Maarten Baas' 'Clay Furniture - Stacking Chairs'
UGLY: How Unorthodox Thinking Will Save Design, by Tad Toulis
Is 'Good Design' an asphyxiating dogma?
Design is a peculiar activity: It's a creative process, but a process that subscribes to and reinforces certain restrictive attitudes. It can be rigid and self-policing, since a profession that earns its living by discerning what is good and bad must necessarily become judgmental. Ultimately this judgmental nature creates and enshrines certain points of view, which left unchallenged, become dogma. Today, one could argue that this dogma, generally predicated on longstanding ideas of 'rightness' and 'beauty' is choking the profession down, and worse yet, stifling its creativity as it faces some truly great problems—problems which if handled with new thinking and true creativity, will define the substance, practice and contribution of a generation of designers.
Pretty: Right priced beauty
But wait. Truth and beauty are good things, right? Not necessarily. Design's traditional preference on establishing 'order' has had the consequence of driving a collateral and unchecked pursuit of beauty. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, of course, and as such is subject to the vagaries of cultural bias and popular opinion. By degrees this pursuit of beauty has gradually been replaced with the much more predictable and less admirable accomplishment of achieving 'pretty'. And while consumer culture, planned obsolesce and design culture in general have benefited soundly from the creation, production and documentation of pretty things—the pursuit of pretty hasn't pushed the discipline of design into the tighter, less comfortable and ultimately more rigorous inquiries that outside forces (sustainability for example) are aligning to demand of us.
How might product designers better position the discipline to take on the hairy problems of sustainability, economic uncertainty, global competition and the like? Well, one thing is for certain, simply co-opting present patterns of consumption into activities and services linked to conservation won't get us there. That path might work if the world population of 6.5 billion was to stay fixed, but with an additional 3 billion consumers arriving to the party by 2050 we'll need to find more expedient (read: more creative) solutions.
>> continue
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Ron Arad 'Guarded Thoughts' exhibition photos, New York
Ron Arad's 'Guarded Thoughts' exhibition opened at New York's Friedman Benda Gallery last night presenting a new body of work continuing with his mix of cutting-edge technology and hands-on craftsmanship. While security did their best to prevent fingerprints (on everything), it was a free-for-all on the mirror finish ping-pong table.
A retrospective of Arad's career spanning 30 years opens at the Centre Georges Pomidou in Paris on November 18th, 2008, and will subsequently show at the MoMA in New York in 2009 and The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2010.
>> continue
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Tokyo Design Festival 2008 : All posts in one place
Check out Core77's event coverage of Tokyo Design Festival in one easy-to-browse place:
TOKYO DESIGNER'S WEEK:
» Tokyo Designer's Week 2008: 100% Design
» Tokyo Designer's Week 2008: Brent Comber
» Tokyo Designer's Week 2008: 100% Design & Blickfang
» Tokyo Designer's Week 2008: 100% Design - First Impressions
» Tokyo Designer's Week 2008: Kicks off Today
DESIGN TIDE TOKYO:
» Design Tide Tokyo 2008: Tide Main Exhibition
» Design Tide Tokyo 2008: Claska & Cibone
» Design Tide Tokyo 2008: Prototype Exhibition
» Design Tide Tokyo 2008: Frank Gehry
VIDEOS:
» Tokyo Designer's Week 2008: Video Drive-By: Michael Young
» Design Tide Tokyo 2008: Video Drive-By: Claudio Colucci
» Design Tide Tokyo 2008: Video Drive-By: Shay Alkalay & Yael Mer
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Core77 Photo Gallery : Designers' Open 2008
Designers' Open 2008 is one of the biggest design events in east Germany. During three days (24-26 Oct.) in Leipzig, we captured the power of a young design generation during a creative fight club, design exhibitions, historical art fair, and downtown specials.
>> view gallery
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Pentawards - 2008 Packaging Design Award Winners
Core77 pals The Die Line have published the winners of the 2008 Pentawards packaging design competition at their site. There are 11 pages of gorgeous and ingenious packaging projects to review there. Shown above is the Coca-Cola Alu Bottle designed by the Anglo-American Turner Duckworth agency. Congratulations to all the winners.
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Coroflot Creative Seeds: Questions for Jordan Nollman of Sprout Studios
Even if you don't recognize Jordan Nollman by name, you probably recognize a lot of his work, and definitely recognize the names he's worked for: Astro, IDEO, Ziba, Eleven, Razorfish, etc. After a successful six years at Astro, though, Nollman has decided to leave, in favor of working independently for personal care product firm Clio, and his own Sprout Studios.
Over at Creative Seeds, Carl Alviani has a nice little interview with Jordan, touching on royalites, his career so far, the attraction of going indy, and where all the designers in Boston live. Here he is on the importance of design school:
A lot of the basic, practical stuff, you can learn in high school: drawing and computer skills. What I learned in design school, more than anything, was how to talk to people and learn things from them. It's funny, I didn't actually receive my degree until three years ago--I had three Spanish classes to complete!--but I don't think a single employer ever checked up on this. If you've got a good portfolio and good references, that's what they pay attention to.
>>Read the whole interview here.<<
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World Economic Forum summit in Dubai produces design manifesto
The World Economic Forum's inaugural Summit on the Global Agenda, which just closed in Dubai, was billed as a new and unique gathering of the world's most influential thinkers - leaders from academia, business, government and society.
Structured in a network of over 60 Global Agenda Councils, the Summit provided a platform to share ideas and collaboratively address some of the key issues on the global agenda, with the aim of becoming a "brains trust" for solving major international problems.
The reports of each of the Councils are already online. The Council that dealt with design chose to write a design manifesto.
The group was chaired by Chris Luebkeman, director of global foresight and innovation for ARUP, and included Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tim Brown of IDEO, Brian Collins who now runs his own ad/marketing company in his own name, Chris Jordan, a photographic artist, Toshiko Mori of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Bruce Nussbaum, assistant managing editor at Business Week, Alice Rawsthorn, design critic at the International Herald Tribune, Milton Tan, Executive Director of DesignSingapore Council, Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, and Arnold Wasserman, chairman of The Idea Factory in Singapore.
Others in the group who couldn't make it to Dubai were Chris Bangle, director of design for BMW, Hillary Cottam, founder of Participle in the UK, Kigge Mai Hvid CEO of Index in Denmark, Larry Keeley of Doblin, John Maeda, President of RISD and William McDonough.
Other reports to read are the ones developed by the Global Agenda Councils on the Future of Mobile Communications, the Future of Media, the Future of Entertainment, the Future of the Internet, the Geography of Innovation, Strategic Foresight, and Technology and Education.
via Bruce Nussbaum
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Interview: Designing and developing the Wii Balance Board
Here's a pretty fascinating (and long!) interview with two of the developers of the Wii Balance Board which, if you think about it, must have been a bear to design; nothing like this had ever been made before, and the developers knew if they couldn't keep the costs down, their project would be axed.
Inspiration for the device came from some pretty strange sources, not the least of which was...Sumo wrestlers. Read on.
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Online Flash-Based Mass Customization Application, or... "Design Your Own Coaster!"
No, we didn't start doing inkblot personality tests... this one comes from studio:ludens who is developing some interesting digital design tools. After a couple of testing weeks, they now launched their epa:kato application, or beter "design your own coaster!"
With this online design tool, you can play with shape, patterns and repetition to create a unique design. Click here to try for yourself!
Note: don't expect a monkey proof product - the developers actually wants you to drop comments, critique, questions, suggestions for improvement or praise here.
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Studio Jo Meesters launched "Odds and Ends, Bits and Pieces" at last month's Dutch Design Week, a collection of four pieces made entirely from 34 discarded wooden beams and 16 leftover blankets. The ongoing experimental project TESTLAB aims to reuse discarded materials by combing craftsmanship with mass production techniques to create new types of furniture.
The basic principle in Jo Meester's work is sustainability. By integrating various aspects of craftsmanship, sophistication, and detailing, Meesters aims to imbue his projects and products with an emotional value. In this way, he emphasises his commitment to the creation and perception of a bond between object and user.
>> more images
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Cradle to Cradle Design in Practice at Nutec 2008
"Can products and materials be healthy for humans and the environment, combine functionality and aesthetics, be produced with fairness in every aspect - and be economically successful at the same time?"
The answer is: "yes!" according to over 100 experts and more than 50 suppliers who will present themselves at the upcoming Nutec 2008 event in Frankfurt, Germany (12-14 November 2008).
Nutec stands for: Nutrients - Upcycling - Triple-Top-Line - Eco-effectiveness - Community, and focuses on the use of natural resources in closed cycles and rethinking the way in which products are designed.
The event is being organized by the Messe Frankfurt in collaboration with the EPEA (Internationale Umweltforschung) and Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart and should be a trend-setting congress and exhibition for the use of materials, products, and services in an entirely new approach.
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The Year's 50 Best Inventions
Time Magazine released its list of the 50 best inventions of the year. The winner? A home DNA-testing kit. The Speedo LZR is on the list, and so's the spinning skyscraper, the memristor, three different electric cars, and a new ping pong serve. There are a couple surprises (namely, the LHC didn't come in first! Holla back, Hadron!), and a few head-scratchers. Annoying blog posts came in at #42. Srsly?
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Coroflot's 8th Annual Design Salary Survey now online!
And finally, since 2001, Coroflot has been conducting its annual salary survey for the design industries. By contributing your 2 cents, you are helping to build an amazing resource for both designers and employers. It will take less than 1 minute: Get started here! (Then you can check out last year's results.)
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Special thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken and William Bostwick for their contributions to this week's newsletter!
Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter
Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.
