Hasta La Ideas

London Design Festival: Zaha Hadid teamed up with hairdressing brand Fudge to create a pop-up hair salon in London last week.

The Fudge Pop-Up Salon was installed in a monochrome gallery space in Clerkenwell, alongside models and furniture designed by Hadid’s studio.

“Zaha wanted to share that beyond buildings we have a large design portfolio of furniture and product design, and Fudge was excited to have her work as a backdrop to their avant garde approach to hairstyling,” explained project architect Melodie Leung.

The salon was located on the lowest floor of the gallery, where a white relief model of one of Hadid’s latest buildings protruded from one of the walls. Named King Adullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre, this building is currently under construction in Saudi Arabia.

Above: photograph is by Marcus Peel

Black geometric shapes on the floor fanned out from the model, outlining the positions for each hairstyling station. ”The black shapes were designed to integrate the stations with the relief,” said Leung.

The salon was open for just five days, to coincide with the London Design Festival and London Fashion Week.

Other recent exhibitions by Hadid include a collection of paintings and installations in Madrid and a pleated metal funnel at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

See more projects by Zaha Hadid »
See more stories from the London Design Festival »

Photography is by the architects, apart from where otherwise stated.

The post The Fudge Pop-Up Salon
by Zaha Hadid appeared first on Dezeen.

When I spoke with Scott Wilson, the force behind Lunatik and Tik Tok watches and asked him about the biggest flaw he saw in Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing platforms, he said finding a dependable manufacturer and a logistical supply chain for the product was the biggest drawback. Essentially, you may have a brilliant design, the seed funding, but no reliable support in the manufacturing process. Here is where Product Design Days and the Yanko Design RoadShow fit into your success story by overcoming this flaw.

Product Design Days is an exhibition and event, which is being held in the Indian metropolitan city of Chennai. Globally connected with the right industry, the aim of the event is to bring together manufacturers and innovative product designers so that they can strike a meaningful business relationship. The event spans over three days, with the main exhibition from November 22 and November 23, 2012.

In easy words, it is an event where product designers get to meet the decision makers from the manufacturing industry. It is the opportunity to meet and network with people who can help you realize your dreams as a designer.

Yanko Design RoadShow

With almost a decade of working closely with designers from across the globe, Yanko Design understands how important it is for designers to strike the right kind of partnerships in order to progress and sustain the business side of design. Yanko Design RoadShow is an exclusive booth where designers can showcase their works and at the same time network with manufacturers in the Small Medium Enterprise segment in India.

A select group of international designers will be able to leverage this offer to participate in the Yanko Design RoadShow. Request an invite by emailing us at show@yankodesign.com with “Yanko Design RoadShow” in the subject. Send in your email along with one quality image of each of the products you would like to showcase, remember very limited invites are available so email us right away.

More About Product Design Days

Product Design Days has created an exclusive platform for product designers to meet, interact and transact with manufacturers in the Small Medium Enterprise segment in India. The event offers an opportunity for design firms and professionals to reach out to their target audience, prospective customers and business associates in the most rewarding, innovative and personalized way. This event will be the largest lead generating activity in the country for product design firms.

• The event also includes a conference and the iDesign Awards.
• To know more how to participate and get your own stall, head to this link.

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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store – We are about more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the YD Store!
(Product Design Days + Yanko Design RoadShow was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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3. Best of Best – Red Dot Product Design 2011

London Design Festival: the first project by MAP, the new studio of designers BarberOsgerby, is a digital laboratory at London’s Science Museum where visitors can interact with internet-users around the world using musical instruments and robots (+ slideshow).

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have founded MAP as an industrial design consultancy that will operate alongside their interior design company Universal Design Studio and their design studio BarberOsgerby.

The Google Web Lab was designed in collaboration with Universal Design Studio and comprises a series of physical devices that can either be operated in person at the museum, or online at chromeweblab.com.

“Web Lab offers the opportunity for visitors to be more than just spectators,” Universal Design Studio director  Jason Holley told Dezeen. “Online and in-museum visitors are equally able to enjoy a dialogue with the museum; engaging, interacting and affecting the exhibition content.”

One device is a electronically-controlled orchestra (above), where different instruments are controlled by different users, while another is a data tracer that maps the sources of images and information and shows where they’ve travelled to (below).

The Sketchbots (below) are robots that photograph the faces of users and draws them on a plate of sand.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Other devices include a virtual teleporter (below), which functions as a set of windows to locations around the world, and a computer that charts the locations of everyone who has taken part in the experiments.

“Museums worldwide struggle with trying to understand how the digital can expand their reach to engage a wider and more diverse audience,” said Holley. “Web Lab offers the possibility of making the online experience integral, not secondary. It offers new opportunities for richer experiences online and physical spaces that expand beyond the walls of the museum”

Cameras are positioned around the exhibition, so users can continue to operate the devices when the museum is closed.

The project was also completed with interactive design and engineering group Tellart and graphic designers Bibliothéque.

See all our stories about London Design Festival »

See all our stories about Universal Design Studio »

Photography is by Lee Mawdsley, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s a lengthier description from Universal Design Studio and MAP:

Universal Design Studio and MAP collaborate with Google on exhibition that merges physical and virtual

Universal Design Studio and sister company MAP are responsible for the 3D design and architecture of a dramatic new Google exhibition. Web Lab brings the extraordinary workings of the Internet to life through a series of interactive, web-connected physical experiments, aiming to inspire the world about the Web’s possibilities and to explain its complex technological processes. Exhibition visitors can make music with people across the world and trace the physical route taken by a simple web search. The exhibition at London’s Science Museum is open to the world online at chromeweblab.com, with online visitors experiencing the exhibition day and night through 24-hour web cams installed at the museum.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Partnering with interactive design and engineering group Tellart, Universal Design Studio and MAP together designed the exhibition environment, creating innovative architectural and design archetypes for this new kind of physical/ digital collaboration. The design approach focuses equally on the experience of the space physically and the experience of it online via web cams. Architecture and design tools help to deconstruct technology and tell the story of how digital and physical realms are connected. New archetypes were created to separate users from their familiarity with objects, reinforcing the experimental nature of the exhibition, and to ensure each experiment could be appreciated both in the museum and online.

Universal Design Studio and MAP have created an immersive lab setting in the basement of the Science Museum, a scheme that foregrounds the idea of Web Lab as an interactive place of testing and continuous experimentation.

An industrial, functional aesthetic forms the backdrop to the series of playful experiments. At the exhibition’s entrance, a centrally positioned glass and wire mesh workshop provides a highly visible ‘curated lab’ space for events, simple repairs and displays. A key feature conceptually, it represents the ‘living lab’ nature of the exhibition, where visitors are not spectators but are engaged in and part of a working space.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Universal Design Studio and MAP were challenged to design a space that would be experienced both physically and online through ‘the eyes of the web’. In order for online visitors to easily interpret the space, architectural planes are clearly and directly articulated. The ground plane maps out the territory as a graphic surface. Bibliothèque created graphics for the rubber floor which, as well as providing an additional narrative layer to the exhibition, creates zoning and flow of movement, and adds a supportive description of each experiment’s function.

The ceiling plane consists of a bright yellow steel grid delivering the network of cables that service the experiments. Rather than be concealed, the grid articulates the physicality of the web, illustrating its data flow – the ‘life source’ of the experiments. Throughout the exhibition, cabling to experiments is intentionally exposed, emphasising this physicality.

A secondary skin of semi-transparent wire mesh lines the walls of the museum gallery, blurring the distinction between the existing building and the new installation. The space is acoustically controlled creating an optimal environment for the Universal Orchestra experiment, which provides the soundtrack to the exhibition experience.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Working with Tellart (who prototyped the experiments) and Universal Design Studio, MAP oversaw the industrial design, look and feel of the exhibition’s five Chrome Experiments:

Universal Orchestra: An Internet-powered eight-piece robotic orchestra creating harmonious music
Sketchbots: Custom-built robots able to take photographs and then sketch them in sand
Data Tracer: A map that traces where the world’s online information is physically stored
Teleporter: A series of web-enabled periscopes through which you can instantly access the world (including a 24 hour US bakery)
Lab Tag Explorer: A real-time visualisation of all Web Lab visitors from around the world that groups and categorises participants in incredible ways

The post Google Web Lab by Universal Design Studio
and MAP appeared first on Dezeen.

Philippe Ruault, courtesy of OMA

We often think of architecture as an art first and foremost, and who can blame us—when have you looked at a building and truly understood the science and reasoning behind a particular design? Rather, we look at a building and take in its aesthetic qualities.

While this is no fault of our own, Considering the Quake, co-curated by Prof. Ghyslaine McClure and founder Dr. Effie Bouras of McGill University, investigates the other side of the coin, analyzing structures that go above and beyond conventional approaches to seismic design, including not only fully constructed seismic technology, but also models, renderings and other multimedia platforms.

Taipei Performing Arts, Courtesy of OMA

Every year we’re reminded of the power of natural disasters, reminded of, in many cases, how unprepared we truly are in the wake of events such as throttling earthquakes. In a world where we can’t predict when the next disaster will strike, advances in seismic technology such as those on display in “Considering the Quake,” could one day, save your life.

Open to the public last Wednesday, September 13th, Considering the Quake is the accompanying exhibit to Vertical Urban Factory.

CCTV time lapse, Courtesy of OMA

(more…)

A 2011 self-portrait by Annie Leibovitz and the Wexner Prize sculpture by Jim Dine.

There’s no mistaking the golden corpse that is Oscar or the atom-thrusting, lightning-winged Emmy gal, but we’ll gladly trade you both for a Jim Dine hammer, gnarled and gleaming. Such is the distinctive statuette that accompanies the Wexner Prize, awarded every so often (beginning in 1992) by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio to “living artists working in any medium or discipline whose achievements reflect bold originality, innovation, and creative excellence.” The fourteenth recipient is photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose work is the subject of a major exhibition opening September 22 at the Center, which has already readied a Twitter hashtag for the occasion: #wexannie. Leibovitz joins an esteemed group of past winners that includes Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Gerhard Richter, Issey Miyake, and Spike Lee. Aside from that smashing hammer—tools for both building and breaking apart, Dine, an Ohio native, saw them as symbols for the creative force that drives artists—she’ll receive a check for $50,000 (no snide comments, please).

“Working with Annie over the last fifteen months to produce her exhibition at the Wex, her ‘candidacy’ quite naturally emerged with all the clarity and authority of one of her photographs,” said Wexner Center director Sherri Geldin in a statement issued this afternoon. “The more than 200 Leibovitz photographs on view at the Wexner Center this fall attest to her stunning achievement across more than 40 years of relentless photographic pursuit. That these works continue to so profoundly move us decades after they were shot is but one measure of her mastery.” Leibovitz will be presented with the prize at a ceremony on November 10 at the Center. She’ll also discuss her work in a public talk that weekend.
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