Hasta La Ideas

To factory workers who are paid not to screw up, it must have seemed a strange request indeed:

“I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error,” Hutchison explains. “I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.”

London-based artist Jeremy Hutchison contacted factories in China, Poland, Spain, India, and elsewhere to request the defective products as part of his new art project, simply entitled “Err.” It’s as if Marcel Duchamp was a whispering factory-line saboteur encouraging workers to express their individualism.

The project is not yet on Hutchison’s website, but will be on display starting tomorrow (Thursday, July 7th) as part of a group show at London’s Paradise Row gallery.

via creative review

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What effect has the arrival of Ikea had on a community in Virginia? How has it influenced local furniture manufacturing and changed the lives of residents? For the answers to these questions, a hard-hitting American news crew might consult with a Swedish business expert, examine local manufacturing and interview residents to provide illuminating insights. But until someone decides to produce a segment like that, we’ll have to settle with this Daily Show clip featuring Jason Jones trying to get to the bottom of it all. (The sensitive among you should note that this clip is NSFW, offensive and funny.)

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They’re doing some spectacular things with wood over at City Joinery, the formerly-Brooklyn-based studio of Jonah Zuckerman, recently relocated to Massachusetts. What initially caught my eye was their hanging buffet design, below, and a closer look at their site revealed an astonishingly deep portfolio that will provide hours of browsing.

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In 1869, Catharine Beecher’s intelligent kitchen design from 1843 was reprinted in The American Woman’s Home, co-written with sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, but still did not see mass uptake. A rational kitchen design based on ergonomics was not the kind of thing that could set America on fire. Electricity was, sometimes literally. When cities began installing electricity en masse around the turn of the 20th century, kitchens would change forever.

But before electricity there were other potent innovations, like gas and water. The widespread installation of running water in the 19th century provided a huge boon to kitchens, because now you had this big magical white thing that you could fill with water without having to carry a bucket to that well down by the Johnsons’ house. Unsurprisingly, sinks became a focal point of the kitchen. They were also huge, heavy and difficult to move, which gave rise to the expression “Everything but the kitchen sink,” meaning if you were going to clear out of your house and take everything you could carry or move, the cast-iron kitchen sink would not be one of those things.

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Used to be that design interns were seen but not heard. You wanted to make Cappellinis but you stood a better chance of making cappuccinos. It also used to be that most of your fellow ID interns were dudes.

But the times have changed. Check out Anna Frey, above, an ID major who graduated from Georgia Tech and is now interning at Porsche Cars. Frey’s paint scheme design for a GT3 was selected for last Saturday’s Porsche Carrera World Cup Race in Germany, and this was no “give the kid a shot” project; she beat out four pros who were also in the running.

“The opportunity to intern at Porsche has been very rewarding and exciting,” Frey told Torque News. “And the thought of my design appearing on a Porsche race car in front of thousands of people—and (99) other Porsche race cars—is quite amazing!”

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