This would be really good wallpaper for a telephone nook:Made by Duncan Wilson in collaboration with Sirkka Hammer, it's interactive design that's both practical and attractive -- imagine! Wallpaper made of four layers of mildly tacky squares of grey paper, on top of a bright background. The patterns created as more and more notes were used, especially once it got really used and the only light greys were at the floor and ceiling, would be pretty fascinating. It would make for a really neat time-lapse study.
(from core77)

Tanning made useful:It's a bikini made of 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in series with conductive thread. That is so fancy. It terminates in a regulator into a female (duh) USB connection. They're coming out with a dude-bikini that keeps your beer cold, too, although truly, the two functions could be interchangeable, as dudes like music as much as ladies like cold beer.

Hanukkah a-go-go:
Minimalist, quick-burning menorah for your Festival of Lights on the run. 9 X 1.5 X 1 cm.
Thanks to Inhabitat.

After all the simplicity and concision I've seen recently, this project addles my brain. "Falling garden," by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger, is complex and beautiful. I can't decide if the wording on their site is poorly translated or an accurate verbal representation of their artwork. The materials they used are as eclectic as the rest of it:

Plastic berries (India), cow pads (Jura), waste paper (Venice), baobab seeds (Australia), beech, elder and magnolia branches (Uster), thorns (Almeria), nylon blossoms (one-dollar-shop), pigs’ teeth (Indonesia), seaweed (Seoul), orange peel (Migros shop), fertilizer crystals (home grown), pigeons’ bones (San Staë), silk buds (Stockholm), cattail (Ettiswil), cats’ tails (China), celery roots (Montreal), virility rind (Caribbean), wild boar quills (zoo), banana leaves (Murten), rubber snakes (Cincinnati)...

Another of their projects, Meta-jardin, features junk juxtaposed with nature. "Growing and decomposing structures live in the same territories hand in hand. Values dissolve. A dense vegetation after the big crash!" Not unrelated to my post about Detroit.

The V&A and PlayStation have sponsored a fantastic interactive experience: Volume (totally surreal and worth clicking). A grid of about 7-foot-tall pillars with LEDs respond to the people walking through them with sound and varying light patterns, taking it one step further than Dune 4.0. United Visual Artists collaborated with Robert Del Naja (3D from Massive Attack)'s music production company, one point six.

More intuitive/interactive installations (and more alliteration) from MoCoLoco:
This one's Dune 4.0, by Daan Roosegaarde, featured at Montevideo, in Amsterdam. It consists of hundreds of fibers that dim or brighten separately in response to 70% motion stimulus, 30% sound stimulus. And it doesn't just glow happily -- based on the amount of motion and noise, it can turn into a veritable lightening storm. The video should be online in early January.

Now here's a good idea for the exterior shell of my building: reclaimed wood. An article mentioning how teak wood is being salvaged from houses destroyed by earthquakes in Indonesia, then something incomprehensible at the end, but I think it's about green resorts.
(Found at Hugg)

Tee-shirts are, of course, pretty multipurpose:
Linked from Treehugger.
I think there should be a "Napkin" one. Ooh, or one with "Kleenex" written on the sleeve. The graphic would be pretty funny, anyway.

Arte Luise Kunsthotel can be called "a gallery where you can spend the night." A different artist designed each room, resulting in an amazing mishmash of design concepts and types. It's a big concept for me to wrap my head around, so instead, I'll just put up some pictures.
Comic, by Kehl:

Flight - the myth, by Silke Vollmers (reminiscent of Tim's project in which everything is suspended):
Boogiewoogie, by Tine Benz (possibly inspired by Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie):

Peter Callesen does amazing cut-and-fold paperwork. In his words, he does "white paper cuts/sculptures inspired by fairytales and romanticism exploring the relationship between two and three dimensionality, between image and reality. I find the materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form as an almost magic process - or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is as well an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts. " His reasoning behind his work makes it that much more beautiful and fascinating.

What can you create in 15 minutes?
I think about it and feel like I could do something spectacular, but think about it a little more carefully and realize I have no idea what I would do, but it's a pretty amazing contest; it's like Iron Chef for design. I'll be interested to see the results and hope they post them all.

Reset Design asked several designers to design tattoos, then printed them on people. This was the result. Some weird,
some fun,
some artsy,
some terrifying.

Dismantling expensive stuff in the name of science:I love this kind of thing. Take something well designed apart, and see how it got to where it is. Core77 featured a segment called "Dissection," in which you find something neato, research all of its little bits, take it apart, and look at all of its little bits. A Motorola V.70 looks pretty much exactly as you would expect: lots of circle-pieces.

Hella good (oh man I couldn't resist, I'm so sorry.):Hella Jongerius's pattern Repeat, commissioned by Maharam, are designed "to create a single textile which would permit a suite of chairs around a table to be cousins – each unique but all related". She takes four seemingly unrelated patterns (stripes, polka dots, florals, houndstooth, etc) and unifies them all through a color theme. I encountered some this summer while working in the sample library, and this stuff is neat in person; the texture is just as interesting as the color and pattern.

Grandma-style teacups made no-skid:
I'm surprised that they're actually made to be distributed (by Tassa, produced for Umbra), and not just part of an art exhibit. It recalls the modernized Victorian jewelry I posted. It also brings that whole idea of art down to an attainable level, even if they are hell of expensive (which I don't doubt). Michelle Ivankovic hand-dipped the teacups (and saucers, creamers, and sugars) in bright, food-safe silicone. The most fun part of doing this would be visiting various thrift stores and antique shops for the cups, so I really hope that's how she got them. Plus, it's reusing: taking something you wouldn't use anymore and making it into something you would. (from mocoloco)

Neato video.
Process:

I wish I could output projects by doodling them in 3d space and printing them like that. The control over it is pretty impressive, though; i doubt i could make anything that resembled a chair just by drawing it in the air.

Before:

After:
It's a lamp that "blushes" in response to the pitch of a cell phone conversation. It's a pretty interesting concept: humanizing technology, responsive environments. Presumably the pitch of your voice gets higher when you're upset or excited, but being the shrill harpy I am, the lamp would be all pink all the time. which isn't so bad.

This is Anya Kivarkis's neato postmodern-ish take on jewelry:

It's a play on Victorian jewelry, using similar shapes and styles, but coated in resin and way cooler.
It reminds me of this chair that I was looking for online today; an acrylic sheet, bent into the approximate shape of a chair, with a formal-sitting-room-looking chair printed onto it. It's really neat, and I was going to blawg about it, but I couldn't find it.

How simple. Sieger Design's Alape washing table is nuts. It's just a spigot coming out of a table, pouring onto the table. Lovely for a public restroom or a half-bath, not so practical for a real bathroom. I wouldn't want to spit toothpaste on it, plus I would forget that the whole thing was a sink and try to put my stuff all over it.

Detail of the faucet running water on the table:

All of the political issues aside, this building is just silly:
It is the ironically named "House of Free Creativity," in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. You'll never guess what they keep inside.

Dumb:


This is a nice idea, how it's modeled after old mesopotamian pottery, and it looks so simple and uncluttered. Now think about holding it. Full of scalding hot tea. And trying to drink or pour from it. It's impractical. You would have to hold your wrist at such a dumb angle to avoid pouring it all down your front. The bulb handles look like they would feel nice in your hand just to hang onto while the mug's still warm but you're done with your beverage, but that's about it. And I'm not saying that the current ear-handle design of most coffee mugs is perfect, but it's definitely better. After considering the human body's interaction with products as we have been in studio, this just seems silly.
La Familia, Ole Jensen, www.normann-copenhagen.com.

This chair is pretty ugly.
According to the site, which is a wealth of information, it's polyester impregnated with resin, which was one of the materials I used in the last project. I feel like my case studies looked better than this, but I can appreciate the fact that this stuff gets unwieldy and smelly when you're working with it.

On the subject of the earth reclaiming civilization and the discussion in studio today, here are some great pictures of Detroit:

Once again, while some people would see it as depressing, I think it's lovely, and would really like to see it in person. It might be a little upsetting to see the city being overtaken if you've lived there all your life, or even worse, all its life (at least all its life as a big city), but not to this guy. I'm not even artsy, and I'd love to go take pictures there.

It sortof reminds me of this:

but not as terrifying.

Treehugger's timeline of Earth's recovery from human inhabitation if all of civilization was wiped out at once:
Some people might think this is creepy or depressing, but I am not one of those people. I think it's great, and would love to be alive to see it (logic isn't my strong point).

Ta-da: the first LEED certified home. Tom Kelly, who is interestingly enough a developer, built this house with all kinds of energy-saving features. It's a 2,000 sqft, "'net-zero energy use' home, meaning over the course of a year, its photovoltaic panels will track the sun and are projected to generate more electricity than the home will consume." I personally like the fact that there is no "lawn," per se, just rocks and shrubs. Treehugger had this picture:

Which is weird, because it's not at all of this house. But when I saw it, I got all excited, because it looked very Laura Ingalls Wilder.

(read about at Earth Advantage)