Hasta La Ideas

It’s not so interesting to see a product you knew was going to succeed, succeed; it’s much more fascinating to watch the success of something you were initially dismissive of. As a designer there’s much more to be learned in the latter situation, requiring a re-jiggering of your understanding of people’s desires.

Designer Dan McDonley’s Ninja Standing Desk is an amusing, if self-consciously silly, product I never guessed would so handily smash its $10,000 funding target. But it’s nearly doubled it with over three weeks left to go. San-Francisco-based McDonley tapped the resources of his local TechShop to create the portable bi-level desk, which can be hung on the back of a door, the wall of a cubicle, or even affixed to an ordinary wall.

I’d initially dismissed it because I wasn’t considering the problem carefully enough. There are plenty of situations where a worker could use a temporary, portable desk with no wiring requirements: As one example, I’ve got a buddy who does interior design work, and architecture firms often contract him for the grunt job of measuring up empty office spaces they’ve been hired to re-do. I helped him out on one such job; using lasers, we had to measure a gargantuan open-plan office space in midtown that had been stripped of all furniture. There were no desks or chairs left, but plenty of windows, columns, soffets, and half-height walls to measure. With no place to set a laptop, nor anything to sit on, we took turns of having one of us sit on the floor in the center of the room with the laptop while the other guy ran around with the laser yelling out dimensions to input into the CAD. McDonley’s invention would have been pricelessly useful for the two-day project. And the nearly 200 backers of McDonley’s project attest to its desirability in other situations too.

Take a look:

(more…)

Paolo Rizzatto may be a self-described architect (scroll through his beautiful architectural drawings on his website), but it’s his colorful and playfully named Ping Pong Pang chair that’s been getting everyone’s attention lately. Designed for the Italian outdoor furniture company, Serralunga, the chair’s nimble design was apparently inspired by a paperclip.

After observing the classic design of paperclips on his office desk, he wondered if it was possible to create a metallic structure that, by exploiting the elasticity of the materials, allows the metal structure to snap into plastic cushions.

Rizzatto played with this idea until he had a stable but spare metal structure for indoor or outdoor use, though I strongly support the latter—just imagine how perfect these would look dotting a poolside patio. Plus, the seat is curved to help with drainage and the cushions are made from 100% recycled plastic coated with a UV-blocking resin to protect it from weathering and discoloration.

Available now from Serralunga for €215 a pop.

(more…)

When the martial arts school I was affiliated with began to expand, I learned something interesting about space usage. Let’s say you could open a yoga studio, a martial arts academy or a gym in New York City. If membership fees and space rental rates were identical for each business, which would be the most profitable?

Answer: The yoga studio. Why? Because you can fit the most bodies into the space. A room that holds 20 yoga practitioners might hold just six tumbling grapplers and three fitness machines. MMA schools and gyms need to charge higher fees (or more “churn”) to turn a profit.

This model mirrors the way airplanes are laid out. For yoga schools and Economy class to make cents, they need to hold as many bodies as possible. The fairly standard 30-by-72-inch yoga mats in rows give you a hard figure you can map to square footage, as do rows of cramped Economy seats. So I’m always interested to see concept work done with airplane seating—even if it rarely seems practical—because the church-pew seating model is such a difficult box to break out of.

UK-based recent ID grad Matthew Cleary has a proposal that might be better-suited to public parks than airplanes, but it’s worth a gander nonetheless.

Fresh off a one-year internship at British aircraft interior firm AIM Aviation, Cleary has conceptualized a triangular airplane seat that seats three, and effectively scatters passengers around the plane in an unusual way.

Two of the seats are pivotable, allowing passengers traveling together (at least in twos) to get a little cozier.

(more…)

To some older folk the word “Chesterfield” means sofa, any old sofa; but to the rest of us, it’s that particular type of leather sofa with the curled-over arms and the distinctive, tufted upholstery. What’s amazing is just how many components go into the thing: Rip one apart and you’ll find a wooden frame, several types of metal springs, fabric straps, stuffing between the springs, foam inside the cushions, the leather, the buttons, the thread to hold those latter two together, and tons of upholstery tacks and staples.

We will of course save you the trouble of having to find a Chesterfield you can rip open. While no one online spells out exactly how they’re made, I’ve found two excellent videos that really give you a sense of how they come together, and in what order. The first vid, from the UK’s Saxon Leather Upholstery, shows things happening at a factory pace:

This second video, from Italian furniture manufacturer Berto Salotti, shows two old-school craftsman going at it mostly with their fingers. The narration is entirely in Italian, but as in the first video, your eyes are all you really need to figure out what’s going on.

(more…)

By GearHungry

Vintage DIY furniture has a certain appeal that we can’t fully explain. While we love the concept of breathing new life into old materials by turning them into something useful, the issue that most of us face (and it’s a big one) is that we don’t actually know how to make anything, let alone a weight-bearing object that sees daily use.

Feel like you’re in the same boat? German designer Jakob Schenk—a.k.a. Linie58—has got our fix: similar in overall concept (but differing in means) to Areaware’s Wall Clamps, the Tick table leg clips turn any large flat board into a four-legged table in literally seconds—no screws, nails or bolts required. The secret behind Tick’s grip is the spring-like tension in the neutral position: loosen it by pushing both legs towards one another (see for yourself here), slip it over the board, then release to have Tick clamp down hard.

All that’s needed now is to find a fitting slab to turn into a table. An excerpt from their site demonstrates their propensity for creativity in the making of your own Tick table:

You can create your individual table by using any board of any size and material. It can be an old cupboard door, a board from the hardware store or whatever comes into your mind.

Tick also wants to encourage you to search for old board materials in order to reintegrate them into daily [life]. This is not just a pleasure for the board, but also for the environment and last but not least for you, as you have a unique piece of furniture in your flat.

A cheaper alternative to this…

(more…)