” appeared first on Dezeen.

Bradley Price, founder of Officine Autodromo, not only recognizes the romanticism and beauty of early automobile racing, he also captures it in his design work—across gloves, sunglasses and watches. His two latest releases in the Continue Reading…

High street fashion chain American Apparel has launched a 43-piece collection of clothing featuring graphic prints by Memphis Group designer Nathalie Du Pasquier (+ movie).

The Nathalie Du Pasquier for American Apparel collection includes womenswear, menswear and accessories in minimalistic shapes covered in colourful, graphic prints.

Du Pasquier was a core member of the Milan-based Memphis Group that pioneered post-modern furniture and fabric design in the 1980s, but has since nurtured a career as an artist.

She was approached by American Apparel creative director Iris Alonzo who asked her to create prints similar to those she designed during the Memphis era.

“It was the first collaboration with a fashion company in many, many years actually because I am a painter,” Du Pasquier told the New York Times. “I have not done that kind of work in a long time.”

The collection marks a departure from American Apparel’s signature style of single-colour staples, with its womenswear often produced in skin tight stretch jersey.

Prints by Du Pasquier also feature in the Wrong for Hay collection launched last year, which is expanding due to popularity.

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Memphis Group’s Nathalie Du Pasquier appeared first on Dezeen.