As of yesterday we've changed our weekly Meta MoCo survey post, we've split it into two parts; Best MoCo Architecture This Week (posted yesterday) and Best MoCo Objects This Week. Best MoCo Architecture This Week will be posted every weekend and Best MoCo Objects This Week will now be posted on Mondays.

+ Kithkin: Some rights reserved video at Designguide.tv, "a group of creative friends who form a platform to show and promote their work. Consumers are given the chance to purchase design instantly, either printing it out on their own printer or taking the file to a listed supplier for production.".

+ Core77's FreeDesigndom 2008 photo gallery, featuring images from the first edition of a new annual design and fashion event in the Netherlands.

+ Core77's London Design Week photo gallery, from the 6th edition of this highly regarded annual event.

+ Ilio's hanging bookwave book/magazine storage from their new 2009 collection. At Dezeen.

+ Viable London's Slat Shelves, "an alternative storage solution constructed entirely using rectangular section FSC pine.". At Dezeen.

+ Doshi Levien's Exhibition at Moroso USA at Cool Hunting, a collection that draws upon Indian culture for inspiration.

+ Patricia Urquiola's Purely Porcelain for Rosenthal at designboom, a new 'landscape' ceramics collection with a "pattern [that] is erratic, sometimes filling the form and at other times escaping".

+ Designband's Birdturf birdhouse design by Emilie Baltz and Ben Bearsch, "inspired by the act of throwing shoes over power lines (which is thought to be how gangs mark their 'turf')". Via design*sponge.

+ The Quooker boiling water tap, a child-proof kitchen appliance that dispenses boiling hot water instantly for tea, pasta, vegetables and more. Via Designlines.

+ The Vroom Solo built-in vacuum appliance, a "quick-cleaning tool for small clean-ups in kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, mudrooms and other high traffic areas of the home, the Vroom is easily installed directly into the cabinetry of a room either as a stand alone vacuum appliance or as an accessory to a central vacuum system.". Via Appliancist.

+ Debbie Smyth's 'pins and threads' electrical pylons, "each point was plotted and measured to ensure that the pylons were illustrated accurately.". At matandme.

Slight change to our weekly Meta MoCo survey post, we've decided to split it into two parts; Best MoCo Architecture This Week and Best MoCo Objects This Week. With the number and quality of design blogs steadily growing, the quantity of design objects and architecture has virtually exploded. The name change also more aptly describes the content we are presenting. Best MoCo Architecture This Week will be posted every weekend and Best MoCo Objects This Week will now be posted on Mondays.

+ Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter's prefab Read-Nest, "Measuring only 10 m2, Read-Nest is a small pre-manufactured structure that is designed to sit in the landscape like an architectural folly. Being flexible in both situation and use, the owner can place Read-Nest where he or she feels would best suit their needs, whether for study, relaxation or both.". At Arch Daily.

+ Also from Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter; Summerhouse in Jørlunde at Arch Daily. "Raised above the ground by concrete pillars, the house extends over the sloping terrain with interior spaces and terraces filtered from the outer landscape by movable fabric screens stretching along the perimeter.".

+ Splitterwerk's 32 sq. meter "Ivory and fresh Shell" apartment # 1 in Black Treefrog, Bad Waltersdorf, Austria. Converted from an old farmyard and a fire station, "The new interior envelope is conceived as a continuously active media surface - Projections, enlarged picture screens or TV - that makes the spatial divisions into virtual phenomena.". Via Judit Bellostes and We Make Money Not Art.

+ Jan Konings and Droog Lab's Hotel Experimenta*. "a temporary hotel at the northern IJ-river front in Amsterdam. It can be seen as an inverted hotel - the neighbourhood as a whole functions as a hotel, the streets are the hotel corridors, and the inhabitants are the hosts that offer the guests services, activities and excursions.". Via Judit Bellostes, Droog lab and Frame magazine.

+ Allied Works Architecture's Dutchess County Guesthouse profiled in the NYT's Style Magazine. "A cool guesthouse for a pair of art collectors upstate New York by the firm that redid 2 Columbus Circle.". Via Materialicious.

+ "Koji Tsutsui Architect & Associates design a house for an industrial designer in a quiet residential area in Tokyo." at World Architecture News.

+ Curiosity, Inc.'s C-2 House at rolu | design, with "a dash of something 70's here. picture the exterior covered in cedar shakes.".

+ Swedish designer Jonas Wagell's Mini House, "a 15 square metre house that can be built in a weekend". At Dezeen.

+ DeMaria Design's Redondo Beach House, "constructed with a combination of prefabricated shipping containers and traditional building materials". At Inhabitat.

+ Morten and Andrea's Gotland island sommarhus at Hemfeber.

Girls Walker has announced the beginning of the search for the next Miss Tokyo Girls Collection, the finale event for the now famous biannual real fashion festival. This is the ultimate opportunity for a would-be reader model, not only to grace the pages of one’s favorite magazine, but to actually join the stage with top teen fashion icons.

Unlike traditional pageants, where the winner is selected by a panel of expert judges, Miss TGC is eventually chosen from a panel of peers: the girls in the audience who can vote with their mobile phones.

For the original post and the latest reviews of other Japanese trends please visit our CScout Japanese blog.

Karrie Jacobs has been writing a series of articles for Metropolitan Home magazine, all under the theme of "How We Live". In the October 08 issue she wrote about our house plans.

We've not seen the issue yet, only this scan from friend Jeff "jake" Jacobs.



Karrie is a thoughtful observer and commenter on design and one of my favorite design writers. It was the questions that she posed as founding editor of Dwell, about why it was not possible to go out and buy a modern home that inspired me to create this collection of house plans way back at the start. Its really an honor to have it come full circle, to be interviewed by her about the house plans and the whole journey.

Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house

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

I recently got a query from one of the editors of Mother Earth News regarding a news story she had read in the New York Times. The writer, David Pogue, had been a judge in a contest sponsored by by the History Channel and the National Inventors Hall of Fame titled "Modern Marvels/Invent Now." A $25,000 prize was awarded to one amoung 25,000 contestants, and the winner was the Enertia House, which was invented by engineer and former log-home architect, Michael Sykes.

The Mother Earth News editor said that these homes had been featured in their magazine before. They essentially provide two wooden shells for the home, one inside the other. She said that there was no mention in the article about the cost per square foot. She was wondering what I thought about the concept from the standpoint of sustainable architecture.

Here is my response:

Double envelope house designs have been around for several decades and they definitely offer some benefits, as well as raise some questions. Any house that takes advantage of the geothermal properties of the ground will be doing its inhabitants and the earth a good turn. This can take the form of earth-sheltering in general, or some clever system of circulating air like the Enertia concept; coupled with sensible passive solar design, it is possible to approach a "zero energy" home.

The concerns about their system that I have are: The use of wood as the primary building material is not generally sustainable in this day of lost forests. With the double envelope design, you are practically building two houses to end up with one. Relying on wood as a thermal mass material compromises the potential thermal performance because wood does not serve this function nearly as well as traditional masonry thermal mass materials. So, I guess what I am saying is that a more sustainable and less costly design can be accomplished in more traditional ways.

Answering the same question, Paul Scheckel wrote, "At first glance, this looks a lot like sunspace design from the 70s (without the stone-filled basement to store heat) which overheated in the daytime and lost lots of heat at night. Consider also that this giant convection oven requires a temperature difference, which in this case is driven by the sun and the cool basement. A New England winter has precious little sun, so my heating system will drive the convective loop, increasing heat loss (in addition to the insulation-free envelope). I haven't heard too many people (ie: none) say that wood is bad for houses and better for biodiesel, but there are good arguments for not using so much material in a home. Does it work? I'd like to see one built in the northeast and see the resulting energy data, wherein the proof will lie."

Clark Snell of www.thinkgreenbuilding.com wrote, "I spent five minutes looking over the web site, so these comments are only based at looking at marketing materials, i.e. they may be inaccurate. Ditto what has been said so far. A couple more “red flags:”

1. Solid wood envelope. They seem to be using the old “mass enhanced R-value” argument for why solid wood walls perform well thermally. I think it’s well established that this is true only in very specific climatic situations. Touting solid southern yellow pine walls in comparison to solid white pine walls is like saying a Chevy Suburban gets better gas mileage than a Hummer…that’s not really a useful statistic.
2. Energy without oil. The presentation intimates that this is a completely passive design. For example, no heating system is mentioned. That simply isn’t credible for most climates using the technology they are describing.
3. Passive means local. You simply can’t create a design that relies heavily on passive techniques and generalize it across climates. In my area where we have high humidity, I’d wonder about this convective loop through the attic and basement, for example.

I could go on. I’m a passive design freak, so I’m all for the basic concepts they are dealing with. However, I don’t see anything really new here, but see marketing claims touting what they are doing as a major breakthrough and “the answer”. That always makes me nervous."

David Eisenberg, of www.dcat.net wrote, "After a skimming around their website, I see that they sell kits and their base prices don't include a lot of things - some of which are enumerated:

The idea of making walls by stacking bags of sand or earth has been around for at least a century. Originally sand bags were used for flood control and military bunkers because they are easy to transport to where they need to be used, fast to assemble, inexpensive, and effective at their task of warding off both water and bullets.

At first natural materials such as burlap were used to manufacture the bags; more recently woven polypropylene has become the preferred material because of its superior strength. The burlap will actually last a bit longer if subjected to sunlight, but it will eventually rot if left damp, whereas polypropylene is unaffected by moisture.

Because of this history of military and flood control, the use of sandbags has generally been associated with the construction of temporary structures or barriers. Using sandbags to actually build houses or permanent structures has been a relatively recent innovation.

It was an Iranian-born architect named Nader Khalili who has popularized the notion of building permanent structures with bags filled with earthen materials. Actually his first concept was to fill the bags with moon dust! Attending a 1984 NASA symposium for brainstorming ways to build shelters on the moon, Khalili coupled the old sandbag idea with the ancient adobe dome and arch construction methods from his homeland in the Middle East. He realized that bags filled with lunar “dirt” could be stacked into domes or vaults to provide shelter.

Khalili came up with a further refinement on this building concept on Earth: for a more permanent, shock-resistant structure, why not place strands of barbed wire between the courses of bags, thus unifying the shell into a more monolithic structure?

At first Khalili was filling his experimental bags with desert sand, but then he evolved his idea of “superadobe,” where bags or long tubes of polypropylene bag material would be filled with a moistened adobe soil that would dry into large adobe blocks. In this case the original bag material was merely the initial form and would not necessarily be an integral part of the eventual structure.

Soon after these first experiments, Khalili began publicizing his work through newspaper and magazine articles and conducting workshops and seminars on the techniques that he was perfecting. Many people who read about his work, visited his compound in Hesperia, California, or studied with him there, decided to go ahead with their own experiments with his ideas.

Among these “early adopters” were Joe Kennedy, Paulina Wojciechowska, Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer, Akio Inoue, and Kelly Hart. I believe that it was Joe Kennedy who coined the more general term “earthbag” to suggest that the bag could contain a variety of earthen materials.

Paulina Wojciechowska was the first to write an entire book on the topic of earthbag building: Building with Earth: A Guide to Flexible-Form Earthbag Construction was published in 2001. This featured some of her early experiments done at Khalili’s CalEarth, along with several other case histories.

Akio Inoue, from Tenri University in Japan, has done extensive experimentation with earthbag construction, both on the campus of the University and in India and Africa where many other domes have been built for assistance programs.

Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer (a couple) became enamored with earthbag construction after studying with Khalili, and worked on a variety of projects, both for themselves and for clients. In 2004 they wrote and got published another book, Earthbag Building: the Tools, Tricks and Techniques, based on their particular experience.

Kelly Hart (the author of this article) first began experimenting with earthbag building in 1997, after being exposed to the concept while producing his video program, A Sampler of Alternative Homes: Approaching Sustainable Architecture. He later documented his experience in actually building his own home in another program titled Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag/Papercrete Home. Both of these programs are now available as DVD’s.

In the meantime, Nader Khalili was continuing the promotion of his “Superadobe” technique and eventually decided to patent the idea, which he obtained in the U. S. in 1999, using very general terms that cover using bags made of any material being filled with virtually any material, and combining these with barbed wired between the courses. While having made many public statements that this concept was his gift to humanity, he obviously wanted to capitalize on the potential economic reward.

Many of us who had been engaged in promoting earthbag building on our own were contacted by Khalili and asked to enter into contracts with him in order to continue our work. It didn’t take much research to discover that his patent could easily be disqualified because he had been publicizing his techniques through various media for at least four years before he even applied for his patent. Patent law clearly states that such publicity occurring prior to one year before the patent application would disqualify it for consideration.

So now the door is wide open for anyone to take this concept and run with it, and more people are doing so all the time, all over the world. While Khalili (and most of his students) have focused primarily on using the bags to form large adobe blocks, others have tried filling the bags with a variety of other materials, such as crushed volcanic rock, crushed coral, non-adobe soils, gravel, and rice hulls.

Earthbag building is unique among all other building technologies in that it can be either insulation or thermal mass, depending on what the bags are filled with. This is a very important distinction, because these characteristics of a wall greatly influence how comfortable, economical, and ecological any given system will be.

Safety is of prime concern with all building technologies, and much experimentation and testing has been done to establish guidelines for many ways of building. Khalili has established a relationship with the building department in Hesperia, California where CalEarth is located, an area where earthquakes are naturally a great danger. In 1993 live-load tests to simulate seismic, snow and wind loads were performed on a number of domed earthbag structures at CalEarth and these exceeded code requirements by 200%.

In 1995 dynamic and static load tests were performed on several prototypes for a planned Hesperia Museum and Nature Center to be constructed using Khalili’s Superadobe concepts with both dome and vault shapes. All of these tests exceeded ICBO and City of Hesperia requirements.

In 2006, at the request of Dr. Owen Geiger of the Geiger Research Institute of Sustainable Building, the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point conducted several controlled and computer-monitored tests to determine the ability of polypropylene earthbags filled with sand, local soil, and rubble to withstand vertical loads. Their written report concluded that “overall, the earthbags show promise as a low cost building alternative. Very cheap, and easy to construct, they have proven durable under loads that will be seen in a single story residential home. More testing should prove the reliability and usefulness of earthbags.”

Despite the success of these tests, earthbag building concepts have yet to be incorporated into the International Residential Building Code. Obviously more enlightened acceptance of the demonstrated viability of earthbag building needs to occur!

It is difficult to know how many residences and other earthbag structures have been made at this point, probably hundreds if not thousands. Many of us have been promoting the technique for use as emergency shelters, and certainly some have been built for this reason. It is easy for folks to accept this way of building temporary shelters because it fits the historical model of sandbag use.

But many of us have also built substantial homes using earthbags, and in the process realized how truly versatile and sustainable the technique is. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these earthbag homes are still standing long after their conventional counterparts built contemporaneously have disintegrated.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of organizations that gather people with common interests participate in do-it-yourself activities

In a reaction to the digital age, creative people are finding ways to build community in the real world to share knowledge, projects, and ideas. People are looking to the Internet to find outlets for active creativity, rather than merely passive entertainment or consumption.

Cases

The Make Lounge

North London’s Make Lounge brings arts and crafts into the 21st century. One-off workshops are delivered in a branded “drop-in” environment, attracting those looking to dabble in activities such as millinery, jewelery making, or knitting.

The School of Life

Located close to some of London’s top universities, The School of Life makes adult education accessible and cool. Opened in September 2008, the space features a shop that sells books, art, courses, vacation packages, and consultancy to those seeking intellectual adventure. Beneath the shop is an underground classroom that hosts regular courses across five central themes - work, play, family, politics and love.





Maker Fair

Dubbed “Woodstock for inventors,” Maker Fair is a two-day event for people who love to make things themselves. Everything from arts and crafts to engineering and science, sustainable design, food, and music are represented. The event is no small job for organizers Make Magazine and Crafts Magazine: the last Maker Fair attracted 65,000 people.

Trend Impact
Although the Internet may provide us with instant, free information, we still thrive on real-world human interactions. Creative people are going online to connect people with common offline interests.

Architecture & Interiors by: SPLYCE
Location: Vancouver, Canada
Specialty: residential and commercial renovations to custom furniture and landscapes
Project Highlights: Renovations of West2nd and West 7th private residences
Interior Photography: Michael Boland Photography

The great thing about blogging is that I have gained such a great sense of community, meeting so many amazing talents from all corners of the world and also reconnecting with the local design scene. Earlier this year I was honoured to read a kind comment from one of Vancouver's most talented architects, Nigel Parish of SPLYCE. I came across his work last year while sourcing images for modern west coast architecture. Over the past months, I have been lucky enough to learn more about Nigel's work and approach to both architecture and interiors. You can see through his work the merging of the structure and interior volumes of space holds a strong relationship and is seamless. I admire his keen sense of attention to construction details in exploring natural materials in flush exterior cladding and the combining of economical yet quality materials.


To see more of Nigel's work, see slideshow

To see complete inspiration library for MODERN WHITE view slide show
Today is a special October 12 - I share with you a MODERN INSPIRATION DEDICATION in honor of today's birthday. The birthday of a talented designer, artist, visonary, spirit and loving friend DONNA TOPPINGS.

I got really fired up this morning after I read a great post in architect Greg La Vardera's blog. In "Our Remodern Movement - the tipping point?" Greg suggests that now might finally be the time for modernist homes to find a place in the mainstream. I really hope so. I see the momentum. And I believe in "tipping points." I know exactly what the tipping point was for me personally, the one thing that got me really excited about modern homes. I picked up a copy of Dwell at the newsstand for the first time, the April/May 2005 issue with Charlie Lazor's Flatpak house on the cover.

I had always been interested in homes. I always dreamed of something better and more exciting than the standard fare of suburban cul-de-sacs, though I wasn't totally hooked on modern yet. But when I saw this cover, with a real family in a cool-ass house, it was like a lightning bolt. I can't tell you how badly I'd like to live in a Flatpak. It's one of the top three contenders for me. It just fits me and my family so perfectly. When the time finally comes to really build a new home I will be giving them a call to talk.

It's funny though, how "weird" most people think modernist homes are. My mother said "you want to live in a white box?" with a look on her face that was pure disbelief. Talking houses with some neighbors I could detect their nervous smiles when I mentioned concrete and steel, as in "uh, okay, sure, as long as it's not next door to my house." And look at the real estate markets. That's all you need to know. You don't see a lot of developers building modernist spec homes. Just pick up a real estate magazine and thumb through it for a minute. How many cool modernist homes will you find in the listings. Maybe one or two in a hundred page book. And they're mostly really big, expensive houses, probably built in the eighties after watching too many episodes of Miami Vice. Good, simple, modern homes for real families are hard to come by. Your best bet is a fifties ranch. Even those are a minority in the market compared to the grand total of everything else.

But I think Greg is right. This is the right time. Dwell has been so successful that some other similar publications have started to appear. Blogs like mine are popping up like daisies. Sarah Susanka's "Not So Big House" movement has a lot of followers (because it makes a lot of sense). Or consider John Brown's Slow Home Movement. And green is suddenly king. People finally realize that their choices have a real impact. Now is definitely the time of Less is More, and modernism fits that bill perfectly.

Probably the biggest helper in all of this, in my opinion, is going to be the bursting of the real estate bubble. I say that for one simple reason: it will make people change their view as to what their home really is - a home to live in and not an investment to make a fortune off of. I really believe that people won't/can't build what they really want because they are too hung up on resale value and growing massive equity. I don't know if this attitude caused the housing bubble or vice versa, but either way they combine to create an effect where the resultant high cost of housing distorts our views, closes our minds to new ideas, prices lots of people out of the market for a good home, and places too much power in the hands of developers, not in the hands of consumers where it should be. And so, here we are. With the bubble busting and home prices correcting I think we may also see home buyers making very different decisions about what they want to live in. I know this is the case for my wife and I, and I hope, at least, that this is the case for others.

It's definitely time for America to focus its attention on things like better homes, greener communities, reliable energy, even better communications technology, education and health care. These are the things that make up the infrastructure of this country. We won't have to worry about foreign threats for long if we allow ourselves to fall apart from the inside.

This whole country is at a tipping point, or near one. Modern homes are just a tiny, tiny part of that. We can choose a better way to live without giving up all the really great things we already enjoy.

Better living through design. Work smarter, not harder. Find the holistic solutions.

We can do it.

I hate to say it, but I haven't spotted anything really interesting in a while that I wanted to post on. Yes, things have been going on. I check my feed readers every day, I see them. But I've sort of found it to be more of the same. Nothing really turned my head.

Finally, I saw something that sparked a little daydreaming again, which is really what I'm after. It's "House t" by Akihisa Hirata Architecture Office (HAO) of Tokyo, Japan. Of course, it's Japanese. Is there any place in the world that produces more unique, original, thought provoking houses than Japan? NO WAY!





The approach to a second story and the division of spaces in the home is totally different. I get lost just looking at the roof line and the placement of the windows. It's bright, clean and sculptural in a way that only Japanese houses are.

Via Things Magazine (October 3rd, 2007)

Image credits - HAO site

Just a couple of quick things:

The wonderful blog DO Research has closed shop - it is already missed. The upside is they've bought land and are building a Flatpak. I am wildly jealous!

Read the story behind the sea container Holyoke Cabin on the Hive Modular blog. So cool.

Skinny Japanese Houses on eye candy (via Things Magazine). Only in Japan [sigh].

The amazingly hip Alan Family Happy New House is complete. Check it out in The New York Times. It turned out just like the renderings - very, very cool. It shows you just how much you can do with a remodel.

I just picked up a good book, Small Eco-houses. Loaded with interesting, green, modern homes from all over the world. Two thumbs up!

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]

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As the summer vacation period is starting soon I’d thought I celebrate and share the 5th anniversary of this blog a little bit earlier than scheduled with you. If you have a closer look at the ‘Full Archive’ section of this blog you will notice that e very first posting is dated 29. July 2003! Wow ;-)

After all in the very first posting (still written in small caption only; huhu fancy ;-) I’ll give credit to Lawrence Lee (back in 1997) who inspired me to do a regular publishing service on the web for the Design Management community as well.

However if I carefully remember how it all started I must admit that it has been more or less a technical coincidence that ‘Vol. 2: design-management.de‘ emerged: I’ve simply played around the other day with a piece of software called ‘Movable Type‘ and after a long night’s playing I succeeded to have this software installed on my hosted webserver. And most important: It worked ‘Hello World‘ :-)

From there the whole thing slowly developed into a tool for making my life as a teacher & lecturer for Design Management far easier. And still today many people ask me what to read or surf and ever since it simply takes a URL to point them to this blog and hopefully address their question in one or the other posting.

For sure the blog also emerged into a means to brand myself and raise my voice in the mist. What I’ve also learned however was that the often advertised ‘conversation‘ for most of us bloggers is a sort of ‘myth’ ;-( the blogosphere is not too different from the rest of the web and people on the web (as in real life) rather like to ‘lurk‘ than to ‘invest’ in a conversation. However please do not misunderstand this as a negative criticism, on the contrary: It’s not! It is simply helpful to keep this fact in mind in times of demotivation when you wish someone would clap on your shoulder and tell you how brilliant your postings are ;-) So yes, blogging also taught me to remain humble and appreciate & respect the fact that people are visiting this blog and spend their precious time on reading my musings.

So some of you might be interested in who else and how many are visiting this blog. Well that’s hard to measure for several reasons. While the web provider statistics report visitor numbers between 35.000 - 40.000 per month (personally I love that number ;-) Google Analytics reports some 100+ quality visitors per day on average (which is still fine for a niche topic I think). Visitors tend to come from across the globe and I think Tibet or Nepal belong to the very few countries that haven’t been logged yet ;-) The majority comes from the US as well as Western Europe, but this varies also depending on the country/institution where I’ve lectured last ;-) After all an interesting side note is the fact that more visitors come from Asia (China, India, and South Korea at the lead) as well as the Far East like Saudi Arabia for example!

So the fact that visitor numbers increased from 10/month in July 2003 to more than 10×10 per day is a good motivation to continue. However one of the key moments that made me think was at a DMI conference back in 2006. While sitting at lunch with a bunch of Design Management professionals both from academia and practice one commonly acknowledged ‘authority’ (at least by the grey hair community mostly in the academic domain) asked me: “Why do you waste your time writing for free on this blog?”. My spontaneous reply has been: “Do I also ask you: ‘Why do you waste your time writing Books?’” Needless to say that the quality of our relation ever since has decreased slightly ;-) After all I’ve learned to live with that.

Let me close this posting with a short anecdote that is linked to the picture above: For the recent inauguration in The Hague the panel members have been kindly offered the opportunity to display any book or paper they have written on a table in the reception hall. Since most of my writing on Design Management has taken place on the web (blog postings as well as guest comments on other blogs) and not on paper I’ve had a hard time to raise attention in the concert of publications on the table. Therefore my (graphic design) wife has been so kind to make a display for me that triggers visitor’s attention and points to this blog (have you noticed the ‘laurel wreath’ she has made ;-). While I can’t prove a correlation I can confirm that visitor numbers have increased slightly for the last couple of weeks ;-)

So, thanks for accompanying me over the last 5 years and I hope you hang out with me virtually or physically from time to time! Feel free to spread the information that there is a blog out there on Design Management and drop me a note whenever you like to: blog (at) design-management.de. Thanks!

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