Earth, Water, and Fire join MacBook Air. Yes someone went there. DViCE, to be exact, decided to dream up MacBook Air's fellow element-themed cousins: Earth (recyclable), Water (pours out of a bottle), and Fire ("blazing" fast). "No word on prices or release dates" as of yet.
via notcot
Four speakers debate the future of design. Find out what Alice Rawsthorn, the design critic of the International Herald Tribune and a former director of the Design Museum in London; Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Hilary Cottam, who develops design solutions to problems in education, health care and other public services as co-founder of the London-based agency Participle; and John Maeda, the digital design star and newly appointed president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), have to say about the future of design.
The debate took place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
(The picture is from ActiveMobs, a DesignCouncil project, led by Hilary Cottam and part of Paola Antonelli's show "Design and the Elastic Mind").
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Re-invent the wheel? No, fold it. The problem with folding bicycles is that no matter how clever the design, the wheels tend to muck it up. Large wheels ride better but are bulky to incorporate, whereas smaller wheels hide away better but provide a crappy ride.
Freelance industrial designer and avid bicyclist Duncan Fitzsimmons may have solved the problem, by designing a wheel that can itself fold. Made of carbon fiber with hinges, the unusual design is currently being looked at by unnamed "major manufacturers," and Fitzsimmons hopes to have the wheel, and a better folding bicycle, on the market soon.
via bike radar
ID History: Marcel Breuer, chair man of the bored. Dissatisfied with the previous generation's seating, Bauhaus designer and architect Marcel Breuer created the B5 chair in 1926 as "a dramatic antidote to the overstuffed seating of the Edwardian era." Though not as well-known as his B3 chair (the "Wassily"), the B5 was recently inducted into the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Museum.
"This chair is an iconic design that has been on our furniture wish list for a long time," says Sarah Coffin, curator of decorative arts at the museum. "We like to tell the history of design by showing things as part of a continuum, and Breuer's work relates to bentwood furniture and industrial design."
Read about the chair and Breuer's then-radical work here.
I Love My Electric Appliance!! image pool. The I Love My Electric Appliance!! Flickr pool has a ton of whimsical vintage appliance imagery--lots of overjoyed women leaning on stuff, as expected.
via coudal
A good read: Horning's design-oriented consumerism essay. Pop Matters' editor Rob Horning has an excellent essay up on design-oriented consumerism, referencing everything from Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness to Renaissance concepts of self-styling to Rich Gold's "Plenitude" ideology.
...once mundane products like toilet brushes, spatulas, and ice cube trays are now complemented by design so flamboyant that it's unmistakable even to the untrained consumer's eye... No longer a prole with a dirty toilet, one becomes a fledgling design critic and a curator of the tastefully appointed museum that used to be a one-bedroom apartment.
If the superficiality of today's design has been bugging you, Horning hits the nail on the head for you here.
via pop matters / marginal utility
2007 Good Design Awards winners announced. The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies have announced the 2007 Good Design Awards winners.
Luckily, "web design" isn't a category.
Yo! C77 Board Alert : How Should Designers Dress? On a more fashion-conscious thread, Stewie asked how everyone dresses for work and how we should dress for work. And the people, they replied:
"I'm pretty sure were supposed to wear those thick black square eyeglasses.""If your an older designer, I think your supposed to wear the jeans and jean jacket with a big bushy white beard and fishermans sandals."
"You can't make a second first impression."
"Best thing i've always found about being a designer is that people expect you to be a little different so you can get away with more (without being over the top- sorry Karim)!"
"Dress for the position you want to be in, not the position you are in."
What do you think? How Should Designers Dress?
As bottle lightweighting reaches its limits, the handle must go. What does the handle of a milk bottle have in common with a low-rent booking agent? They both take ten percent. UK recycling org WRAP estimates getting rid of the handles on plastic milk bottles will shave 10% off the materials, which means not just cheaper manufacturing costs, but less landfill.
Peter Skelton from WRAP's retail team said: "Plastic milk bottles are probably the most common plastic item found in household waste and manufacturers and brand owners have taken the current handled designs as far as they can go in terms of lightweighting. The vital next step is perfecting a handle-free design which works for the consumer."
Bottle producer Nampak is tackling the project in association with Dairy Crest, which puts out roughly a billion liters of milk in a year. Estimated savings gained by losing their bottle's handle? 1,250 tonnes of HDPE plastic. Designing a better grip feature seems like a small price to pay.
"Nuage Vert" - Artists Are Growing a Green Cloud in Helsinki. It might sound French but it's going to happen in Finland. Every night from the 22 to the 29 of February 2008 the vapour emissions of he Salmisaari power plant in Helsinki will be illuminated to show the current levels of electricity consumption by local residents. A laser ray will trace the cloud during the night time and turn it into a city scale neon sign.
Nuage Vert is a part of Pollstream series, an artistic intervention in environmental ethics by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen). This terrible beauty is presented by the Pixelache Festival of Electronic Art and Subcultures.
And finally, tpod, if tea floats your boat. tpod is a teabag design concept by Soos that plays MP3s adds fun to the tea steeping process. Well, on second thought, unless you think the paper tag falling into scalding hot tea and you burning your finger while fishing it out is amusing, we'd say tpod makes steeping tea fun. After removing a tpod tea bag from the box, you unfold the tag which then becomes a boat that floats cheerily atop your soon-to-be-ready cup of tasty tea.
via swissmiss
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