Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2014: an exhibition simulating the homes and workspaces of architects including Shigeru Ban, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield and Daniel Libeskind has opened in Milan, allowing young designers to explore the domains of their idols (+ movie).

Located at the Milan Fairgrounds, the Where Architects Live exhibition entails a series of spaces based on the domestic environments of nine eminent designers, based in eight different cities.

The installations, which also feature Mario Bellini, Marcio Kogan, Bijoy Jain, and Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, focus on one detail from each home to create a multimedia representation of both that building and its surroundings.

“A house is not really private,” said Daniel Libeskind at the exhibition launch. “I have no secrets, so all the secrets are shown and of course my house is not just about furniture and light.”

In Libeskind’s space, sliced openings and recesses frame a series of views of artworks. “The domestic environment is no longer seen as some mechanical functionalistic machine to live in, in my view, and it is something that has stood with the global memory with where we are, where we are coming from and where we are going,” he said.

The home of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, was built around existing trees and features a series of elliptical windows and openings. Here, these shapes become projection screens displaying views of Tokyo.

“The problem with my house was that there were so many trees, and I didn’t want to cut any trees; that was the main problem. So we are living in between the trees,” said Ban, explaining how the design first came about.

The space belonging to Italian architect Mario Bellini replicates the combined staircase and bookshelf that reveals the architect’s love of reading, while David Chipperfield‘s installtion is dominated by a concrete wall that reflects the stark interior of his Berlin home.

Venetian blinds line one side of the installation for Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan, allowing light to filter gently into the space, contrasting with the spectrum of light and colour that patterns the walls of the room based on Zaha Hadid‘s London studio.

Antique warriors stand guard at the Paris home of Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, and reappear here, while the final space is based on the reading room of Studio Mumbai principal Bijoy Jain.

Where Architects Live was curated by Francesca Molteni and Davide Pizzigoni, and can be found in Pavilion 9 at the Rho Milan Fairgrounds from 8 to 13 April. The exhibition also includes film interviews with each architect and scale models of all eight spaces featured.

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Milan 2014: Dutch designer Hella Jongerius is launching her first range of rugs as the newly appointed design director for Dutch firm Danskina (+ movie).

Showing at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, the collection includes six designs, four of which are by Jongerius. Her designs are called Bold, Cork&Felt, Duotone and Multitone.

“A rug is a two-dimensional product,” Jongerius said. “There is no construction needed, just an expression of yarn and colour. A Danskina rug has clear colour concepts, the colour and texture on the floor is very important in giving a space a certain atmosphere.”

Each design is created using a different mix of techniques, materials and colours. According to senior designer at Danskina, Edith van Berkel, Duotone took the longest to design. “We worked on this fabric for a longer time. We thought it was interesting to make a nice balance of colours. It was made with a flat woven carpet warp in one colour and weft in the other so that the design appears in squares.”

In contrast, the hand woven Bold design is created by using just one piece of wool yarn that is dyed in two different colours. This makes the two block colours in the rug appear to grip one another.

The Cork&Felt design is the only unwoven design, instead made of assembled strips of cork and felt. The strips appear randomly in the design making each rug unique.

The Multitone rug started out as a colour blanket to see how colours mixed and was not supposed to be in the collection at all. “We thought the colours worked so well that it deserved a place in our collection,” said van Berkel.

The other pieces in the collection are two hand-knotted designs by Dutch designer Karin An Rijlaarsdam.

The rugs will be on show in Pavilion 16, stand D20 at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan until 13 April.

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Milan 2014: brushed steel frames surround monochrome shirts at this installation that Japanese studio Nendo has created for fashion brand COS, unveiled in Milan today (+ movie).

The COS x Nendo installation comprises a series of white shirts, which are displayed on stands and hung from the ceiling at different heights throughout the space.

Geometric brushed-steel frames in a variety of heights and widths surround the clothes, and the parts of the shirts that sit inside them are dyed with different shades of grey.

“I feel that Nendo and Cos have a lot in common with how we see things, simplicity, purity and focusing on the small details,” said Nendo founder Oki Sato. “When you look at a white shirt from COS it explains so much, so I decided to let the shirt do the talking.”

At the front of the space are five metal frames that incrementally increase in size. These surround a series of shirts, which gradually change colour from white to dark grey according to the scale of the surrounding stand.

“The white shirt is the cornerstone of our design philosophy; we love to reinvent them every season and so we were really excited that Nendo picked the shirt as a centrepiece for the installation, as it is such an important part of our collection,” said Martin Andersson, head of menswear design at COS.

The installation is on show from 8 to 13 April at Via delle Erbe 2, in the Brera district of Milan, above Nendo’s solo exhibition that features the studio’s furniture patterned with brush strokes and chairs with wood grain patterns printed onto natural timber. Visitors are invited to browse and purchase pieces by COS and Nendo at the exhibition.

Photography is by Daici Ano.

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for COS installation in Milan appeared first on Dezeen.

Irish designer Johnny Kelly has debuted a short movie that attempts to show how design impacts on everyday life using basic shapes and without words (+ movie).

Directed and designed by Kelly, Shape was written by graphic designer Scott Burnett, who is creative director of Dublin-based Studio AAD. The movie shows a day in the life of a nuclear family, but also illustrates some of the changes that happen over time “so slowly that we never really think about them”, Burnett told Dezeen.

“The characters are actually affecting the changes themselves in the film, everything changes and shifts to suit their needs,” said Burnett. “They’re very much part of the changes, the daughter understands this and has more control, the Dad doesn’t so is hijacked by a series of chairs.”

Commissioned by Pivot Dublin as part of its remit to promote the value of design, the brief for the film included a stipulation that no text or voiceover be used so it could be understood universally.

“Having tried to explain design, and particularly its value, to everyone from sisters and grandmothers to politicians and CEOs, I know that it usually takes about ten seconds until people start to glaze over,” Burnett told Dezeen.

“In the end we did the only sensible thing and decided not to try and explain design, but just to show it. Its prevalence, its impact, its role in everything we interact with.”

The film is set to be used in schools and classroom in Ireland as part of the MakeShapeChange campaign to raise awareness about design. This informed the style of the graphics, which aim to create something that is immediately understandable for a young audience.

“I like that it is simple enough to be watched small on a phone, in fact you could probably watch it at postage-stamp size and it would still make sense!” Kelly told Dezeen. “When it comes to characters, I find the simpler they look, the more you empathise with them. So I started with a square, circle and triangle and went from there – Saul Steinberg has a lot to answer for.”

“In a lot of ways, all we did was animate the idea that good design is invisible, which is the bit that’s always hardest to communicate to people who aren’t designers,” explained Kelly. “They get the ‘designer’ stuff, the added extra, all bells and whistles version, but it can be really difficult to explain the invisible bit.”

“We didn’t want to highlight supposed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ design – that’s not the aim with this film. Rather we wanted to show how almost every thing around us has been designed, and can and will be re-designed,” he added.

Pivot Dublin – the organisation behind Dublin’s bid to be named World Design Capital 2014 – worked with Dublin City Council to commission the project. Despite coming runner up to Cape Town, Pivot has continued with its original plan to promote the value of design in Ireland and is collaborating with other design capitals to use Kelly and Burnett’s film internationally.

Here’s some information about the film:

MakeShapeChange

As part of PIVOT Dublin, the city’s bid to become World Design Capital 2014, project initiator Ali Grehan thought that a simple animated film, that somehow explained what design was, would be a great way to expand the conversation, providing a way in for the wider public. Post bid, PIVOT Dublin has continued as planned to promote wider acceptance and use of design as a tool for positive change.

In 2012, Ali approached director Johnny Kelly to collaborate on making the film, and he in turn approached designer Scott Burnett to help write it. The challenge was to show what design was, and why it’s important in a way that could be understood universally, so without language. Simple. After exploring several ideas the team did the only sensible thing and decided not to focus on design at all.

MakeShapeChange is a project to get young people thinking about how the world is made around them and where design fits in. It’s grown from a film to a website to an education programme.

‘Shape’ is the short film at the heart of the project, highlighting the changes happening around us that we don’t ordinarily notice, and how they affect us. The website makeshapechange.com hosts the film and provides a prompt to Think Design. Breaking the film into a series of scenarios, it presents design within wide contexts, prompts curiosity and identifies some of the practitioners working in these contexts.

As part of the project we’re developing an initiative to get designers into schools to talk about what they do and the difference it makes. And to come full circle, while Dublin came runner up to Cape Town for World Design Capital 2014, both Cape Town and previous host Helsinki are keen to collaborate on projects that use the film to educate, connect and explain. We hope this network will grow to include more partners.

The project was commissioned by Pivot Dublin and Dublin City Council.

Directed & Designed by Johnny Kelly
Written by Scott Burnett
Produced by Ali Grehan
Production company: Nexus
Nexus Producer: Isobel Conroy
Animators: Felix Massie, Joe Sparrow, Alex Grigg and Johnny Kelly
Gif Wrangler: Alasdair Brotherston
Editor: Steven McInerney

Thanks to Mark Davies, Sergei Shabarov and Chris O’Reilly
Special thanks to Cllr Naoise O’Muiri and Dublin City Manager Owen Keegan for their support

Music & Sound Design: Antfood
Ensemble: Andrew Rehrig (flutes), Will Bone (trombone, trumpets, tuba, baritone sax, tenor sax I, clarinets), Jesse Scheinin (tenor sax II), Wilson Brown (pianos, guitars, synths, percussion), Chris Marion (strings)
Composition and Arrangement: Wilson Brown
Sound design: Spencer Casey, Charlie Van Kirk, Wilson Brown and Pran Bandi
Final Mix: Andy Baldwin

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the role of design in everyday life appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in this exclusive video interview, musician Imogen Heap demonstrates the electronic gloves that allow people to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures.

The interview was filmed at Heap‘s home studio outside London, shortly before she launched her Kickstarter campaign to produce a limited production run of the open-source Mi.Mu gloves.

“These beautiful gloves help me gesturally interact with my computer,” says Heap, explaining how the wearable technology allows her to perform without having to interact with keyboards or control panels.

Pushing buttons and twiddling dials “is not very exciting for me or the audience,” she says. “[Now] I can make music on the move, in the flow and more humanly, [and] more naturally engage with my computer software and technology.”

Working with a team of developers and musicians, Heap has mapped movements made with the gloves to musical functions such as drum sounds or bass notes, changes of pitch, arpeggios and filters.

“What this glove enables me to do is access mappings inside my computer so that I don’t have to go to a keyboard or a fader or a button,” she says.

For example, instead of using a finger to push a fader on a mixing desk, Heap can raise her arm to achieve the same affect. By raising her hand, she can move through a scale of notes, or through pinching together her thumb, middle and forefinger and rotating it, she can apply filters to the sound.

Each gesture-control glove contains a wifi-enabled x-IMU board developed by x-IO Technologies containing an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope.

These work together with a series of motion sensors incorporated into the fingers of each glove that track the degree of bend and the spread of the fingers. The gloves can also understand postures such as an open palm, a finger-point or a closed fist.

The latest version of the gloves feature e-textile technology, where sensors and wiring are integrated into fabric. Heap is now exploring how to make further use of electronically conducting textiles, to reduce the number of hard components in the gloves.

Heap says they will not just change performance, but the production of music too: “We really feel that they are going to change the way we make music.”

Heap’s Kickstarter campaign aims to raise £200,000 to develop and produce a limited production run of Mi.Mu gloves. If successful, she will make both the hardware and software open source, allowing people to develop their own uses for the technology. “It’s really exciting to see what people might do by hacking them,” said Heap. The Kickstarter campaign closes on 3 May 2014.

The music featured in this movie is Me, the Machine, a track that Heap wrote specifically to be performed using the gloves.

for more information about the technology in the gloves, read the edited transcript of our interview with Heap.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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