design

BC Binning house, in photographic works by artist Arni Haraldsson

December 21, 2008

Vancouver artist Arni Haraldsson, known for his photographic studies of modernist architecture and his research on Corbusier, produced these three photographs of the house of another artist, BC Binning, in 1994.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Nanna Ditzel

December 20, 2008

Nanna Ditzel is considered the “first lady of Danish design,” which is one of those informative yet cringe-worthy labels that just highlights the whole problem of accidentally ghettoizing designers who happen to be women by the very act of celebrating the fact that they’re women designers.

Categories: design, furniture, Uncategorised, women designers

Stefan Boublil

December 19, 2008

Stefan Boublil of the NY design company The Apartment has done a holiday shopping guide for the NYT. Stefan is great because he tends to go for items that are useful, beautiful and clearly thought out.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Io, Saturnalia!

The customary greeting of the Roman winter holiday season sounded like “Yo, Saturnalia!” (The latin word “io” is the equivalent of the prayerful “Ho” in ecclesiastical English, as in “Ho, praise to Saturn.”) Saturnalia was a carnivalesque winter festival celebrating the god Saturn’s birthday and it encompassed the winter solstice, running from December 17 – 23rd.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Japanese tenugui cloths

December 16, 2008

The multipurpose Japanese cloth known as the tenugui has had a meandering history that includes ritual, practical and decorative uses. The tenugui is a 1′ x 3′ rectangle of thin woven fabric originally used for ritual purposes (silk and hemp blend tenugui have been found dating from 200 AD), then more practically as a hand towel, bandage, or sweatband often worn around the head, most famously by samurai fighters.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Furoshiki: how-to videos.

December 14, 2008

Making a “drop bag” at Kakefuda, the famous Furoshiki shop in Kyoto where Mick Jagger bought a furoshiki last year. Also see How to tie up two Bottles and Furoshiki – Reusable Grocery Bag.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Wrap your bottle of wine in a furoshiki this year.

Furoshiki is a traditional Japanese means of wrapping presents or carrying objects in a square of cloth. It’s waste-free, it’s practical, and it’s beautiful. As an art form, furoshiki is less known outside Japan than origami, but it is just as venerable – it simply uses fabric instead of paper.

Categories: design, green, textiles, Uncategorised

The new wave of algorithm-based design.

December 12, 2008

The new ability to generate mathematic algorithm-based design via computer, and then 3D model them in real space, is – as most people have probably noticed – rapidly producing a new generation of art, design and architectural structures.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Cynthia Maxwell, cool science design nerd girl

December 11, 2008

Cynthia Maxwell, who is not only a mechanical engineer who has just finished a PhD on “Sound Synthesis from Shape-Changing Geometric Models” at Berkeley and has been part of the audio group at Apple and has worked for NASA, she also has a great eye and a sense of humour.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Street Use – “The street finds its own uses for things.”

December 9, 2008

This post is about design in the broadest sense, as a process of problem-solving that leads to interesting and strangely compelling solutions. Above is an improvised streetcleaner in China found on Street Use, a truly fascinating blog about DIY and general inventiveness.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

design

BC Binning house, in photographic works by artist Arni Haraldsson

Nanna Ditzel

Stefan Boublil

Io, Saturnalia!

Japanese tenugui cloths

Furoshiki: how-to videos.

Wrap your bottle of wine in a furoshiki this year.

The new wave of algorithm-based design.

Cynthia Maxwell, cool science design nerd girl

Street Use – “The street finds its own uses for things.”

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