At 9:40 a.m. on Thursday, a white van pulled over near the corner of 68th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. A cameraman armed with a telephoto lens watched from the corner. A video crew snooped from a rooftop. Half a dozen operatives on the street murmured discretely into walkie-talkies, calling each other "Hound Dog," "Crow's Nest," and other code names. Within minutes Andrew Haarsager, an interaction designer with the technology firm Tellart, removed a white steel chair from the van and placed it on the sidewalk. He crouched over to activate a Motorola cell phone with GPS software affixed to the underside of the seat, then skulked away.
Over the course of two days this week, Mono, an advertising firm based in Minneapolis, dropped off 25 Real Good Chairs, a $129 item designed and manufactured by Blu Dot. Whoever found the chairs was free to take them. The chairs were left outside the Apollo Theater on 125 Street (below), at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and atop the Highline, elevated park on the West Side, among other New York locations.
The recipients did not know that the video crew documented their snatch and get-away, sometimes trailing them for blocks. "I've never actually trailed anybody before," said Henry Joost, an executive producer for Supermarche, the video production firm. "The only thing I know about surveillance is from movies."
The 10 chairs equipped with GPS have their own twitter feeds updating their locations in real time. A Web site will display the drop point of each chair and its current whereabouts until the GPS batteries run out.
Some chairs have traveled surprising distances. A chair dropped Wednesday on the lower Bowery had migrated dozen or more blocks to Union Square by yesterday afternoon. And within a few hours a chair left on Central Park West showed up a couple of miles away in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Mono considered Twittering the drop locations in advance in the style of flashmob events, but decided against it for fear of drawing unmanageable crowds.
The drop-offs are an exercise in interactive marketing timed to the first anniversary of Blu Dot's Soho store, which opened Dec. 11, in the thick of the economic collapse. The company will show a short video documentary about the project at an anniversary party held in the store next month. "We want to be the friendly modernists," said Medora Danz, director of sales for Blu Dot. "We're Midwesterners and we want the showroom to reflect that. We want to emphasize that we take design seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously."
This weekend the Supermarche video crew will try to track down the chair's new owners for interviews. The GPS may lead them to a building or a stretch of buildings but not to individual dwellings. So they're planning to post leaflets asking for help. "It's going to be tricky," said Heather Burnikel, a Mono project leader. "That's the biggest mystery of this project: Will they talk to us?" Each chair comes with an 800 number and the promise of a second chair if the owner calls in.
The only hitch occurred Wednesday in Chinatown, where a chair sat in Cunfucius Plaza (above) for an hour and a half without gaining notice. The crew eventually twittered its location, and it was snatched almost immediately. Minutes later a woman showed up asking passersby if they'd seen a chair sitting around anywhere.
Yesterday the crew on West 68th Street conducted themselves with utmost caution, suspecting that chair stalkers might have sussed out their location. "A treasure hunt mentality has taken hold," said Danz. "We have fans who are willing to cyber-stalk us."
Meanwhile, the crew was watching for potential takers. A handful of passersby double taked, but walked on. Danz spotted a hipster in a hoodie and porkpie hat approaching. "He'll be the one," she predicted. Sure enough, he stopped and sat on the chair, but unaccountably strolled off. At 10:23 a.m. a man with long hair and an army jacket abruptly picked up the chair and carried it into a Christian Science reading room. Moments later he left and walked west without it. A crew member went in to investigate on the pretense of needing to use the ladies room, but did not see it. "It's so cloak and dagger," Burnikel said. Within moments the chair showed up on the Web site, joining the constellation of other chairs loose in the city.
Here's one for the annals of experimental marketing: On Wednesday and Thursday a white van carrying a stack of powder-coated Real Good chairs by Blu Dot, a Minneapolis design firm started by three college friends, will patrol Manhattan neighborhoods dropping the chairs one-by-one on the street. No promotional material or sales pitch will accompany the drop-offs. The chairs will be free for the taking. But what the adoptive owners won't know is that Blu Dot will be watching them.
It sounds like one of the unconventional strategies from the pages of Free, Chris Anderson's book about the unlikely new routes from product to revenue. In fact, the event was planned to mark the first anniversary of Blu Dot's Soho store, with a nod to freegan culture.
"The idea came out of the curb mining culture in New York and other cities," said Michael Hart, co-founder of Mono, a Minneapolis advertising firm that developed the project with Blu Dot. "What's the best way to get great design out to more people? You give it away."
Blu Dot isn't the first designer to follow that strategy. Three years ago Tom Dixon, the influential London designer, handed out 500 of his polystyrene chairs to a frenzied crowd in Trafalgar Square. The next year, in the same location, he gave away a 1,000 energy-efficient lightbulbs of his own design.
When Dixon handed over his goods they vanished forever into the world. By contrast, Blu Dot will be tracking its chairs as avidly as air traffic controllers. A video crew stashed in the van--the design world's version of Candid Camera--will capture passersby as they circle and inspect. Each chair will be equipped with GPS, so as soon as they're claimed the Blu Dot crew can begin tracking their whereabouts. The location of each chair will be shown in real time on a Web site. (It may also be projected on to the wall of the Soho store.) As if that weren't enough documentation, each chair will have its own twitter feed updating its movements.
If all goes according to plan, the video crew will use the GPS to find the chairs a few months from now. They'll knock-on doors and interview the owners--homeless people, Apartment Therapy readers, whoever they turn out to be--about why they took the chairs and how they use them. "Where does great design end up in New York? What sort of a person invites these chairs into their homes?" said Hart. "It's all an experiment, but in our experience consumers appreciate brands that come up with new ways of interacting."
Like everyone else, the design field braced for the fallout from the financial meltdown. At the time, some of us argued that good things could come from a period of constraint and reexamination. The consumer culture of design had become overwrought, with limited edition candleholders that sell for $2,700. For all its pain, the downturn gave design a chance to revitalize by taking on the pressing problems of infrastructure, energy efficiency, and transit. Who better than designers to come up with inventive answers to complex problems?
To be sure, green design has produced some unqualified successes, like the California Academy of Sciences (above) by Renzo Piano. But the first wave of designs associated with the new efficiency is also being met with some murmurs of disappointment. In our zeal to be conscientious, are we creating designs that fit our notions of what green should be, but which don't actually look good? To put it another way: Is virtuous design always good design?
In an article published in the Sunday New York Times, curator and critic Alice Rawsthorn lays into the new fleet of electric cars. "Can you think of a better opportunity to wow us with an amazingly seductive object than a brand-new type of car? Probably not," she wrote. "Why then do so many electric cars look so boring? Or, if not boring, ugly?"
The Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf (above), she said, "look dishearteningly like the dullest of Nissan and Chevrolet's gas guzzlers."
The Tesla Roadster Sport "isn't quite foxy enough." The plug-in i-MiEV from Mitsubushi (above) "looks chillingly like a Smart car that's been pigging out at Krispy Kreme."
Does the new plug-in mark the end of the car as a romantic icon? In Detroit, form always followed fantasy, with exaggerated tail fins and hubcaps gaudy with chrome. It's hard to imagine people collecting the new electric cars as they do vintage Mustangs and MGs. They may be worthy advances, but they hardly quicken the pulse.
In some cases, the urgency to appear green may actually stand in the way of good design. That's the argument Kriston Capps makes in a recent issue of American Prospect. Capps reports that Robert A.M. Stern was hired to design parts of the 2010 Olympic village in Vancouver, but the city fired him when his scheme didn't look sufficiently green. A local firm, Arthur Erickson Corp., filled in with a mandate to focus squarely on function and sustainability. As a result, Capps says, the village structures have "a default 'green' look to them: blocky, all glass, covered in matted foliage. It looks as though the developers simply forgot to design the place."
I suspect that a lot of mediocre design, particularly furniture and accessories, is making its way into the marketplace simply on the dubious claim of sustainability. Is the use of, say, a recyclable metal a raison d'être, or should a table or chair be judged by its appearance and day-to-day function?
Green design may simply be going through an unfortunate adolescent phase as it evolves its way into the new era of efficiency. In truth, it's hard to object to design that emphasizes function and responsibility after so many years of wanton styling from designers like Studio Job,Marcel Wanders and Philippe Starck. But it would be good to have a eye-popping piece of new work to rally around.
Sir Terence Conran, the designer and founder of the Conran Shop, has made preparations to design a dozen hotels and resorts in Cuba.
Sir Terence, who revolutionized the sale and marketing of home furnishings in the sixties and seventies, has applied for a series of 75-year leases with his development partners, he said in an interview yesterday at the Conran Shop in New York. The projects are on hold until the U.S. lifts travel restrictions to Cuba. "To build tourist facilities, you need investment," he said.
The projects include golf courses which, he said, are made possible by the development of turf that can be irrigated with salt water. A fresh water system would be prohibitively expensive in Cuba, he explained.
What would a modernist Cuba look like? The crumbling Communist outpost had a brief mid-century modern period shortly after the revolution, the remains of which Sir Terence has found moldering in and around Havana. But his main impression, not surprisingly, is of abject poverty. "They get by by smoking cigars, singing and dancing," he observed.
Business executives love stability and the cold imperatives of logic. Ambiguity gives them fits. Designers, by contrast, can't abide the status quo. "That tension never goes away between inventing the new and preserving the old," Sam Lucente, vice president of design for Hewlett-Packard, said yesterday at a panel discussion conducted by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum during its National Design Week. "It's like navigating no man's land," he said.
The panel, entitled "The Business of Design," addressed ways to integrate designers, and design thinking, into organizations that usually resist change. Here are some of their observations:
The most effective designers know instinctually how to navigate bureaucracies. They handle matters "often in subversive ways," Lucente said. "They quietly figure out how to end run the system and get things done. They know how to work it."
It helps for a designer to have multiple interests. "The people who are going to flourish are the schizophrenic ones," said Bill Moggridge (shown at left in the photo above), co-founder of IDEO. "A lot of people at IDEO have degrees in different areas than they work in. You have to be great at one thing, but interested in working with people in different areas." His term for this personality type: "cross-dressers." Example: Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfus both designed theatrical sets before turning to industrial design.
Design thinking works best when integrated. Engineers start with technology. MBAs start with funding. Designer start with people. The trick is to get interdisciplinary teams to raise their collective I.Q. by working in the overlap of those three areas. "That's where innovation flourishes," said Moggridge.
PowerPoint is the enemy. The kind of discourse associated with Power Point presentations, with bulleted observations marshaled in support of an argument, tends to be team divider, not a unifier. “What organizations are good at is debating,” said Jeanne Liedtka, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. “Debating very rarely leads to real solutions.” That’s because debates tend to revolve around data and examples drawn from the past. Design thinking should be about future possibilities.
Be stupid often, but early. Executives often harbor the
unrealistic ambition of being right 100% of the time. A few stupid
mistakes can actually make you smarter, in the same way that physical
exertion rounds you into shape. For obvious reasons, mistakes are less
costly if they're committed early in the process.
You don't have to try very hard to spot the architecture students on a college campus. They're the ones with the carefully considered shoes (and artful eyewear). It's easy to see why architects are so selective about their footwear: What are shoes, after all, but mini buildings for your feet? Design and fashion are kissing cousins, and moving closer all the time, so it makes sense that a group of well-known architects have begun designing shoes, especially since the economic slowdown may have left them with spare time. Though it's hard to say whether these shoes are full-square design efforts, vanity projects or glorified licensing agreements.
Frank Gehry and his son, Alejandro Gehry, an artist, collaborated on a foppish two-tone boot for the high-end French shoemaker J.M. Weston. The boot is based on a 19th-century design for Prince Albert, though it looks like the kind of thing Keith Richards might have worn in swinging London.
Last year Melissa, an eco-conscious Brazilian shoe label, introduced an all-rubber high heel by Zaha Hadid with the same swooping, futuristic lines as her recent Star Trek-like furniture.
Hadid also designed limited-edition boots for Lacoste with a tail that entwines the ankle--a serpentine version of Crocs. In both cases Hadid transferred the blobby design forms made possible by rapid prototyping to shoes.
Rem Koolhaas's nephew, Rem D. Koolhaas, left the architecture field six years ago to start a shoe company with Galahad Clark, scion of the Clarks shoe family. Their brand, United Nude, produces shoes "inspired by an architectural idea or an existing design object, like a chair." There is at least a passing resemblance between the metal foot of the famous aluminum office chair by Charles and Ray Eames and the heel of their Eamz shoe shown above.
Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, creator of several versions of the Air Jordan, worked in architecture until age 28, when he Joined Nike as in-house architect.
Marloes ten Bhömer, a London-based fashion designer, may be worth mentioning because of her architectural sensibility. Her Beigefoldedshoe (above) is made from a single piece of folded leather with a stainless steel heel.
Thirty years ago, in the badass seventies, the warehouse loft was cutting-edge real estate. The loft was then the height of bohemian cool; now it seems tame and utterly conventional. The conversion of offbeat industrial spaces--designers call it ‘adaptive reuse’--has moved on to more adventurous ground as architects and developers try to preserve the past and keep building materials out of landfills. As these five projects illustrate, the art lies not in what’s removed but in what industrial memory is preserved, and how it’s woven among new materials.
Architects Brian Bell and David Yocum, principals of bldgs, found this abandoned repair shop and car parts warehouse in an industrial backwater of Atlanta. Their renovation is based on the notion that a decaying repair shop has its own form of beauty. They converted it to a studio for their firm and an apartment they call Villa de Murph without losing the paint-chipped cement block walls and rusted canopy. Inside is a courtyard with a fireplace, a table that seats 18, a glass-walled studio looking onto the courtyard and an apartment with skylights in a corrugated metal roof.
The Turtle Creek Pump House was built in 1915 to supply water to the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas. It was bought at auction in 2000 by a neighboring couple and converted to a gallery and guest house by Cunningham Architects with plantings by Julie Bargman of D.I.R.T Studio. Steel benches were made from old electrical panels; a well-head was turned into a cocktail table; the old concrete reservoirs were replumbed as rough-hewn fountains.; 70-year-old broken concrete slabs form stepping stones in a garden path.
The owner of a penthouse loft in a downtown Manhattan building turned this water tank, once used to feed the building’s sprinkler system, into a retreat for reading and zoning out in front of skyline views. Messana O’Rorke Architects rehabbed the cylindrical cast-iron tank, most notably by blowtorching a hole for a 12-foot window and lining the interior with sheetrock and oak flooring.
Behold the the mother of all rehabs: Over the course of three decades the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill converted an abandoned cement factory with more than 30 silos and enormous engine rooms into his home and office, with a cavernous space for lectures, exhibitions and concerts occupying the largest of the former silos.
Plans for a national design center to help alleviate rural poverty will be solidified when 60 designers, corporate leaders, foundation heads, and journalists meet next month for the 2009 Aspen Design Summit. The event, sponsored by the AIGA and Winterhouse Institute, is a strategy session for the social design movement.
The prospective design center will be based in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest areas in the country. The county was chosen because it already hosts a number of similar efforts, including Project M,Teach for America and Rural Studio, a group started by the late Samuel Mockbee to help Auburn students design and build structures for poor communities in Western Alabama, including the Harris House shown above.
The center would serve as a collaborative hub and a laboratory for design ideas that could be used in Alabama or elsewhere, according to William Drenttel, a founder of the Winterhouse Institute and editorial director of Design Observer. "If ever there was a place where synergy might occur, this is it," Drenttel said. "For example, Rural Studio is planting a vegetable garden at its headquarters. HERO (Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization) is planting a vegetable garden on the backside of main street. It wouldn't take a lot to create a food initiative." The center might also collaborate on infrastructure for health and education, house students working on local projects and direct design tourists to local works.
A dozen or so designers, including John Bielenberg (above), founder of Project M, will detach from the main group next month to develop a concept and business model for the center. "We're trying to create a fleshed out strategic outline with enough initial work that we can actually make something happen in 24 months," Drenttel said.
The Aspen summit, which is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, will also explore ways in which designers might help a UNICEF project to make classrooms safer and more conducive to learning and how designers might aid sustainable alternatives to the U.S. food industry. Participants include Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, Robert Fabricant, vice president of Frog Design, and Allan Chochinov, editor of Core77.
Four years ago Paola Antonelli curated a collection of emergency shelters, gas masks, and security bollards for a MoMA exhibition called "Safe: Design Takes On Risk." The show demonstrated how thoroughly 9/11 had galvanized the design field. Since then, our collective fear has shifted from terrorism to biology: Our nightmares now center on ebola, swine flu, and pandemic panic. So long Bin Laden. Hello hot zone.
On Tuesday, a diverse group of creative professionals--an illustrator, a sound designer, a set designer, a game designer, and architects, among others--met for the first of eight weekly sessions during which they will each develop a design for quarantine, the safe house of our bio-terror era. The results will be shown in March at Storefront for Art and Architecture, a gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Quarantine is an ancient practice, according to the project brief, "yet it has re-emerged as an issue of urgent biological, political, and even architectural importance in our era of global trade, bio-engineering, and mass tourism."
The project has an open source aspect, with readers invited to submit their own designs online. To encourage participation, Manaugh and Twilley will post their research as they go, including interviews with a biosafety consultant, the head of the American Public Health Organization, the plant health and quarantine officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, and Thomas Mullen, author of The Last Town on Earth, an historical novel set in a quarantined village during the 1918 flu outbreak.
The quarantine tanks with the most prominent place in the public imagination are surely the handful of modified airstream trailers used by NASA to isolate astronauts after the Apollo missions. An iconic photo of that era shows President Nixon chatting with the Apollo 11 crew aboard the U.S. Hornet after the first moon landing. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin cluster around the small trailer window, smiling at Nixon standing somewhat awkwardly outside. What became of those trailers? The one used to quarantine Apollo 12 was recently found at a fish farm in Marion, Alabama. "It's like finding a Rembrandt in a yard sale," said Al Whitaker, a NASA spokesman. "There aren't going to be any more of these."
Maybe Barry Bergdoll should have come to the opening of his museum show dressed as the Grim Reaper. In Home Delivery, MoMA's show last summer, Bergdoll recalled more than 100 years of failed efforts to make prefabricated homes a workable proposition. Bergdoll offered no prediction for the much-hyped modernist prefabs of today, but the show by implication cast doubt on their feasibility.
The dream of shining minimalist prefabs rolling off assembly lines and whisked to their sites on flatbed trucks has soured over the last few years as architects struggled to fulfill the promise of cheap alternatives to conventional housing. By the time installation and finishing work is done, most established prefabs cost $300 to $400 a square foot--no less than a custom home built by a frugal architect and contractor.
The prefab industry received demoralizing news last May when Michelle Kaufmann closed her studio. She had been a darling of design editors, and her prefabs--the Glidehouse, Breezehouse, mkLotus, and mkSolaire--are among the most visible on the market. If she can’t make it, who can?
Now it looks like Kaufmann's designs have a sponsor. Last week, Blu Homes, a start-up homebuilder based outside Boston, bought Kaufman’s designs and will begin manufacturing them next yearat their factory.
Prefab companies normally work one of two ways: they manufacture the largest boxes allowed on a truck or they make walls and ceilings to be assembled on site. Either way, shipping is cumbersome and expensive, and the houses can never be more than, say, 600 miles from the factory.
Blu Homes says it has invented a system that allows for homes of about $150 a square foot delivered anywhere in the country, or even abroad. It already offers a handful of designs developed in collaboration with RISD, including a 1,400-square-foot prefab for $200,000 (shown above). The price includes shipping and foundation work, but not utility hook-ups and permitting costs. Their first home has just been finished (the company has also completed nearly a dozen commercial buildings).
The crux of Blu Homes’ innovation: Instead of loading the bulk of a home onto a truck, the company trucks a series of flat-packed wood and metal sheets, in widths of up to 22 feet, which unfold on site. The folded components reduce shipping costs and assembly time, according to the company. “They basically pop-up,” said Michele Perry, a Blue Homes spokesperson. “The old-fashioned way of doing it was like a gingerbread house. The Blu Homes way is more like an erector set. We think our method is the future of factory built homes.”
The fate of prefab may reside more with finances than with fabrication. “Blu Homes may well have developed a revolutionary system, but technical expertise, although advantageous, has never proven to be a guarantee of commercial success in the prefab business,” said Michael Sylvester, publisher of fabprefab.com, a clearinghouse of information about contemporary prefabs. “The current salvation of prefab will be a return to rational mortgage credit markets.”
