Hasta La Ideas

This weekend, New York’s Toda Design Studio opens its doors to for a workshop series under the heading “Sustainable Exchange: Methods and Practices for Collaborative Partnerships.” Organized by designer Megan Howard, the three-day event features local artists and fashion designers who will share how they utilize sustainable design in their work.

By illuminating the potential of sustainable consumption, production and business methods for someone who isn’t necessarily in a creative industry, the multi-disciplinary expo attempts to bridge the gap between sustainable design by—and for—designers, and sustainable design for all, by all.

Learn how to finger crochet with Eko-Lab‘s Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard. Established in the Lower East Side, the design collective specializes in eco-friendly, hand-detailed womenswear and accessories and has plans to open a fair-trade facility, teaching green methods of textile-making to the local community.

Check out the dark, cultish line of jewelry and personal effects from Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons. Award-winning designer Derrick R. Cruz resurrects old-world techniques and uses ethically sourced materials in his line of high-end accessories.

Fashion and art world vet Susan Cianciolo (clients include Badgley Mischka, Kim Gordon’s X-Girl and Habitual Jeans) will teach fashion drawing and painting. She now works as a designer, making custom-made clothing from recycled, repurposed or organic fabric whenever possible.

Other workshops include experimenting with natural dyes sourced from nature including turmeric spice, smoked tea and madder root, and even cooking with seasonal, locally grown foods.

Sustainable Exchange is open to the public and runs from 7-9 May 2010. For more information visit Megan Howard’s website.

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pGlobally speaking more of us now live in cities than in the country, but this statistic is not evenly distributed; for example, 73% of India lives in a rural environment, and since roughly one out of six Earthlings is Indian, that adds up to a huge rural consumer base./p

pThat in turn calls for a large amount of product design to address specifically rural, as opposed to urban, customers, who have different needs and tastes. As seen in A HREF=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127313731105787137.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines” this WSJ interview/A, South Korea’s LG is one of the companies specifically targeting rural customers with design. An excerpt:/p

blockquoteBWSJ: How do you design differently for rural markets?/B

p[LG Electronics Managing Director] Moon B. Shin: Colors are a major differential [and] we work with color specialists to design rural products. Rural people like brighter, beautiful colors, urban people prefer more classic colors, like grey or white, with a metallic finish./p

pDurability is also very important. For example, we’ve introduced plastic bodies, instead of metal, for washing machines geared for supplies to coastal areas to guard against the high corrosive content of salt in the water supply. Also, we have tailored our designs to suit rural conditions. Often, rural areas have erratic electricity supplies and they tend to be dry and dusty, so product design has to meet those demands. For example, our refrigerators have built-in voltage stabilizers to protect the compressor from fluctuations in electricity supplies./blockquote/p

pRead the full interview A HREF=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB127313731105787137.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines” here/A.br /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/lg_on_designing_for_the_rural_indian_market_16514.asp”(more…)/a
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Andreas Gursky, Ocean I, 2010, 249.4 x 348.4 x 6.4 cm, C-Print © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London

The Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin is currently showing a new series of work by Andreas Gursky, inspired by the blue void of ocean displayed on an in-flight monitor during a flight from Dubai to Melbourne…

The Ocean I-VI series is on show from 1 May until 19 June at Sprüth Magers and features six new large-scale works by the German artist. The work apparently originates from Gursky being struck by the pictorial quality of the back-of-seat display as it showed the wide expanse of water that he was flying 35,000ft above (with the Horn of Africa to the far left of the screen, a tip of Australia to the right).

A text on the Sprüth Magers website explains the processes involved of creating the resulting series of images. “Gursky used high-definition satellite photographs which he augmented from various picture sources on the Internet,” say the gallery. “The satellite photos are restricted however to exposures of sharply contoured land masses. Consequently the transitional zones between land and water – as well as the oceans themselves – had to be generated completely by artificial means.

“Given that they make up by far the largest part of the works, this resulted in a gigantic project that only compares with the efforts Gursky lavished on the series F1 Boxenstopp (2007). That all these pieces nevertheless convey the feeling of real subaquatic depths is due solely to the precision of Gursky’s visual work. He even consulted shoal maps to get the right colour nuances for the water surfaces.”

Andreas Gursky, Ocean VI, 2010, 340.9 x 249.4 x 6.4 cm (framed), C-Print © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Installation shot from the Sprüth Magers show

More info on Gursky’s new work, plus images of the pieces in the show, here.

Staying in London for a few more minutes (ah the rain and the expense of it all), the Architectural Association School there is preparing to mount an interesting exhibition called “OMA Book Machine: The Books of OMA” which will show off the entire collection of books and other publications by Rem Koolhaas and his firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (much, much more than what’s currently listed on their site). The show will include more than 40,000 pages pulled from OMA’s archives, offering up likely the most complete Koolhaas retrospective ever (albeit in book form). Here’s a quick description of some of what will be on display:

Many OMA books – like S,M,L,XL (1995) and Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (made by the founders of OMA in 1975, and submitted by Koolhaas as his fifth-year thesis at the AA) — have had a decisive impact on architectural practice and book publishing in general. Others, like MoMA Charrette, made for the (lost) competition to expand New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1997, have remained hidden in the OMA archive. By compiling and presenting the depth and relentlessness of OMA’s dedication to the making of books as a still-revolutionary architectural form, OMA Book Machine reveals how central books remain to architecture today.

The show was set to open at the school tomorrow, May 7th, but according to their site, was “postponed due to transport disruption.” We think that means it was set to open earlier, but then there was that whole volcano travel ban and it will still be opening on Friday, but even if you aren’t there opening night, whenever it happens to be, the exhibition runs until June 4th, so you have some time.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Un riche portfolio par le photographe anglais Andrew Brooks. Basé à Manchester, il possède un style maîtrisé, entre manipulations numériques et HDR. Découvrez une sélection et de nombreux exemples de son travail dans la suite de l’article.

Previously on Fubiz

• Sven Prim
• Ross Brown
• Benedict Campbell