V&A in South Kensington

As a graduate student of art & design in London at St. Martin's School of Art, following exhibitions and shows at the Victoria & Albert Museum was a requirement. A requirement without saying, meaning of course, you must know everything going on there without being told you must attend to its programs.

In recent years, the V&A as it became simply known, has become a friendly museum that caters to the taste and sensibilities of a paying audience. It wasn't always this way and had gone through a transformation to become a exhibition space appealing to popular tastes. V&A was never a high arts museum like the Tate or the National Gallery of Art. Within its walls exhibitions of design, clothing, industrial design, graphics and crafts were assembled.

However, in the early 80s when I was attending grad school, the museum was known for its extensive survey exhibitions of design and defining the trends in architecture, furniture, graphic and industrial design. It was at the V&A I first experienced the Memphis Group of Italian designers like Ettore Sottsas from Milano. I also saw annual exhibitions of industrial design of young British designers who went onto design groundbreaking commercial products like Macintosh computers, iPods, and iPhones.

As one V&A employee remarks in the video below, 20 and 25 years ago when I was living in London, the museum did not try to reach out to the public and instead required that you grasps its importance. That was true of many British libraries and museums in that time.

Sneakerhead Design Obsession

Design and the obsession for the object of desire shows up in all kinds of places and with all different types and classes of people. Recently, I heard about a family with an autistic son who is fascinated by the "bumpers" in films -- those graphical lead-ins that tag the movie with the Hollywood studio or indie production company identity.

This fall the magazine I work for won an Emmy for this story by my man Steve Marsh about a Sneakerhead Heaven in North Minneapolis, where those who see art in the design of street footware flock for the latest releases of rare editions of their desirable objects.

Football As It Should be Played

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

POV Placemaking

In Melbourne, Australia Axel Peemoller developed a way-finding-system for Eureka Tower Carpark while working for Emery Studio a placemaking, branding, communications, publishing and graphics firm. Peemoller's distorted letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position or while driving out of the ramp to direct your exit. This graphic design project won several international design awards.

Jam Design

Design is about learning from the materials and tools given to you in nature and crafting them into something amazing.

Julie Taylor makes jam but, of course, to say that is an litote. She makes fruit butters, marms, fruit oils, syrups, conserves, candied peels, fruit glazes for poultry and fish, and there is almost no end to what her creation might become in the kitchen or elsewhere.

In this video a statement by Taylor stands out, "Artisans do the work."

Taylor handcrafting and dedicated approach to the science of fruit, flavor, and natures combinations of elements brings art and design to her creations. Ultimately, as she suggested in her response to a customer who didn't want to eat her jam because it is so beautiful, she knows the temporary and passing nature of creation, "It's just food so just eat it and have good memories."

Generational Shift

Alternative energy is the answer to John McCain's idiotic call for offshore drilling along California Coast and Florida. Can a person be any more blunt than that?

The problem is that at his stubborn age he cannot imagine a future without all the entrenched dependencies and harmful addiction's the Arizona Senator fought to maintain all his life. Oil rigs. Grid electricity powered by nuclear. Automobile built on the combustion engine. McCain is not going to give these things up without a fight.

So this is going to be McCain's line of attack on his opponent Barack Obama? Line the coasts with oil rigs and use taxpayer money to subsidize big oil exploration! That's not a solution to the problem that is a continuation of the problem.

Philippe Starck has designed a miniature rooftop windmill, or wind turbine if you will, that will provide 80% of your home's energy. And it costs about a thousand bucks. A home owner can mount it on his rooftop in roughly 15 minutes and he's producing rather than merely consuming electricity. It's kindalike pirating cable TV.

The Rain Water harvesting is another concept that will, more than likely, piss McCain off. In the northeast regions of Brazil, one of the largest rain water harvesting projects in existence with government using it to increase moisture levels for urban greenry and bring up the ground water table and while it might require treatment before drinking it can certainly be diverted for gray water purposes.

On a neighborhood or association level these systems could radically change our dependency on water and turn back the privatization of water into the hands of a few as documented in FLOW: FOR THE LOVE OF WATER which probably has McCain grumbling about Hollywood celebrities who think they can change the world.

Alright, so it really is going to take a whole new generation to bring about change. Might as well start now.

Blobwall

Blobwall, made from a lightweight honeycomb material developed by Panelite, is “a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system made of a low-density, recyclable, and impact-resistant polymer.”

Designed by Venice Beach, California architect Greg Lynn, the idea originated while playing with his children and he began wondering how he might recycle his children's outgrown plastic toys to build outdoor architectural and reusable structures.

The elemental unit of blogwall is an innovative redefinition of the brick into a lightweight interconnectable object made of colorful plastic and reinterpreted into modular elements. Lynn presented the Blobwall Pavilion in Miami in December 2007 as a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system built of the recycled polymer forms.

The blob unit, or “brick,” is a robotically cut, mass-produced, hollow tri-lobed shape formed through rotational molding in collaboration with Machineous. located in Los Angeles performs precision multi-axis cutting using robotic arm technology.

The Intimate Goes Public

Everyone start text messaging!

While the cell phone SMS message and "bluing" have become contemporary social networking phenom, there is something slightly tantalizing about bridging the intimacy of a two-way discourse and throwing it up onto twenty-foot thought bubbles in the heart of Paris or New York.

TXTual Healing is the concept of New York public artist Paul Notzold and deploys mobile phones and SMS to project private inner voices in massively public spaces with a degree of anonymity.

The way it works is that Notzold projects photo images from a hotdog vendor cart with a Mac laptop and digital projector on the side of buildings. Passerby's send SMS messages via their phone that Notzold, using proprietary software, places inside thought or dialog bubbles as you might see in a comic strip or a Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney. All very automated and instant public messaging.

This concept takes very well to a city like Paris, where the private affairs dialog is often scandalously public proportion (witness newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy and his highly public martial affairs) and concepts like bluing (text messaging strangers in bars or on the street using bluetooth capabilities) are normative.

Notzold projects dialog bubbles onto the side of a residential multi-story apartment building. As street pedestrians enter text into the dialog bubbles, it is as if we are witness to intimate conversations between apartment dwellers in the building.

Roughly translated from French: Woman: "...good luck with all the things which you trusted in this moment!"

French Man: "I just want to dance with you, just to feel the heat with you..."

In Austin Texas, Notzold projected a large decal-like image of an American Flag on the University of Texas campus building. UT Police shut down the performance after a couple of massagers wrote the ‘n’ word along with asian slurs from their cell phones. Notzold understood the police reaction, however, he commented, "...given today’s politics, seeing the ‘n’ word being said by the American flag is somewhat appropriate and telling."

Climbing the Wall

Boys of summer upstaged or not?

Playing the Industrial Space

David Byrne, 80s pop artist of Talking Heads fame and experimental musician, takes Boing Boing TV's Xeni Jardin on a tour of New York's Battery Martitime Building where the composer has wired up an old pump-style organ to play the building. Crawling around the underbelly of the building Byrne and Jardin find an old slide transparency of former New York Mayor Ed Koch.

In early 80s when I was working at the ICA in London, Byrne and Brian Eno (formerly of Roxy Music and British art rock) frequently used the ICA's flex multimedia performance space to collaborate in recording samplings, making Polyrhythms and experimenting with world music that emerged out of the British melting pot of post-punk and ska London art music scene.

The environmental musicality of Brynes industrial music invention remind me of living in my East Village walk up and lying in bed at night listening to the symphony of pipes surging with... hot air and clanking sounds, groans, hisses, banging for which there was no explaining their source.

Crazy Cool Shop Toys

Ever wonder how they make things that are fabricated in metal and huge signage and bend steel?

TechShop in San Francisco is an open-access workshop with a bunch of awesome low tech heavy weight industrial tools. Think of it as a giant ErectorSet playroom for real men and women too.

Power coating systems, sandblasting cabinets, computer driven vinyl lettering machines, cutting and grinding equipment, large metal lathes, large vehicle project bay... and a brainstorming lounge -- you name it, they've got it.

One TechShop member shows us his all-electric two-passenger car that zips around like a motorcycle that he has prefabricated and built inside the facility. As Xeni Jardin explains, TechShop is an incubator for inventors and entrepreneurs and an environment for people at all skill levels to experiment and pursue their own crazy ideas.

Every city should have one of these and plans are for this concept to spread across the country.

Rainbow Flag

There are simple graphic designs that become iconic, axiomatic, and emblematic in the eyes of almost any viewer. In culture we might think of them as the incidental pop art of our times. As we approach Pride Season there is one image that cannot be mistaken by lovers and haters alike and it is the Rainbow Flag.

Not unlike the red streamer of the Solidarity movement created by Kaz Bascik, the red rose clenched in a upraised fist for the French Socialist Party under François Mitterrand, or the London Underground logo, these graphic icons are unmistakable and transcendent by becoming a bookmark for a epoch.

Telectroscope's Suppression of Absence

Telectroscope started out as a dream of digging a transatlantic tunnel that turned into a terrifying and tragic nightmare. An eccentric 19th century inventor, Alexander Stanhope St. George began with the grand scheme to build a two-way tunnel connecting London to New York.

According to Alexander's plan, once the tunnel had boroughed through Altantic shore and the earths core, an amplifying set of mirrors and lenses would act as a giant telescope to transmit an image (almost like a fiber optic cable) from the City of London to the Brooklyn Bridge or from one side of the world to the other, so tells Paul St. George.

As legend has it, after raising some capital, Stanhope St. George hired a workforce of unemployed laborers from Liverpool and began digging the tunnel to America. Eventually, tragedy struck when on March 5th, 1892, the Atlantic ocean breached the tunnel roof and 15 men lost their lives.

As most visionary inventors would do in the face of tragedy and even death, despite all reasonable laws of physics, the unyielding Stanhope St. George vowed to soldier on and persevere with his dream. However, fearing for their lives his workers mutinied and Alexander, filled with shame from failure, died in a asylum in Bethnal Green after suffering deteriorating mental health in 1912.

What began as an idea for a “device for the suppression of absence” as Alexander wrote in his resurrected journal complete with elaborate drawings and plans, and then seemingly ended in a tragedy searching for a lesson, fell into the hands of Paul St. Goerge, Alexanders grandson. Where would Stanhope St. George legacy lead?



Paul St. George a professor of 19th-century chronophotography at London Metropolitan University picked up where his grandfather left off and with grants totally over $700 thousand from the British government, private sponsors and Artichoke has built the Telectroscope connecting the Brooklyn and London's Tower Bridge via visual amplification (transatlantic fiber optic cable perhaps?), arriving in time to celebrate the 125 anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Okay, so this story is almost true but not quite. Why let the truth get in the way of some elaborate and expensive fun? You may experience Paul St. George's Telectroscope at the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or the Tower Bridge in London from May 22nd through June 15th, 2008 or visit the telectroscope's flickr group.

MUTO: Exterior Animation

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Running Time: 7 minutes, 26 seconds

This new ambitious short animated film by BLU was done in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2008. Created as a painted wall mural, ultimately due to its fluxus nature it only exists in its final form as hand drawn cell animation on digital video.

In order to get the most enjoyment I recommend clicking on the expand picture icon to view full screen and listen with headphones or turn up the volume on your computer to hear the sound effects. Great effort has been made to keep video and sound quality better than average YouTube or other internet animation.

Confounding Public Expectations

You've probably seen this video documentation of the Grand Central performance by Improv Everywhere based in New York City as it is hugely popular on the internet and has been viewed over 11 million times on YouTube. However, the group has done more than 70 missions using social networking tactics to draw together willing participants in their public works.

Reminiscent of Michael Kirby's 1960s New York Happenings and Adrian Henri Liverpool movement, a phrase coined by Allan Kaprow for performance art and spontaneous street theater, IE has taken public happenings to a whole new level. As interesting as missions can or cannot be, the social networking methods Improv Everywhere uses to assemble a group, focus the public on a temporary happening, documenting it and then just as quickly disperse into the ether, punctuates the surprise element the unexpected interruption can accomplish.

In a recent mission, three agents, as IE calls them, haul their desktop wifi enabled computer CPU, monitor and keyboard into a Starbucks and start working as if nothing is abnormal at all. "Their schlepping! Their computer! Their server! Their keyboard!" says one customer outside the coffeeshop in Manhattan. Improv Everywhere's missions are conceived to cause observers to rethink place and their routine expectations. Perhaps more skillful than any previous pubic art performance has been IE ability to document their missions on video for wide-spread dissemination and ultimately historic preservation.

You usually have to do a lot to break the ice and get noticed on the NYC Subway system but No Pants certainly can get a person noticed in New York. And if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere...

Improv Everywhere's Freeze in Grand Central Station has been watched replicated in 80 cities in 30 countries and No Pants has been performed in January every year in New York since 2002 as well as 12 cities worldwide. Comedian Charlie Todd, one of the founders of IE, says he is in talks to produce a national program based on IE performances.

Octocube: What is it?

What is that mechanical brain-like matter sitting in the corner?

Designer Vivien Muller has created this combination art object and space heater using a simple 90 degree plumbing elbow as the repeating nexus element of her design. The modular tubing increases the surface area producing radiant heat and you can make it just as simply at home but following the concept. That the beauty of simple elegant design - art following function.

Sixteen foot Multi-touch Obscura Digital Screen

You know you want it...

Counting Crows, Teaching Them New Tricks

Joshua Klein asks why we can't just get along with crows. Crows, we are finding out, are very adaptive in living around human beings and all we want to do is kill them. As a hacker and writer Klein embarked on a amateur study of corvidae behavior and he thought it might be great to harness the power of the intelligence of crows.

Urban Loft Cube Addon

As urban-living becomes more sacred and living space more valuable, the city dweller and country nomads alike look for alternatives to expand and parcel out life. Loftcube is a pre-fab personal mobile home modular structure consisting of 420 sq. ft. of living space conceived by German furniture designer Werner Aisslinger.

The unit sells in Great Britain for roughly between 65 and 80 thousand pounds ($125,000 to $150,000) depending on the kitchen and bathroom configurations (plus shipping unless perhaps you can get Amazon to throw in free shipping on orders over $25).

The modular unit could be used as an rooftop add-on to an urban industrial loft, a weekend cabin in the country, a bunk house at a ski lodge, or a backyard studio and guesthouse in the suburbs.

The various window spaces can be custom designed during prefabrication for transparent, translucent, and louvred coverings to match with its placement, room arrangements and lighting environments. Floor coverings can also be customized and an unique stone floor in the bathroom evaporates water quickly while messaging the feet.

The interior structure also uses a number of innovations to maximize floor and wall space. For instance, wall panels separating the kitchen and bathroom feature integrated waterspouts or facets that can be maneuvered to each side of the panel. Likewise, a shower-head flips down into the bath space for bathing while it turns out over plants in the living-room to water them. Water, lighting, and electricity runs up through narrow hi-tech fabricated panels minimizing wasted space.

Fixtures and appliances recede into their panels or fold into cabinets so that they are not openly visible during the day or at times when not in use, clearing space and clutter for alternative uses of the wide open living space.

Overall, the modular mobile loft space itself can be custom configured to match a variety of uses: disconnected office space, guest house, elderly apartment, relaxing retreat, crafts studio, or private apartment for returning parents or unemployable bounce-back children. The minimalist domicile makes use of flat rooftop urban space often wasted or left used in the conversion from industrial warehouse to residential living and accomodating backyard. We can only expect the demand for these structures to increase as urban living space and transportation demands intensify.

Bio-Design by Luigi Colani

Unabashed agent provocateur of industrial design, Luigi Colani created a four-rooms-in-one space-saving house with a 20 sq. ft. (6 meter) cylinder inside that contains a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

Colani is an advocate of Bio-Design and has been joined by a younger generation of designers like captain organic Ross Lovegrove and Karim Rashid who pre-empt the technically feasible using a fusion of art and organic design. The German-born Colani applied his unique ideas to produce cars, trucks, boats, aircraft (he studied aerodynamic design at Sorbonne in Paris), motocycles, Colani tea pots, mineral water bottles, SLR cameras and sun-glasses.

As Lovegrove describes his fellow techno-anthropomorphic believer, "Colani’s place is secured as perhaps the most influential form visionary of the twentieth century in the field of industrial design. He remains ever relevant, connecting man to machine in the most profoundly utopian of ways."

A cylinder located inside the modular cabin rotates left or right bringing the room you want into view of the main living room. There's a separate toilet and a small hallway, and the moving parts are controlled with a remote. Colani's house, not unlike Kurokawa's Nakagin Tower, was designed with young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career in mind.

As a designer, Colani saw his responsibility to translate nature into design as paramount, using the birds wing as evolutions design for aerodynamics in aircraft and automobile design. His C-Form designs from the 1960s established a shape language seen for years in vehicles such as the Corvette. Later Colani moved to Japan where he designed the Canon T9 camera body, applying bio-forms that we see in all SLR digital cameras today.

Bio-design's signature in Colani's work is rounded, organic forms that he sees as the biodynamic. Colani himself wrote, "Everything on the microcosmic as well as the macroscopic plane is made up of curves... I can only obey the laws of nature."

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Design Museum website: designmuseum.org

Colani website: colani.de

Robert Rauschenberg [1925 - 2008]

Two artists with tremendous influence over me as an art graduate student in my 20s were Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. Last night Rauschenberg died at age 82 in Florida. In one very memorable act, the course of art history collided, when in 1953 Rauschenberg went to de Kooning's Greenwich Village studio with a bottle of Jack Daniels (de Kooning was an incorrigible alcoholic) to ask the modern master of painting and drawing, at the peak of his career, if he could erase one of his drawings. de Kooning wasn't very happy with the request but granted the young unknown painter his wish.

Rauschenberg took the de Kooning drawing away that night and began to erase it and when the work was exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York it caused great controversy in the art world. The arguably "best artist in the world" de Kooning was outraged. According to de Kooning's biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, the Dutch immigrant New York artist feared pop-art and neo-Dada was supplanting the New York School of Abstract Expressionism and that Rauschenberg had laid down an anti-expressionist manifesto, of sorts, not so much by the act of erasing the drawing but by hanging it in an exhibition of new American artists. In other words, de Kooning expected it all to end after that night and it would not surface in the art world front-and-center.

The significance of Rauschenberg's act wasn't lost on the New York art critics - especially Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg both highly critical of Pop Art and what they termed Kitsch. There was much speculation that Abstract Expressionism had run it course and a new generation of pop-artists using direct images from the popular media and capitalist advertising carried a more relevant message that the painters from the 40s and 50s obscured with action painting and flat gestural drip field obfuscation.

Even though he had one foot firmly in the world of action painting and the other in pop art, Rauschenberg's act of erasure was taken as a statement that "Abstract Expressionism is Dead!" And de Kooning in his darker moments, while fighting his own demons, also began to think Rauschenberg's act of fluxus did signify exactly this sentiment.

Rauschenberg recalled about this time, “Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”
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NY Times article on the life of Robert Rauschenberg.

A recording of the panel discussion, Who is Robert Rasuchenberg?: A Discussion with Mary Lynn Kotz, Christopher Rauschenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Darryl Pottorf. Running Time: 42 minutes 45 seconds


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Walker Art Center has in its permanent collection 120 prints and two multiples by Rauschenberg including the 1960 painting Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) currently on display in Gallery 2. The Minneapolis Institute of Art has one combine sculpture and numerous prints including Rauschenberg's largest (72" by 638") but none of his work is currently hanging at MIA.

Capsule Architecture

Being a post-sputnik child, we grew up with a especially tainted idea of the future. Part of our notion of the future was capsular in nature and another part, no doubt because of the cold war nuclear fear, was post-apocolyptic doom. Basically, we assumed earth would be destroyed by the stupidity of man at war with aliens like in H.G. Wells War of the Worlds and in order to survive, we'd be propelled into the dark outer space of the non-gravitational universe like 2001 A Space Odyssey. We would need pods, sachets of Tang, and life support-system modules to exist.

A nation with a more intimate knowledge of apocalypse cannot be found than Japan. Ravaged by atomic horror, after the 1950s, the Japanese seemed to embrace radical new ideas in architecture and urban design. One designed movement, that has been referred to as capsule architecture, manifest itself in the work of architect Kisko Kurokawa and his landmark Nakagin Capsule Tower in Shimbashi, Tokyo, Japan. Architectural tourists have pilgrimed to the upscale Ginza neighborhood to see this unique building of the Metabolic movement.

Kurokawa's modular tower was completed in 1972 and consisted of two concrete towers with steel frame and reinforced concrete shaft to which are attached pre-fabricated galvanized, rib enforced steel capsules by four high tension bolts. The capsules are about the size of a small Winnebago (2.3m x 3.8m x 2.1m or 7.5 ft x 11.5 ft x 6.8ft) designed to be easily replaceable. Stacked on top of each other, the capsules climb 13-stories and look like washing machines with their round windows and square-box repetition. The two steel shafts to which the modular units are attached also function as elevators to bring owners up to their abodes from the buildings lobby.

The features of these Metabolic pods include a built in rotary phone, a color TV, stereo radio tuner, numeric clock, built-in speakers and a reel-to-reel tape deck -- in the day when Nakagin was constructed all very high tech. And let's be fair, Kurokawa always imagined that due to the modular pre-fabricated factory construction and assembly of the pods that they would be redesigned, rebuilt and replaced periodically as technology advanced and the pod aged in need of repair.

The 100 square foot pre-fab unit feels very much like the interior cabin of a commercial aircraft or a closer to Nakagin reference the shinkansen or Japan's bullet train. All along one wall there is a series of storage cabinets, a desk, the built-in electronics. At the far end next to the single round window, is a double bed and on the other end of the 11.5 length is the door and a bathroom with sink, shower, and toilet all combined in a space roughly the size of a airliner lavatory.

When the building opened in the disco era of the 70s all 140 units sold within a month. Kurokawa imagined that the residences of his tower would be young energetic professionals living in the fast-paced city who'd spend long hours in the office, eat all their meals in Mochi, Soba and Sushi restaurants, and long evenings at the discotheque. However, many of the original buyers were corporate journeymen and commuting salarymen with larger homes and families further outside the city and simply needed a place to crash three or four nights a week

But the capsules haven't been replaced since they were orignally built and in a recent Architectural Record reported that the tower will be demolished. In a Dwell magazine essay by Tom Vanderbilt, he reported that the Nakagin Tower owners association had voted to tear down rather than repair the aging structure. One of the compelling reasons looming over Nakagin's fate was the asbestos used during the construction has condemned the entire structure to die.

Kurokawa died in 2007 but before his death campaigned to keep his architectural landmark from being consumed by the forces of urban renewal and Tokyo's rampant development engine. Kurokawa 's Sony Tower, also designed and built on the Metabolic modular capsular concept in 1976, was constructed with stainless steel materials rather than galvinized. Sony Tower in Osaka was brought down last year. The international heritage protection group Docomomo, have unsuccessfully pleaded for the United Nations' heritage arm to protect this landmark building.

In the Metabolic maestros own writings, the Buddhist Kurokawa expectantly wrote, "We used to consider things that could live forever to be beautiful. But this way of thinking has been exposed to be a lie. True beauty lies in things that die, things that change."

SENSEable City's Digital Water Pavilion

Imagine an outdoor pavilion with four exterior walls made of running water. This summers international design Expo Zaragoza 2008 will feature and interacive exbitional area, cafe and public spaces designed at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory.

According to Patti Richards of the MIT news office, the "water walls" that make up the structure consist of a row of closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations - a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen. The entire surface becomes a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward.

The Tribute to Water Expo Zaragoza 2008 will be held from June 14th to September 14th in Zaragoza, Spain and is committed to searching for solutions to water and its sustainable development in the world.

Memphis: The New International Style

When I arrived in London for graduate school in the early 1980s, a radical new design movement coming out of Italy was the Memphis Design collective from Milano. Ettore Sottsass and a group of furniture, ceramic, print, industrial products, and architectural designers inspired by the Radical Design of Italy in the 1960s were joined by Andrea Branzi one of the leaders from the earlier movement.

The Memphis Group formed in 1981 included Martine Bedin, Andrea Branzi, Aldo Cibic, Michele de Lucchi, Nathalie du Pasquier, American-born architect Michael Graves, Viennese designer Hans Hollein, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, Japanese designer Shiro Kuromata, Italian product designer Matteo Thun, Spanish artist and designer Javier Mariscal, British industrial designer George Sowden, Marco Zanini, the journalist Barbara Radice in addition to Sottsass.

Sottsass called Memphis "The New International Style" which we took to have a hint of irony since the international style we were seeing all over in Eastern Europe from Yugoslavia and East Germany to the Soviet Union was utilitarian hard, cold steel and glass boxes and redundantly large with gray humorless severity. Meanwhile Memphis screamed with cartoon wavy lines, lyrical patterns, neon glow, and bright primary colors.

Memphis' most memorable pieces on show were the the Carlton Cabinet (left) and the Dublin sofa that popped vibrant in contrast to the stern minimalism in design had become the norm. Memphis' use of industrial materials – printed glass, tortoiseshell luminance, leopard print fibers, celluloids, fireflake finishes, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals – jazzed up with flamboyant colors and patterns, spangles and glitter followed Branzi's ideas about "exalt everything kitsch and pop" in the 1960s to break from old European traditions.

Writers and critics accused Branzi and the other Memphis designers of having too much fun and folly with design, not practical to the real world but Sottsass shot back explaining that Memphis design was serious while doing industrial design for Olivetti or other Italian manufacturers was all play.

Viewing Memphis designers you can easily see the influence of 60s and 70s pop artists Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Dazzle panel artist John McHale, optical artists Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely as well as commercially designed objects like film projectors, aero-dynamic kitchen appliances, jukeboxes, gramophones and comic book illustration. Memphis brought high art values and pop art fantasy into industrial and commercial design.

An exhibition at Boilerhouse, Victoria & Albert Museum, London brought Memphis to the forefront of European design and crowds stood in line for hours to see this new Milan based design group. The Memphis designers were like rock stars with design groupies anxious to jump on their every word. Memphis disbanded in 1988 but members of its group continue to have influence world-wide in a variety of design fields.

Utopian Visions: One Laptop Per Child

If utopia has returned in these cynical times it is the buzz around the technology of this little machine being developed at One Kendall Center in Cambridge. One Laptop Per Child. Of course, cynics would like to say that Western culture technogeeks are looking through rose colored glasses and pronouncing what third world kids "need." What poor kids need, says Nicholas Negroponte, is the OX laptop computer and they will be raised out of poverty.

Aside from the underlying assumption OLPC that this will be good for poor kids, the design challenges the XO computer are formable. The case needs to be very tough. Power consumption must be minimal. It must be water and dirt proof. The hard drive cannot be mechanical - no moving parts. The wifi antenna must be powerful enough to work in a range of circumstances. The goal was to make it for $100 (although they've only been able to get it to $188). And it needs quality software and educational "content" delivered to it every where in the world.

As one employee of Red Hat, the Cambridge based company developing OLPC, said this is not a product it is a global humanitarian cause. In this case, the team in Cambridge is trying to apply difficult design concepts, mesh networks, open source software communities and social networking to solve world problems of poverty. And it should look freaky cool also.

Archizoom & Folding Enclosures

In 1968 Italian designer Andrea Branzi and a group of radical designers in Florence, Italy decided to take the ideology of architectural modernism to its absurd limit. They headed a group in Italy that became known as Radical design. With No Stop City they proposed an endless stamping of circuit board buildings stretching as far as they eye could see. The group he formed with Gilberto Corretti (b 1941), Paolo Deganello (b 1940) and Massimo Morozzi and joined by Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini as it became known as Archizoom split up in 1974.

Archizoom led to the Anti-design movement in Italy, whereby as Free thinkers in order to get away from Tradition, they stated, "...men must overturn conventions and exalt everything kitsch as a statement of aesthetic and ideological challenge." The gravitational center of anti-design shifted from Florence to Milano.

In the 1980s, a group led by Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis Group (allegedly inspired by Bob Dylan's lyric "stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis Blues again..") with the purpose of reviving the radical design movement with Branzi as one of its members.


Branzi has currently exhibiting Open Enclosures at the Cartier Fondation in Paris through June 22nd. This project involves a surrreal piece of folding furniture of metal, glass, and organic matter that unfolds to form walls, a bed, personal workspace and shelf.

Candle Cannon

Minneapolis' agency Colle + McVoy employees seem to be having too much fun at client Ebert & Gerbert's expense. Smokers and ex-smokers will take particular pleasure in the idea of the worlds biggest smoke ring maker. Essentially an air vortex canon blows a smoke ring 180 feet to extinguish birthday candles on Midwest subway sandwich maker Ebert & Gerbert's 20th anniversary cake. Even more fun than reaching desired outcomes was the process of prototyping, designing, building, and painting the canon. One can say, in this case, viral media on YouTube has become the mother of invention for ad agencies. Although viral media might be the newest trend, one thing has not changed in 40 years, as evidence the AMC retro TV series Mad Men, ad agency employees have always been crazy and quite possibly mad.

Hacking the Wii

Johnny Lee says it best when he talks about design that can reach millions in an incredible short period of time from conception to use. Internet and in particular YouTube have played a big role in speeding his Wii Hack to a half million users around the world in a few months. Two inventions Lee describes in this TED talk is a really inexpensive interactive white board and a $5 infrared head mount that allows a computer to know your head position. The results have amazing potentiality. For gamers and the vivid experience of 3D virutal worlds. Lees' hack is radical not only for the invention but also the extremely low cost using readily available off-the-shelf consumer technology. That's a design idea a common person can enjoy.

Film by Design

The films are Errol Morris include Gates of Heaven; Vernon, Florida; A Brief History of Time; The Thin Blue Line; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control; Mr. Death; The Flog of War and Standard Operating Procedure scheduled for release this month from Sony Pictures Classic.

I have a film blog and although there are so many elements of effective design co-mingled into the space we call cinema, there are a select few filmmakers who so purposefully use design as an internal logic to their thoughts and expression as Errol Morris who's web site also reflects his visual mastery. That is why I have singled him out for fluxus design blog. You might know Morris from his Apple TV ads but you really ought to go and sequentially rent each of his documentaries to fully appreciate his use of design. And then be sure to see Standard Operating Procedure opening nationally in cinemas this month. Morris is a man possessed of his own brilliance.

Styl'ist (stil'ist), n. and the Mustang

Over the years, it has been astonishing how little the barebones of automobile design has changed despite annual manipulations of the body and model lines that have come and gone. In this video from Ford Motor Company there are two amazing concept cars described. The first is the Ford Aurora "designed for the whole family to enjoy" that never made it into mass production and the second, the Ford Mustang which did.

The Aurora has a few quite astonishing features: a clam shell rear entry to the children's seating area; swivel passenger front armed bucket seat; a three adult passenger limo-style couch; termo-elecric oven and refrigerator; three AM/FM radios; advanced position indicator map (an early conception of GPS); a steering wheel that wasn't round (shocking!) and a whole different headlight scheme comprised of 12 lamps stretched across the front of the vehicle.

Looking at today's automobiles, very little has changed: The front seats are still mounted facing forward, the middle seats straight benches, steering wheels are still round (and roughly the same diameter), the instrument gage and user interface are approximately the same except for cosmetic variations and with the exception of modified roadsters and mobile van/homes there are few extras like multiple radios or TVs refrigerators or ovens proposed in the Aurora. While concept cars appear radical in the proposal stage, eventually they all seem to conform to a narrow design specification.

The first real cool automobile my family owned was the Ford Mustang in 1967. This was the first car my father went out and bought new off the dealer lot. All other family cars prior to the Mustang had been hand-me-downs or used klunkers just to get us by. In the 1960s, the Mustang set the standard for stylin' ride.

Concept Cars

Concept cars over the ages and today give us a glimpse of the fantastical ideas we have about our times. Whether it be sputnik or rocket age technology, our fears and fantasies were quickly transformed into our automobiles and then just as easily discarded on the road to pragmatic realizations.

Futurist Design

Jacque Fresco designed conceptual models based on futurist notions of where we might be progressing toward with Global Climate Change threatening our shorelines. Fresco designed cities and housing in the ocean and talked about the "Future by Design" an utopia to elevate the human condition. Perhaps this all seems far-fetched and it is, however, there is a fine line to be draw between delusional and visionary.

There are many design movements inspired by science fiction and fantastical visions of the future from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to Ray Bradbury's speculative fiction to Futurama, Populux and Googie architecture. They too might be just as crazy but provided a generation of computer designers at MIT Media Lab grist for their inventions mill.

Recently, some of these ideas might have re-emerged in Dubai and with oil-rich Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum has set out to break architectural records for highest, largest and first residental, office, hotel, stadium and spaceport buildings of the world.

This film trailer was shot by William Gazecki:

Design for the Other 90 Percent

We often think of design that makes mundane things luxurious and the plush extravagances expensive. But what about design for the other 90%? Recently, I attended a lecture at the University of Minnesota by the African Wildlife Foundation about the shocking fact that the worlds population of lions in Africa has radically dropped to anywhere between one quarter and one eight its population of 20 years ago. And while lions are not yet extinct they are well on their way to becoming endangered.

What I found surprising is that part of the problem can be solved with a technology fix. Lions are often killed in conflict with people because herders in East Africa do not have to proper technology to construct bomas that protect their cattle, that can be manufactured inexpensively, as well as remain mobile to support their nomadic life. This is a problem screaming for a design fix.

The Walker Art Center will be hosting an exhibition beginning May 24th called Design for the Other 90% showing design concepts and objects such as this personal water purification straw that uses human energy to extract clean water from open rivers and streams. Diarrhoea and other waterborne disease is a major killer of children around the world. LifeStraw, as it is known, was designed by Vestergaard Fransen a Danish company dedicated to design that will change the world.

LifeStraw photo courtsey of Vestergaard Frandsen

Design: The Everyday Revolution

Designers are often though to be people who make objects, paper, buildings, furniture or things beautiful or pretty. But there is much more to design than this simple way of seeing. Designers are tinkerers or thinkerers who take revolutionary ideas and apply them to everyday life. Paola Antonelli who is a curator for design at MoMA talks about her mission to shift our understanding of design from pretty to the revolution of the everyday life.

fluxus

fluxus will look at many aspects of changing design in the internet age