Short of material innovation and aesthetic refinement, the bicycle as we know it has changed very little since its early days of development in the late 19th century. However slight, the evolution of the world’s most widely used mode of transportation is not…
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Memories preserved in the physical form by UK design grad Greg Smith
Commemoration, a range of poetic capsules designed by recent Kingston University grad Greg Smith, preserves nostalgia in a tangible realm. Smith’s elegantly crafted airtight vessels “preserve traces of personal scents to trigger memories” after a person has passed away. The secular series not only allows for greater personal sentiment,…
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The future of nightlife as conceived by a cross-disciplinary team of club-going creatives
“We wanted to show design in action, not on a pedestal,” said Heineken’s Global Head of Design Mark van Iterson as he walked us through “The Club”, the first project of their Open Design Explorations, a pop up nightclub in the Tortona district during Milan’s Design Week. He wasn’t kidding around. The culmination of a year’s work, it represents an ambitious collaborative research and design project that he led with a hand-picked team of 19 club-going young designers from São Paolo, Tokyo, New York and Milan.
The cross-discipline team, mostly students and young professionals, includes interior, product and fashion designers, architects and graphic designers. The crowd-sourced finalists were invited to present their ideas at Pecha Kucha events, at the end of which the team was selected. The team visited clubs in all four of those cities (we participated in the Tokyo tour), and shared and collaborated on ideas, leading to the design elements brought to life in the pop up club. Van Iterson coached the group along with Professor Buijs and six industry experts.
“It was new for everybody to co-create cross-disciplines, cross-cultures, cross-time-zones,” says van Iterson. “We collaborated in an online hub, a kind of virtual creative lab. Some were more comfortable in the open ideas phase, others more in the detailing phase, some fueled the overall concept, others stayed within their discipline. But that’s the beauty of diversity.”
The hub served to mediate ideas while the designers worked remotely. “The portal was the open lab where we all came together,” says van Iterson. “It was bridging all continents and timezones, stimulating cross fertilization and kept the creative juices flowing through new progress, new insights, new briefs.” Heineken sought to create the perfect club—the rare combination of place, space and crowd that makes for a good time. “If you get the energy, the interaction and the vibe right, the club is a great club,” relates van Iterson. “And design can play a crucial role in facilitating that.”
Similar to how car companies use concept cars to have a dialog with their fans and customers, Heineken sought to create a physical place to express new ideas, and to present them to the world’s largest gathering of design professionals during Milan’s Design Week, with the goal of having a conversation around innovation in the club space. Van Iterson’s expectations are realistic: “For sure, certain elements will never make it to ‘real clubs’, but other elements might impact on club design or Heineken design worldwide for future years.”
Uniting The Club’s three spaces—which include a lounge, bar and dance area—is an origami theme that is applied to every element, reflecting the “changing perspectives” concept that fueled the project. The layout takes a cue from the team’s logical sequence of a typical night out: Connecting, getting a drink, discovering, dancing, cooling down and ending the night.
Walking through the completed concept, we found innovative details throughout. A video-mapped DJ booth pumps out killer beats as waitresses in extravagant origami uniforms and custom-designed shoes serve Heinekens from an origami-shaped tray that rests comfortably on the arm and holds up to eight bottles securely so that servers can use their free hand to open the bottles with a matching opener. An interactive bar features video display counters that lets you order another round with the tap of a finger, and a massive display made from more than 2,500 Heineken bottles features programmed images interspersed with live feeds from the dance floor. A wall on the dance floor has numbered shelves to place your drink while you dance, and a black origami wall glows with graffiti from the attached chalk pens, allowing club goers to get graphic in a harmless way.
Open Design Explorations is one of several crowd sourced design initiatives Heineken is leading, which live at Heineken’s Ideas Brewery.
The Club will be exhibited until 20 April 2012 from 13:00 – 23:00 daily at Via Privata Gaspare Bugatti 3, Zona Tortona, Milan. Even the club’s construction was important. Because the club was designed to be easily transportable, assembled and broken down in a cost-effective and sustainable manner, it’s likely that you’ll see it an event near you soon. See more images of the concept club in our gallery.
Two budding designers turn a classic motorcycle into a modern work of art
For their final year project while studying transport design at Northumbria University in Newcastle, budding English designers Roy Norton and Tom Kasher wanted to create a bike that would borrow from the past while looking to the future. The result—an exceptionally sleek take on the classic Triumph Speed Twin, kitted out with girder forks and signature quilted Barbour fabric on the seat.
The duo met with Triumph Product Manager Simon Warburton, who not only gave them the utmost support in creating the concept, but sees the project as an inspiring foundation. “Some elements may have an influence on some of our future projects,” he says. Triumph gave Norton and Kasher the frame of a production Bonneville to build from, which they reconstructed for a more contemporary aesthetic before adding Firestone tires, inverted levers, Thruxton brakes and a redesigned filler cap.
Warburton says Norton and Kasher’s take on the Speed Twin is like “the bike the Bonneville might have evolved into in an alternative universe.” Now graduated and fully employed by bike manufacturer Xenophya, the two are likely to be shaping the future of numerous machines to come.
via BikeExif
Web-connected robots dispense custom scents and candy treats
When a creative brief tasked them to “make something connected to the Internet that doesn’t live on the screen,” Foundry, a small research team at Mint Digital, came up with Olly, a scent-based system rewarding social media activity or, as they describe it on their site, a “web-connected smelly robot.”
Olly links up to web-based social applications and emits a fragrance—thankfully, one that you choose—when you receive emails, re-Tweets, instant messages, and various other pings across the channels of social media. Exploring the notion that smell is one of our most under-used senses in an over-stimulated world, Olly is a modular system that will have its own website from which the user can customize the way the smelly robot responds to web stimuli.
Joining Olly on Kickstarter is Molly, a robot Foundry will release today that graduates from scent to candy, dispensing one’s chosen sweets upon receipt of virtual notifications.
Molly operates in a similar way to Olly, which for scents stores a removable tray and a small interior fan to release the aroma. The user can customize various modules to assign different fragrances to different alerts—perhaps something sweet to soften the blow of a bill from your accountant, or a loved one’s perfume or cologne for their notes. According to the team at Foundry, “Olly wants to be fiddled with.”
While Olly works around a more cerebral sense, Molly is all about indulgence. Together, the robot pair might just serve as the ultimate carrot and stick for the digital generation. Olly and Molly (available later today) sell on Kickstarter for $50 each. The project will only come to fruition if they make the $35,000 goal, so pledge now.
Our latest video looks at the prototyping process behind museum displays
Designer Charlie Nghiem reinvents the digital camera’s user interface
The Rotor Digital Camera, a concept developed by designer Charlie Nghiem, is in an effort to reinvent a new interface for using digital cameras. Offering an innovative way of browsing through features and options, the Rotor gets rid of buttons all together, instead using a rotational cylinder to scroll through the settings.
The functions of a standard digital camera remain the same, but the user interaction becomes more pleasant as the menu appears on the LCD display screen while browsing through options. Even though still a prototype, it’s fair to say that Nghiem has succeeded in making an attractive and ergonomic camera. Fingers crossed that it will jump from concept to production.
via Designboom
Three old Benz concepts that we wish saw the light of day
As a recent guest at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, I fostered a new understanding and appreciation for the brand and its history. Inventors of the automobile, Daimler is constantly innovating and exploring new solutions for safety, comfort and performance. During the tour there were three prototypes that really caught my eye.
An evolution of the iconic 300 SL gullwing, this 1955 300 SLR hardtop was developed for the 1956 racing season, but was never used in competition. Fortunately for Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the company’s head of product testing, it became his daily commuter despite not even being street legal.
Originally presented at the 1969 Frankfurt International Motor Show, the C111 series was developed to test various innovations like alternative combustion engines and air conditioned cooling. This wedge-shaped gullwing model, from 1970, uses a center-mounted rotary-piston Wankel combustion engine instead of a traditional cylinder-based one and was reported to produce 370hp and a top speed of 180mph.
The Auto 2000 was developed in 1980 to test methodologies for reducing fuel consumption. While the focus of the research was comparing three different engine concepts (petrol, turbo-diesel and gas turbine), the brutalist-esque ’80s approach to aerodynamic design is particularly charming.
A sustainable body waxing concept by NYC design firm The Way We See The World
by Jack Shaw
What the Hella?, a set of sustainable hair-removal products by New York design studio The Way We See the World, combines sustainability and aromatherapy in one DIY concept.
The tongue-and-cheek name comes from designer
Hella Jongerius’ experiments using sustainable chicle latex for The Nature Conservancy’s Design for a Living World exhibition. “I really don’t know what to do with this material,” Jongerius explained in a video related to the project. “It was really nice to have an alien in the house. You know, how often to you find a material which is still a secret?”
Their interest piqued, before long the TWWSTW team had their hands on and industrial-sized block of chicle, donated by Glee Gum. After a good deal of experimentation and a few singed fingers they developed an effective and sustainable home-epilation system.
The
award-winning prototype includes a chicle body wax, chicle and copal aromatherapy incense, and a sapodilla fruit-scented soap and oil to moisturize and remove excess wax. Each product is designed with its own porcelain vessel.
Pedal-powered all-in-one appliance can really get you cooking
StudioMontag, an open association of product designers and students who met at Germany’s Bauhaus-University Weimar, share an interest in transforming daily life into something incredible. A brilliant illustration of their creative thinking, the R2B2 looks like something Pee-Wee Herman would invent, but unlike the cinematic version it actually conserves energy while rapidly chopping, whipping, crumbling, spinning and more.
Designed by Christoph Thetard, the mechanical appliance hides a flywheel below a worktop, that when accelerated with a simple foot pedal can directly power a hand mixer, a blender and a coffee grinder. Smart transmission ratios and different gears enable more than 10,000 rotations per minute. Chopping herbs, grating cheese or mixing cocktails can be accomplished with a few pedal kicks only, in an unexpectedly silent way.
Still in prototype form, Thetard has started a Kickstarter crowd-funding process to bring his concept to reality. Find out more info at the R2B2 website.
See more images of the building process and final prototype in the gallery.
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