"Hippo" by Yuma Harada
“Hippo” product (prototype) / chair for kids, 2004 by Yuma HARADA
3 months ago
Fieldcandy Tents
5 months ago
BY THE CITY / FOR THE CITY
Earlier this year the Institute for Urban Design in New York gathered ideas from its residents about how to improve the city. Now is time for designers to step up and give shape to those ideas in specific sites. The jury is quite impressive so make sure to submit your best work!.
Submissions accepted until midnight, July 14. Below the official info:
Calling all Designers: New Yorkers shared hundreds of ways that they think the city’s public realm could be designed to make it smarter, more beautiful and livable, and now we’re asking architects, designers, artists, and urbanists to respond to their challenge!
Now it’s your turn: Look through 500+ ideas we received, define your site, and apply your design skills to give visual form those ideas.
Together, all of these ideas – from citizens and designers alike – will be form a collective portrait of how we imagine the future, a crowdsourced testament to the ingenuity the many people who love this city. All of the submissions will be gathered in the Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York, an exhibition and book that we’ll launch at this September’s first-ever Urban Design Week.
11 months ago
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DIETER RAMS!
Happy 79th birthday to Dieter Rams, one of my favorite industrial designers. A great excuse to post (again) his TEN PRINCIPLES FOR GOOD DESIGN:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
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.
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.
1 year ago
States of Design 01: Visualization
Ben Fry, Disarticulate, (2004)
In a new series in Domus magazine, Paola Antonelli, the design curator of MoMA, reflects on the status of central design disciplines today. The first installment reflects on the currency of visualization design.
1 year ago
ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FILM FESTIVAL
Today and until May 9 Chicago will host the Architecture and Design Film Festival. Plenty of good movies and panels to attend. I will take part in the “Documenting Architecture” panel along with Bjarke Ingels and Rick Valicenti, moderated by Zoë Ryan (recently appointed chair of the architecture and design department at the Art Institute of Chicago). The panel will take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center tomorrow May 6 at 5:30 pm.
Enjoy the festival and If you are planning on going to the “Documenting Architecture” panel, stop by and say hi!
1 year ago
1 year ago
BMD Love Blog: Avoid fields, jump fences and do better.
If you have woken up and realized that the internal monologue and obsession with policing the boundary of “big A” licensed Architecture means that architects could lose the thread of the most important movement in history, the movement to redesign the world and everything we do to sustainably meet…
(Source: architectmagazine.com)
1 year ago
2010 Year Lists - Fimoculous.com
More lists!
1 year ago
A Small Book on a Big Career
Imagine that you’re one of the world’s best book designers — some say the best — and you have to design a book about your own work. How would you feel? Excited at having the freedom to do whatever you want? Daunted by that freedom? A bit of both? What sort of book would you come up with? Whatever you’re thinking, I’ll bet that it doesn’t involve squeezing 704 pages into a “baby” book that’s roughly the same size as a small box of matches. Yet that’s what the Dutch book designer Irma Boom did with the book she created to accompany an exhibition of her work, “Irma Boom: Biography in Books,” which runs until Oct. 3 at the University of Amsterdam Library. (New York Times)
1 year ago
