ICFF, which opened Saturday, is America's answer to the Milan Furniture Fair, a city-wide showcase of upcoming designs with plenty of late-afternoon drinks thrown in. (Sometimes the beer is in equal proportion to the booth visits.) Unlike Milan, which revolves on deal making among the established Italian manufacturers, ICFF is aswarm with young designers hoping to catch on. So it's pleasing to see the French designer Pierre Paulin, at age 82, in full stride. Within the last year he has created new work for Ligne Roset and Artifort, his client of more than 50 years. At ICFF, Magis is showing Paulin's new injection molded Flower Chair (above). Vladimir Kagan, also 82, occasionally shows up at design events, but as far as I know Paulin is the only prominent mid-century designer still in the mix.
Dutch designers are usually the brainy class clowns of design shows, with their ironic, off-kilter work. None has gained more attention in recent years than Hella Jongerius.
Tomorrow, on the opening day of ICFF, the Museum of Arts and Design will host the premier of a short documentary called Hella Jongerius: Contemporary Archetypes. Here's a sneak preview.
Favorite moment: Paola Antonelli gives her litmus test for good design: "If the subject were not in the world would I miss it?"
We all knew it was coming. With the opening today of InDisposed, the backlash against green orthodoxy is officially underway.
InDisposed, an exhibition in New York's SoHo neighborhood, opens on the eve of ICFF, the country's foremost design event, with more than a dozen design concepts that put an arty contemporary spin on disposable products. Jen Renzi and Dan Rubinstein, former House & Garden editors, organized the show to deflate "the eco-friendly design movement's tendency to pretentiousness--and, alas, intellectual laziness."
The show includes Fire Wall, a room divider that can be used as firewood by Situ Studio, a young Brooklyn firm.
Design Glut, the young masters of irony, created candlestrip, a candle in the form of a power strip.
One of the cleverest items can't be shown here, because it has no material form: Tobias Wong persuaded Paper magazine to let him guest edit 10 pages, and then dispose of them by putting them online.
The Web site for the ICFF, the furniture fair opening Saturday, contains an obscure nook where designers can post videos. For the most part you'll find the kind of boring, self-promotional stuff you might imagine: a glassblowing demonstration, Harry Smith of CBS testing out chairs, etc. But it also contains two seriously odd videos--strange to the point of disturbing--produced by Blu Dot, a Minneapolis firm known for sensible modern furnishings.
A man dressed as a squirrel assembles a flat-pack chair to electro-pop.
Eric, a jaunty doll with a cockney accent, impresses his Voldemort-like design professor by releasing a pack of silver monkeys.
The design world is a bit like Cher, the Alicia Silverstone character, in Clueless. Wrapped up for too long in baubles and bright pretty things, it has come to find a social conscience.
An early sign of mood change came two years ago when the Cooper-Hewitt in New York mounted "Design for the Other 90%," an exhibit of products that serve the needs of people living in developing countries, such as the Lifestraw water purifier, shown above.
Tomorrow the museum opens "Design for a Living World," which could be seen as a sequel to the earlier show. Shrewdly timed to coincide with this week's lead-up to ICFF, the country's premier design event, "Design for a Living World" addresses a topic that has come into sharp focus since the economic downturn: how to reinvent the egregiously inefficient and wasteful production and distribution of furnishings and other design goods.
The show, which was organized with the Nature Conservancy, is meant to demonstrate that products can, in theory, help to sustain the places and people that produced them. In the giddy days of Moss openings and Philippe Starck hotels nobody thought much about where things originated. Today the discourse of design is focused squarely on informed and responsible consumption.
Unlike "Design for the other 90%" which showed the work of mostly unknown designers and engineers, the new show goes for boldface names. The museum invited ten well-known designers to create ten sustainable products from ten places where the Conservancy works. All of them are prototypes, which is fitting for a show that is more about theory than the actualities of production.
Christien Meindertsma, a Dutch textile designer, used wool from a sustainable sheep ranch in Idaho to create a large knit rug made of modular parts parts, each one made from the yield of a specific sheep.
Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, made a cocktail dress and high heels out of Alaskan salmon skin, which fisheries normally discard.
Stephen Burks designed a tool made from Australian jamwood to be used by the local Noongar people to make and package a line of organic cosmetics.
Maya Lin created a bench from slices of sustainably harvested red maples on the banks of the Upper St. John River in Main.
Industrial designer Yves Behar worked with a woman's chocolate cooperative in Costa Rica to make packaging and a grating tool for the local cocoa industry.
Hella Jongerius made decorative vessels and plates from the traditional chicle latex harvested on the Yucatan Peninsula.
Abbott Miller, a partner at Pentagram who curate the show, designed furniture made from FSC certified plywood and hardwood from Bolivia.
Ted Muehling, the jewelry designer, carved ivory nut palms from the Micronesian island of Pohnpei into a necklace.
Kate Spade's New York design team worked with Bolivian craftspeople to create a collection of handbags made of sustainable wood, cotton and jipijapa, a fiber made of palm leaves.
Ezri Tarazi used raw bamboo stalks from China's Yunnan Province to create building materials and furnishings.
Read more about sustainable business practices in Fast Company's Ethonomics channel.
Americans are driving significantly less, despite the drop in gas prices over the last year. So concludes Nate Silver, a numbers cruncher named by Time magazine last month as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
In "The End of Car Culture," an article published in the new issue of Esquire, Silver argues that the 4% decline in per capita miles driven over the last year was caused by lifestyle as much as the wallet. It's no coincidence, he says, that the two cities with the biggest gains in housing prices over the last year--Seattle and Portland, Oregon--are known as alternative transportation meccas.
No doubt unemployment has reduced the amount of driving. I suspect the evolution of telecommuting has also taken a lot of cars off the road. After years of chatter about the virtues of working remotely, the home office may have finally reached a tipping point, with employers more fully accepting and new technology keeping workers connected. (An article in today's The New York Times suggests that Skype has popularized the entire field of videoconferencing.) In cities like Los Angeles, where traffic has gone from miserable to prohibitive, the home office is almost a necessity. That accounts for the surge of interest in backyard structures like the OfficePod (above).
The traditional American home is big on formal dining rooms and entranceways, but its arrangement is poorly suited to private desk work. In flusher times, homeowners would be more inclined to create a workspace by adding on or trading up. But in this economy a cheaper and more expedient option is to order a work shed, like the Kithaus (above) sold by Design Within Reach. (Prices start at $32,450.) They generally do not require permitting, and they can be installed weeks after making a down payment.
Five years ago this might have seemed an oddball solution, but the enormous publicity accorded prefab homes seems to have romanced the notion of a modern structure that arrives on a flatbed truck. Tiny prefab sheds like the Modern Cabana (above) have received a great deal of attention over the last year or so, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago.
The backyard office is particularly popular among women, who tend to do without much dedicated space of their own (unlike men, who have historically laid claim to dens). Ryan Grey Smith of Modern-Shed, a Seattle-based manufacturer of room-sized structures (above) that sell for $7,000 to $18,000, says that roughly 60% of the customer inquiries he receives are from women.
That walk across the backyard may be best commute you'll ever have.
In the 1950s Jonas Salk was working on a cure for polio in the basement of a Pittsburgh laboratory. Stymied and discouraged, he went to Assisi, Italy and wandered around a 13rd-century monastery. There, among the cloisters, he felt his mind unwind. Fresh lines of pursuit came to him, including the breakthrough that led to the vaccine.
Salk was convinced that the monastery had influenced his mind. So convinced, in fact, that he solicited the architect Louis Kahn to design the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in hopes that other scientists might benefit from serene surroundings.
Sixty years later Salk's hunch is now backed up by empirical evidence as new research in neuroscience hints at how our surroundings affect feelings and behavior. In the current issue of Scientific American Mind, Emily Anthes describes how ceiling height, colors and other design factors influence attention and creativity. Scientists are just beginning to address these questions, in part by studying changes in brain activity as subjects make their way through virtual reality rooms.
The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:
A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects--sofas, watches, etc.--subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we're more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, blue is the color.
Researchers at the University of Rochester asked a group of interior designers to mock up cocktail lounges in red, blue, and yellow. Subjects were invited to have a drink wherever they liked. Most gravitated to the yellow and red rooms, which proved to be the most socially active areas. But the participants in the blue rooms stayed longer, presumably because blue has a calming effect. (In earlier studies scientists found lower heart rates in blue rooms.)
Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor at the Carlson School of Management has found that ceiling height also affects brain function. High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail. "If you're in the operating room, maybe a low ceiling is better," she said. "You want the surgeon getting the details right."
Are we hard-wired to dislike minimal interiors? A joint study by MIT and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health suggests that clutter increases the "memorability" of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place. In other words, a generous scattering of objects generates a fondness for the place.
You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.
Visualization got a big boost during the political season from newspapers and networks. On March 24, CNN aired what it claimed was the largest ever tag cloud composed from President Obama's press conference that day.
If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.
Visualization has been used prominently, and to dazzling effect, at The New York Time s, where a collaboration of art directors and programmers turns masses of data into intuitive displays, like the interactive map of the swine virus shown above.
Another example: the Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system.
Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnishings) and helps create efficient new forms of buildings, food distribution and transportation.
For example, it's likely that New York and other major U.S. cities will experiment with systems that monitor traffic patterns in real time and manage the use of lanes and access accordingly. A project like that would hinge on our ability to map patterns as they happen, along with the alternatives and consequences. It's a big undertaking, but the benefits are considerable: In Stockholm a system that tracks the movement of every car has reduced carbon emissions by 25%.
Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.
You might think of visualization as the antithesis of Power Point, which sometimes seems to make us dumber. Six years ago, Edward Tufte, a Big Thinker in the field of information graphics, issued a 28-page pamphlet that dumped on Power Point as "a faux analysis" that "turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Visualization does the opposite: it reflects the complexity of the world in simple terms. It is a window onto the world, in all its digital complexity. Though of course data can be skewed in deceitful and insidious ways.
Visualization isn't just for RISD graduates. You can create your own word clouds at a new site called Wordle. Paste in a piece of text or enter a URL and Wordle creates a cloud of the most frequently occurring words.
Oddly enough, design thrived in the Great Depression. The age of breadlines and Hoovervilles gave us Charles and Ray Eames, Marcel Breuer and other designers who steered Americans to a more efficient way of living. It was a cleansing, bracing moment in which we sloughed off our Victorian inheritance and took modernism to heart.
Will a new style emerge from the current scarcity?
It's hard to imagine, given that much of the new architecture will be the unglamorous fulfillment of stimulus spending for new schools, hospitals, and transportation infrastructure–infertile ground for new design ideas.
Say goodbye to those grand shiny homes standing in splendid isolation. Architects are now more concerned with reworking existing structures than building new ones. Rather then razing and rebuilding, homeowners renovate. Factories and offices will be reworked for efficiency and sustainability. With suburbs languishing, planners and developers will favor infill.
Still, some kind of new aesthetic will come out of all this. Furniture happens so fast we're already seeing the first responses to the downturn. But architecture can take years to formulate, so it's harder to know what Downturn Décor might actually look here.
Here are a few possibilities.
Rooms will romance the dilapidated. An early indicator is Rough Luxe, a London hotel designed by Rabih Hage as the opposite of the high-living boutique hotel of the hedge fund era. It opened last year in the King's Cross neighborhood with artfully torn wallpaper, bare floorboards and chipped paint. To be sure, this is a theatrical expression of neglect which stands alongside luxuriant wallpaper and huge photographs of Italian palazzos. Nonetheless, it suggests that an anti-opulence may come into fashion.
Houses will shrink to a mini scale. One of the sleeper trends of the last year has been the proliferation of tiny shed-like structures, like the Kithaus sold by Design Within Reach. People who are reluctant or unable to trade up to a bigger house are using them as home offices, yoga studios and guestrooms. Plus, they're a form of instant gratification: tiny structures like the Micro Compact Home (above) arrive within weeks of the down payment, and the don't require contractors traipsing through your home.
Aside from these practical benefits, the super small home holds a picturesque appeal as a sanctuary or escape from the complications of everyday life. For any baby boomer with regrets about how their life path, the road not taken can arrive on a flatbed truck, and it takes just a few hours to assemble.
Architecture will go back to the farm. An emerging genre of contemporary homes reflect the humble virtues rustic structures, like the converted dairy house (above) by the British firm Skene Catling de la Peña. Like any trend, the rustic-building revival is a reaction against what came before--in this case the clean, hard-edged surfaces of modernism. That cabins and farmhouses would appeal in hard times is no surprise. With their heavy timber and stone walls, they convey solidity and reassurance at a time when those qualities are in short supply.
Is there altogether too much design out there? That's the assertion of Liz Kinmark and Kegan Fisher, a pair of young designers based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, who call themselves Design Glut.
The pair met two years ago at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair where, as Pratt students, they sold their own works from a retail section reserved for young designers. They came away from four days at the fair with a sickened sense of excess. "It felt like gluttony," Kinmark told me recently. "There were so many objects out there, and so little of it had a reason to exist. Design Glut was a term coined as a reflection of that moment in time."
Much of what they saw struck them as a needless reiteration of existing trends, like the seemingly endless versions of laser-cut furniture with baroque intricacy. "Of course there are good laser-cut pieces out there but it's just so overused," Fisher said. "So much stuff is made simply to put another product on the market."
Design Glut's premise is pitch perfect for this moment: All the shiny, fun design objects produced in the age of Irrational Exuberance now look superfluous as design shifts away from the consumer culture of the last few decades. Design's preoccupation with high-end furnishings seems particularly excessive in this interlude between the Milan Furniture Fair, which ended yesterday, and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, known ICFF, which opens in New York on May 16.
It may seem contradictory for Ms. Kinmark and Ms. Fisher to add their own designs to the abundance. They justify it by producing home furnishings and accessories that mock consumerism and respond to current economic issues with sardonic humor, as in the Dow Hanky (above) they released earlier this year with the downward zag of the Dow Jones industrial average over the last five years. "Fashion and design are about money and valuation, but nobody thinks about that," Kinmark said.
Another example: Design Glut designed an oil barrel pendant engraved with the price of oil on the day it was made. (A limited-edition version commemorates Jan. 2, 2008, the day oil reached $100 a barrel.)
"We see products as a way to convey messages," Kinmark said. "People have such a particular relationship with products, so you can convey messages that you can't in other mediums"
Design Glut will be showing their work at the Javits Center during ICFF, and at InDisposed, an exhibition of disposable products at Studio X.
![Child-using-LifeStraw[1]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2449/3545696387_6cbb1b9f1b_o.jpg)
Another example: Design Glut designed 
