Hasta La Ideas

London Design Festival: Hackney designer Lee Broom has transformed his studio into an old-fashioned grocery store for the London Design Festival (+ interactive image). Broom spoke to Dezeen about the installation and we’ve annotated a photo of the space with his insights above.

“We’re just showing one product, the Crystal Bulb, so I felt like I needed to present it in lots of alternative ways,” Broom told Dezeen.

Two hundred of the bulbs are presented in crates, cabinets, weighing scales and jars, as well as hanging from the ceiling and reflected in mirrors.

The hand-blown, cut-glass bulbs were inspired by whisky decanters and are made by British firm Cumbria Crystal. Read more about them in our earlier story. The Crystal Bulbs are also available at our pop-up shop Dezeen Super Store at 38 Monmouth Street until 30 September.

The panelling is recycled from his Public House installation styled like an English pub in Milan earlier this year, where the Crystal Bulb was unveiled for the first time.

This time last year, Broom used the same space to create his dark, moody Salon installation to showcase his furniture with studded detailing.

Crystal Bulb Shop is open until 23 September at 93 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY.

See all our stories about Lee Broom »
See all our stories about the London Design Festival »

Dezeen’s London Design Festival map

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The map above is taken from Dezeen’s guide to the London Design Festival, which lists all the events going on across the city this week. We’ll be updating it over the coming days with extra information on our highlights so keep checking back. Explore the larger version of this map here.

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by Lee Broom appeared first on Dezeen.

London Design Festival: white metal chairs are stacked in a tower and clustered on staircases around the V&A museum as part of an installation by Japanese design studio Nendo (+ slideshow).

Above photograph is by Daici Ano

The Mimicry Chairs are made from pressed and punched metal finished in white – an intentionally simple design which stands out from the museum’s ornate interior.

Above photograph is by Daici Ano

Each installation responds to its own space in the museum, with chairs joined together by variously sized backrests to reflect picture frames on the walls, or stacked up high near an outdoor staircase.

“The museum offered us eleven different spaces and they told us to choose one, but we said that we wanted to use all of them,” said Oki Sato of Nendo at the press preview on Friday. “So we took one chair and let it evolve throughout the museum.”

Above photograph is by Daici Ano

Other installations at the museum as part of London Design Festival include Prism by Keiichi Matsuda, a digital installation that visualises data streams from across the city, and The Journey of a Drop by Rolf Sachs, in which drops of coloured ink fall from a great height into a tank of water.

The museum is also showing four pieces of contemporary furniture recently acquired for its permanent collection, including the Bone chaise and its mould by Joris Laarman.

Above photograph is by Daici Ano

The new Dark Noon watch from Nendo has just launched and is now available to buy from the Dezeen Watch Store.

See all our stories about London Design Festival »
See all our stories about Nendo »
See all our stories about the V&A »

Photographs are by Susan Smart except where otherwise stated.

Above photograph is by Daici Ano

Here’s some more information from the V&A:

Nendo’s Mimicry Chairs comprise a series of elegant chair installations appearing in varying locations throughout the Museum.

Japanese design studio Nendo has created a simple chair archetype made from pressed and punched metal painted white giving it an almost ghost-like appearance.

These chairs will be placed within the Grand Entrance and further locations throughout the Museum including galleries, staircases and corridors.

At each site, the chair is modified to mimic the space it inhabits and the objects around it. In some locations visitors may sit on the chairs and observe and appreciate the collections from different perspectives.

London Design Festival map

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The map above is taken from Dezeen’s guide to the London Design Festival, which lists all the events going on across the city this week. We’ll be updating it over the coming days with extra information on our highlights so keep checking back. Explore the larger version of this map here.

Nendo’s climbing wall made from picture frames is included in our book, Dezeen Book of Ideas. Buy it now for just £12.

The post Mimicry Chairs
by Nendo appeared first on Dezeen.

These spinning ‘light paintings’ made with sparkling crystal beads by designer Philippe Malouin are currently on show in the Digital Crystal exhibition at London’s Design Museum (+ movie + slideshow).

“Blur is a series of ‘paintings’ realised through light and motion,” Malouin told Dezeen, explaining that they were made by attaching rows of colourful Swarovski crystal beads to a motor that spins at high speeds.

“The circles shimmer because LEDs shine light at them, while variations in the speed of rotation affect the colour intensity,” he added.

Like the other pieces in the exhibition, Blur explores the idea of memory in an increasingly digital world.

Malouin says the piece alludes to memory through the “transformation from its solid state to its accelerated state,” as it retains the memory of its simple underlying design while transforming it through movement. “It doesn’t always spin – it’s programmed to reveal its different states,” he adds.

Digital Crystal continues until 13 January 2013. We recently featured another installation from the exhibition – a mechanical projector by London design studio Troika.

Malouin is also taking part in Seven Designers for Seven Dials, an aerial installation in Covent Garden curated by Dezeen that will be on show throughout London Design Festival, which takes place between 14–23 September.

See all our stories about Philippe Malouin »
See all our stories about the Design Museum »
See all our stories about Swarovski »

Photographs are by David Levene.

Above: movie interview with Philippe Malouin filmed by the Design Museum

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Philippe Malouin appeared first on Dezeen.

The London Design Festival is underway and the sun is shining so if you’re out and about this afternoon be sure to check out the Seven Designers for Seven Dials installations curated by Dezeen (+ map).

Aerial installations by young designers Faye Toogood, Vic Lee, Paul Cocksedge, Philippe Malouin, Aberrant Architecture, Gitta Gschwendtner and Dominic Wilcox are installed above the streets of the Seven Dials area of Convent Garden, London. Click on the map above for more details about each one.

While you’re there, pop in and see the Dezeen team at Dezeen Super Store at 38 Monmouth Street, where you can still get 10% off any Dezeen Super Store purchase (excluding sale stock and Jambox) and enter our competition to win a designer watch worth £150 by downloading this flyer and presenting it at the shop.

The map above is taken from a larger map we’ve put together to chart all the events at this year’s London Design Festival. Explore the large map here.

The Seven Designers for Seven Dials installations will be in place until 5 October and Dezeen Super Store is open until 30 September.

See you there!

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curated by Dezeen appeared first on Dezeen.

In the first of three posts about the Digital Crystal exhibition at London’s Design Museum, we look at a mechanical projector built by London design studio Troika which uses Swarovski crystal lenses and LEDs to create portraits on the gallery wall (+ slideshow).

The projector uses 858 custom-cut crystal optical lenses, each positioned in front of an LED.

Rotating cams move each LED towards or away from its lens, diffracting the white light into variously sized spots.

The spots of light then combine to produce three blurry, low-resolution portraits on the gallery wall.

“The recent past has seen a complete shift in the reproduction and selection process of visual information, and today we no longer need to restrict which and how many images we take,” Troika’s Conny Freyer told Dezeen.

“We are on the brink of a new age, still informed by the analogue world yet provided with new digital tools,” she added. “Hardcoded Memory is a reflection on that change and on the digital world by approaching it from an analogue point of view.”

The three portraits were selected according to their postures, in a reference to the traditional posed portraiture that was prevalent throughout the last century but is seen less often today.

Digital Crystal: Memory in the Digital Age continues at the Design Museum in London until 13 January 2013.

Other projects we’ve featured by Troika include an outdoor LED installation that displays yesterday’s weather and chandeliers that project overlapping circles of light.

See all our stories about Troika »
See all our stories about the Design Museum »
See all our stories about Swarovski »

Here’s more information from Troika:

Troika (Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, Eva Rucki)

Hardcoded Memory (2012)

2.60 m (H) x 2.0 m (W) x 0.4 m (D)
858 custom cut Swarovski crystal optical lenses, custom software, 858 LEDs, brass, anodized aluminium, dyed fibreboard.

Memory is closely linked to forgetting. Before the digital era, forgetting was easy, for better or worse. Not only is it biologically in-built to forget, the analogue world around us cannot guarantee that recorded memories will last forever.

Photographs fade, film footage can be lost and media out-dated. In the past, remembering was the exception, forgetting the default. Only a few decades ago, analogue photography was a limited edition of images taken of precious moments or the everyday: our grandparents, parents, children or ourselves. By selection, these images became meaningful, carrying the story for, and of, an extended period of time, a life, a person.

Now in the age of endless digital image reproduction there is no longer a function for a selection process, and so we do not need to forget. We externalise our memories by handing them over to the digital realm enabled through digitisation, inexpensive storage, ease of retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software, blurring lines of ownership and making virtual forgetting close to impossible.

Hardcoded Memory is a reflection on the moment and on time itself, standing as a metaphor for the human search for meaning and continuity, while celebrating forgetting in the digital age.

Low-resolution portraits are projected onto the gallery wall, generated by a hardcoded mechanical structure which in the nature of its construction limits the selection of available images. Custom-cut Swarovski crystal optical lenses project light from LEDs, which, motored by rotating cams, move away from, and toward to each crystal lens, transforming, through diffraction, the white light into a constellation of circular projections, creating a rhythmical fading in, and fading out of low resolution imagery on the gallery wall.

All pictorial information is hardcoded into the rotating cams of the mechanism giving a pre-determined selection of what can be displayed by the projector. And while the low resolution image is lending the portraits a universal appeal, the body posture of the portrayed informs a definite era or decade.

Experiencing the dream-like imagery on the gallery wall, the visitor is immersed in a digital memory embedded into an analog physical object, reinforcing Troika’s agenda of exploring rational thought, observation and the changing nature of reality and human experience.

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by Troika appeared first on Dezeen.