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Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments by Troika, Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, and Eva Rucki (Amazon UK and USA)
Publisher Thames & Hudson says: 'Digital By Design' is a wide-ranging survey that considers the work of those visionaries who are reimagining the relationship between technology, design products, immersive environments and human interaction for the twenty-first century. The result is a captivating assessment of pioneering approaches in art and design that encompasses a broad spectrum of humanist values, humor, magic and sensory experiences. 'Digital By Design' features more than 100 objects, products and installations that exemplify this progressive new wave of technology infused art and design. Digital By Design features a foreword by Paola Antonelli and is completed by a series of incisive interviews by noted contributors such as Dunne & Raby, Ron Arad, Steven Sacks and Machiko Kusahara. In 'Digital by Design', Troika presents a new world of art and design in which the latest digital technologies are explored and exploited, enriching our lives and experience in new and unanticipated ways. Pushing the boundaries of interactive technology and 'intelligent design', the designers and objects featured in 'Digital By Design' are the ones tearing away the closed doors of the science labs and institutions, creating realms of experience, customization and beauty that engage their audience, surroundings and users in new, playful and subversive ways, ultimately bringing the future into the hands of the people.
This is the book that makes digital (or should i say 'interactive'?) design finally steps out of the gadget and design blogs and announces "Hello mainstream! Here we are!' At the risk of seeing burst into laughter those who say that i play admirably well the 'naivety' card, i will say that i'm a bit confused. There is the word 'design' in the title, the book is written by some of the most talented interaction designers in the world, the forewords and interviews star some of the people who are most intimately associated with design (Paola Antonelli, Dunne & Raby, Ron Arad, Steven Sacks and Mashiko Kusahara.) Yet the description of the book occasionally mentions the word 'art'. And here and there inside the volume, you'll find several installations created by artists.
I'm not happy. Not happy at all. The moment i turn my back on that damn issue 'Is it design? Is it art?' and pretend the question doesn't make much sense, the book lands on my coffee table and brandish its hefty pink arm to throw back the issue at me. Last week only, i was wearing my 'so what?' smile when i saw Pors&Rao's The Uncle Phone and 22 Pop exhibited as art works in one of the booths of the ARCO contemporary art fair in Madrid. A few years ago, these two projects were developed at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. They were interaction design products at the time. No matter the label you give them, i still like these two projects/art pieces. Here i am back in the days when a designer would be outraged because i bring up the 'art' word. Or vice-versa. Sometimes designers purposedly -or because it's part of their culture- play with the blurring between art and design. Most of the time they don't. Are the borders between (interactive/digital) design and art so flimsy and vague that we cannot discern any difference between them? Is it fair to throw them in the same basket? Does the whole RCA dream of being exhibited at ars electronica? Would that happen if it were a book about product design where technology wouldn't play a prominent role? Would tea cups be mixed with sculpture? I don't have an answer for that but, even if i believe that both disciplines can only benefit from spending more time with each other, i was hoping that the book would not make the issue even muddier for me. Does it matter? Let's say it doesn't, let's say digital design is a state of mind, a culture and keep on with the review, shall we?
Digital by Design is wonderfully well designed. The graphics are impeccable, the balance between words and images is most charming. The text is limpid, simple and lively. You'll be happy to see your favourite projects featured in the book and, as well as you might think you know the digital design field, i'm sure you will also make quite a few discoveries. Books like this one are precious, go for it!
More images "inside the book'. Image on the homepage: UVA's Constellation - Covent Garden Winter Lights. |
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BOOM, the work in progress show at the Royal College of Art in London is on until February 11. Run to Kensington Gore now. You won't regret it. Architecture and Animation reserve some excellent surprises. And so does the Design Interactions department.
Under its rather unassuming name, The Toaster Project is probably the most ambitious project of the show. It is also a clever and humorous reflection on today's most burning issues such as sustainability, industrialization, mass consumption, child labour, DIY culture, etc. Its author, Thomas Thwaites is trying to make an electric toaster, from scratch. Beginning with mining the raw materials. And yes, that means extracting oil to make plastic and even processing his own copper (to make the pins of the electric plug, the cord, and internal wires), iron (for the steel grilling apparatus, and the spring to pop up the toast), mica (around which the heating element is wound) and nickel (for the heating elements! The end result (which will hopefully see the light of the day for the RCA Summer show in June) will be a fully functioning toaster. The extraction and processing of these materials happens on a scale irreconcilable with that of a mass product that Argos sells for a few pounds throughout the UK and that performs the very mundane task of toasting your bread every morning. The result of Thwaites's endeavour might not be as neat and clean as the Argos model. But maybe i'm being unnecessarily bitchy here. See for yourself what the designer is exhibiting now:
The installation re-creates the first attempt by the designer to melt mineral and turn it into iron using hair dryers. He later tried with a leaf blower and then used his mother's microwave and china to finally obtain iron. And here is the original toaster model:
In the designer's own words which i pasted below: The point at which it stopped being possible for us to make the things that surround us is long past. To redress the balance I'm making a mass produced object by hand - creating a domestic product on a domestic scale. (...) This faintly ridiculous quest to make a toaster from the 'ground up' serves as a vehicle through which questions about economics, helplessness and life as a consumer can be investigated. The outcome will be a toaster that I imagine will bear a very imperfect likeness to the ones that we buy - a kind of half-baked, hand made pastiche of a consumer appliance.
Commercial extraction and processing of the necessary materials happens on a scale that is difficult to resolve into the humble toaster. This contrast in scale is a bit absurd - massive industrial activity devoted to making objects which enable us, the consumer, to toast bread more efficiently. However, this ridiculousness dissipates somewhat when you consider that life pre-toasters required stoking the fire when a piece of toast was desired.
Part of the project consists of going to the places where it's possible to dig up these raw materials. Mining no longer happens in the UK, but the country is dotted with abandoned mines, some having been worked since before the 'UK' existed, but all currently uneconomical. We shot some footage at Clearwell Iron mine in South Wales before Christmas. It had an output of thousands of tonnes a week up until the end of World War 2 when it was closed. It is now run as a visitor attraction by Ray and Jonathan, a father and son team. Ray (who originally worked as a miner at Clearwell) was of the view that mining on the huge scales seen today (for instance in Australia) reduces humans to ants, with no understanding of what they're doing. His son Jonathan is more pragmatic, pointing out that it is the scale of modern industry that gives more of us access to toasters. Their points of view are not incompatible; the question becomes 'Are toasters worth the inhuman scale on which they're produced?'
The only known deposit of Nickel in the UK has long since been exhausted. In Finland however exploitation of a huge deposit has begun. I'd very much like to go and bring back a lump of nickel ore from this remote industrial area, and make it in to an element for my toaster. I'm also trying to negotiate a helicopter ride to an oil rig in the North Sea to collect some oil from which I would try (and certainly fail) to make plastic. The point at which it stopped being possible for us to make the things that surround us is long past. For example, my first attempt to extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hairdryers, a leaf blower, and a methodology from the 15th century - this is about the level of technology we can manage when we're acting alone. I failed to get pure enough iron in this way, though if I'd tried a few more times and refined my technique and knowledge of the process I probably would've managed in the end. Instead I found a 2001 patent about industrial smelting of Iron ores using microwave energy. Microwaves are so much more convenient and so I tried to replicate the process using a domestic microwave. After a bit of careful experimentation through which I realised I was unlikely to blow the thing up or cook my insides without realising, I got the timing and ingredients about right and made a blob of iron about as big as a 10p coin. I'm rather proud of it, though it's only enough to make perhaps one bar of the grill to hold the bread. Still, it's proof of concept. The project won't be a 'how is it made?' industrial promo or an anti-industry tirade either. It's about scale, the total inter-reliance of people and societies, the triviality of some (anti-)globalisation discourse, what we have to lose, and DIY. All images courtesy of a href="http://www.thomasthwaites.com/">Thomas Thwaites. |
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I would usually not write about monographies but nothing feels better than breaking my own rules today: the first book is starring blackletter also known as Fraktur or Gothic type, the second one is dedicated to the paintings of Miltos Manetas.
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Blackletter also known as Fraktur or Gothic type was commonly used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. By the end of the Renaissance it had mostly been replaced by the typeface Latin Antiqua. The use of Blackletter type became taboo in Germany after World War II because it was incorrectly associated with the Nazis who actually banned its use in 1941 because it was falsely believed to be a Jewish invention. Revelations about the true history and meaning of Blackletter type have resulted in a resurgence in usage by graphic designers. (...) Fraktur Mon Amour reproduces 300 variations of Blackletter fonts ranging from historical fonts to contemporary reinventions in a sensuous beautifully crafted hot-pink prayer book-style catalog that is destined to become a fetish object for designers and type enthusiasts. Each Blackletter font is presented on a full page along with its complete alphabet date of origin the name of its designer and its original foundry. On the facing page is a composition created from that font that explores the subversive beauty of this unique typeface. In addition 137 of these fonts--including four created exclusively for this book--are collected on an enclosed CD (Mac and PC) for free private and restricted commercial use. Fraktur Mon Amour is the winner of several awards including the Type Directors Club of New York's 2007 Award for Typographic Excellence.
Who knew that fonts could have such fascinating lives? I believe this book has received a huge echo in design blogs but as it is the most elegantly and skilfully designed book i have received in 2008, i thought it deserved a few more words here. Closed it looks like a bible. Open it and you get over 700 pages of pure pink font porn. My expertise and talent at discussing fonts being extremely limited i'll end with a video flip through the book:
Publisher Johan & Levi Editore writes: In his work Manetas acts as an observer of this daily phenomenon. At times he works from a 'subjective' angle, bearing witness to both our total involvement in technology, and the sense of alienation that comes from interacting with machines. Other times he takes a 'bird's eye view' to draw attention to the gestures, often underestimated or taken for granted in daily life, that man performs on machine, in a world which is lacking in concrete 'actions/ that point up to what is going on. Echoing Baudelaire's famous 'Painter of Modern Life', Manetas, as an observer of the contemporary world, is part of a time-honoured tradition in art> the practice of depicting man and the elements which represent modernity in the era in question has been a prerogative of the Impressionists, the Realists and the exponents of New Objectivity, not to mention the paintings of Post-Revolutionary Russia, where 'modern' meant 'industrial.'
Joysticks and joypads, plugs, keyboards and routers, a shoe lost among cables, a pair of feet emerging behind an open laptop, videocassettes, websites and girls watching intensely at a computer screen. Miltos Manetas hands a thought-provoking mirror to the gadgets blogs, tech magazines and even new media art exhibitions. The soft-coloured canvases reminds us that we are not merely 'users' 'interacting' with 'devices', but people absorbed in activities which might still appear as trivial to some but are nevertheless essential to our new human equilibrium. The introduction essay is penned by the only media theorist and guru who is as flamboyant as Manetas himself: Lev Manovich.
Image on the homepage part of Judith Schalansky's fraktur set. Related stories: Superneen world and Book review: Hand Job: A Catalog of Type. |
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Three D: Graphic Spaces, edited by Gerrit Terstiege, the editor-in-chief of European design magazine form. Includes a design-historical essay by Steven Heller, an interview of Stefan Sagmeister about his typographical installations and various interviews with graphic designers by Sophia Muckle.
Publisher Birkhäuser says: Three D - Graphic Spaces highlights a current trend in international graphic design: more and more visual designers are staging their compositions as three-dimensional scenarios, in order to turn them into posters, magazine covers, web sites, and animated films. The result is a host of suggestive new pictorial worlds that range from playfully arranged still lifes to room-filling installations. Edited by Gerrit Terstiege, editor-in-chief of the European design magazine "form", and designed by the prizewinning German studio Pixelgarten, this book offers an inspiring look at the various modeling techniques and means of expression involved. The book collects designs of about 50 international creative individuals and studios. A volume on a similar subject, Book review: Tactile - High Touch Visuals, was published last year but Three D: Graphic Spaces is way more talkative, offering essays, deeper analysis and descriptions. The projects are grouped into 4 main categories: Still Lifes Come Alive, Intricate Installations, Touching Type and Thrilling Animation. Nice touch: at the end of the book, you'll find a small description of the design studios as well as the contact address and url of their website. A few examples. In no particular order: Rebecca Stephany's Paradise is Made of Paper, an XL origami installation in the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Damien Poulain, 3-D illustrations for Uniqlo paper no.3, 2007. Tokyo, New York and London are neatly and unmistakably represented using just a couple of landmarks and key elements of the local culture.
Rita's Living Room sketches the typical style of a Québec living room. Nothing glamor or ready for the pages of trendy design magazines, just simple, archetypical decoration and lay out. Ultimately, the designers ask: 'Where is the design? What is design anyway?'
Jocelyn Cottencin's practice stands at the intersection of photography, video, installation and graphic design. Her 2004 wall drawing La consommation d'oxygène est différente d'un individu à l'autre ('the consumption of oxygen differs from one individual to another' video) is based on the typo 'Floréale' that she created in 2003. Convinced that the fate of her work was to disappear swiftly, she used chalk to draw the floral pattern. Surprisingly the work remained intact for 3 years.
Elene Usdin's La Barbe Bleue series turns the most terrifying aspects of Bluebeard's butchery of his wives into dolls limbs and threads of wools.
Playarea for footwear Pointer. Models are robots given the illusion of 3D life with the help of soft shadows.
Emil Kozak's work for MAG, a competition for the best magazines in Denmark. All the posters Kozak designed for each award have a connection to the medium of the award.
Graphic comes to life in a more literal way in this video by Colors and the Kids and in another one shot by Jared Eberhardt for Cansai De Ser Sexy: Julien Valle and Nicolas Burrows' explicit paper metaphor of the way digital existence spills over our physical life.
Related stories: Book Review: Super Holland Design, Book Review - Enter Spanish Creativity, Book review: Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, Book review: Tactile - High Touch Visuals, Joshua Davis at OFFF - Lisbon. |
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NAI (the Netherlands Architecture Institute) in Maastricht, one of my favourite venues to see how architecture fits into the broader context, is currently running an remarkably well-curated exhibition called Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House.
Architects consider the house the best place to test and demonstrate new concepts. Some even go so far as to claim that the history of modern architecture coincides with the search for the ideal house, which is why the house is sometimes called the ultimate paradigm of modern architecture. The exhibition assumes that innovation of the architecture of dwelling can only be based on the interaction between 'container' and 'contained', that is, between architectural invention and changes in living ideals. As conditions vary, this notion gives rise to completely different designs.
Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House consists of two parts: - 8 different housing concepts presented downstairs, in the Column Hall under the title Le Salon Imaginair. The selection downstairs combines historical examples with contemporary designs. Every house in the exhibition corresponds to a specific lifestyle and highlights the most radical, fiercely mainstream or thought-provoking positions. Each of them not only represents a formal language, but has also been given a speculative quality. The Mauritshuis stands for representation, the Soanes's Museum for the collection and the Big Brother house for voyeurism.
One of these houses is the iconic and most commented House of the Future (1955-1956). With this work, Alison and Peter Smithson attempted to give a face of what the average house would look like in 25 years' time. Designed to be a plastic structure which could be mass-produced in its entirety, the house included 'futuristic' features, such as a self-cleaning bath, remote controls for the TV and lighting and a series of high tech gadgets supplied by the sponsors, such as an electrostatic dust collector and a 'Tellaloud' loud-speaking telephone (via.)
The other houses are the Mauritshuis, by Jacob van Campen; GWS 497 (Greenwitch Street) by Winka Dubbeldam; House VI, by Peter Eisenman; Visser house by Gerrit Rietveld and Aldo van Eyck; the Soane's Museum, one of the most curious art spaces in London, IKEA's BoKlok. And then there is Endemol's Big Brother house. The BB House is not only world famous but its structure, while meant to convey a sense of domesticity, is also very different from a 'normal' house. The house was one big show box with special areas for cameras. The centre of the house was a cross-shaped corridor area that was not accessible to residents but reserved to camera work. One-way screens were all around the house and to ensure good footage, the interior was fitted with cold and halogen lighting with a day and evening setting.
And almost paradoxically, the very televised house didn't contain any tv set. While the outside world knew almost everything about them, no matter how intimate, the residents were cut off from the outside world. When the programme was first broadcast in 1999, the BB house was noting more than a couple of cheap prefab containers surrounded by a tall fence. In subsequent editions, both in The Netherlands and in other countries, new rules and new themes were introduced and translated into new layouts for the house. Some series saw a section reserved for 'the rich' and another one for 'the poor', a prison, a sauna, special love rooms, etc.
In the Arched Gallery upstairs, Rianne Makkink and Jurgen Bey's charming installation evokes the industrial hall where they lived until recently. The space served as a home, office, garage, storage facility, guest house, gallery, country house, farmyard, school, garden and laboratory all in one. They regarded it as the ideal house.
In this ideal house, the order of living is dynamic, not static. its composition and arrangement keep changing according to its use. It's part a part nomadic, part settled life. Single pieces of furniture participate to the transformation process: a packing case morphs into a desk, a walking cane is affixed to a chair that needs its fourth leg, another chair is wrapped in bandage to make it sturdier. Almost anything can be re-combined and re-purposed.
Although Studio Makkink & Bey's work belongs to the world of design, it also criticises consumer culture, throw-away society and the depletion of natural resources. Their work suggests a more sustainable economy where discarding objects is unthinkable thanks to a strategy of alternative production and consumption cycles. Storing, piling up and collection is a crucial part of their working method. The objects are more than just a pile of objects. With each transformation, they acquire new meanings, life and narratives.
Living with Things, the installation in the upstairs gallery illustrates Makking and Bey's ideas and working methods. It is divided up in 3 thematic zone: - The studio zone contains the study, workspaces and a storage space.
- The rural and relaxation zone contains a "Sandbag Garden", various gazebos, two 'Birdwatch Cabinets' (one for a girl, the other one for a boy.)
In parallel with the exhibition, various 'salons' - meetings between designers, critics and experts in the area of dwelling - are exploring further the issues raised in the exhibition. In the spring of 2009, a conference will be held as part of the exhibition.
The exhibition has been designed by the very talented EventArchitectuur, with photographs by Johannes Schwartz and graphics by the always elegant Experimental Jetset. Changing Ideals: Re-thinking the House runs at NAI Maastricht until 29 march 2009. Slideshow: Previously at NAI Maastricht: Edible City - Part 1, Edible City - Part 2 and State Alpha, on the architecture of sleep at the NAI in Maastricht. More Jurgen Bey: Designing Critical Design - Part 1: Jurgen Bey, Dust furniture and Blob art pavilion. |
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RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion, an exhibition conceived by ATOPOS in Athens, is the outcome of an investigation on paper clothing, a long-forgotten but very popular phenomenon in the United States at the end of the '60s.
The fad can be traced back to 1966 when manufacturing company Scott Paper Company used the paper dress to promote their toilet paper and paper tissues. In exchange of $1.25, happy housewives would be mailed a paisley or op-art 'Paper Caper' dress and some coupons to buy napkins and toilet rolls. Demand exceeded the 500,000 garments produced and other manufacturers soon followed with designs to promote their own goods.
It didn't take long for designers to grab the idea and launch a proper 'Paper Fashion'. In pure '60s Pop culture, you could find one-off paper dresses adorned with portraits of the Presidential candidates and flower-power paper bikinis. Disposable clothing had a very futuristic, 'space age' appeal. As one textile designer stated for Life Magazine, "Who is going to do laundry in space?"
The curator of the exhibition and director of ATOPOS, Vassilis Zidianakis, asked today's fashion designers and artists to create something of their own inspired by the over 100 authentic paper dresses that form part of its collection. The show puts side by side dozens of authentic sixties paper dresses, and the creations by the likes of Sophia Kokosalaki, Michael Cepress, Yiorgos Eleftheriades, Johanna Trudzinski, Takashi Murakami, Bas Kosters, Angelos Bratis, Deux Hommes, Marcus Tomlinson etc.
Besides, the exhibition has extended its scope to the study of the use of paper in the history of garments and in contemporary fashion: paper kimonos of the Edo period in Japan, paper shirts burn with the deads in China, prisoner's of war waistcoat from WW2, made from paper sacksgarments for hygienic and industrial use, early 20th century men's collars, cuffs and ties made of paper as a cheaper alternative to fabric, etc. The exhibition is also displaying samples of paper creations by famous designers, such as John Galliano, Issey Miyake, Hussein Chalayan, Kosuke Tsumura, Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester and many more. Far from being one-offs to be thrown away, a number of these paper garments can be worn several times thanks to the use of sturdier paper materials such as tyvek, a synthetic paper material.
Paper is not the only material used as an alternative to textile. Suzanne Lee's BioCouture project explores the possibility of growing garments from bacterial cellulose. Lee, a Senior Research fellow at Central Saint Martins in London and the author of the book Fashioning the Future: tomorrow's wardrobe, has been experimenting with cellulose bacteria and yeast in a bid to bring forward sustainable techniques for manufacturing clothes.
The material is cultivated in a sweet tea-solution, allowing the bacteria to produce a material half-way between papyrus and leather with a color that can be altered through the choice of tea. The end product looks like leather (here's a bad photo).
The show is splendidly designed by Normal Studio. The exhibition closes on February 2, 2009. It will then tour to the Mode Museum in the Province of Antwerp from 05/03/2009 until 16/08/2009 and to the Design Museum in London from 10/2009 until 01/2010. |
