Mr. Kiji returns to gallery walls with a solo show of design prowess
Not long after Mr. Kiji removed his paintings from the walls of NYC’s Mallick Williams Gallery in April last year, he was struck by a car while riding his bike around his Brooklyn neighborhood. The hit rendered Mr. Kiji with a hand lacking feeling and he was unable to…
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Ever wondered how does a 3D printer work or a do a chair and a wicker basket have in common? The answers are there for all to learn at explore at this year’s Łódź Design Festival. Commencing on the 18th of October, the design festival will run for a full ten days and has the underlying theme of AWARENESS. Currently in its sixth year, the exhibition is split up into three sections: AWARENESS, must have and make me!
To know the full timetable for the events please head here and make sure you send us some pictures from your experience. Special events held under the motto AWARENESS will bring to light how important awareness in design is and how many connotations and meanings it has in relation to it.
Here is a sneak peak into what you can expect to see at this year’s festival.
Festival Dates: 18 – 28 October 2012
Venue: Łódź, Poland
Does design mean only a process of creating another object or does it also imply a way of thinking that can have impact on the reality around us? How does it influence our lives? Can it make the world a better place?
The must have poll is intended to promote Polish design, and the best-designed products have been selected to be showcased at a joint exhibition.
The make me! contest and the accompanying exhibition give young designers from all over the world the opportunity to show their ideas to the public, to establish contacts with companies and to enter the market. The winner of the main prize of PLN 20,000 will be announced at the gala event!
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(AWARENESS at Łódź Design Festival was originally posted on Yanko Design)
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Five eco-friendly innovations for food and travel at the forward-thinking exhibition
The thematic exhibition “Yes Future!” at this season’s Maison et Objet show in Paris unveiled visionary novelties, and while browsing the show, it was obvious that environmental concern is currently one of the major motors of design. These five examples from the eco-conscious exhibition highlight innovations for food and…
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When Lin Lin, co-founder of the Chinese design consultancy Jellymon says something, people usually listen. Her tiny frame conceals a ebullient personality and creative energy that has propelled Jellymon’s unique graphic branding vocabulary into an insider’s language of what’s fun and cool in youth-oriented China.
At this year’s Beijing Design Week, Lin Lin took over five rooms in a Dashilar Hutong to present her latest creative projects to the public—accessories and furniture, a new food endeavor and a sneaker branding concept.
Triple X Ohhh! Sauce from Jellymon’s Spoonfull of Sugar Cafe
GFG is a personal project from Lin Lin that is an exercise of her passion for product design. The debut collection includes a range of accessories, furniture and tableware. I love the punchout DIY nipple tassles (after the jump) that are packaged in a beautifully designed paper envelope, perfect for gifting. A small group of linked, overlapping “Top Me” rings are an obvious nod to Vivienne Westwood’s Knuckledusters but display a delicacy and femininity in the details.
The Velveteen Rabbit meets Blade Runner in “Dark Peculiar Toys,” an exhibition of photographs by Viktor Koen that opens Thursday, October 4 at the United Photo Industries Gallery in Brooklyn. Koen’s dystopian playthings evoke the scarred and spooky future stars of a Steampunk sequel to Toy Story. “Their appeal lies solely in the tendency children (of any age) have to cannibalize existing objects in order to fuse their own,” says the artist of his “tragic action figures” in a statement about the project, which has been previously exhibited in Berlin, Boston, and Athens. “These creations come at odds with their carefully planed origins and brake gender and age molds by defying children experts, focus groups, and sales projections. The newly assembled toys, though somewhat dramatic and traumatic due to their darkness, evoke our emotions and form a connection with us, by taking a place in our personal memories. Not in a ‘lost childhood blah, blah, blah’ way—but as images that communicate nostalgia and joy, or the nostalgia of joy.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Model of the Olympic cauldron designed by Thomas Heatherwick
With only 48 hours left to see “Heatherwick Studio” at the V&A in London, the fantastic exhibition about the progressive and experimental work by the studio established by architect and designer Thomas Heatherwick, it’s not surprising that crowds are packing in to see the overwhelming array of projects developed and executed by the studio, so be sure to book your free ticket in advance. Given the expansive nature of the studio’s work, it’s not clear as to why the museum chose to hold the exhibition in a single, smallish room off the central hall. Still, if you can bear shuffling through the thicket of wonderstruck visitors it really is well worth the occasional bump or shove. The projects on view, which range in scope and scale from the recent Seed Cathedral to the Christmas cards his studio has been sending out every year since 1994 give you an idea not only of the full range of Heatherwick’s abilities and expertise, but the smaller projects, proposals and materials experiments give a sense of perspective and deeper understanding of the studio’s larger architectural structures.
Heatherwick, who studied 3D design at Manchester Polytechnic, began what would become a lifelong obsession with the relationship between architecture and practical craftsmanship when he interviewed architects, builders and contractors for his dissertation. “His research supported his view that there was a disconnection between the design of buildings and the craftsmanship of architectural details.” To marry the two, he founded a studio in 1994 that focuses on the creative process and pushes fabrication techniques to the limits of the materials. Ideas for larger scale structures emerge from experiments with crushing or folding paper, or dropping molten metal into a beaker of cold water, for example. “One of their lines of enquiry has been that texture can define the form of a building rather than simply act as a surface detail or facade decoration.” The textures the studio experiments with include everything from the spiky exploded form of B of the Bang, a metal sculpture located in Manchester, and the Seed Cathedral built for the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. The exterior, comprised of 60,000 acrylic rods embedded with plant seeds, has since been dismantled, but pieces of it are shown in the exhibition.
Heatherwick studio remains one of the only design and architecture practices that makes the majority of their models in-house in an effort to use model-making as an essential part of the overall design process. They’re also the only studio, to our knowledge, that takes their Christmas cards so seriously. Until 2010, the studio used the annual tradition of creating and sending Christmas cards as an opportunity for even more experimentation with materials, and the meticulously crafted cards “were considered to be individual studio projects in their own right… Mini production lines were set up each Christmas. Bespoke tools, jigs and other devices were invented specifically for the fabrication of hundreds of cards.” Taking in this huge range of projects in a single lap around the exhibition space at the V&A is the perfect way to wrap up London’s season-long celebration, first with the Olympics and then with the city-wide engagement in London Design Festival.
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A conversation with Slinkachu on his international street installations
A de facto ambassador for “little people,” London-based Slinkachu delights passersby with diminutive scenes left in unexpected locales. From dunking basketball players and magic carpet riders to hanged men and lonely brides, Slinkachu’s tableaus show off the many faces of the human condition. The quick-witted artist has been doing…
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Photography courtesy of Rebecca Blissett
Tobias Wong was a star in New York City, but he always remained close to his family, friends and his roots in Canada and especially Vancouver, where I had moved to several months before he died. In January of 2010, I had shown some of his work and curated a lecture of his in Toronto and was shocked and saddened at the loss of him; a colleague I had great fondness and respect for.
The idea for a show in Vancouver manifested in the months that followed. I felt strongly that attention was better directed toward his ideas and influence instead of his too early end. It seemed fitting that I was living out west at the time, and had the resources to make an exhibit happen. The city where he was born and raised, his family and friends and Tobi himself deserved a celebratory homecoming for his work that had made an indelible impression on the worlds of art and design. I set out to accomplish this with the utmost respect for Tobi’s tight-knit community and am so grateful for their support (which in the end, was not only a buoying source of energy, but also integral to the exhibition itself).
I came at the show from a perspective of curatorial lightness, meaning the vision was already there (the work speaks strongly for itself), all I had to do was to make space for the community to relay the context; each piece on exhibit is accompanied by a short blurb of commentary from a friend, collaborator or curator. My intention with this show was to create the ultimate Tobias Wong project: an inspiration machine that would take his ideas up and out, inspiring others to see their surroundings as ingredients for making art… that art is everywhere and we can all use it to say something.
Todd Falkowsky is the curator of Object(ing): The Art/Design of Tobias Wong on view now through February 24, 2013 at the Museum of Vancouver.
Akin to MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, which awards a young or fledgling architecture firm with modest funding to build a summer pavilion in the courtyard at PS1, Design Museum London’s Designers in Residence program provides professional and financial support to young designers or design studios “in the often challenging years following graduation as they try to progress in their careers.” Now in its fifth year, the 2012 program chose four designers and asked them to respond to a brief entitled “Thrift,” and investigate the notion that “it is more difficult to produce a refined design for £10 than it is to produce the same design for £1,000,” a fact that may seem obvious, but it encouraged the designers to explore whether “the limitations of economy require more resourceful, inspired and intelligent use of materials and processes.” The four resulting projects and the designers’ commitment to seeking out underutilized materials that are either extremely cheap or free and pushing them to their limits resulted in one of the most fascinating exhibitions we’ve seen all year. Each project is presented in its various stages so that you can see the work in process alongside the finished product. Each display is accompanied by a short, beautifully shot documentary by Alice Masters on each designer and their project for the Residence.
Freyja Sewell, who graduated from Brighton University in 3D Design in 2011, decided to work with wool for its naturally renewable, durable, biodegradable, flame retardant and insulating properties. Taking thriftiness into account, she sourced a wool by-product of the British carpet manufacturing industry available in mass quantities for next to nothing. To make something from the mixed bag of wool fibers and random bits of thread, Sewell tried wet felting, an ancient technique in which the wool is soaked in hot water and agitated until the fibers are worked together into a single piece.
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