Hasta La Ideas

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.

The post Hella Jongerius reveals “expression of yarn
and colour” with rugs in Milan appeared first on Dezeen.

News: a conductive rug that can detect movement and call for help if someone has fallen over has been developed by German firm Future-Shape.

Called the SensFloor, the two-millimetre-thick textile underlay can be installed beneath flexible floor coverings like tiles and parquet.

The system measures capacitance – changes to the local electric field caused by a person or any other conductive object coming near the sensors. The process is the same as that you would find on your touchscreen phone, said a spokesperson from Future-Shape.

Based on the area of disturbance to the electric field, the sensors can tell if a person is standing on the floor or lying on it. It can even tell the difference between a liquid spill and a person.

The developers of SensFloor believe it can offer a discreet way of monitoring people living alone or the elderly, and alert support staff if a fall is detected.

The system was recently installed in a nursing home in Alsace, France. It monitors 70 rooms and turns a light on when a resident first puts their feet on the floor. It calls the nurses’ station when it detects a fall.

“In the first four months, we had 28 falls discovered by our system and none were false alarms,” said SensFloor research and development director Alex Steinhage. “One nurse told us that she wouldn’t have seen one of the falls because the person fell on the far side of the bed where she wouldn’t have been discovered.”

Each square metre of the fabric features four radio modules and proximity sensors that can track the speed and direction of a person’s movement. It can track the movement of several people at once, including those in wheelchairs. The information is then passed to a separate control unit where it can be analysed in real time.

Because the technology doesn’t rely on physical contact, it can be laid under other flooring such as carpets, tile or wood.

The post SensFloor conductive rug by Future-Shape
turns the floor into a giant touchscreen appeared first on Dezeen.

Known for their gorgeous leather goods and travel accessories, and more recently their black walnut furniture, last weekend the artisans at Moore & Giles extended their range even further…

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Following in the footsteps of last spring’s limited-edition Post Recycled Dry denim launch, Nudie Jeans is back with another ecologically-minded initiative. This time the Swedish denim brand branches into interiors with a limited run of Post-Consumer Recycled Denim Rugs. Available today exclusively from Nudie Jeans’ eight brick and mortar…

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The asymmetric fringing on these wool rugs by Swiss designers Dimitri Bähler, Linn Kandel and Ismaël Studer makes them appear to pop out from the floor like drawings of 3D shapes.

Fanions, which means ‘fringes’ in French, is a collection of rugs intended to look like “extruded 3D shapes”, according to designers Dimitri Bähler, Linn Kandel and Ismaël Studer.

“We used the fringes in a modern and graphical way,” they said, adding that the material was cut with a CNC machine.

We featured Bähler’s storage set for stationery last December, while two years ago in Cologne we reported on Kandel’s tables inspired by electricity pylons.

The rugs were shortlisted in the [D3] Contest for young designers at imm cologne, which was won by Swiss industrial designer Lucien Gumy’s interlocking wooden shelving.

Other rugs we’ve featured lately include a rug decorated by squeezing bottles of paint over it and an installation of dozens of rugs in a Barcelona square – see all rugs.

We reported on lots of products launched in Cologne this year, including paper clip-like desk lamps and a table with a cross-shaped notch that holds magazines – see all products from Cologne 2013.

See all homeware »

Here’s some more information from the designers:

Fanion is a project by Dimitri Bähler, Linn Kandel and Ismaël Studer

The starting point of our project is the traditional rug and its details. Especially the fringes; Fanion in french. For that project, we used the fringes in a modern and graphical way. Their direction creates an illusion. The rugs become extruded 3d shapes.

The felt (made of pure wool) provides the rugs different qualities; the colors are very deep and the material, dense, is easily processed by the cnc cutting machine. Thanks to that material, Fanion gives also a warm atmosphere impression. Simple and direct, Fanion is a contemporary vision of the traditional rugs.

The post Fanions by Dimitri Bähler, Linn Kandel
and Ismaël Studer appeared first on Dezeen.