When rapid prototyping becomes cheap and ubiquitous, everyone will get a chance to realize their craziest dreams for products. The results should be...interesting. And you can bet you'll see more projects like this jewelry by Joshua DeMonte.
DeMonte created these when he was a student at Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art--which is presumably when he had free, unlimited access to a rapid prototyping machine. He writes:
My jewelry objects mimic ancient architectural elements activating the space surrounding the body and altering the viewers perception of the wearer. My work has replaced the traditional embellishments of jewelry objects with the details of traditional architectural form. The objects have become jewelry that have defined architectural space around the body, altering our perception of the figure.
Heh--"Activating the space" and "altering our perception of the figure." That's design-speak for: My stuff is ginormous!
Looks like the dude got his head caught in the space shuttle toilet seat. The rest of the stuff looks like wedding cake decoration that was left in a hot car. WOOF!
The three high-cheekboned lads above aren't in a Danish pop group. They're all big-name product designers, and they've joined to form the new firm KiBiSi.
In the picture, from left to right, are: Jens Martin Skibsted, founder of Biomega, which makes some of the most beautiful bikes in the world; Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG architects, a firm that's had a meteoric rise in the last couple years; and finally, Lars Holme Larsen, founder of Kilo Design.
All three have known each other for years--the Danish design scene is still pretty small, after all. It makes sense that they'd form a joint venture: We've seen for some time that clients are eager to get a suite of services, surrounding a single project. For example, when Coke rolls out a new soda machine, it incorporates graphics, product design, and environmental design (kiosks, show booths, etc). Some design firms have begun offering services to suit those sprawling projects--but the results have usually been hackneyed. (Here's a free tip: DO NOT hire advertising agencies to do architecture--I'm looking at you, Microsoft and Coke.) Hopefully, these three genuine talents from disparate fields will be able to produce something better.
Naturally, the three of them have excellent Rolodexes, which they capitalized on for a series of products launching in 2010:
Headphones with leather-covered ear pieces:
Bespoke chairs for a new housing development in Copenhagen that BIG is designing, called 8 House:
Another set of headphones launching in 2010, and produced by AIAIAI:
A series of bikes, designed for Puma, and continuing on Biomega's brilliant early design for bike with an integrated cable lock (visible in the second row, on the left):
We look forward to the day when American product designers are treated like rock stars too. In the meantime, you can be a groupie over at the official KiBiSi site.
Bless the Web team over at Mint.com for this new infographic, detailing their shopping indices in the run-up to the coming Black Friday. Mint's users input their spending habits on the site, and the anonymized data has yielded lots of interestingresults. The latest is about Black Friday sales, they're predicting that this year should be pretty strong.
The bottom two graphs show sales figures among mass-market and luxury retailers, gathered from Mint's own records of consumer spending. Both are well over the moribund stats they posted in 2008.
But maybe the most helpful of the three graphs is the first one. Mint looked at their users' spending at several major retailers, and used that to calculate an average spend per user. The dotted lines show the trend in 2008; the solid line shows the trend in 2009. In 2008, the average spend was flat or declining. In 2009, things are trending back up.
Now, economists have reached a broad consensus that consumer-spending is a pretty dicey way to rescue us from a recession--it's better to invest, and let innovation create more jobs. Nonetheless: American Consumer, to the rescue!
Fresh off of a landmark exhibition at MoMA, furniture-designer Ron Arad is rounding on another milestone: In January, he'll complete The Design Museum Holon, in central Israel.
Arad was born in Israel but made his career in London. Though trained as an architect at London's Architectural Association in the 1970s--a hot house period that also saw Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas studying there--his furniture business took off first in the 1980s, after Jean-Paul Gaultier bought one of his chairs, made from the gutted seating of a car. He's toyed with architecture since then, but has never built anything approaching the scale of the Holon museum.
It's hard to miss the fact that the building looks like the love child of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim New York, and a Richard Serra sculpture. The latter similarity goes beyond looks, too: The building is clad in five twisting bands of cor-ten steel, the same stuff that Serra uses in his pieces. It's intended to be the center piece of a 16-year urban revitalization for the tiny city, which lies on the coast south of Tel-Aviv. It's neighbors will include the National Cartoon Museum, theaters, and a libraries.
It would be fun to be a fly on the wall when the famously prickly Serra first gets wind of this one.
A rendering of the building, which gives you a better sense of the overall design:
Diller Scofidio + Renfro has completed another stage in their massive overhaul of Lincoln Center: A new home for the famed Julliard School.
The new 45,000-square-foot development occupies the upper floors of the building that houses the recently completed Alice Tully Hall. Apropos of a school for the performing arts, the space puts all of its inhabitants on display, like a fish tank or a stage (depending on your perspective).
Maybe the best example is the main public space, a huge set of stairs that double as seating--which face out onto Broadway and turn the social life inside the building into a living tableaux:
And from across the street, the drama rises. A glass-walled dance studio looks cool enough from the inside...
... but actually, the best feature is the outside. The dance studio itself hangs from the underside of the building, and creates what amounts to a picture box and a free show for passersby:
The superb detailing throughout:
The beautiful, monolithic box office:
The cleverly designed public benches outside. Note how the backrest of the lower-level seats becomes the seatpan for the higher levels:
Maybe these days the rich are less rich--but there are still enough filthy, stinking loaded people out there to buy outrageously priced gifts, as Yatzer's round-up of ultra-luxurious doodads attests. A few of our favorites: Aurumania's $120K gold-plated, diamond-encrusted track bike (above).
Bless's $15K fox-fur hammock:
And the comparatively bargain-basement $6K Bang & Olufsen Beosound 5. Hey, something has to go in the kid's room, right?
Designer Konstantin Grcic is everywhere these days. Last week, there was news of his first American retrospective--which we gave you a sneak peak at here. Today, he's offering a brilliant collection of inspiring designs, in an online slideshow. If you're at all interested in cutting-edge design, check it out.
Meanwhile, this Thursday, in a show he curated for the Sepentine Gallery in London, Grcic's going in a completely different direction.
Design Real highlights the hyperlogical: Rather than presenting sheer design porn, the pieces on display will range from laptop batteries to airplane cargo containers to artificial hearts to welding helmets. In other words, stuff where the form is pure function. As The Timeswrites:
Rather than exhibiting the most beautiful, innovative,
eco-responsible or whatever product of each type, Mr. Grcic has chosen
the most eloquent one. The computer is the XO1 educational laptop
designed by One Laptop Per Child for children in developing countries.
"I couldn't show any other computer, not even an Apple, because the
story behind OLPC is so strong," he explained.
Similarly he chose
the battery of the Tesla Roadster electric sports car over the vehicle
because he was intrigued by how the recent investment in developing
cell phone batteries has succeeded in producing one that is small and
powerful enough to move a car.
On Thursday the show's site will go live, stocked with backstories for each object.
We'll bring you an update then. In the meantime, seriously, check out Grcic's primo stash of design porn, over at Wallpaper*.
A new icon has risen in Chicago: Studio Gang Architects have completed major construction on the 82-story Aqua tower. It's already being hailed as a masterwork for the young firm, which previously has made it's name on excellent, small-scale buildings. And, as the Chicago Tribunereports, it's a milestone for women in architecture, the tallest building designed by a female-owned firm, and the first edifice by Chicago's Jeanne Gang, 45, of Studio Gang Architects. The story continues:
Aqua also is a real estate miracle: Its financing documents were signed in late August 2007--just before the credit crunch hit it. Had the tower been delayed by 60 to 90 days, says the building's architect-of-record and co-developer, Jim Loewenberg, it might never have been built.
None of this would matter without Gang's singular design, whose three chief components are hotel space (for now, without an occupant) on floors 4 through 18, apartments on floors 19 through 52 and condominiums from floors 53 to 81. There are also shops, parking and townhouses.
Essentially, then, Aqua is a residential skyscraper, a place to live (or sleep) rather than a place to work. And it fully takes advantage of the aesthetic freedom afforded by that identity, which means it doesn't have to be tidy and buttoned-down, like a corporate headquarters.
All that came at a relatively cheap price: The tower's signature feature are the undulating balconies, which because of their curving, bulging shapes, cantilever anywhere from 2 to 12 feet outwards, thus affording city views that would otherwise have been impossible to appreciate. They cost a scant 1.5% of the building's $325 million construction cost.
And that, above all else, makes Studio Gang worth watching: Architectural flamboyance at a reasonable price is always a rarity; flamboyance that increases the bottom line is almost unheard of.
After a year of debates and inflammatory rhetoric, we're finally nearly the 11th hour for health-care reform: Over the weekend, the U.S. Senate voted to begin hearing debates on a bill designed to bring health care to the uninsured.
The most bruising fights lie ahead, since the ensuing debate will shape the final bill--but this was an important procedural milestone.
So given that, today we bring you a spectacular health-scare graphic, designed by Ben Fry, a demi-god in the discipline. "The Cost of Getting Sick" illustrates exactly where we spend all out money, in managing chronic disease.
The data is drawn from both 500K records from GE's databases and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, a blue-chip study of medical expenses.
Though the graph looks simple, it belies a mammoth amount of information. Each section of the pie chart is devoted to a different chronic disease, from hypertension to depression. And each section has four--count 'em--data elements. The height represents the yearly cost of managing an average person's condition; the width represents the total cost to the system, on all those people combined. The color coding inside the section tells you how much cost is borne by insurances companies, versus individuals. Meanwhile, what's even cooler: A slider at the bottom lets you look at the data by age.
From simply a data-visualization POV, it's amazing stuff. Ben Fry is no joke.
But with respect to the current debates, the graphic highlights a couple important points. You'll see, using the slider, that the highest chronic health-care costs occur among the elderly. No surprise there. But the elderly also happen to be covered by Medicare.
So why is it so important to cover more people with health insurance? Simply because if you don't maximize the people participating in an insurance plan, you can't achieve the economies of scale required to lower prices, system wide. And if health-care costs continue to rise, our economy is facing disaster.
The uninsured are largely either young or middle aged--they don't pay for insurance, but when they do get sick, it tends to be catastrophic, and extremely expensive. To manage that risk, you need those people inside some sort of insurance system.
They might not look like a big consideration in the graph above, but really, the debate right now centers on them.
