Growing furniture, the Venus chair by Tokujin Yoshioka
Tokujin Yoshioka's chair made from growing natural crystals will headline the exhibition Second Nature opening on the 17th in Tokyo this week. The Venus chair builds on his earlier work such as Honey-pop (2001) which used a honeycombed paper structure to obtain it's strength and the Pane chair (2006) made of a translucent spongy material called polyester elastomer. The Venus chair is grown in a tank, the production process half controlled by Yoshioka and half left up to nature.
The Second Nature exhibition will feature work from Noriko Ambe, Makoto Azuma, Campana Brothers, Asuka Katagiri, Ross Lovegrove, Kaiji Moriyama & Takeshi Kushid, Yukio Nakagawa ikebana and Tokujin Yoshioka.
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Stepmothers of Invention: Branding Firms Enter the Industrial Design Fray, by Carl Alviani
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to sell what we design--people would just know. When Industrial Designers imagine utopia, it's not only full of beautiful, functional products, it's also full of consumers who recognize them instantly and without prodding. Persuasion, in the form of logos, ad campaigns, and the ever-broadening array of activities known as branding, has attained the status of Necessary Evil to many of us. Designers--as we repeatedly tell each other in school, in the studio, and at conferences--are all about function, emotion and progress; persuasion is for shills.
If we're honest about it though, we'd have to admit that branding and ID have been intimately related for a long time. Moreover, a lot of product designers have made their careers by getting in on the branding game in the past couple of decades. It shouldn't come as any surprise to hear that the same thing is starting to happen in reverse--branding agencies are doing product, and they're doing it fairly well.
Should product designers feel threatened? Depends on who you ask.
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Spain throws its hat into the Eco City ring.
One of the more unexpected charms of driving through the Spanish countryside is the proliferation of windmills, especially in the windier, higher plateau areas in the north of the country. We're not talking about charming medieval ones that Quixote took for giants either -- Spain is rapidly becoming one of Europe's leaders in green energy, and broad acceptance of wind power is a big part of it.
As if an annual 30% growth rate in wind energy weren't enough, the Spanish are also going after the sustainable living thing in a more immersive way, with plans released recently for a completely carbon-neutral city on a pair of hills in the storied Rioja wine-producing region. Consisting of 3,000 homes, the Logrono Montecorvo Eco City will include wind turbines and photovoltaic cells to supply all of its own energy needs, and just received approval from the local government.
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Core77 Photo Gallery : FreeDesigndom 2008
FreeDesigndom 2008 is the first edition of a new annual design and fashion event in the Netherlands, with four-week program of festivals, exhibitions and symposiums including Experimenta Design, Hacking IKEA, Sustainable Design Collective and Red Light Fashion in the heart of Amsterdam.
>> view gallery
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Japan's Hakusan Porcelain company discuss their design driven approach
PingMag caught up with Keiichi Matsuo of Hakusan Porcelain, an eighth generation ceramic company in Nagasaki, Japan. His father introduced a design-based approach to traditional crafts in the 1950's employing designer Masahiro Mori.
As the story goes, the famous industrialist Konosuke Matsushita was disembarking from an airplane after a trip around the world when he said "This is the beginning of the Design Era." My father heard that and thought, "Oh, so that's what era it is. But, what is design? If Konosuke Matsushita says it's the Design Era, then it must be so. OK then, let's hire a designer. I wonder where we find one of those?"
Peaking in 1980, a slow decline set in as sales began to drop off year after year, the economy burst and by 1998 Matsuo thought he was going under. Things changed for the better when he sidestepped his distributors and began exhibiting at Tableware trade shows. The collection was met with a positive reaction and the company discovered a new audience for their contemporary minimal range.
Read the full interview here.
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Book Review: The Design Entrepreneur, by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico
Frank Kozik's brightly colored toy smoking rabbit for Paul Budnitz's Kidrobot typifies the intersection between graphic design and product design. Is it a product design, graphic design, or art? Perhaps it is simply a masterful exercises in anti-form, since its shape needs to be serve more as a canvas than a standalone product. Steven Heller and Lita Talarico's The Design Entrepreneur: Turning Graphic Design into Goods that Sell profiles Kidrobot, along with around fifty other companies who have managed to convert graphic design into "goods." Some, like Shepard Fairey's Obey posters, can be produced as pure printed graphics, while others, like Constantin Boym's "Buildings of Disaster" manifest as matte grey 3-D objects, though admittedly with graphic sensibilities.
The Design Entrepreneur is structured with introductions written by Heller and Talarico, followed by a series of case studies. Each case study consists of an interview with the designer, along with photos of finished products and inspirations. The main emphasis, however, is on the entrepreneurial process. Nearly all of the subjects started small and without clear business plans. Their companies grew organically by making one-offs, selling to friends, and just having fun. Only later did the enterprise grow to a scale that required management. While this should be heartening news for aspiring product design entrepreneurs, I couldn't help but wonder whether turning graphics into goods is simply somehow, well, easier than it is for industrially designed products. With digital design tools and large format CMYK printers it seems as though graphic design ambitions lend themselves more to modest beginnings than hundred thousand dollar injection molds. Fortunately, with the advent of 3D printers and CAD visualization, making products and prototypes is getting easier by the year. So as startup costs fall, and Heller and Talarico's book about goods made by graphic designers may have a lot to teach those of us involved in capital-intensive product design.
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"Muji To Go" lands at JFK
If you're traveling through JFK (and have some cash to burn) you'll soon be able to pack a little lighter; Muji To Go is opening an outpost at the New York airport in two weeks, as they did in Hong Kong's airport earlier this year. With nearly 400 items focused on "travel and mobile," the 596-square-foot store expects to see high traffic. If it takes off, no pun intended, you can expect to see more Muji To Go at an airport near you.
Click here to download the Muji To Go catalog.
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just imagine...what will life be like in 2020?
CNN, in collaboration with Ericsson, looks at the future in 2020.
In addition to feature articles focused on people such as Ross Lovegrove and Rem Koolhaas, the site contains entire sections on the future of nature, cities, space, living spaces, community, health, transport, and education.
The same site also features an article on interior design of the future, with a extensive photo gallery.
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Seoul Design Olympiad - A design festival of Olympic proportions
Most event organizers would be content with producing a three-day conference featuring 20 speakers from around the world, including Ross Lovegrove, Daniel Libeskind, Yves Behar, Kim Young-Se among others. But the Seoul Design Olympiad has greater ambitions. The conference, which concluded on Sunday, was just one element in a month-long celebration intended to promote design and the design industry to the public in leading up to 2010, the year Seoul will be officially designated as the World Design Capital.
Other elements in the program include a design business exhibit, a young designers market with more than 50 participants, a design competition exhibit housed in three tents showcasing more than 100 entries, a car design exhibit, a street furniture exhibit (designed by citizens!), fashion and lifestyle exhibits, a custom art installation that literally wraps the entire Olympic Stadium, installations from more than 20 schools and continuing presentations from speakers world wide.
The best part is that the entire event is free of charge and open to the public. So the consumers of all this future-looking knowledge, for the most part, were not a select group of industry insiders, who already know and believe in the power of design. Instead it was a mainstream audience, young and old, including families with children, something you don't usually see at a design festival. The city of Seoul has done a great job in promoting ideas and visions usually confined to the halls of art and design schools to the mass market, and should serve as a model for how other municipalities world wide can help educate people about the power of design in ways that easily relate to their daily lives.
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eco:Drive
At the Paris Motor Show a couple weeks ago, the Italian car manufacturer Fiat unveiled eco:Drive, an innovative, easy-to-use social software application that helps drivers improve how efficiently they drive. It analyses their driving style and helps them to use less fuel by reducing their CO2 emissions and to save money.
(and make sure to choose the correct language - choices are English, French, Italian and ...International English)
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Why Apple doesn't 'do' concept design
On the Counternotions blog, the author - known only as Kontra - writes at length about the concept of releasing concept products that many companies such as Microsoft, Nokia and various automobile manufacturers indulge in. He points out that Apple doesn't 'do' concepts and hasn't released one to the public since the eighties then tells us that 'real artists ship'. His post expounds at length on Steve Jobs' approach to visionary product design and Apple's strategy of releasing real products not just concepts. Here's a snippet,
Pretenders don't quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design - hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells.It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple's case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what's delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability.
So, what do you think? Should companies release concept designs or simply wait to launch the products?
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Vienna Design Week 2008 Highlights
Pure Austrian Design (PAD) have posted a few highlights from this year's Vienna Deign Week which will continue through till Sunday. Taking place in their home city, PAD's contribution was a huge bubble showcasing Austrian furniture in the main courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier. Given the wet weather, the installation was possibly the best solution for an outdoor exhibit.
Pictured above, the exterior of the Liechtenstein Palace where the opening party took place, PAD's oversize bubble at the MQ, Marie Rahm & Monica Singer from Polka, Czech designer Maxim Velčovský (Qubus design) and new wine glasses from Polka produced by LOBMEYR Vienna.
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Flying car or drivable airplane?
And finally, scheduled to ship in late 2009, the Terrafugia Transition is one step closer to realizing the flying car. The Transition is being designed to be a factory certified Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) that just happens to be street legal.
To qualify as "light sport," the Transition will have to weigh around 1,300 pounds. That's 500 pounds less than a Smart car, but the Transition will be as long as a Suburban and, in places, just as tall.
The first flight test of a fully functional proof-of-concept vehicle is scheduled for next month, over 40 customers have already put down a deposit with the anticipated purchase price of $194,000. Popsci caught up with Terrafugia co-founder Carl Dietrich, 31 to get the story on the roll out.
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Special thanks to Niti Bhan and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this week's newsletter!
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