Hasta La Ideas

The designer Alice Wang visited us in the Appartamento in Milan and talked to us about her approach to design and the methodologies she uses. Looking at mundane activities from a psychological and emotional point of view with a particular interest in the man machine relationship, she manages to create everyday objects with a certain twist, unmasking the “dark side” of our everyday actions. Her latest project Chairs for the Dysfunctional is dealing with the fact that the society we live in is changing and therefore the interactive side of these daily objects should change with us. “Perhaps the function of the objects stay, but it is the process of how we interact with them that must change. Should there be different chairs designed for people with different sitting habits? Do you sit on all four legs or just two? Do you continuously shake your leg? Or do you like to sit with your back facing the public?” This series of chairs, presented at this year’s Salone Satellite in Milan, illustrates each of these stories. “Will these chairs become props that normalize the unwelcomed habits? Or will they act as therapy to “cure” one’s syndromes?”

This chair is specially designed for people who tilt their chairs. It has a spirit leveler attached to the side allowing one to measure how balanced one is.

Click below to see more of the chairs.

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On the Salone del Mobile we had the great pleasure to meet Marti Guixe on the Danese booth, where he showed his Xarxa chair – a seat, made of 5 different pillows of different materials and characteristics, but united together, so that you can use it as a bed, a sofa or a chair, depending on the position, order and sequence you arrange the pillows taking in this way a quantic behaviour. The self-proclaimed ex-designer gave us an interesting insight into his take on where design is currently at and where it should be going. This video is part of a series of interviews that we conducted during the Milan design week, the so-called Post Futurist Manifesto Talks.

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Marco Bettiol is a researcher of the Venice International University. He visited our temporary production office in the Lago Appartamento in Milan and gave us an insight into his research about design & economy. This video is part of a series of interviews that we conducted during the Milan design week, focusing on the current state of the design world and attempting to identify the ingredients for a new value system out of the crisis – the so-called Post Futurist Manifesto Talks. More to come soon!

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A quick sampling of some of our pics from the streets of Milan. Want more local flavor? Check out the entire street life gallery here: 43 images

Core77’s entire photo gallery from Milan here: 657 images

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Barbara Bondi and Marco Raino of the architecture company brh+ were visiting us in the Lago Appartamento in Milan. Marco is also the president of TURN – a design community in Turin, Italy.

“Design concept is TURN’s mission focus. Starting from the definition of three main categories – Product Design (things), Environmental Design (places), Communication Design (messages) as given by Norman Potter in his essay What is a designer (1968) – TURN thinks the word design as a broad and up-to-date term, reflecting how a designer can rethink its society and look for a role in it following its own insight and courage, its mind’s openness and creativity.

TURN loves Turin and believes in its future. That’s why TURN takes in charge the role of primary interface towards the local administration – letting people understand which is the new Turin’s creativity asset inside a strategical planning for the city. Every single associate works with passion keeping in mind Turin’s fate and its design. So TURN represents a careful watcher of planning and communication quality inside the city and its governance activities.”

We had a great talk with them – in the video a short version of some of their views about design.

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