Hasta La Ideas

Last night was the opening party of The Dock, the design extravaganza curated by Tom Dixon. The newly developed Portobello Docks is a beautiful site right on the canal in London’s West, existing of three buildings: The Wharf Building which is housing Tom Dixon’s brand new shop. The Canal Building which hosts a number of exhibitors (amongst others Case Furniture, Thorsten van Elten and Andre Klauser’s and Ed Carpenter’s freshly launched company Very Good and Proper). In the White Building are the young creative gunslingers such as Dominic Wilcox, Luka Stepan, Valentin Vodev and many more.

Pictured above are Bethan Wood’s furniture and accessories from her Super Fake Series as well as Luka Stepan’s foldable bar stool.

Please click for many more pictures!

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Emily Pilloton’s new book, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People, with a foreword by Core77’s Allan Chochinov, was released earlier this month, to much excitement. To celebrate, Project H will be throwing back-to-back launch parties in San Francisco and New York. The San Francisco event will be held at the Adobe offices on October 1st, with a presentation by Pilloton. On October 6th, she’ll be joined at at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City by Chochinov and Susan Szanasy, the Editor-in-Chief of Metropolis Magazine.

These events are open to all—just make sure you RSVP. And, if you can’t make it, look for the Design Revolution Road Show, coming in 2010.

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Latest news from the Creative Confab we’re putting together through Coroflot: the afternoon panel’s just grown by 33%, with the addition of Google Creative Lab recruiter Emily Delmont. She’ll be getting the 2 Questions treatment next week, so stay tuned, but in the meantime, we can offer up a quick preview from Emily’s official bio:

Emily has been with Google for 3 1/2 years. In that time, she has worked as a researcher at Google.org, the company’s philanthropic wing, as well as in recruiting, most recently for Andy Berndt and the Creative Lab. Since joining the Creative Lab in May 2008, it has more than doubled in size. Before joining Google, Emily received her BA in Global Studies and MA in African Studies, and also taught and worked abroad in such places as London, Vietnam, South Africa, and Korea. She has been to over 30 countries and is always planning her next adventure. Most recently on tap was the eastern European leg of the last Radiohead tour and drooling over street art in Berlin.

The Creative Lab was established two years ago as a sort of internal branding agency devoted to building Google’s identity across multiple platforms, “even some that don’t exist yet,” according to this interview with Managing Director Andy Berndt (formerly of Ogilvy & Mather). Sounds very exploratory and a little strange to us, and thus we’re fascinated. Looking forward to hearing more from Ms. Delmont.

Coroflot’s Creative Employment Confab
Wednesday, October 21, 2pm – 6pm (workshops: 10am – noon)
The Autodesk Gallery
One Market Street, San Francisco, CA

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This year Designersblock is at Earls Court alongside 100% Design, which will be opening this Thursday. Here a little preview of what to expect from Designersblock this year. Pictured above:

Sustainable and energy preservation become a global issue, however consumption is incalculable, saving is often neglected through daily consumption. Rather than forcing people to consume less, thus depressing the using experience, Yan LU offers with his Poor Little Fish basin an emotional way to persuade consumers to think about saving water, by making consumption tangible. There is a traditional shaped fish bowl in the Poor Little Fish basin. While using, the level of water in the bowl gradually falls; it will go back to the same level once the water stops. Hence the consumer needs to consider the fish while using. Due to separated pipelines, the water that comes from the tap is pure and clean while the one in the bowl is not actually changing; no more water is wasted in this process.

One of the projects that KithKin is presenting is Whistle while you Wait by Celene Mcdowell: Tired of waiting for your tea to cool down? When you blow on your tea these ceramic cups will sing to you. The double walled design provides insulation and a crafty way of introducing sound as a fun diversion until your tea reaches its optimum drinking temperature.

Matthew Coombes will show his Non-therapeutic Tools of Grieving, aiming to encourage a discourse around the ‘awkward’ subject of grief. They are all based based on individual grieving experiences that he gathered through public engagement. From the process of collation and interpretation of this valuable information derived three final products. Featured above are the Single Tear Catcher and the Husband Stilts. The Single Tear Catcher came from the experience of shedding a solitary tear at a funeral. “My brother and father died when I was sixteen.Throughout the whole funeral shed a single tear. I guess that’s how I coped.” The Husband Stilts represents the physical loss of a loved one, the practical implications. “My husband always helped me reach things that were too high and lift things that were too heavy for me.”

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Frog’s latest issue of designmind, their multimedia publication on business, technology and design, focuses on the TedGlobal conference held in Oxford this past July, on the theme of “The Substance of Things Not Seen.” With selected articles online and a print version available to purchase, this issue offers both behind-the-scenes coverage of the acclaimed TedGlobal conference (where frog acted as a content partner) and reflections by frog designers, technologists and strategists on the conference content. For example, in Seeing the Future Synesthetic, Laura Richardson, a principal designer at frog, reflects on Beau Lotto’s talk about artificially created synesthesia:

Like TEDGlobal speaker Beau Lotto (see “A New Way to See”), I don’t research synesthesia—I prefer to create it artificially. Lotto calls this “virtual synesthesia.” I call it “associational synesthesia.” While he might want to leverage synesthesia for experimenting with the brain’s adaptability, I want to cultivate and harvest it in order to design thinking processes and problem solving skills.

“You can teach people through [synesthetic] experiences to heighten their ability to find new relationships and new associations that haven’t been discovered before. That’s the creativity,” says Lotto.

There’s much more where that came from—frog has a wealth of selected articles here, including pieces on musician Imogen Heap, the working homeless, organized crime and micro-sculptures, among others. For even more, get the printed version.

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