Adriean Koleric's Herd of AT-ATs is a salute to the designers of a toy that was truly a piece of art.

The lost city of Atlantis could well be at the bottom of any body of water, if it is really made out of plastic containers, the way Gayle Chong Kwan sees it.

Madrid's Spy lightens the urban panorama with his signature interventions.

Antlers are certainly not over. Not when they are on Alessandra Exposito's horses, at any rate.

Si Scott's intricate pen and pencil drawings cover a wide range of themes. Shown above is part of a piece called Babel, in answer to a project on God.

More at Art MoCo.

Craig Alun Smith's WANK chair is a metaphor of the interdependent relationship between the first and third world and speaks to the war for oil in Iraq. You may have noticed the white chair is missing a leg (possibly due to a roadside bomb) and is bleeding oil....

Craig's summary of this work: "In reality WANK is a joke, a commentary on the current state of design and the trend of designers to create pointless 'one line' design objects and pass them off as art". WANK is also currently on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery as part of the 2 Chairs exhibition.

+ othergallery.com

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.

Consumer packaged goods makers enhance product designs with practical twists.

Always on the lookout for new ways to interest customers, packaging designers have found ways to enhance the pack’s contents, by using it to chill or make its contents more flavorful. No longer competing on aesthetics along, the new designs give customers a practical reason to opt for the packaging.

Cases

Fruit Stickles

Trying to help customers find new ways of getting their five a day in a less monotonous way, Fruit Stickles are skewers infused with a cinnamon or tropical flavor. The company has refrained from adding sugar to its recipe to attract a health-conscious customer base.

Robero Cavalli for Coca Cola Light

Enhancing its contents in a fashion sense rather than a functional one, these limited edition Roberto Cavalli designs have been commissioned by Coca Cola Light (Diet Coke). 100,000 bottles of each animal print will be released, bringing a sense of exclusivity, fashion and collectability to a readily available commodity.

Burn Energy Drink

Coke’s Burn Energy Drink, currently available in Europe, offers a can with a unique re-sealable top. A plastic cover can be twisted into place, with a design that is based upon the packaging of salt and other spices. With new energy drinks being constantly introduced, Coca Cola is adding special packing features to separate themselves from competitors.

Kyo No Matcha
With “fresh” and “local” being key words for food products these days, manufacturers of pre-packaged items are seeking ways to change the image of their traditionally less than healthy goods. While bottled green tea might be one of the already acceptable convenience store products, CIC Co. goes the extra mile with its Kyo no Matcha. With a twist of the air-tight cap, 1.4 grams of traditional Kyoto matcha (high-grade green tea) is released into the mineral water below, creating a serving of fresh (yet instant) tea with no added chemicals or preservatives. At ¥5,280 ($52) for a case of 24, Kyo no Matcha is nearly twice the price of regular bottled teas, but certainly within the acceptable range for products billed as healthy and natural.

Trend Impact
These products may not revolutionize the food industry, but they could inspire new approaches to packaging, putting the customer in control of the final stage of preparation before the product is consumed. It’s also possible this trend could inspire food wraps infused with certain flavors or cling film that absorbs certain unpleasant odors or bacteria.

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

What do flowers, drapes and wave flower vases have in common? They were all sources of inspiration for designer, Jane Punnopatham who created the Drape Side Table. The molded acrylic table form resembles tablecloths except there are no tables!  The rigid form of the Draped Table makes it free-standing. The design softens with the wavy  edges created by heating and hand molding. Each table is thus unique.

Here’s what’s cool about it - invert the table and you’ve got yourself a handy basket!! Somewhere to toss dirty laundry perhaps? Or a toy basket to corral the toys that get underfoot? The Drape tables are available from Spectrumwest for $1250 in black, clear and frost. - Via

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Drape Table by Jane Punnopatham

What if we could light our homes with glowing wallpaper rather than having to rely on electric lights? Swedish designer Camilla Diedrich has asked this exact question, and in response, created a stunning line of luminescent wallpaper that is lit by fiber optics. Her Nature Ray Charles Wallpaper features a delicate assortment of floral motifs that shine through in lucid lines, adding a touch of energy-efficient ambiance to any room.

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We often see new home designs at Inhabitat that incorporate advanced technologies, reduce energy use and provide a healthy and safe living environment, but we really enjoy seeing home designs that have been vetted in competitions such as the Lifecycle Building Challenge. This annual competition, in its 2nd year and sponsored by well-known organizations such as the EPA, AIA, Building Reuse Association, Southface, and West Coast Green, is a challenge to design buildings with several points in mind: incorporate local building materials, consider the whole lifecycle of building materials, reduce the overall embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions from materials, use innovative and creative strategies, and reduce environmental and economic costs. The 2008 winner of this contest for Best Residential Design was the Spoorhouse, by Benno van Noort of Van Noort Designs, LLC.

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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?

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?

I should share some snippets from last Friday when I’ve joined several of my peers in The Hague, NL. However please allow for some digesting of my impressions and thoughts! I will write a follow up for sure ;-)

After all what we’ve touched in our panel discussion as well as during the ‘after show’ talks has been (amongst others) the question how to best enter the ‘Design Management Sphere’. From regular email conversations as well as face2face talks this seems to be an urgent question in particular for fresh (design) graduates.

What I usually respond (and this is not meant as ‘fobbing off’) is that independent from their focus of study (let it be design or business administration just to name the two most dominant ones) graduates should try to gain as many and rich experiences in their field of profession as possible. This enables them to comprehensively explore the pros and cons of the field and will help them to render more precisely which domain of the Design Management sphere they are most interested in: Digital, Brand, Corporate, Industrial, Consumer, Services, just to name a few.

Ultimately and this is what I truly believe in: Design Management to a large degree is to a large degree nurtured by the application of (for sure!) cross-disciplinary experiences and skills that tend to rather grow over time. This does however not mean that undergraduate BA & MA programmes in Design Management are not useful. This is however a different discussion to be discussed at another time.

So, for those of you who are seeking for these cross-disciplinary experiences delivered in a highly condensed format you might want to have a look at the MoHo Website. Here’s a snippet from their vision statement:

“Innovation is hampered by a myriad of factors in today’s globalised world. The lack of communication between knowledge centers such as engineering, marketing and design in companies, creates distortions and miscomprehensions between people that heavily penalize the innovation process.

These problems are further amplified if economic reality is brought into the picture. Too many products have been ‘invented’ in the past with little or no potential for economic success. ‘Inventors’ very easily forget the importance of market reality.”

Unfortunately I haven’t been aware of this initiative and hopefully they will share some of the findings publicly soon!

Side note:

These are the facts & figures of the event I do miss more designers here for sure:
# 7 days in Palo Alto
# June 1 - June 8
# 1 house
# 16 partners
# 15 endorsements
# 15 engineering students
# 3 design students
# 15 business students
# 10 social entrepreneurs
# 10 artists
# 5 venture capitalists
# 2 design professors
# 3 business professors