Une excellente initiative de la fondation Pink Ribbon (luttant contre le cancer du sein) avec cette customisation du modèle de la Mercedes B-Class. Une oeuvre réalisée par l’artiste de Calligraffiti Niels Meulman en dessinant des centaines de noms de femmes pour lequel la fondation se bat.
Yves Béhar of San Francisco design firm fuseproject has designed an affordable family of office chairs inspired by suspension bridges for Herman Miller.
The SAYL chair features a frameless back, providing support by suspending the back material in tension between the under-side of the chair seat and the Y-shaped vertical structure.
The chair has been designed completely from the ground up, reducing the number of materials and components in the process, achieving Cradle to Cradle Silver certification and also enabling it to be sold from the modest price of $399.
Here’s more from Yves Béhar:
SAYL: LIFE UNFRAMED Yves Behar’s artist statement
I knew that creating a work chair is one of design’s greatest challenges, an intimidating project in every possible way. What makes it so difficult? There is no place to hide in a chair. Every part serves a structural or tactile purpose. Every part is about creating comfort while needing to be visually cohesive and beautiful.
In addition, a chair is also a symbol of its time, revealing the technological advances of an era, and expressing how humans live and work together in that era. Its daunting constraints, from ergonomic regulations to expectations, are only matched by its tremendous potential: to become a metaphor of its time.
And so, almost deliberately, I practiced for more than a decade and waited to tackle the work chair. And it is only after turning 40 that I feel ready for such an epic design challenge.
So how did we start? I believe that one of design’s most important promises is to create attainability. This has been a central pursuit of my studio fuseproject: from laptops designed for kids in developing world classrooms (OLPC) to energy-saving lighting and EV charging stations. So we approached this project with the following questions: How do we create a task chair that is attainable? And can we make a comfortable, supportive, healthy, and, yes, beautiful task chair at a fundamentally lower price than anything Herman Miller, the leader and innovator in the field, has yet accomplished?
Attainability can only be reached if every molecule in the product is working harder. Fewer parts and less material ultimately mean less cost…and less carbon footprint. We call this principle Eco-Dematerialization.
Early inspiration came from observing the way suspension bridges carry tremendous loads. The Golden Gate Bridge is near my home in San Francisco, and its structural towers and cable system led to some ideas: what if we use a tower for vertical support, cables for back tension and comfort, and a lower span as base? This early intuition led to some experiments in the studio’s workshop, and some early successes in defining the engineering principles of the SAYL chair. Iterating on the curvature of the lower ArcSpanTM allowed us to fine- tune the shape of the back of the chair to mirror spine curvature. Ultimately, between the fuseproject shop and Herman Miller’s, we produced 70+ prototypes, constantly building, testing, breaking, and starting all over again.
The next stage was also a question: What materials could bring our engineering experiments to life? To replace the wood and rope of the early prototypes we focused on injected soft materials that would be comfortable and support the body in specific ways compared to mesh textiles. After dozens of iterating pattern density, thickness, and tensile levels, we settled on an injected urethane sheet placed under tension between the Y-Tower and the lower ArcSpan.
The result is a breakthrough: We can eliminate the use of a hard material to frame the SAYL back, allowing greater movement and the first frameless suspension back. No more hard edges! We are also able to change the performance of the SAYL back to reflect ergonomic support needs: more supportive and responsive areas through thicker injected sections in the sacral, lumbar, and spine areas, and softer areas in the upper back and edges. We named this approach 3-D IntelligentTM surfaces, and refined the feel of the back through 100 different patterns, material thickness, and tension strength experiments. The frameless back allowed us to design the parts to more easily twist and move with the user, encouraging movement and a more dynamic response from the chair.
Once the bridge suspension principle was refined and ready for final engineering, another opportunity became clear: to combine structural parts and achieve further dematerialization. For example, the ArcSpan, arm structure, and tilt mechanism undercarriage have been fused into a single triangulated part whose strength has the advantage to lighten the chair’s material requirement significantly, as well as its visual weight, becoming a multifunctional super-part.
We also pursued the detailing of every part and every surface with two goals in mind: removing as much material as possible, and shaping every part to be beautiful, expressive, and tactile. Structural parts are simultaneously sculpted and hollowed-out, such as the Y-Tower and ArcSpan, which results in an aesthetic that reveals structure. Touch- points like the back tension knob and height adjustment paddle have the bare-minimum amount of materials with a tactility that informs the user of the part’s function.
Too often, task chairs look assembled from a kit of parts, and often they are. There is a dance between SAYL’s functional engineering work and its cosmetic shaping, and there is a relentless desire to have parts run fluidly into each other. For example, I was particularly interested in making the arms look as if they were stretched and growing seamlessly out of their height adjustment posts. There is also the idea of separate parts drawn as if conceived as one: The SAYL’s frameless back is shaped to both express the tension distribution from the top attachments, and visually follow the form and exposed ribbing of the Y- Tower. As a result, the two parts are visually layered as if one.
In my opinion, Herman Miller does not sell a style, but rather a set of inventions that are identifiable as the most radical in the industry. But what makes the chair relevant now? It was important to reflect the workplace now and communicate the new horizontal nature of 21st century corporate structures. SAYL gives a sense of visual lightness and transparency rather than a status-announcing design, and an ergonomic feel that is biomorphic. At the same time SAYL has a sense of humility and attempts to achieve high-tactility design rather than visual statement. The chair screams design intent when viewed and touched by the sitter in close proximity, but from afar it almost disappears. The workplace is not about chairs and what they say about the people that sit in them; it’s about the humans and their work. To that effect, SAYL appears smaller in scale, and its dematerialization makes it more transparent in the environment.
The final chapter has been to design a whole collection of work chairs, with side chairs benefiting from the material innovations and the 3-D Intelligent design of SAYL, and to craft a forward timelessness that puts the details at the center of the design.
The whole SAYL design adventure was really a process of invention, iteration, constant failure and experimentation. It did not take place on the computer, but in the workshop and on the drawing board, with real prototypes leading to failures and successes. What Don Goeman at Herman Miller describes as “growing” a chair rather than “building” one is the idea the fuseproject team led by Bret Recor, Qin Li, and Naoya Edahiro took to heart for three years, and through a deep collaboration with a dozen Herman Miller engineers under John Aldrich, and the watchful eye of Jack Schreur, we really “grew” the SAYL line of work chairs.
Every design and invention should benefit the company that takes the risks to invest in a new innovation, but every product should also benefit the world by demonstrating a more sustainable and socially responsible way to do business. In addition to being dematerialized, lighter, and by default having a smaller carbon footprint, the SAYL is also manufactured on three continents to reduce shipping environmental costs, packaged in a half-size box, Cradle to Cradle certified, backed by a 12-year warranty, and receives all the service a conscientious enterprise provides.
There is an amusing parallel between the SAYL’s physical lack of frame around its suspension back, and my belief that we humans are increasingly benefiting from “unframed” expressions of our potential, taking on bigger challenges and to going beyond work or social expectations. This led me to give the chair the nickname of “unframed” early on in the process. The idea continued to grow in my mind, and eventually became bigger than the chair itself. “Life unframed” now describes all workplaces and life-places as having that freedom and potential. So somewhere along the way, SAYL started to feel just like the beginning of a bigger idea, a “life unframed” that is accessible to more of us and will continue to evolve.
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| VerBien by Yves Béhar | PACT underwear by Yves Behar | More furniture stories |
This week in Switzerland, Le Corbusier isn’t being celebrated by his native countrymen as much as he likely would have wanted. Shortly after the Swiss bank UBS began a new advertising campaign featuring the legendary architect, the AP reports that they were reminded that relatively new information has come out over the past few years that he also might have had a penchant for being a Nazi sympathizer, something that didn’t sit well with this bank in particular given certain dark spots in its history. Thus, the campaign was immediately shut down and likely stuffed in a vault somewhere, never to be seen again. Following the UBS incident, city officials in Zurich, who were planning to dedicate a town square in his honor are now planning to take “another look at the historical record.” So despite having squares and roads named after him already in other parts of the country and his face on each and every 10-franc bill, this could be the first move in Switzerland distancing itself completely from Le Corbusier’s name.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
It’s Friday, so it must be time for a round-up of the lovely work that has landed in our inboxes at CR Towers this week. We open with this great animated video from director David Wilson, for the Japanese Popstars track Let Go. The production company is Colonel Blimp.
Directors Lucinda Schreiber and Beatrice Pegard used over 2,000 pieces of paper to create this vid for Midnight Juggernauts track Lara Vs The Savage Pack, which is shown for the first time here.
Director Ben Read gets fruity in this new video for Mumdance, for track Don’t Forget Me Now (feat. Esser).
Some commercials for you now. First up, two rather nice new spots from Karmarama in London. This one is to promote Murderous Mondays, a series of programmes about real life British murderers on the Crime & Investigation Network. It is directed by Karmarama creative director Sam Walker, who also wrote the ad alongside Joe de Souza.
Walker and De Souza are also the creative minds on this spot for Costa coffee, which sees a roomful of monkeys causing chaos as the ad tests out whether, if left alone with a set of coffee machines, they would be able to produce the perfect cuppa (a spin on the theroem that, given enough time and typewriters, monkeys would produce the entire works of Shakespeare). The ad is directed by Sam Brown, and produced by Rogue Films.
Projector in Japan has created a charming website for sock brand Tabio, which is all based around the pleasure of sliding on wooden floors in your socks. Visit the site at tabio.com/slideshow.
Finally, Forsman and Bodenfors has followed up its beautifully designed baking book for Ikea with this ad for the brand’s Kondis (meaning ‘fitness’ in Swedish) app, which tells you how much exercise you have to do to work off the calories of one of the home-baked cakes. The app also includes the recipes. Creatives: Staffan Lamm, Christoffer Persson, Fredrik Jansson, Anders Hegerfors.
—This stool is the result of research project. The brief? To provide support based on various frequently adopted natural postures and objectify ..
Une belle initiative et un objet original, avec ce parapluie sous la forme d’un sabre de Samurai. Le produit est disponible en deux formats (grande et petite taille) et il est doté d’un poignée de sabre japonais ainsi que d’un sac en bandoulière pour le transport.
Every once in a while, you get a reminder of how wonderful and complicated a thing art can be. Though often it comes at the expense of something negative happening. Such is the case in the small town of Loveland, Colorado, where the local museum, the Loveland Museum Gallery, is in the middle of running an exhibition called “The Legend of Bud Shark & His Indelible Ink,” a collection of prints assembled/curated by the famed printer, publisher and Colorado resident, Bud Shark (who donated the exhibit and therefore “no tax dollars were used”). Included in the exhibition was a beautiful paneled lithograph by artist Enrique Chagoya, “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals,” which according to Fox “includes several images of Jesus, including one in which he appears to be receiving oral sex from a man as the word ‘orgasm’ appears beside Jesus’ head” (Chagoy’s own description of the piece is far more accurate and far less inflammatory). Somehow, possibly due to some online outrage that caught fire and then the local, then national media picked it up (see the quote above), protests and things like failed calls from a councilman to have the piece removed revved up to a full boil. The final act came this week when a woman from Montana showed up to the gallery with a crowbar and smashed a cover protecting the piece and then tore Chagoya’s print. She was arrested immediately and is now facing felony charges and fines. The artist and Bud Shark are both understandably upset by what’s transpired, Chagoya stressing that it was his First Amendment rights that were attacked and violence is hardly a teaching of Jesus, who this woman was presumably trying to protect from a piece of printed paper. So while charges have been filed, the museum isn’t going to rehang the print, and a piece of art has been damaged, if art’s purpose is to engage the public, then it feels like it was a life well-served.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
This temporary pavilion with reflective purple scales that shimmer in the breeze has been installed in Beijing by New York architects SO-IL.
The pavilion – created as the main hub for the arts festival Get it Louder – was constructed in four days and will be dismantled and transported to Shanghai for the second leg of the festival.
Photographs are by Iwan Baan.
Here’s some more information from SO-IL:
TWO TEMPORARY STRUCTURES BY SOLID OBJECTIVES – IDENBURG LIU OPEN IN BEIJING AND NEW YORK
Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL), winner of the 2010 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, has opened two temporary structures in Beijing and New York. SO-IL’s ”Flockr” pavilion serves as the central hub for “Get It Louder,” a biannual media and arts event taking place in Beijing through October 10th and in Shanghai October 22nd to November 7th. In New York, SO – IL was one of the winners of Sukkah City, a competition to design a small ritual shelter traditionally associated with the Jewish holiday Sukkot. SO-IL’s entry “In Tension” was displayed on Union Square in Manhattan on September 19th and 20th, and the project will be featured at the Center for Jewish History in New York until October 15th.
“We believe the importance of ephemeral architecture will increase in this prolonged era of uncertainty. The economic environment has become so unpredictable that short-term, low-cost projects are the most feasible. Yet this kind of project can also offer a perfect testing ground for larger scale work,” says SO-IL partner Florian Idenburg. “Temporary projects require a particular mindset. You have to quickly grasp the local condition and provide a lean and elemental solution that provides a sense of specificity— a fleeting mark—even if only for an instant.” The two projects reflect SO-IL’s interpretation of the distinctive moods of contemporary Beijing and New York, the latter more contemplative and considered, the former full of energy and gusto.
Flockr Pavilion for Get It Louder Get It Louder, an acclaimed biannual media and arts festival sponsored by Modern Media of China, features a series of lectures, screenings and exhibitions by over one hundred Chinese and foreign designers, artists, writers and filmmakers. Organized by an international team including Chinese curator and writer Ou Ning and design writer Aric Chen, this year’s theme “SHARISM” focuses on the relationship between public and private realms in the digital age. SO-IL was commissioned to design Get It Louder’s main pavilion, which serves as a central hub for the event and houses many of the festival’s activities.
SO – IL conceived the “Flockr” pavilion as a structure that responds to its environment while also creating a sense of place through its basic form. Covered with thousands of tinted mirrored panels, the skin reflects its surroundings and makes the changing contexts of this temporary and mobile installation—the cityscapes of Beijing and Shanghai— an integral part of its expression. In SO-IL’s experimental façade, only the top of each panel is attached to the structure, allowing the individual pieces to respond to wind and creating a kinetic skin that is permeable by light and air.
The pavilion’s structure is made out of 56 thin, flexible steel rods that connect at the bottom and the top into two large steel rings. The larger bottom ring frames the interior perimeter of the structure while the smaller top ring creates a skylight; the relationship between the two results in the pavilion’s curvilinear womb-like shape. The activities that take place within are gently enclosed by a dynamic pattern of thousands of flickering reflections.
“Because it is circular in plan and curvilinear in section, the pavilion does not discriminate any direction,” says SO-IL partner Jing Liu. “Once passing through the entryway, the interior is generous and encompassing. “We envisioned the pavilion as a place where ideas can flock together, be projected, pass through, and be nurtured and distilled.”
The structure was assembled within four days for the opening on Sept 20th and will be demounted and reinstalled within a week’s time for its use in Shanghai.
Can’t see the movie? Click here.
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| KAPKAR/TO-RXD by Frank Havermans | South Pond pavilion by Studio Gang | More pavilion stories |
Naresh Ramchandani becomes the first advertising and communications partner in Pentagram’s 38-year history…
In a move that looks set to further extend the multi-disciplinary nature of the London office, Ramchandani’s appointment comes soon after Eddie Opara’s to the New York studio. Where Opara brings a knowledge of digital and interactive work, Ramchandani will be able to apply his experience as a writer and creative director who has worked both in print and moving image to the London office.
“Pentagram has always kept moving and I think this is very much a way of extending graphic design outwards,” says Ramchandani of his new role. “They’ve always tried to configure projects that come from within their craft skills but are measured against what clients need. They increasingly need graphic design to live and breathe through other outputs – to offer relevance – but from the basis of good craft.”
Ramchandani started out as a copywriter at HHCL in 1990 and won industry recognition with only his second TV spot, the Israelites commercial for Maxell, which won a Grand Prix at Cannes. He then went on to work for Chiat/Day, which later became St Luke’s, where he created the Chuck Out Your Chintz campaign for IKEA. A co-founder of Karmarama in 2000, he also worked on the Van Den Puup “elite designer” character for the furniture brand and helped create the now infamous anti-war poster, Make Tea Not War.
“What I like about Pentagram is when they do communications work, it’s done with the sense of putting something good in the world,” he says. “It’s not just something for the client, or a self-serving graphic identity, because communications can’t just serve the business – the work must be of value or of interest out there in the world. The projects I get to work on could be beautiful, thought-provoking, funny, but they’ll chime with how the partners do things.”
So what does Ramchandani hope to bring to the studio? “They like the fact that I can do things that aren’t in their core skills set, but that I still value craft and how things sound, all the details,” he says. “I can write and use language, which is often the kind of communication that reaches out to people, rather that having them go to it. I can make things move, as I’ve had years of working with directors and animators, using audio-visual language that can take graphic design from pure identity and into communication.”
Ramchandani will also continue his work with Green Thing, the non-profit public service he co-founded in 2007, which has helped nearly 6 million people to embrace a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle.
The Kno is a fundamental shift in the world of education; an iconic digital book that aims to make overflowing backpacks a thing of the past. Defined ..
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