The London Design Festival saw the launch of the first Rabih Hage/Piet Hein Eek pop-up store in a space large enough to highlight a wide variety of Eek's work. The temporary shop will be open through October 31 and features Eek's new 99% cabinets, storage that makes use of 99.13% of a whole steel sheet (the waste is a result of the holes for the fasteners). There was a nice selection of signature Waste Scrapwood pieces, all a glorious, yet soothing, patchwork of colours. The Plywood Chandelier and Plissélamp were good examples of Piet Hein Eek lighting, and the ceramics range caught the sun on the tables. The Crisis Cushion Sofa beckoned softly from a corner, and the Plywood dining set showed up well in the space.

+ pietheineek.nl

On October 14, 2008, in Seoul, Korea, the Open Web Asia 2008 conference will gather web industry leaders from across Asia, as well as the US and Europe. The day long event focuses on the theme of “The Social Web.” Speakers include Shusaku Maruko (General Manager, Corporate Strategy Department, FeliCa Networks,) Jean Min (Communications Director, Ohmynews,) Loic Le Meur (Founder and CEO, Seesmic.com,) Arthur Chang (VP of Sale, Alibab.com,) and Jason Calacanis (CEO Mahalo.) As well, Korean tech blogger, writer, and CScout consultant, Taewoo Danny Kim, will also speak.

The combination of executives, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists is going to explore how social media is evolving on the international, regional, and country stage. The event is the first pan-Asian web technology industry conference of its kind.

London textile designer Kathy Schicker's light-reactive woven textiles appear to be beautiful white jacquard fabrics, but when they are exposed to sunlight, the light brings out colour and pattern. At the same time, the sunlight charges the fabric, causing it to glow in the dark. The effect is usually quite subtle, but will vary depending on the time of day and season.

+ kathyschicker.com

Considering the fact that the average person produces 4.5 pounds of waste per day according to the EPA, we would be remiss not to address the question of household waste in our exploration of what it takes to make a green home. Thanks to more widespread public and private recycling programs and increased consumer awareness, Americans are definitely learning to tighten their ‘waste-line,’ but we still produce a phenomenal amount of garbage on a daily basis. Before we can talk about reducing, re-using and re-cycling, Green Home 101 needs to talk trash.

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i’ll always have a soft spot for anything coming from savannah. savannah is the first city, other than my hometown, where i really felt at home, and it’s also the city where we’ll be getting married next year. so i was happy to hear from jessica at working class studio (a program where students design work for sale) about these cute new fabric-covered storage boxes. i always need a pretty place to keep things in order so these might need to be in my tiny mini-office some day. the boxes will be available december 1st so click here to pick one up when they’re officially for sale.

As for their energy efficiency, they claim that when the appropriate coatings are installed, the envelope reflects about 95 percent of outside radiation, resists the loss of interior heat, provides an excellent air infiltration barrier and does not allow water to migrate in.

One idea that has occurred to me is that this system might benefit from the use of SIP's (Structural Insulated Panels) for the roofs, rather that standard truss framing. SIP's are very well insulated, install quickly, and use much less wood than convention roofs.

This finished house is virtually indistinguishable from conventional housing.

Kalkin has recently opened a factory—“a hangar at a little airport in New Jersey”—to manufacture Quik Houses. “There are a lot of elbows flying in this process, and this is the best way to protect the quality of the house, to keep the accounting transparent, and to make sure I am not unwittingly responsible for heinous crimes to the built environment.” Once the factory is fully functional, Kalkin plans to export many of his products, commenting that “the possibilities of working on a world scale are exciting.”

Twenty-one thousand containers hit American shores every day of the year. Containers can be shipped to the interior of the country via trains and trucks. Shipping containers are like Lego toys and the modules can be assembled in thousands of ways.

maybe sunset yellow?



or working with an image that approximates an old blueprint

Technorati Tags: house plans, Hus1, modern design, modern house

Diaz is the Executive Director of My Shelter Foundation which has collaborated with various other governmental and industrial organizations to build new schools and clinics throughout the Philippines. He is quick to point out the many economic and sustainable advantages of this method of building, since the main component is abundant and natural earth. In hurricane-prone areas, such as the Philippines, earthbag buildings can withstand the ravages of nature better than most other systems. And with thicker walls, they are more thermally stable.

Here are several pages where you can find out more about the humanitarian works of Illiac Diaz: earthbagbuilding.com/articles/filipino, earthbagbuilding.com/projects/school, earthbagbuilding.com/projects/clinic.

With good access all around the house the work can be done with the all terrain fork lift, saving the expense of a crane.

Technorati Tags: 6030 House, 6040 House, ecosteel, modern design, modern house, prefab house

When they were first commissioned to create a “Bahaman” seaside cottage on secluded South Stradbroke Island, Brisbane-based Arkhefield was faced with a few interesting challenges. The design had to be livable all year round, made from materials strong enough to withstand the harsh climate conditions, yet remind its inhabitants of memorable vacations spent on exotic islands. The resulting design stands out as a modern, sustainable interpretation of a Bahaman cottage that capitalizes on the site and celebrates volume but is also capable of isolating, re-orienting and shutting down against inclement weather when necessary.

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“The reuse of billboard vinyl in earthbag construction mitigates the impact of global warming in two ways. Transforming this landfill-bound material into another useful product helps lessen landfill overflow worldwide. It also eliminates the need to protect earthbags from UV rays, resulting in more robust emergency shelters that can be used longer to lessen the human suffering caused by natural disasters.”

“As a visual concept, each billboard shelter stands as a symbolic gesture of sustainability. Beyond its environmental benefits, the strategy of reusing billboard vinyl visually recontextualizes the nature of billboards, which are symbols of mass consumerism and a pervasive form of visual pollution in our world. This concept does not seek to generate imagery, but instead appropriates existing commercial imagery as a metaphor for global recycling and reuse. Assembled together into a shelter, the earthbags create a dynamic and vibrant pattern of collaged images and text from around the world, dramatically suggesting a unified, international gesture of sustainability, hope, and humanitarianism.”

According to the jurors, they "were intrigued by this project as an example of ‘cradle-to-cradle’ design pertinent to the signage industry. Utilizing intrinsic qualities of billboard PVC—UV resistant and near indestructible—this concept proposes the creation of dwellings from recycled material and imagery. The idea takes the recycling of billboards, street banners, and print graphics—already employed by art museums in the creation of second-use products—to another level. Truly inventive!"

This all sounds pretty good, and might well work if the billboard material were cut and sewn into bags. One obvious disadvantage of the idea is that since PVC is toxic when burned, this would present a potential hazard to the occupants, but of course this is true of many modern building materials. PVC poses a great risk in building fires, as it releases deadly gases long before it ignites, such as hydrogen chloride which turns to hydrochloric acid when inhaled. As it burns it releases yet more toxic dioxins. Additionally, vinyl does outgas highly toxic VOCs over time. Fortunately most of this danger would have passed with the use of recycled signs, but this could also be an issue.

+ The Ideaco & Muku collection of brings together a lovely collection of wooden desktop accessories.

+ Tokujin Yoshioka's Venus chair will be the centerpiece of the "Second Nature" exhibition at 21_21 Design Sight. Via Dezeen.

+ The Good Design Award 2008 "Best 15" has been announced. JS

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!

DO Research - A favorite Minneapolis-based modernist blog
rosenlof/lucas - the hippest modern landscaping duo going, with a cool blog to boot
Alchemy Architects - you cannot resist the appeal of their weeHouses
Flatpak - I drool over these Eamesish beauties
City Desk Studio - recently in Dwell, awesome Skyway Retreat
Bark Design - I'm in love with Doris
Hive Modular - The B-Line is an instant classic modern prefab

When it comes to mobiles, everyone knows that they can make great nursery decorations and playthings for babies, but sophisticated, abstract mobiles can also function equally well as artsy decor for grownups. Such is the case with Frazier & Wing’s beautiful recycled magazine mobiles. Made from hundreds of paper cut-outs from old magazines, and strung in linear cascading forms, Frazier & Wing’s chandelier-esque mobiles make a stunning centerpiece for any room: nursery or grownup.

READ MORE AT INHABITOTS >

• Price: regular cement , $125 per cubic yard; new-crete, $75 per cubic yard
• It has the ability to shed water with a .5 mm saturation point. this will prevent water seeping into it and freezing causing cracking.
• The ingredients to make New-Crete are readily found around the world and are in no danger of being depleted.
• New-crete can be formed into any object. We have the designs for walls, drywall, floors, shingles, stairs, window frames, cupboards, bricks, doors ect....we can make a whole house from the bottom up using only New-Crete
• It can be painted, or laminated with wood panels, ect.
  
• It can be nailed into and not crack.
  

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.

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]

The title of the Lighten Up exhibit by [re]design certainly reflected some of the humour that lit up the display, such as the charming Bakelite Telephone lamp from Jericho Hands or the more contemporary Pixel by Alison Edwards. Lizzie Lee