Milan 2008: Moooi

The Salone del Mobile Milano wouldn't be complete without an appearance from these decadent Dutch masters of luxury. The Marcel Wanders Couture wallpaper collection enveloped the entire stand, immediately setting the classic Moooi tone. Visitors followed a path through a series of themed rooms, and shaped cut-outs in the walls allowed a sneak peek into the next room. Love or hate their highly decorative aesthetic, you can't deny Moooi's continued commitment to quality and holistic direction.

Pictured above:
CLIP TABLE by Blasius Osko & Oliver Deichman
LOLITA by Nika Zupanc
RANDOM LIGHTS by Bertjan Pot

>> more pics

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Murray Moss on the state of ID

Reading about industrial design in an art magazine is like reading about America in The Economist--why do we Yanks have to learn about our own country by reading another country's magazine? Simple: lack of good indigenous coverage.

Art Info has a "What is design?" chat with maven Murray Moss, who discusses the current state of industrial design and explains why he's "finished" with "standard-issue modernism." Click here to read.

For more on Moss, BusinessWeek's got a profile on the man here.

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Advertisement

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1 Hour Design Challenge: TWO DAYS LEFT
Things are heating up at Core77's 1 Hour Design Challenge, "THE Olympic Torch."

Brief:
Here's your opportunity to design an Olympic Torch for the city of your choice without Jacque Rogge going all Steve Jobs on you. ANY CITY GOES. Pick your hometown, favorite vacation spot, a city with historical significance, or a random city determined by dart throw. The torch design should represent that city/country and the Olympics in general.

Last Call:
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
4pm EST

Jury:
Winner will be selected by the Core77 Admin. Community discussion is encouraged to help ensure the best design wins.

>>> Click Here to Enter Your Submission <<<

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Book Review: What is Exhibition Design, by Jan Lorenc, Lee Skolnick & Craig Berger

Exhibits like Bodies at the South Street Seaport and the Darwin Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History may be capable of producing both wonder and horror, but not all visitors may realize the history of the discipline behind them. What is Exhibition Design illuminates the thread of history spanning from the cabinets of curiosities popular in the Renaissance, through church reliquaries, worlds fairs, and department stores. The journey brings the reader all the way to our present-day knockdown displays and provides a tour of the process behind their creation along with striking images of the results.

>> read full review

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Feel More Human launches light green lifestyle site

At first glance, Feel More Human seems to have everything for the conscious consumer with a modern design sense. The online store has an eco-friendly home and lifestyle section, with tables from Scrapile, sofas from Dutch designer Bjorn Mulder, and even a Buddha cat perch made from renewable bamboo plywood. There is a content section featuring interviews with inspiring eco-entrepreneurs, a classifieds area where visitors can buy or sell their pre-owned modern design goods, and the whole operation is powered by 100% wind energy.

Yet scratch beneath the surface and you'll find that even those with the greenest of intentions have a hard time making the most environmentally sound choices. Mixed in with all of the bamboo, reclaimed wood, and toxin free fabrics are not-so eco foams, lacquers, plywoods, and plastics, like the NotNeutral Melamine Snack Set for kids. How did a kid's dinnerware with melamine, a resin manufactured by mixing urea with formaldehyde, get onto a site devoted to sustainable lifestyles? Or chrome, a material known for emitting toxic elements into the air, land, and sea, which can be found in several items in the store, such as the Tokyo Shelving Unit or the Valis Chair. Jill Stalowicz, the company's founder, says, "smart design goes beyond aesthetics now, people are questioning how products are constructed." The lesson here is that the practice of green is harder than the promise, and that Feel More Human might want to take a look at how all of its products are actually made.

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Appropriating Sub-cultures: Read About It, Then Watch It Happen

Interesting coincidental postings on two Core fave blogs--Design Observer and io9--that gain an added dimension when viewed one after the other. First, Steven Heller at Design Observer constructs this impassioned (though familiar) accusation of the predatory nature of mass marketing, lamenting the ever-shortening space between the growth of a sub-culture and its appropriation into popular culture and commerce. Then, sci-fi blog io9 gives a near perfect example of it happening at this very moment: a compelling list of examples indicating fan-glam as the next big "authentic underdog" to get yanked into the mainstream.

What's fascinating about reading these two together is realizing how quickly we forget that many now-hip subcultures were once genuinely lame, scary, or deeply obscure. It's one thing to note that pop-art was something only a handful of weirdos were into before Laugh-In used it in their set design; it's quite another to realize that the Trekkies and comic book collectors getting tossed into trashcans last year are on their way to becoming The Next Big Thing.

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Garbage in space: New pics

There's not much to comment on here that isn't self-explanatory, and certainly this isn't a problem we weren't aware of before, but if you need more reasons for designers to stop the madness and take account of the consequences for everything they put into the world--or out of the world in this instance--then sure, bookmark away. Seems things are a LOT worse than was previously thought. Here's Gizmodo:

The European Space Agency has just released images showing all the satellites and human-made debris now orbiting space as a result of 51 years of launching stuff since Sputnik. That's about 6,000 satellites up there—of which only 800 remain operational—plus thousands of other objects from launches and accidents. According to their mindblowing simulations things are getting a lot worse...While the idea of bringing back used stages and satellites back to Earth may seem too expensive, in the long run it's clear that leaving all this trash up there is going to have huge consequences to the development of space exploration and colonization. Those concepts may still seem science fiction for many, but as these simulations show, the current and future problem is very real, and could be extremely dangerous.

ESA link is here, with hi-rez images. Yay--New wallpapers!

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Platform design and mass customization

MELD is a Norwegian product development company, that's in the business of mass customization by way of platform design.

According to MELD, "the world is not ready for mass customization on a grand scale. Presented with the choice of 'anything', most people will be overwhelmed and simple draw a blank. To both educate and react to this reality, platform design give a basic starting point, a first step in moving to a mass customized world."

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Five-year-old inventor comes up with a better broom

Most five year olds are busy eating glue, but inventive tyke Sam Houghton watched his pop sweeping out the yard and came up with an idea for a better broom. "I was swapping from one broom to the other and he asked why," explains Houghton's father. "When I said it was to pick up the different leaves and twigs it must have got him thinking. He got a large elastic band from the shed and put it over the two brooms, holding them just the right way to use both together."

Sam, who's reportedly a fan of Nick Park's animated inventors Wallace & Gromit, explained his design succinctly: "I saw my Daddy brushing up and made it. There are two brushes because one gets the big bits and one gets the little bits left behind."

Although the Houghtons have no plans to start selling the device, Sam's innovation is protected: Houghton senior works as a patent lawyer and promptly hooked up the paperwork.

via bbc

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A farm on the roof tops down on Canal Street

The folks at New York magazine asked four architects to come up with fantasy buildings for the plot at Canal and Varick in NYC. We like this one from Work AC that is an apartment building topped with a working farm. The concept was born out of ideas generated during at Young Architects Program at P.S.1.

"We thought we'd bring the farm back to the city and stretch it vertically," says Work AC co-principal Dan Wood. "We are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels]," adds his co-principal (and wife) Amale Andraos.

Unfortunately, of the four concepts in the article, this one is presented as the least practical. Growing food near where people live? Doesn't seem all that impractical to us!

See the other 3 concepts here.

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Automotive design driving plastics innovation

You've heard of PET and HDPE; have you heard of TPO?

Driven by the automotive industry, plastics companies like Borealis and Sabic are making material advances and devising new production methods.

Pictured at top in a Fiat 500, Borealis' new TPO (polypropylene-based Daplen thermoplastic olefins) is being used for bumpers and dashboards; the new plastic's properties are "excellent scratch resistance and the ability to achieve uniform thickness over a large surface area. Its low thermal expansion over a broad temperature range ensures consistent high quality for large, moulded parts and precise fitting to other exterior panels."

Sabic's new Visualfx resins use two-shot molding and hydrographics. The former (photo below, in an Opel Corsa) is a method of layering resins with hardware or wiring embedded inside, which can enable glowing switches and knobs with translucency and internal light sources. The latter is a method of "immersing a part in an ink pattern floating on water like a film. The pattern adheres to the part [and] can wrap around the part to provide better coverage than with traditional in-mold decoration applications."

via jobwerx and jobwerx

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Milan 2008: MYTO chair

And finally, check out those innovative plastics from the automotive industry on the exhibition floors of Milan Design Week: Inside the Triennale, Basf revealed the process for making Konstantin Grcic's new cantilevered chair, MYTO. The chair is innovative in that it is made entirely of BASF engineering plastic Ultradur High Speed (chemically speaking, PBT: polybutylene terephthalate) till now only used in the car industry.

Actual prototypes were on view -- black cardboard mock-up included! (see top right)

more pics

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Special thanks to Jen van der Meer, Xanthe Matychak, elle* and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this weeks newsletter!

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