Today was the first day of Figment NYC, a weekend-long festival on Governors Island with a focus on interactive, participatory art. Along with dozens of ephemeral artworks, the event is hosting a few semi-permanent installations, including a mini-golf course, a sculpture garden, and the winner of this year’s City of Dreams Pavilion Competition. The latter is a low-tech structure made of plastic milk cartons sandwiched between a CNC-milled plywood skeleton, with a lush interior lining of of Liriope plants. Called the Living Pavilion, it’s the work of the New York architects Behrang Behin and Ann Ha (although they’re quick to point out that the project was realized thanks to the help of about 70 volunteers, most of them students or underemployed architects.) As for the idea to put the greenery inside the structure, rather than on the roof, Behin says it was “an old architect’s trick—take what you have and turn it upside down.” Or inside out, as the case may be. The Living Pavilion will be on display on New York’s Governor’s Island until October 3; click here for the ferry schedule.

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In the June issue of Metropolis (which we’ll be posting online next week) Belinda Lanks writes about Santiago Calatrava’s recent design of five stage sets for the New York City Ballet’s spring season. In this short film, Calatrava and several of the NYCB’s choreographers talk about this uncommon collaboration between architecture and dance.

We’ve written about Katie Salen’s game-design initiatives a couple of times in recent years—in “The Principals of Play” (2006) and “Learning, a New Game” (2009)—so, naturally, we were interested to see Salen answer a few questions about her practice in a video interview posted last week on the Big Think. Check out the full video above.

In the interview, Salen also mentions the “slow games” that she and some of her colleagues created in 2006 for the 25th anniversary issue of Metropolis. “What, we wondered, would it mean to design a game that takes 25 years to play?” Salen and Nick Fortungo wrote in the issue. Click here to download a PDF of the four “conceptual exercises” they came up with—two of which, Salen says, are still open to new players.
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This year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair is less than two weeks away. If you’re traveling to Chicago for the event, be sure to pick up a copy of our annual Taste of the Town guide at the Merchandise Mart. Although, really, why wait until you arrive to make dining plans? You can read all our restaurant recommendations—conveniently classified by lunch, dinner, and drinks—in the online version of the guide, now available on our Live@NeoCon site.

Even after last week’s ICFF live-blogging extravaganza, we ended up with dozens of unpublished snapshots of noteworthy new products and projects from the 22nd annual furniture fair. Here, then, in no particular order, is a final roundup of neat stuff from the 2010 ICFF.

Above: Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance’s Corvo chair, for Bernhardt Design, which we wrote about in the April issue of the magazine.

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The biggest foreign presence at this year’s ICFF came from Spain, with 20 companies exhibiting a range of colorful and well-crafted furniture, lighting, carpets, and wall-coverings. Here are a few of the highlights:

Actually, one of my favorite Spanish products wasn’t on display at the fair: Nanimarquina’s new Digit rug, by the London-based graphic designer Cristian Zuzunaga, resembles an extremely enlarged color photograph. It comes in a 26-color version (shown) or with a more muted monochromatic palette. Read more…

At the Alessi Takes the Cake party, on Greene Street, the French designer Matali Crasset poses with the mixing bowl from her new Essentiel de Pâtisserie collection, designed with the renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé. Read more…

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Not to be confused with our more idiosyncratic editors’ picks, the official ICFF Editors Awards are selected by a group of international design-magazine honchos (including Metropolis’s own editor in chief, Susan Szenasy) and considered among the industry’s highest accolades. Here are this year’s winners:

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The Brooklyn-based distributor didn’t have too much new to show since we caught up with them at the Gift Fair last February, but there were still a couple of items that caught our eye. For instance: We’ve long been fans of Anything’s plastic desktop accessories (like the scissors and tape dispenser pictured above); now the design studio is planning to launch a bamboo collection, which will include an elegant magnetic board (above, center; the full collection comes out in September). Also new from Anything: a minimalist letter opener with a pleasing weight and a simple kinked angle, a welcome relief from the phony ornateness usually found in the product. Read more…

Sunday night saw a cluster of parties in the Meatpacking District, including the opening of Dune’s Enamored exhibition, with new designs by Harry Allen, Karim Rashid, Claesson Koivisto Rune, and others.

Richard Shemtov is Dune’s president and one of its designers—he created the new Deluxe lounge and sofa. The design was inspired, in part, by Japanese anime, but Shemtov said that the result is also “American in a way—very fat and bulbous.” Read more…