Hasta La Ideas

Product news: Bangkok-based design firm THINKK Studio has launched a collection that includes hanging lamps made from concrete and wood, concrete vases with wire frames and a little truck to hold your pens and paper clips.

The Workaholic collection by Thai designers THINKK Studio includes the CementWood hanging lamps made from hand-lathed ash and concrete.

The Truck desk tidy is made from ash wood and powder coated steel and has a container that slides out to reveal two compartments inside.

The Foldo desk lamp comprises an ash base and a thin sheet of powder coated steel which curves over to form a lampshade.

The Truss concrete vase can be paired with one of three different wire frames in geometric shapes.

The vases in the Workaholic collection are similar to an earlier series of concrete and wire vases by THINKK Studio designer Decha Archjananun.

We’ve published two other lamps by THINKK Studio – a wooden lamp that slots into a marble base and another wooden lamp held together by a red cord.

Other desk accessories we’ve featured include a silicone pen pot with a dish for paper clips and sharpeners and a solid concrete tape dispenser, pen pot and tray.

See all our stories about stationery »
See all our stories about lamps »

Here’s some more information from THINKK Studio:

Workaholic is a set of small items for working space or studying area including Truck, CementWood lamp, Foldo lamp and Truss Vases.

Truck

Truck is a little desk organizer which allow us to have fun and enjoy our childhood memories in order to recharge and refresh our imaginations as we were young again.
Materials: Ash wood , Powder coated steel
Dimension: 110 x 200 x H190

CementWood lamp

On this project, We provide more choices of materials for 2 main parts of the hanging lamp which made of concrete and wood. There are 2 different hand crafted techniques for making the same shape made of both materials. Wooden pieces are made by hand lathing while the concrete pieces are formed by rotational shaping process.
Materials: Ash wood , FRC Concrete
Dimension: 130 x 130 x H180

Foldo lamp

Foldo is a simple desk lamp, combined with wooden base and a single piece of folded steel which act as a lampshade.
Materials: Ash wood , Powder coated steel
Dimension: 250 x 150 x H290

Truss Vases

Truss Vases are inspired by metal structures which normally found in construction site. 3 shapes of wired steel can be insert on the top of concrete base for different flowers arrangement.
Materials: Concrete , Powder coated steel
Dimension: A.135 x 200 x H240 / B.135 x 200 x H350 / C.135 x 260 x H350

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THINKK Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

These delicate bowls by Japanese design studio Nendo are so thin they quiver in the wind (+ movie).

Nendo created Shivering Bowls for the KAMA. Sex & Design exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Eight designers were asked to produce a piece that explores the idea of eros, the Greek term for erotic love, and Nendo responded by creating an extremely thin bowl from silicon.

“We wanted to express eros through a design that invokes desire – a design that viewers simply can’t bear not to touch,” said the designers.

The bowl changes shape when touched by a finger or buffeted by a breeze, as the movie shows.

The KAMA. Sex & Design exhibition runs from 5 December until 10 March 2013 at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan.

Other projects by Nendo we’ve featured recently include a collection of glass bowls that look like the bottom half of a Coca-Cola bottle and a chair that’s wrapped in fishing line rather than varnished.

See all our stories about Nendo »
See all our stories about bowls »

The movie is by Takahisa Araki and photographs are by Hiroshi Iwasaki.

Here’s some more information from Nendo:

Shivering Bowls

A set of bowls for the KAMA. Sex & Design exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. The curators asked eight designers to create an object, in conjunction with an exhibition that explored ideas of eros in design from ancient times to the present, from a cultural anthropology and mythical perspective.

We located the intersection of eros and design in the spiritual pleasure provided by an object’s touch, and decided to make an extremely thin bowl out of silicon for our contribution. The bowl resembles a ceramic one, but with a tension to this perception, generated by the extreme thinness that would be impossible to achieve with clay. The bowl changes shape as easily as liquid when it is touched, and continues to quiver momentarily in response to the outside force. We wanted to express eros through a design that invokes desire – a design that viewers simply can’t bear not to touch.

KAMA. Sex and Design
Date : 5th Dec 2012 –10th March 2013
Place : Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy

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by Nendo appeared first on Dezeen.

Can the shape, texture and colour of cutlery change the way food tastes? Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Jinhyun Jeon created this set of knobbly, bulbous and serrated cutlery to stimulate diners’ full range of senses at the table (+ slideshow).

Jinhyun Jeon, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, made Tableware as Sensorial Stimuli as part of her MA thesis about the relationship between food and the senses.

The project was inspired by the phenomenon of synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimuli like taste, colour and hearing are affected and triggered by each other. People with synesthesia often report seeing a certain colour when they hear a particular word, for example.

To find out whether this “sensory cross-wiring” could be encouraged and used to enhance taste, Jeon created cutlery based on five sensory elements: colour, tactility, temperature, volume and weight, and form.

The ceramic pieces shown here explore the effects of colour, with various coloured glazes defining the tips of each implement.

Warm colours such as red and orange are supposed to increase appetite, says Jeon, and are most effective when used sparingly.

Other pieces are made from stainless steel, silver or plastic, and the various textures and shapes are intended to stimulate the sense of touch inside the mouth.

Above: photograph by Femke Riierman

The plastic pieces resemble glass, which creates a jarring sensation for the user when the item’s appearance is incongruous with its feel. ”We tend to believe our sight and touch would be the same, but this is not the whole story,” says Jeon.

“The tools I created make us focus on each bite, feel the enriched textures or enhanced chewing sounds between bites,” she told Dezeen. ”If we can stretch the borders of what tableware can do, the eating experience can be enriched.”

Other strange sets of cutlery we’ve featured on Dezeen include a set of knives, forks and spoons that look like workshop tools and plastic cutlery that clips together to form a small table sculpture.

See our top ten projects from this year’s Design Academy Eindhoven show here.

See all our stories about cutlery »
See all our stories about tableware »

Photographs are by Jinhyun Jeon except where stated.

Here’s some more information from the designer:

Tableware as Sensorial Stimuli – ‘Enhanced Tasty Formulas’

Cutlery design focuses on getting food in bite‐sized morsels from the plate to the mouth, but it could do so much more. The project aims to reveal just how much more, stretching the limits of what tableware can do.

Focusing on ways of making eating a much richer experience, a series of dozens of different designs has been created, inspired by the phenomenon of synesthesia. This is a neurological condition where stimulus to one sense can affect one or more of the other senses.

An everyday event, ‘taste’ is created as a combination of more than five senses. Tasty formulas with the five elements – temperature, colour, texture, volume/weight and form – are applied to design proposal.

By exploring synesthesia, if we can stretch the borders of what tableware can do, the eating experience can be enriched in multi-­cross­‐wiring ways. The tableware we use for eating should not just be a tool for placing food in our mouth, but it should become an extension of our body, challenging our senses even in the moment when the food is still on its way to being consumed.

Each of these designs has been created to stimulate or train different senses, allowing more than just our tastebuds to be engaged in the act and enjoyment of eating as sensorial stimuli, therefore it would lead the way of mindful eating which guides to rediscovering a healthy and joyful relationship with food.

Temperature: The temperature influences certain changes to the taste. Sugar starts to taste sweeter at body temperature. Salty tastes become stronger when the temperature drops. A sour taste will always be a sour taste when the temperature rises or drops. Bitterness decreases as the temperature rises above the body temperature.

Tactility: According to Dr. Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University School of Medicine, it is generally known that the tongue map is incorrect. Sweet, sour, salty, and bitter are perceived anywhere there are taste buds. When a strong sweet taste and strong salty taste are mixed, it creates a completely new taste. When salty and sour tastes are mixed, both the tastes soften. If the salty and sour tastes are mixed well, a sweet taste can be created. If the sweet taste is stronger than salty taste, the sweet taste becomes stronger. The different types of sensitive tactile spoons could not only stimulate our tongue, but also lips and the palate. The exact effects depend on the level of individual sensibility of our own tongue map.

Colours: Colours can increase appetite when using warm colours, such as red, orange, and yellow. Comparing how sweet tastes between red and yellow with the same level of sugar, the sweetness of the red (crimson, scarlet) coloured food is stronger than yellow. Orange stimulates the appetite, because orange has been found to increase oxygen supply to the brain, and stimulates mental activity. Yellow increases metabolism so it is a good choice for dishes or tablecloths. However, if the food and the table are arranged with warm colours, it could decrease the appetite. The warm colours are most effective when used in small amounts to create highlights.

Volume and weight: The volume of the hollow part of the spoon influences and enhances the auditory sense of the sound scraping against glassware, as well as our taste/appetite. A spoon that is 40g in weight can give us the sense of stability. However, if you decrease the weight to 10g, then we are able to feel the weight of food, making us more aware of the amounts of food that we are eating.

Form: Adding new elements to the general archetype of a spoon aims to give the sense of comfort in hand, but also makes using it more intimate. Changing the thickness of the handle can create more awareness when eating. Small amounts of food can become heavy, or big amounts of food increase awareness about the consuming moment.

How can we slow down the moment of one bite and taste enhanced sweetness, while nevertheless consuming less sugar? ‘Tasty formulas’, which have been created by Jinhyun Jeon, would help us to understand interesting ways of how we consume our food with the tasty cutlery for enhanced temperature/tactility/ colour/volume/weight/form, interpreted in synesthetic ways:
SWEET × 36.5°C = SWEET +++
SALTY × < 36.5°C = SALTY ++
SOUR × 36.5°C = SOUR × 100°C
BITTER × > 36.5°C = BITTER -­‐

SWEET + (0.5% × SALT) = SWEET ++
SALT ÷ SOUR = SALTY/SOUR -­‐
SALTY × SOUR = SWEET +

10% × (5R 4/14+5YR 4/14+5Y 4/14) = 2.0
90% × (5R 4/14+5YR 4/14+5Y 4/14) = 0.1
20% × R > 20% × Y

5cm3 × SOUND/ SIGHT = 10g × TOUCH
1mm × TOUCH > 10mm × TOUCH (y=f(x)) × TOUCH = Y

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by Jinhyun Jeon appeared first on Dezeen.

Product news: Japanese designers Nendo used glass from old Coca-Cola bottles to make these bowls with dimpled bases, which are meant to resemble the classic green bottles with their tops sliced off.

The Bottleware collection was made by Nendo for Coca-Cola by recycling glass bottles that had deteriorated through repeated washing and filling.

The dimpling on the base of a glass bottle is designed to protect it from dramatic changes in temperature during the fizzy-drink production process, so Nendo chose to retain this feature to tell a story about the way glass is made, used and recycled.

The collection was shown at the Design Tide Tokyo trade fair this month alongside a huge mound of crushed recycled glass, illuminated from below to cast a green glow inside the room.

Recent Nendo projects we’ve featured include a chair wrapped in hundreds of metres of fishing line and a Starbucks outlet that works like a library, where customers take books to the counter to order their coffee.

See all our stories about glass »
See all our stories about Nendo »

Photographs are courtesy of Coca-Cola.

Here’s some more information from Nendo:

Bottleware

Coca-Cola’s “contour bottle” has been a brand icon since its inception in 1916. It is also recyclable: after each use, the bottle can be collected, washed and refilled for further use. This tableware collection is made from bottles that have deteriorated over the course of extensive recycling, and can no longer be used for their original purpose. We were captivated by the particular green tint known as Georgia Green, and by the fine air bubbles and distortions that are a hallmark of recycled glass, so decided to create simple shapes that would enhance these traits. But we also wanted users to feel a remnant of the distinctive bottle in the new products.

Our solution was to create bowls and dishes that retain its distinctive lower shape, as though the top had been sliced off. The dimpling on the bottle base that added to mitigate hot impacts during the production process is not ordinarily a strong visual feature, but it’s a particular characteristic of glass bottles and visible to anyone who picks up the bottle to drink. Keeping these ring-shaped dimples on the base of our bowls and plates also helps to convey important messages about the way that glass circulates between people as it’s made, used and recycled for further use, and about the connections it makes between people in this process.

Product Information:

Bowl S : φ125 H70(mm)
Bowl L : φ190 H100
Dip Dish : φ100 H35
Dish S : φ155 H40
Dish L : φ240 H45

Bottleware exhibition at DESIGNTIDE TOKYO 2012

The installation design for Coca-Cola’s Bottleware presentation space at the main site of DESIGNTIDE TOKYO. Bottleware is tableware made entirely of glass that has been recycled from no longer usable Coca-Cola bottles. We built mounds of crushed recycled glass from 7000 bottles, and placed lights inside them to illuminate the entire space with the bottles’ iconic green hue. The Coca-Cola presentation space is a passageway between two exhibition halls. Visitors entering it from the left find an explanation of the project’s design process, and visitors arriving from the right the explanation of its manufacturing process. Our circulation plan envisaged a space that people would want to traverse.

Exhibition Information
Date : 31st Oct – 4th Nov. 2012
Place : Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi

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for Coca-Cola appeared first on Dezeen.

I bet André Breton himself could not have foreseen the ‘consequences’ of inventing Exquisite Corpse: four score and seven years after he popularized the collective writing/drawing game, designer Chloe Lee Carson has resurrected the surrealist pastime as a collection of playful tableware.

For her “Exquisite Cups,” Carson came up with a total of nine characters—further refined by an illustrator—divided into three sets, which loosely adhere to the themes of “Folk,” “Wild,” and “City.” (The pun is less successful in French, as the game is known as cadavre exquis. C’est la vie.) In homage to the game, each cup “displays different body parts that stack up to form a complete image. Once stacked, they can be twisted to create amazing cross-breed creatures.”

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