Hasta La Ideas

Although I had worked with Ti Chang, the spark behind the DUET, I met her for the first time at the IDSA’s Conference in Chicago (2013). One of our first conversations was about how there is little recognition and fame for Women in Design. Those at the conference will recollect her Individual Talk on the same subject and how passionate she was. I guess the fire thus ignited has resulted in the phenomenal Women In Industrial Design Show 2014, to be held in San Francisco.

Ti met one of her design idols Betony Vernon last year, and decided to look up other women in industrial designers of our time (preferably still living) and researched Wikipedia’s page List of Industrial Designers, sure enough there wasn’t a single woman industrial designer listed. Eileen (Gray) Eva (Ziesel) and Ray (Eames) were at least listed in their times; De Stilj, Art Deco, but there weren’t any listed in our Post Modernism contemporary era! Stumped by this revelation, she actually made her first Wikipedia entry right there and added Betony Vernon as well as Belle Kogan and Greta Von Nessen.

Ti is also the force behind the upcoming exhibit, which is the first one organized by the Women in Design Section of IDSA and is the first exhibit featuring women industrial designers scheduled to coincide with SFDesignWeek.

We hear about great industrial designers such as Jony Ives and Yves Behar, but stories of Isabelle Olsson (lead designer of Google glass) are extremely rare. In order to put things into perspective, Women In Industrial Design Show 2014 in San Francisco has been organized. Women designers can participate in two groups: Up + Coming (less than 5 years of experience which includes student work) and Professional (5 or more years of experience). The works exhibited will range from industrial design soft goods, to electronics, to home goods and conceptual work. You will see design projects that are in production and available on the market plus designs that are works in progress.

To participate and know more, head here.

Deadline for submission: March 10, 11:59 PST
Announcement of acceptance: April 2
Show date: San Francisco Design Week (between June 13-21) / Evening TBD

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(Women In Industrial Design Show 2014 in San Francisco was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Employees meet in octagonal timber gazebos at the San Francisco headquarters of technology company Cisco by local interior designers Studio O+A (+ slideshow).

Studio O+A created the interior for Cisco‘s primary San Francisco workplace, after the company acquired WiFi firm Meraki in November 2012 and needed more space.

Located in the city’s Mission Bay neighbourhood and overlooking the waterfront, the 110,000-square-foot office is split over two floors. It was designed to maximise daylight and provide communal areas based on feedback the designers received from staff.

“O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find out what they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters,” said the designers. “A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.”

Wood-frame pavilions that are partially enclosed with triangular panels provide intimate meeting spots and break up the large floor plate.

Timber-clad walls feature padded niches in which individuals can recline with their laptops.

Seating areas are sunk beneath floor-to-ceiling windows to prevent them blocking the light into the deep open-plan areas.

Giant whiteboards and blackboards give the employees opportunities to write and sketch ideas over the walls, while notes and memos can be pinned to cork panels.

Levels are connected by a wide open staircase, which has wooden stadium seating integrated at its base.

The mix of flooring types includes carpet, wood and astroturf, and a varied palette of colours is used for walls and furniture.

Green electricity cables run up the white corridor walls and across the exposed concrete ceilings to power the overhead lights.

The hallways are wide enough for workers to cycle or skateboard between zones.

A large roof terrace provides views across San Francisco bay towards the baseball stadium, the Bay Bridge and downtown.

Studio O+A has designed offices for quite a few technology companies around California. The studio completed both Facebook and AOL‘s headquarters in Palo Alto, as well as the Silicon Valley HQ for Evernote.

Photographes are by Jasper Sanidad.

The text sent to us by Studio O+A follows:

The panoramic view of San Francisco’s waterfront visible from Cisco’s new offices in some ways sets the theme for O+A’s design. From almost any angle the visual impact is of light, spaciousness, bright colour, long sight lines.

Meraki, which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems, makes wireless routers—and takes pride in the elegance of their design.

O+A sought to build the space the way Meraki builds its products – with an emphasis on simplicity and seamless ease of use. But it was also mindful of the importance to the company’s identity of the Cisco-Meraki merger.

Located in the rapidly changing Mission Bay neighbourhood, Cisco’s 110,000-square-foot suite of offices now becomes the company’s principal San Francisco location.

At the outset O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find outwhat they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters. A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.

The size of the new space and the prominence of its floor-to-ceiling windows made collaboration and natural light relatively easy bills to fill.

O+A’s design offers a variety of meeting spaces formal and informal, indoor and outdoor, many of them bathed in the crystalline light of San Francisco Bay.

The scale and the light support both a rich palette of colours and design elements tailored to the broad canvas: a wide staircase with integrated stadium seating at its base, a meeting room showered from above with hanging tillandsia plants, an outdoor deck with views of the baseball park and Bay Bridge.

Maintaining Meraki’s cozy ambience in the hangar-sized complex proved more challenging. O+A’s solution was to create a medley of small gathering spaces within the large footprint.

Sunken seating brings intimacy to horizontal common areas while preserving broad sight lines. Yurts, cabanas and phone rooms offer varying levels of enclosure. And throughout the office informal lounge spaces allow passing colleagues to sit down and talk.

Despite the richness of the finishes and the wide array of typologies deployed, this is not a project that feels overly “designed”. One of O+A’s goals was to give Cisco a canvas on which to paint their own pictures.

In lieu of pervasive branding graphics, O+A provided ubiquitous chalkboards, whiteboards and corkboards so that Cisco’s employees could sketch, write and pin-up graphics meaningful to them.

As might be expected of the company’s strongly do-it-yourself culture, mobility and adaptability were big factors in the selection of furniture and workstations. These are people who like to move things around.

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wooden meeting pavilions appeared first on Dezeen.

Continuing our coverage of the recent explosion of tech company headquarters in San Francisco, here’s a look inside the offices of online property rental service Airbnb, which feature rooms modelled on eight of the company’s listed apartments (+ slideshow).

Airbnb currently offers rental accommodation in over 34,000 countries cities, but the company’s first ever listing was a San Francisco apartment, so the team’s in-house designers decided to transform one section of the interior into an exact replica of it.

They sourced items from various countries to furnish the spaces and even installed a bed in one of the rooms.

Other sections of the headquarters mimic properties from various other places around the world, including Reykjavík, Bali, Amsterdam and Paris, and are filled with casual seating areas where staff can interact.

“We asked ourselves, how can we create the sense of travel in an office?” explained Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky. “Simply having photos of listings and far off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there.”

Named  888 Brannan, the offices occupy a renovated 100-year-old industrial building. One of the structure’s original rooms was a conference suite modelled on the War Room in the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, which has been completely restored.

The office canteen features long communal tables where staff can hold informal meetings, while the walls are covered in over a hundred sketches relating to different employee experiences.

“We wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity,” said Chesky.

Another feature is a green wall that extends up one side of the main atrium.

Here’s the full design statement from Brian Chesky:

888 Brannan

The opening of 888 Brannan is an exciting moment for Airbnb because the building embodies what we value as a company: creativity, community engagement, and thoughtful design.

Joe, Nate and I started Airbnb when we saw the potential in something others had overlooked – the spare space in our apartment. In the same way, we saw massive potential in 888 Brannan. The building is a hundred­‐year‐old city landmark that had been practically forgotten about, but we saw the opportunity to turn it into the perfect space for our growing company and community.

The first time we stepped into the atrium, we imagined looking up and seeing a cross section of the very homes that are featured on our site – immediately knowing, without seeing any logos or signs, that you were at Airbnb. We invested a lot into the space, learning about its history, and transformed it from a non-­descript building into a physical representation of who we are and what we believe.

At the core of Airbnb is the connection between people and spaces. In designing 888 Brannan, we asked ourselves how we could use the space to encourage connections between people. All too often, office design doesn’t consider collaboration, creativity or spontaneity. At Airbnb, we wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity.

To achieve this, we wanted as many lines of sight as possible, both inside the building and to the neighbourhood outside. Not only is this visually interesting, but we believe it inherently creates connections. We also created spaces for these connections to develop. In an open floor plan, you typically have two types of spaces: desks and meeting rooms. We focused on creating a third shared space as well. Sofas scattered amongst the desks, the communal dining area, and project rooms with long standing tables all provide an opportunity for our employees to have casual conversations, spontaneous collaborations, or informal meetings.

Another key focus for our new home was to create a truly comfortable place for our employees, whose hard work is fundamental to everything we do. We believe investing in them is the foundation of our success. A lot of companies under‐invest in their office space, and therefore under‐invest in their employees and their growth. We believe that if our team is working in an inspirational and creative space, they will be inspired to create a better product and service for our hosts and guests.

One exceptional aspect of the new space is the ability to experience travel without leaving the building. We asked ourselves, “how can we create the sense of travel in an office?” Simply having photos of listings and far off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there. We replicated some of the most unique places on Airbnb to create this feeling. Each room, from Milan to Reykjavik, Bali to Amsterdam, not only celebrates our global community, but also lets everyone who visits them truly experience a different place.

In designing Airbnb’s new home, we wanted to create a place that would bring our mission to life, a place where people could instantly see what is at the heart of our company. At 888 Brannan, we are creating a space not just for our employees, but for our hosts and travellers, our neighbours and friends. Airbnb is creating a world where you can be at home everywhere, and everyone can be at home at Airbnb.

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rooms modelled on real apartments appeared first on Dezeen.

American studio Emerging Objects 3D-printed this pavilion using salt harvested from San Francisco Bay (+ slideshow).

“The structure is an experiment in 3D printing using locally harvested salt from the San Francisco Bay to produce a large-scale, lightweight, additive manufactured structures,” said Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello of additive manufacturing startup Emerging Objects.

They explained that 500,000 tonnes of sea salt are harvested each year in the San Francisco Bay Area using power from the sun and wind. “The salt is harvested from 109-year-old salt crystallisation ponds in Redwood City,” they said. “These ponds are the final stop in a five-year salt-making process that involves moving bay water through a series of evaporation ponds. In these ponds the highly saline water completes evaporation, leaving 8-12 inches of solid crystallised salt that is then harvested for industrial use.”

In addition to being a renewable resource, the salt is inexpensive compared to commercially available printing materials and creates strong lightweight components.

They claim that their pavilion is the first to be printed from salt but draws on traditional techniques for building with the material. “No one has ever 3D-printed a building out of salt,” Rael told Dezeen. “However, there is a long tradition of architecture constructed of salt blocks, particularly in the Middle East and in desert environments.”

The 336 unique translucent panels of the Saltygloo structure were made in a powder-based 3D printing process where a layer of salt is applied then fixed in place selectively with a binding agent, before the next layer of salt is deposited and the process is repeated.

The panels were then connected together to form a rigid shell, further supported with lightweight aluminium rods flexed in tension.

“Each panel recalls the crystalline form of salt and is randomly rotated and aggregated to create a larger structure where all tiles in the structure are unique,” explained the designers.

“The form of the Saltygloo is drawn from the forms found in the Inuit igloos, but also the shapes and forms of tools and equipment found in the ancient process of boiling brine,” they added. “The translucent qualities of the material, a product of the fabrication process and the natural properties of salt, allow for natural light to permeate the space, highlight the assembly and structure, and reveal the unique qualities of one of humankind’s most essential minerals.”

Rael and San Fratello are professors of architecture and design at the University of California Berkeley and San Jose State University. They founded Emerging Objects six months to focus on printing architecture from a diverse set of materials, largely renewable or sources from industrial waste, including some they have developed themselves.

Besides salt, they are also working in 3D-printed wood, cement and paper, adapting old models of 3D-printers to suit their materials and processes. “Emerging Objects is interested in the creation of 3D printed architecture, building components and furnishings that can be seen as sustainable, inexpensive, stronger, smarter, recyclable, customisable and perhaps even reparable to the environment,” they explain.

The Saltygloo pavilion follows a piece of furniture printed in the same way and the firm is now gearing up to produce a large-scale architectural room. “We see possibilities to create building enclosures and building cladding systems, as well as free standing walls using the salt material,” Rael told us.

The project is on display at the Museum of Craft Design as part of an exhibition called New West Coast Design 2 until 5 January 2014.

Design team: Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Seong Koo Lee.
Fabrication team: Ronald Rael, Seong Koo Lee, Eleftheria Stavridi
Material development: Ronald Rael, Mark Kelly, Kent Wilson
Special thanks: Professor Mark Ganter, Solheim Lab, University of Washington, Ehren Tool, Department of Art Practice, University of California Berkeley, Department of Architecture, University of California Berkeley, Department of Design, San Jose State University, Kwang Min Ryu and Chaewoo Rhee.

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by Emerging Objects appeared first on Dezeen.

News: architecture firm Snøhetta has unveiled the design for a new staircase linking the existing San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with the 21,000 square-metre extension currently under construction.

The terrazzo stairs will lead visitors from the Hass Atrium of the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) building to the first floor of the Snøhetta-designed extension, which is scheduled to open in early 2016. It will be positioned directly beneath a large circular skylight designed by Mario Botta, the architect of the original building.

“We have imagined a stair that feels at home in Botta’s atrium, yet introduces the visitor to the language of the new spaces, creating a powerful overlap moment between the two worlds,” said Snøhetta principal Craig Dykers.

He continued: “It bridges the current and future buildings, and extends the existing design vocabulary, while foreshadowing that of the new Snøhetta addition. Most importantly, the new stair serves the next stage in the trajectory of the museum, which is about reaching out, embracing a wider public and becoming more extroverted.”

The cantilevered body of the structure will be made from wood and will feature a clear glass balustrade.

“While grand in dimensions, the stair’s impressive cantilevered construction gives it a very modest footprint,” said Dykers. “Its atypically low walls make it feel smaller than it is, which gives the atrium a new, open, airy, character that looks to SFMOMA’s future.”

Snøhetta broke ground on the SFMOMA extension earlier this year. Once open it will double the gallery’s exhibition and education space, creating 12,000 square-metres of indoor and outdoor galleries.

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art appeared first on Dezeen.