Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house

This week's picks:

+ Matali Crasset's interactive chandelier at matandme, "the light changes colour to the colour of the food [underneath]".

+ Studio Job's Industry collection at designboom, "a cabinet, a screen, a dresser, a table and a pedestal all inlayed with white dyed bird's eye maple and black dyed tulip tree veneer. The studio adapted this traditional woodworking technique using modern laser cutting technology. The pieces all feature intricate and thin patterns, achieving something not possible before.".

+ Asobi design studio's Plye Lamp for Intra Lighting at DesignEast, "The restrained use of bundles of lights offers the possibility of creating different spatial effects.".

+ Igor Pinigin's ANEMONA lamp at Behance, weighted at the bottom the "lamp can be freely rotated and tilted. Several lamps can be assembled into dynamic figures.".

+ Amélie Lachance, Alexandrine Lemaire, Christine Mongeau and Jackie Richardson Allume-moi lamp (light me up), a simple wooden block that transforms into an ambient lamp. Via TrendsNow and AEDII.

+ Patricia Urquiola launches the colorful polycarbonate Frilly chair for Kartell at designboom, "Urquiola wanted to create a fabric effect and incorporated pleats for her final design.". .

+ We Make Money Not Art interviews designers El Ultimo Grito, curators of the Nowhere/Now/Here show at LABoral on now until April 20, 2009.

+ Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec narrate a video of their design portfolio with insights on some of their best known works. The video is in French with English subtitles, click on the Quicktime icon on the lower left side. Via Dezain.

Again one of these posts I would have wished to have written myself ;-) Anyway I’ve skim read Kevin McCullagh’s posting on the Core77 Design Blog just before leaving to The Hague last week. Fortunately Kathryn Best reminded me on Kevin’s posting after my return a week ago!

What I like about Kevin’s post is his approach to assemble a sort of list of patterns he has observed when it comes to describing the term we love so much these days: ‘Design Leadership’. What I like in particular about ‘pattern recognition’ in general and this is also a reason why I like Kathryn’s book on Design Management is that it is not aiming for categories and definitions academia is looking after like: ‘right-wrong’, ‘good-bad’ or ‘truth’ in general.

While I will give my very own definition or better ‘description’ of the term later on I’d like to point to the four questions that have triggered Kevin’s article:

1.) What makes a design leader?

2.) Do they have to be designers?

3.) Who is leading whom?

4.) And to where exactly?

A point where I do disagree with him is clearly addressing question 2 as I don’t think that ‘Design Leaders’ necessarily need to be designers themselves. Let me try to explain this by referring back to the photo (or collage) I’ve assembled and which you see in the upper left corner. The picture in the lower right corner is taken from Kathryn’s book and illustrates quite well the three areas of responsibility of a Design Leader, a Design Manager and a Designer as those people in organisations who ‘Define a Vision’, ‘Manage the Process’ and ‘Create the Content’.

While on one hand I think that this ‘classification’ is helpful for better understanding the very often unclear terms I do think that on the other hand they are too discrete. Apparently a Designer or Design Manager can only remain in their category and won’t be able to embrace all of them at the same time. In contrast according to my understanding of a ‘Good Designer’ she/he must be able to address all those levels in order to ‘thoughtfully design’.

Therefore and in order to make the model more flexible I’d want to refer to one of the originators of the term ‘Design Thinking’ namely Roger Martin. You see his latest book ‘The Opposable Mind’ pictured in the upper left corner of the collage. Then replace ‘Design Leader’ with ‘Design Thinker’ and let ‘Design Leadership’ embrace all three functions ‘Design Thinking, Design Management and Design’ and you have a more flexible framework that communicates the key message: “Only if you’re good at all disciplines: ‘Thinking, Managing and Designing’ you are a ‘Design Leader’!

Accordingly this perspective also implies that one person will have a hard time to act as a ‘Design Leader’ since this would imply that all functions would need to be addressed by her/him alone. Even though for example the success of Apple Computer these days might appear as the single effort of Steve Jobs it is for sure the joint effort of many more (needless to mention Jonathan Ive).

Furthermore I do think that it is somehow anachronistic to believe that (in the competitive business landscape of these days) that individuals are still able to dominate; even though I admit that we tend to have a fascination for these sort of ’single heroes’.

Instead ‘Design Leadership’ according to my perspective above recognises that it is something that needs to be achieved collaboratively as a joint team effort of various ’specialists’. So the answer to Kevin’s question No. 2 definitely is: No, because only teams as I’ve described them above can effectively handle various functions from several disciplines with ‘Design Thinkers’ as the category most likely to embrace people from non-design disciplines.

What do you think? Is this something Kathryn/We shall adopt for the future?

For the January issue of Dazed & Confused, the magazine asked everyone under 18 and living in the UK to get in touch with an idea for an article about what it means to be young and British today. With the idea landing on homepages from Myspace to Channel 4, the inboxes at Dazed & Confused soon started to buckle under the strain… so, they thought they asked the readers to do the cover as well.

All of the fashion for this issue was shot over three days by designer Hedi Slimane, on a portfolio of British youth street-cast from various locations around London. You can now download a Dazed cover template and three of Hedi’s images. If you want to use one (or all) of them, go for it – they’re yours to do with as you like. You can do what you want with the images or use a completely different image of your own, that’s fine, too. The idea is to get an attractive and revealing Dazed cover that says something about what it’s like to be young and British today. If you’re from a different country, you’re welcome to take part and just make a cover about what it’s like to be young today in your country.

If you are under 18 send all entries (JPEG format, ideally) to stephen.ll@dazedgroup.com by Thursday November 20th and be sure to include your name, age and where you live. Happy designing.

Ping Intressant.se

Andra bloggar om: media, mode, fotografi, hedi slimane

A combination of factors underpins rapid growth in the Chinese mobile commerce sector.

Trend Description

China is rapidly emerging as the global capital of m-commerce applications, driven by an increasingly high-tech digital environment, the world’s largest mobile phone subscriber base (nearly 600 million), and the recent launch of the country’s own 3G standard (TD-SCDMA).

Although China currently lacks the advanced mobile applications of Europe, North America, Japan and Korea, many cellular players are now launching sophisticated mobile applications, and analysts predict the country may leapfrog more traditional m-commerce markets in the near future.

Penetration of new markets, including retail, ticket purchases and person-to-person transactions, is predicted to result in increasingly high volumes of small payments to Chinese m-commerce service providers. Because this type of transaction costs businesses far less than retail or other forms of transaction, the demand for m-commerce solutions is expected to grow and result in tremendous opportunities for these SPs.

Cases

UFIDA’s hapigo

The “hapigo” platform developed by UFIDA Mobile is China’s first large-scale, multi-functional m-commerce platform. With a strong focus on mobile internet technology, hapigo provides retailers and consumers with an efficient and effective  one-stop m-commerce shop. Last year hapigo became “the first brand of mobile e-commerce in China”, serving 200,000 retailers over 1 million mobile consumers.

UFIDA Mobile is a recently created US$13.42 million joint venture between the Beijing-based Ufida Software Company and Japan-based wireless heavyweight NTT DoCoMo.

Taobao’s WAP Site

Alibaba’s Taobao, the Chinese version of eBay, has recently launched a WAP version of the site at wap.taobao.com., in an effort to expand its reach to China’s huge mobile phone subscriber base, many of whom do not have net access of their own.

More interesting still is the way in which the site is served by a mobile interface for Alipay. Payment for most m-commerce in China so far has been processed by mobile service providers as part of the consumers’ bill. Although China Mobile may not be too happy with Alibaba’s move to cut them out of the loop with its “m-Alipay” service, its hard to imagine they can stop it in the long term.

Trend Impact

While the future for m-commerce in China looks rosy, there are still many obstacles to overcome. China is still largely a cash-based economy, with m-payment support structures only recently being developed. The rate of mobile phone uptake is also very  biased toward urban areas, especially when it comes to smartphones / PDAs.

Since voice is still the dominant application, decades-old mobile technologies are still some of the most profitable, and many mobile operators will need to upgrade large parts of their networks to the 2.5G and 3G technologies needed for most m-commerce applications. Still, with m-commerce proving increasingly popular and profitable, the financial incentives will surely continue to drive investment in both infrastructure and applications.

Find the original blog at CScout China blog.

Charlie Lazor is the founder of FlatPak, the system of prefab building components that are configured to meet the client's needs. The client works with the design team to create the best house for the site and can have as much creative input as he or she wishes. Or simply leave it up to the design team. (The excellent FlatPak website features a revealing case study about this process.) The system is based on one component: an 8' wall that is one storey high. The design comes into being eight feet at a time, so the possibilities are almost endless. Or are they, now that the housing market is a mess?



FlatPak House in the Catskills

How are things going now that the real estate business is suffering? Is this a golden opportunity or the beginning of the end?
We sell a product that is a good value. We don't sell silver bullets. So like all good values, your market might shift in a severe downturn and you would expect to do less, but frankly, it's too early to tell. I can say we have clients looking to capitalize on hungry builders; savvy homeowners, university and resort property people. Worst case scenario, we can ride this out because we have low capital inputs and overhead and we'll be ready to rock when things getting moving again.

Here is an animation of the proposal for Slussen in Stockholm by BIG Architects of Copenhagen, Denmark, and NOD Landscape Architects of Stockholm, Sweden. By moving the public program towards the most attractive place, and integrating the heavy traffic under the cover of a public square, it is possible to regain the waterfront, and at the same time connect the city parts around Slussen. The edge towards the water is terraced to provide day light to the public and commercial spaces behind.

See the original post about the Slussen project.

Andra bloggar om: arkitektur, stockholm, slussen, stadsplanering, bjarke ingels

If you’ve ever wondered what it means to work at the intersection of Managers and Designers than you should watch this great video clip! … after all I was wondering the other day which Muppet character would best characterise a Design Manager!? Any ideas?

• Meetings suck, but they don't have to
  We all know the drill when it comes to meetings: Arrive prepared and in time, stick to the agenda, don't interrupt others and let them speak until they're finished … But we all do also know that we so often suck with these basic rules.

  Therefore I'd thought that it might be a good idea to have the basic rules written down. This is no matter of being a business or design manager. On the contrary maybe some more structure in discussions would very often help meetings on design, process, and aesthetics to be more effective … What are your experiences?

  (tags: design mangement meetings rules productivity management business tips office projectmanagement)

• Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs
  Well, we all need to tweak our presentations from time to time, right? ;-) Anyway even though most hints are not rocket science at all it's good to have them written down in order to be remembered; take me at my word!
  (tags: steve_jobs presentation inspiration education tips steve speech)

it won’t take you long to figure out that dolan geiman’s chicago place isn’t what we typically feature in our sneak peeks. but looking through his images and reading through his descriptions felt like i was unlocking a treasure chest full of great stories and memories into the world of dolan geiman. it’s funny to think about where everything we own comes from and the stories behind it. and it’s very clear from dolan’s work how his surroundings inspire him. be sure to click here for more full-sized images, with complete descriptions, and you can find more of his work here (psst…there’s a sale!) and his blog here with all sorts of fun stuff he has in the works. [thanks dolan and ali!] -anne

[Above: This is the area I refer to as “the waiting room”.  This is where my pal Chris Nightengale, fashion photographer extraordinaire, does some of his shoots. The mint colored chest of drawers is entirely metal and was a gift from my friend Denny, who always has been a wonderful inspiration in my life. He lugged this heavy thing to me when I was down on my luck and living in an unheated rat-hole apartment in Virginia. Now it looks a little better, as does my luck.  I found the globe in a dumpster in Charleston, South Caroline, and the artwork, Jazz Atlas (2008), is one of my collage constructions made from magazines I found in old farm houses. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Yours truly at work. . . This is the Art Machine. There is a long story behind the Art Machine, but essentially I made this out of old doors and found objects from a soon-to-be-demolished house I was living in when I first moved to Chicago.  Hockshop refers to the name of my previous studio and gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Under the moniker Hockshop, the Art Machine debuted in Chicago during a yacht-based art show organized by Bridge Magazine (now called Bridge Art Fair, they produce expositions in London, Miami, New York, and elsewhere). The top of the Art Machine is an old canvas tent that my granddad used when hunting in Canada and which I screenprinted with various images. The little squares of metal on the front are hand-cut signs I grabbed in a scrap yard in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. The little Panel Paintings, on the wall behind the Art Machine, are the staple of my art business. I make about 1000 of these things a year, out of recycled wood, recycled paint, and water-based silkscreen ink.  This is my carnival area, I like to say, because the combination of the Art Machine and the Panel Paintings presents a nice sideshow feel. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

This is a cabin-like installation just inside the front entrance of my studio.  I created this out of salvaged wood, found billboards, and old signs I’ve found along the road driving to and from art fairs. The raw wood slats were given to me by my pals over at Circa Ceramics who were using them as shelving. I found the deer head while exploring an abandoned barn in Ohio. I saw one of the antlers sticking out of the floorboards. The rusted milk can was used by my dad when he milked cows as a kid. The old glass bottles adorning my bottle tree surfaced outside my warehouse building when the City dug up the cobblestone street in preparation for resurfacing the road. The green bucket is full of shotgun shells I gathered from a shooting range in southern Illinois. The buoys have been collected from various coastal towns including Key West, Cape Cod, and New Orleans. I grabbed the screen door from an abandoned general store in Virginia, and I bought the lentil above the door at a yard sale here in Chicago for only five dollars. I’ve started collecting green and greenish-blue boxes from abandoned warehouses here in Chicago. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

This is the back side of the entryway installation.  This is where I feel most like a mad scientist. And yes, in case you’re wondering, there is a whiskey flask in the bottom drawer. I found the chair in an old farm house in North Carolina and screenprinted the back and seat myself. The desk was left in the basement of my last apartment and could kill an elephant if it fell on it. I had to use a truck jack and three retired football players to transport the desk when we moved into this space. The framed oil painting on the floor was hanging in my grandma’s den when I was a kid. She was trying to throw it out when I intercepted it.  The red dolly in the corner I bartered from an old (semi) drunk barber for two six-packs of Old Style beer. I think he got the better deal, but at least it looks cool. I snagged the green metal hanging light from a warehouse here in Chicago. Above my desk is one of my inspiration clotheslines. I’ve found this is the best way for me to display various ideas and my notes to myself. The little white paintbrush holder sitting on my desk with the face on it is a ceramic mug made by my pal Ed Brownlee. Ed is about two pints away from being mistaken for a criminal, but he’s a damn good artist and has an enormous heart. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Our building has a green roof, which Ali helped plant, and this is where the plants were stored before they were given the outdoor penthouse suite. The equipment featured in the photo is one of our landlord’s lathes; he collects old, industrial machinery amongst other things.

This is my little shrine to Johnny Cash. On the day Johnny Cash passed away, I was getting ready for an opening at Unit B Gallery, formerly in Chicago and now in Austin. The work I was showing was loaded with connotations of death and resurrection and was called the Tombsigns of St Emmeline. The synchronicity of the event was really overwhelming and would have seemed spooky, except that I seem to attract energy like that and I am open to it. The week before I was eating pizza in St Louis and some kid was skateboarding nearby with a boom box and he was playing Johnny Cash’s last recording. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t know it was Johnny Cash, and that he had just found the tape under a tree and liked the sound. I found the whiskey jug on the bottle tree in the dirt behind the warehouse. The butterflies are screenprinted on wood and were part of a spring window display for a local shoe store . . . I use one corner of the studio for staging photos, both for Etsy and for print brochures. The mantel was a gift from a T-shirt printer (48 Industries) in the building, a fellow scavenger. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Stuff I love: plastic dice, old painted nail, orange train ticket to California (1898), list of numbers in Spanish, green feed tag, hand-drawn family album for collage, Virginia text from a high school Math book cover. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

In this entryway installation close-up, the fresh eggs (fresh eyes) sign was a studio warming gift passed on to me from my buddy, artist Michael Merck, who grabbed it from a little Mexican street cart.  I found the paintbrush hanging on a hook in a bathroom of a warehouse I was occupying while living in Virginia. It’s the only paintbrush I own that’s never been used for painting.  Below the brush is a catfish sinker I bought when I went fishing in Kentucky last year.  The rooster painting, Dirt Road Series IX, is one of my own, silkscreen and acrylic on recycled wood available here. He’s a good pet and doesn’t eat food or make any noise.  He just sits there lookin’ pretty. The books to the left of the rooster are my sketchbooks.  I use old books for my sketchbooks, pasting ideas and collage materials into the existing pages, instead of buying new white-paged, sterile sketchbooks. I think it’s important to be surrounded by many different textures, so I started collecting the softballs over the past four or five years. Almost every time I make a trip down to a river, I find softballs stuck in leftover flood debris and so I started saving them in this locker room bin. If you like metal baskets like this one, you can find some here. The blue oar is a mystery. I found it one night in the middle of the road while I was driving through West Virginia. The strange part was that one end of the oar was tied to a tennis shoe.  I kept the oar; the shoe didn’t fit, so I left it. Above the fresh eggs (fresh eyes) sign is a wooden gun I made from a piece of billboard I found in Indiana and then adorned with little metal objects from an old trade school parking lot. Finally, the rooster painting is sitting on an old hen crate, used by my granddad to take chickens to market. Ali won’t let me get chickens yet, but I’m working on it. [Photo credit: Kara Elliott-Ortega]

Included in this shot are an Ed Brownlee mug (paintbrush holder), comic book collage materials, old picture frames found in a barn in Kentucky, a bluebird collage in progress, and a couple print proofs. Used paint cans, thrift store mugs, and Quaker Oats bins are used to hold brushes, pens, and markers.[Photo credit: Kara Elliott-Ortega]

I did some further internet research and found out more about these interesting structures. Tulou are traditional communal residences in the Fujian province of Southern China, often of a circular configuration surrounding a central shrine. Some of these vernacular structures were constructed of cut granite or had substantial walls of fired brick. The end result is a well lit, well-ventilated, windproof, earthquake resistant building that is warm in winter and cool in summer.

There are more than 20,000 tulou in southern Fujian, and these were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008 as “exceptional examples of a building tradition and function exemplifying a particular type of communal living and defensive organization, and, in terms of their harmonious relationship with their environment".

Actually the Tulou were built by a minority called the Hakka, who were originally Han who fled south to escape war and famine during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). As they gradually moved they changed the local architecture by incorporating Han styles and that produced the tulou. Not only were the high walls built for defense but they were also the result of traditional Han architecture. Tulou were mostly built between the 12th to the 20th centuries. The oldest one was constructed over 1,200 years ago and is regarded as a “living fossil” of the construction style of central China.

There are three types of Tulou. The Wufeng has three halls and two side rooms and are said to be the result of a redesign of the Han courtyard. The oldest tulou are the rectangle ones, and the most emblematic ones are round. They are typically designed for defensive purposes and consist of one entrance and no windows at ground level. The biggest round one can have up to five stories with three interior rings. The largest houses cover over 40,000 m² and it is not unusual to find surviving houses of over 10,000 m². Most round tulous are three or four stories, with family kitchens and livestock on the ground floor. The next floor becomes a storage room for food and furniture (with no windows), and above that are the bedrooms.

These structures are exemplary of sustainable architecture in that they are built of local, natural materials with simple techniques. They have good thermal attributes, with the massive earthen walls to help buffer temperatures. They are obviously built to last, and house many of the necessities for life. And they embody a communal life style that conserves energy and resources; these represent a form of ancient co-housing.

Here is part of a letter sent out by his family to former students:

“The flames that ignited him in life and the quest that brought each of you to Cal-Earth to learn from him have touched all of us and led us on this path….the right path……. for arts, humanity and the environment. His work and words have inspired us and his spirit is powerfully alive in every work and word, building and echo that your enthusiastic and loving hands have helped to create for this world.

His soul imbues every grain of sand and every memory contained in Cal-Earth, which expresses so much of his personal life of the last 17 years. And your works, like seeds have been growing and flourishing in every corner of the world…”

Born as an Iranian, Nader lived most of his life in the United States, gaining an architectural degree. He worked on the design of high-rise buildings and taught architecture in Southern California. In 1991 he founded Cal-Earth (the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture) based in the desert region of Hesperia , California. From this center, he taught classes and workshops on the use of both bricks and bags to fashion domes, arches, vaults, and irregular shapes. These forms sprang from his early exposure to Middle Eastern architecture.

The earthbag concept evolved from attending a 1984 NASA symposium for brainstorming ways to build shelters on the moon. He realized that bags filled with lunar “dirt” could be stacked into domes or vaults to provide shelter. This concept was later refined to include stretching barbed wire between the courses of bags to help stabilize the structure. Nader never referred to this building technique as earthbag building; he preferred to call it “Super Adobe,” referring to the fact that he generally filled the bags (or long tubes) with an adobe soil mix.

In 1999 Nader was issued a U.S. Patent for his Super Adobe technique and he subsequently tried to require contractual arrangements for its use. At this point, however, he had been publicizing the idea for so long it was not an enforcable patent, and few would comply with his request.

This fact points to the complex nature of Nader’s personality. He truly loved humanity and the arts, and was an eloquent and passionate speaker. He often said that his ideas were a gift to humanity and he hoped they would provide shelter for the poor and disadvantaged. At the same time, he wanted to control the economic potential of his invention, and he pursued this vigorously.

Nader was the author of several books, including Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own, about literally making ceramic houses, and Sidewalks on the Moon, an autobiography. He also wrote several books about the the mystic poetry of Rumi. Interestingly, he never really wrote a book about his Super Adobe invention, allowing others to take the lead in doing this.

With the passing of Nader Khalili we have come to a point where his ideas and work can truly become universal. All of us who explore the potential of the earthbag concept and expand on its possibilities can help further his vision for bettering the world. We owe a great debt to this truly inspired individual. May he rest in peace!

The idea behind Viidrio shirt designs is to practice other options aside from screen-printing. Initially when they knew they wanted to use an aluminum tin, they were thinking about having the containers printed by packaging manufacturer. But that option would have contradicted the concept behind Viidrio.

The shirt designs have embroidery-art, and Viidrio wanted the packaging to have a cohesive design and theme. Packaging to Viidrio has a big impact on how you perceive a product at the beginning, and at the end of its use. Packaging becomes part of the product, and is a form of presentation. But it must be done correctly,