Nick Knight

Martin Holzapfel

Las week my friend Jan Rose told me that one of the desk that I have featured for my research is from a very famous german designer. I think that his work worths to share it with u.

http://www.martinholzapfel.com/

V&A Showcase Environmental Connections

Expanding our notion of space

We all discovered quite quickly that each of our projects questioned perceptions of space in different contexts. Curro looks at how our notion of “home space” is changing and the impact of technology on central spaces in our lives.

Lee’s project aims to bring the outdoor world indoors in a sensual way. Marie too explores how our senses and tactility play a key role in how we interpret space.

Miriam’s project attempts to make air tangible and explores how it connects us in space through the physical act of breathing. Amy looks at how expandable space can be employed to aid the future wellbeing of the urban honeybee. Anne reinvents the act of sitting and aims to design furniture that allows us to expand our body in space. Bharat questions boundaries more literally by integrating his project with “non-places” such as communal fences. Through this shared theme we realize how each of our proposals hopes to develop the common idea of ‘expanding’ what a space can be.

Making it physical

Engaging with the familiar

Marie, Anne and Bharat are all working on the idea of creating a new way to Experience our familiar environment, .

--> They are using the familiar to make the user realize a completely different experience can be achieved !

(Marie : You touch everyday objects that now have new tactile properties : It allows you to develop your sense of touch and makes you aware of what you were touching before.

Anne : You discover your body as a tool as you now use it to engage with your environment

Bharat : amalgamation of various familiar elements that are taken in another environment in order to attract you, and encourage you to use them.)

Curro, on the other hand, is working on putting the familiar (the laptop) outside of its original context. Likewise, Minhyung Lee is working with rice, a very familiar ingredient which is connected to culture,imagination and memories, and taking it to fusion asian restaurants.

Amy is changing the concept of beehives. What already exists for bees and is familiar to us and to them, is probably not what's best for them. What we considered as familiar needs to be changed, to get better.

Miriam is exploring the most familiar element of our environment : AIR, making it visible and tangible, highlighting it.

Temporary Experience

Amy: temporary in moving space, nomadism, for the bees, renewal

like Curro: not belonging in one place in society, we can create this through technology, so that we can belong to a place temporarily and without boundaries to distance and matter, but only the choice of which sum of different spaces provided trough technology

Miriam is creating s temporary space which appaers and disappears with air, allowing a temporality and notion of transience in the space which often impose on us how we are connected with our natural surroundings.

As Elena, Bharat is concerned with temporary place-making in a physical space, which in Bharat's sense is a fence where there is a static movement happening, electricity stores the things taking place temporarily for giving back light at night. Elena is connecting children and their parents on one level, for a playful interaction that takes place seamlessly in the different time schedules and which are made easier through her designs.

Marie and Anne create the temporary experience through the body and the sense of touch: For Marie changing the experience of touch develops our senses and creates an acute moment in how we connect to things, while Anne subtly shifts the experience we have we our whole body, the designs should trigger the exploration of how we “sit” so the furniture encourages a sense of temporality. Minhyung Lee triggers physical and visual experience through two types of tiles which can be arranged in different ways to allow a moment of different perceptions.

Design Decades

pages scanned from Viewpoint

They are real

Kerry Degman

at the end we have to apreciate the work of those people called photographers...

Mentor: Critical Journal Ep.17

Marc Owens Avatar Machine, RCA Graduation Project

Two weeks ago I met my mentor Marc Owens a designer graduated by the Royal College of Art. It was very positive to see how he expressed his interest on my project. I send him a resume of all the proccess that I have been through until that point with my project and a quick paragraph and sketch about the idea of making a desk as my final design project. He could not see the conection and why I ended an apparently interesting proccess where I was going through into an object so common.

It took me time to convince him, it was more a chat between two friends than an official tutorial in which I asked him about not just his opinion but also for advice... He saw the point that I was not making just a desk, it is an object in which I am trying to project all the theory and context development that I created for a near-future scenario.

As a conclusion of all the proccess I have been through I can say that as a designer we are suppose to express who we are. Our work reflect part of our persona so you have to be confortable enough with it to be able to defend it... I guess I was not feeling that way before or I did not have ebough support to continue into that path...

Anyway, the most interesting thing we talked was about the Maslow Piramid. This graphic is a constant reference for Marc work and he said to me that is esential for every designer... at the end we are designing for humans and we have not chaned that much over these thousand of years.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, all of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans.

Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.

via wikipedia

Principles of Good Design

Dieter Rams' Principles of Good Design from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.

1_ Good design is innovative

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

2_ Good design makes a product useful

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

3_ Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

4_ Good design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

5_ Good design is unobtrusive

Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

6_ Good design is honest

It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

7_ Good design is long-lasting

It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

8_ Good design is thorough, to the last detail

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consume.

9_ Good design is environmentally-friendly

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

10_ Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Tomas Alonso

Variations of a tube

V&A Chairs

Mr. Lights Junior

5 degree stool

A stool reduced to its minimum expression.
As temporary seating devices, long term comfort is not usually a mayor priority in the design of stools.
5° stool uses that premise as a starting point to explore the use of a different formal language that focuses on reducing the amount of material and space used to a minimum.

Mr. Lights Series

Mr.1, Mr.2 and Mr.3 are the first three of a series of lights designed around the new LED T8 tube light bulbs.
Aside from being radically more energy efficient and durable than standard fluorescent bulbs, these newly developed light tubes allow for more flexibility with the design by reducing the number of components needed to power them as well as by not needing a reflector shade. These lights explore the formal continuity between the bulb and the fixture while playing with the way the materials come together to produce a series of unexpected characters.

La verdad que no se porque este no ha sido uno de los primeros post de este humilde blog. El señor Alonso es todo un icono y referencia personal en lo que al diseño se refiere. Ha sabido dotar de personalidad todo el trabajo que realiza y cada una de sus piezas tiene ese toque de genialidad que se espera de todo gran diseñador industrial.


The truth is that I do not know why I haven't created this post before. Mr Alonso is an icon and a personal reference for design. He has imposed on his work an Alonso personality and each piece has a genious touch, all that you can expect from a brilliant industrial designer.

www.tomas-alonso.com/

Dwelling

Dwelling, as well as being a term for a house, or for living somewhere, or for lingering somewhere, is a philosophical concept which was developed by Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger's philosophy is founded on the attempt to conjoin what he considers two fundamental insights:

• The first is his observation that, in the course of over 2,000 years of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the "world" itself), but has forgotten to ask what "being" itself is. This is Heidegger's "question of being," and it is Heidegger's fundamental concern throughout his work. (...) indicating that Western philosophy has neglected "being" because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question. Heidegger's intuition about the question of being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes his concern with the "history of being," that is, the history of the forgetting of being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive "destruction" of the history of philosophy. manifold uses of the word "being," a work which provoked Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger opens his
• The second intuition animating Heidegger's philosophy derives from the influence of Edmund Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, "to the things themselves"). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended toward something, and is always "about" something) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in "care." This is the basis of Heidegger's "existential analytic", as he develops it in Being and Time. Heidegger argues that to describe experience properly entails finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to "Dasein," the being for whom being is a question.^[27]Being and Time, Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. Dasein, then, is not intended as a way of conducting a philosophical anthropology, but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything like a philosophical anthropology. (...) isDasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one's own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one's own existence, is the basis of Heidegger's notions of authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for Dasein which depend on escaping the "vulgar" temporality of calculation and of public life. In care. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that

The marriage of these two observations depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that Dasein is an essentially temporal being; it also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself.(...)

That Heidegger did not write this second part of Being and Time, and that the existential analytic was left behind in the course of Heidegger's subsequent writings on the history of being, might be interpreted as a failure to conjugate his account of individualcollective experience with his account of the vicissitudes of the human adventure that he understands the Western philosophical tradition to be. And this would in turn raise the question of whether this failure is due to a flaw in Heidegger's account of temporality, that is, of whether Heidegger was correct to oppose vulgar and authentic time.

text from (of course) wikipedia

Lea T

was born this way

Zelos

by Christoph Böninger in 2008 for Classicon

Calder

http://www.calder.org/