Categories

Shop Laboratory, Good For Business?

During their scholarship year at the Designlabor Bremerhaven in 2008 an interdisciplinary design team devised temporary usage concepts as part of a strategy to counter the number of unoccupied shop premises in Bremerhaven. These innovative concepts were tested in a vacant shop under experimental conditions. This was in turn transformed into a gallery, a media café and finally an outlet offering its own design products called the Shop Laboratory.

Designer: Designlabor Bremerhaven

With One Hand He Lifted, His House Designed

Clouds from the sky he used, and colors from the atmosphere. He would with two hands attach them to eachother, and with maybe the help of a string or two, to the ceiling hold them. The kids would find them fort-like, and the mother of juice-stains find them easy to clean, as this is a detachable grid of replaceable fabric pieces; tiles, if you will.

Designers: Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec in collaboration with Kvadrat Textiles

Self-Sustaining Urban Area Abode Chapeau

Hydroponic Greenhouse. Turns air we breath out into air we can breath in. Uses solar-powered turbines to pump this air. Converts (biodegradable) human waste into food for plants. Plants are edible by humans. Greenhouse creates condensation which is collected for aquarium-dwelling animals, also edible by humans and hamsters.

Beautiful green building helmets.

Designer: Natalie Jeremijenko and Crew

Experience Summer Glow During Winter

Hollywood movies showcase the perfect winter day effectively, however the truth is quite contrary. Look at the snow on the driveway! How gloomy and dark the skies are! After you’re done with the shoveling and nursing your frostbitten fingers, it takes a while to really appreciate the snowman or the snowflakes. If you were to have the Luminaarparaad installation on your lane, wouldn’t it make the drab, cold winters more cheerful?

Designers: Pent Talvet & Kristian Paljasma

Space Frames and Rapid Forms

Lilah Fowler’s new show at Brown Gallery in London continues a line of exploration that has preoccupied artists in the second half of the 20th century: the presence of geometry in our lives. With visual influences ranging from Tony Smith’s sculptures to Sol LeWitt’s drawings to Fred Sandback’s string installations, Fowler would seem to be putting herself into a minimalist corner.

Designer: Lilah Fowler

Confess It to the Poles

Everyone has secrets, and the poles want to know! Designer Florian Brillet creates the newest amalgamation of the main points of secrecy: the public, and the secret itself. In Brillet’s “Secret” project the secrets are told to the public poles, and the public poles tell the secrets back to the public.

Once the secret is separate from the teller, it becomes public property.

Designer: Florian Brillet

Rundle Lantern

The Rundle Lantern is a parking garage in Adelaide, Australia, composed of a big corner-wrapping screen. Each of the 748 “pixels ” has two LED lights behind it, and it can do all the stuff that awesome big screens can do. It was designed by brand consulting firm Fusion , but this is no jumbotron: it was intentionally designed to be a lantern to this part of town, and even though it moves it doesn’t display hard images or text. It’s more like a huge Jeremy Blake light-painting , and we love it for that. Check out the videos.

Designer: Fuse Project

The Danube Flower Blooms Again

When you think the word “innovate,” you don’t often associate it with “recycle.” But what Stojanovic, Pavlovic, Milanovic have done here is both of those things, with a project called “Wellness Sky.” Together they transformed a 35 year old, lost and decrepit building into the once glorious landmark it was at its height, and they did it by turning it into a fitness center.

Designers: Djordje Stojanovic, Vlada Pavlovic & Slavko Milanovic

100% Design London 2008 Recap

It’s official, the 2008 London Design Festival is now over!  In its 6th year and with over 150 events held all over London, I was lucky enough to be able to view the best of the best within furniture, craft, architecture, fashion, multi-media, graphic and industrial design.

Exhibition: 100% Design London

Ghost in the Machine

Place both elbows to the railing, place hands to skull, hear airplanes, bombs, and air-raid horns fill your eardrums the same as if you were there, Dresden Germany, 1945. Markus K has designed a different kind of memorial, one that allows the person visiting to not only stand in the place where history happened, but to hear and experience it as well.

Designer: Markus Kison

Chromazon / A Giant Skeleton with Colorful Leafies

Chromazon is a design installation whose color and construction make it an environment to behold. Did I say whose? Its organic nature makes it not just an art installation, not just a park bench: Chromazon is unnatural nature. Lately (the last ten years?) in our modern architectural design environment* competitiveness is a must. The Chromazon encapsulates the world’s new(?) radically concentrated love for design in all things.

Designer: SU11 Studio

The Eyes have it

Shanghai nights are going to get a little more interesting with this “Night Watch” art installation in Jubilee Park. Commisioned by Canary warf, Wokmedia together with lighting designer Admir Jukanovic/Mindseye employed the ancient Chinese art of inside painting where an image is reverse-painted through a small opening of a hollowed crystal ball.

Designer: WOKmedia