Hasta La Ideas

In this movie filmed by Alice Masters for the Design Museum’s annual Designers in Residence exhibition, Yuri Suzuki talks about his radio with a circuit board arranged like the London Tube map and his mission to demystify consumer electronics.

Above image is by Rima Musa

In the movie, Suzuki first discusses how he built a radio from an electronic circuit board by arranging the components according to the lines and stations of the Tube map. Read more about the Tube Map Radio in our earlier post.

“The printed circuit board is a remarkable invention. Due to the process of the efficiency of the electronics you can see something very complicated, almost like a maze,” he says. “But what if you could replace it with something you are familiar with?”

He goes on to explain how he adapted Harry Beck’s famous Tube map design into a circuit board that tells a story. “I really wanted to make a design that’s a little bit like a narrative,” he says.

In the second part of the movie he talks about working with Technology Will Save Us to create the Denki Puzzle kit, a set of redesigned and enlarged electronic components that can be pieced together in working sequences. “If you wanted to make a computer [with them] it’s possible, technically – but it’s going to be huge,” he jokes.

We’ve featured a number of Suzuki’s other designs on Dezeen, including a set of pens that record and play back sounds and a miniature record player that runs along a track made from vinyl records.

See all stories about Yuri Suzuki »
See all stories about the Design Museum »

Photographs are by Hitomi Kai Yoda except where otherwise stated.

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Designers in Residence 2012 appeared first on Dezeen.

Austrian design duo Mischer’Traxler talk to Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs about how their basket-building machine will only work when someone’s watching in this movie we filmed at Clerkenwell Design Week.

Called Collective Works, the machine uses sensors to detect an audience and starts to glue together strips of wooden veneer.

When more bodies join, felt tips pens make contact with the veneer and apply colours for as long as the onlookers remain clustered round it.

“If the process ends with just something to look at, it’s not enough,” says Katharina Mischer when describing their projects, “the outcome needs to be as strong at the process”.

See all our stories about Mischer’Traxler »
See all our stories from Clerkenwell Design Week 2012 »

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at Clerkenwell Design Week appeared first on Dezeen.

This movie by filmmakers Stretch documents the ongoing work by Cape Town studio Noero Architects to create a cultural centre within the barracks of Port Elizabeth that were once used as a concentration camp.

The barracks were dismantled and reassembled in Red Location Precinct after the Boer War, before becoming the first community of black African families in South Africa during the racial segregation at the start of the twentieth century.

Noero Architects have designed a complex centred around a museum for the centre of the historic settlement, which is under construction and due for completion in 2022.

“We thought, what better place in Port Elizabeth than to use Red Location as the new cultural centre of the city?” explained Jo Noero. “Where you could bring together the histories of the Afrikaner people and the histories of the black African people and show that they both suffered in different ways at different times, under different groups and regimes. In a way it was about talking about a real form of reconciliation.”

The movie was completed after the opening of the exhibition and shows some of the completed buildings of the project and how they fit in amongst the existing urban fabric.

“The best public space in South Africa is the street and the way in which life happens along its edges,” said Noero. “What we did at Red Location was to reinforce the idea of street and where we make bigger spaces we simply created indentations in the buildings which come directly off the street”.

Plan detail – click above for larger image

Noero has also produced a nine-metre-long, hand-drawn plan to illustrate the proposals, which he is presenting at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

When discussing the use of hand drawings, Noero said “there is nothing that the computer can do that can replicate that sense of control that you have by drawing by hand. When you draw by the hand you connect with your mind and your heart, and it is an action that you can control.”

See more stories from the Venice Architecture Biennale »

Here’s a few lines of text about the exhibition:

“South African Architect Jo Noero’s work has always been sensitive to the divided and contested urban conditions of his country’s cities, and his installation here reflects thus through two powerful artworks.

Above: exhibition at the Arsenale Corderie

One is a 9m-long hand drawing, depicting at 1:100 the Red Location Precinct in Port Elizabeth, a project that proposes common ground in a city torn apart by the urbanistic consequences of apartheid. Next to it is the artwork Keiskamma Guernica, a tapestry made by fifty women from the Hamburg Women’s Co-operative from the Eastern Cape.

Above: exhibition at the Arsenale Corderie

These two meticulous, labour-intensive works are contrasting and complementary pieces of evidence of an urban condition where common ground is not easily achieved.”

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by Noero Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Reinier de Graaf of OMA talks to Dezeen about ”architecture with a degree of social conscience” by anonymous local authority architects in France and Italy in the second of three movies we filmed at the firm’s Public Works exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012.

Above: Centre Administratif by Jacques Kalisz

The exhibition features a selection of “masterpieces by bureaucrats” and includes three public buildings commissioned by communist-run mayors in the municipalities surrounding Paris in the 1960s and 70s. De Graaf explains how the construction of the Centre Administratif by Jacques Kalisz, the Hotel de Perfecture du Val-D’Oise by Henry Bernard and the Montreuil Zonne Industrielle Nord by Claude Le Goas each made a deliberate statement against the monumental architecture promoted after the war by Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou.

Above: Hotel de Perfecture du Val-D’Oise

By contrast, de Graaf also presents the San Giovanni Bono Church, which was designed by Arrigo Arrighetti at a housing estate in Milan on behalf of a democratic Christian government. He discusses how the building was constructed as a gift that would keep the population happy and prevent the communists gaining favour.

Above: Montreuil Zonne Industrielle Nord (MOZINOR) by Claude Le Goas

“What you see as a communist endeavour in Paris you can actually see as a more right wing endeavour in Milan,” says de Graaf. “The outcome is suspiciously close because they both try to court the same masses.”

Above: San Giovanni Bono Church by Arrigo Arrighetti

Find out more about the exhibition in our earlier story, or hear about another of the featured buildings in the first movie from the series.

See all our stories about OMA »
See more stories about the Venice Architecture Biennale »

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“architecture with a social conscience” appeared first on Dezeen.

In case you missed it yesterday, designer Dominic Wilcox has created an animation that links together some of his illustrations of absurd inventions, including a reverse bungee jump (above).

The animation also features slides for falling leaves (above) and a dock that matches the outline of a ferry (below). It was created to coincide with the launch of his new book, Variations on Normal.

We are running a competition to win one of five copies of the book – find out how to enter here.

Wilcox has a solo exhibition running from 6 to 26 September at the KK Outlet in east London, where the book is shown for the first time.

A selection of his illustrations are available to buy at Dezeen Super Store, our pop-up shop in Covent Garden, London.

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by Dominic Wilcox appeared first on Dezeen.