Warm and exhibition-happy, the Brazilian art and design world is showing the rest of us that the moment is theirs now, a samba way past the Campanas and green and yellow T-shirts at H+M. A steady stream of art and design events plus the country’s booming economy are just two reasons Brazil is hot and visible now. These include the recent BOOMSPDESIGN;  CasaCor (at 25 is the world’s second largest architecture and decoration event, running through October); and the much anticipated 2012 Sao Paulo Art Bienniel, which will have, for the first time, an international curator based in New York City, Luis Perez-Oramas, the Latin American Art Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All this activity translates to the prominence of Brazilian talent. You can just imagine the multiple design confabs and collabs with brands being cooked up right now, anticipating the upcoming events of the World Cup 2014 and a proposed green, first-ever in South American Olympic Games in Rio, in 2016.

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If you want something well done, do it yourself, so the saying goes. That is exactly what Etel Carmona ended up doing some three decades ago when she started designing furniture pieces and couldn’t find anyone to make them the way she envisioned them.

She earned a reputation for sophisticated craftmanship as accolades piled up about her elegant, modern designs where nothing is superfluous and all parts contribute to the whole. Soon other designers were coming to her and asking for assitance on getting their projects built, making her company the place of choice for Brazil’s top ranking furniture designers including Claudia Moreira Salles and Isay Weinfield. In addition to new designers, those who were already known for their classic modern works sought her out to bring back their once popular designs; Gregori Warchavchik, Jorge Zalzupinm, and Oswaldo Bratke among them. This venture has created a veritable time capsule of the very best in Brazil’s history of furniture design. Read more…

We have heard it all before—more times than we’d like to, in fact—the recession of 2008 has changed the face of design forever. As in all great paradigm shifts, there are winners and there are losers, and in this brave new world, it seems, the winners are those who are willing to work together.

Design collaboration has seen a steady increase in recent years. Some companies are looking for a partner to share the burdensome costs of research and development; while others are clamoring to create new and exciting products that will differentiate them in a tight-squeezed market.  All are searching for ways to move beyond choices and patterns that have gotten them to the point they’re at now.

We’ve seen Nike and Maharam team up to crate a small run of premium material sneakers in 2010.  And this September, socialite Lilly Pulitzer and fabric producer Lee Jofa announced a new textile collection they created together.

But while these and similar partnerships have been mostly about creating appealing new products, one new collaborative effort has stood out among them, simply because it created a new product category: roller shades that bring fine art into a room.

Just last year Hunter Douglas Hospitality and Farmboy Fine Arts came together for a new endeavor: turning a basic window shade into the focal point of a room. Read more…

A new project by the Canadian design firm molo, called softshelter, considers the frightening reality of homelessness after a natural disaster, a topic which is unfortunately never too far from recent events. Only a few months ago, tornados leveled homes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and the Mississippi River swelled to its highest water levels since 1937, flooding neighborhoods in Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

How do public organizations respond to these unanticipated needs for mass shelter? How do families continue the routines of daily life without their homes?

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Even with the necessary emphasis on LED technology and efficient materials, many lighting designers can’t resist experimenting with products that are just, for lack of a better word, cool. While strict functionalists may cringe, I admire this vein of creative conceptual design, in the tradition of Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural Akari lamps. Last week saw the debut of three new lighting designs that are similarly imaginative and playful, blurring the lines between lamp and objet d’art.

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A criticism frequently heard at recent furniture expos, from Milan to New York, was the absence of real product innovation. The bad economy has something to do with this shortage: During the past few years many manufacturers have used restraint, showing few new products, trotting out previous years’ introductions.

Still, there were a few surprises. One of them was the first-ever presence of Minnesota-based 3M, sandwiched in between bathroom faucets and textile stands at ICFF in a shiny, large-scale booth that seemed to say little more than, “We’re here!”. A Midwestern approach to attention-grabbing?  At closer inspection I found one of the most interesting offerings, no larger than an iPad: a new way to light up a building using sunlight – sans skylights or photovoltaic transfer.

“Sunlight Delivery System,” 3M’s daylighting solution, uses one of the company’s noteworthy inventions, a highly reflective film, familiar to users of LCD screens and smart phones. This luminous film brings sunlight inside a building through galvanized steel ducts connected to a rooftop catchall. Read more…

There is a hidden world of structure, grace, and functionality in a car. What about simplicity? Designers talk about it. But each new model seems more complex than last year’s. This has frustrated tinkerers for some time now. While we could once replace components ourselves, today’s mechanics connect to the car’s computer and diagnose the problem in cyberspace.

Your days of rolling up your sleeves on weekends to change the oil are numbered, if not over. Technology is limiting our relationship with our automobiles. While many of us may not want to work on our cars, all of us are missing out on larger conversation about automotive technology and sustainability. If local mechanics or owners are unable to repair cars because of their increased complexity, this is a serious problem of job loss, fiscal loss, and wasted resources. As I see it, in the age of environmental and social responsibility, the car of the future should be assembled  from  simple components, and maintained locally.

But what if this future car has been around for over 30 years? The Mercedes w123 belongs to a generation of automobiles that I know intimately and love. I remember the first time I laid eyes on it. There could have been every other exotic car in the world in the same parking lot, and I would still have picked the cream colored land yacht evocative of Saddam Hussein’s motorcade. Read more…

What would the world look like if the foundation for a designer’s education was based in biology? Nature is the best teacher. And since we now know that all useful systems have been shaped by the natural world, it’s important for designers to understand nature’s intricacies. And so, the future of design, as I see it, is interwoven with the fibers of biology, sociology, and an understanding of the human construct.

Designers like to draw inspiration from the natural world in order to create successful products. One frequently used device is biomimicry, the act of emulating natural processes to benefit the human condition with nature-inspired beauty. The designs shown here are extensions of biomimetrics and utilize living, biological systems within design as opposed to emulating them.

Nature has spent thousands of years devising countless mechanisms that we have toiled to translate into industrial products. What designers need now is a basic understanding of science in order to utilize biological systems in making our products. An example of this would be the “Tree Fab Hab”, devised by Terreform1, which enfolds its occupants in a growing tree. Based on a century-old grafting technique, the tree’s exterior will be Computer Numerically Controlled so it will take to the desired shape.

Although the concept is far from fruition, it is a sensible idea. Considering that many buildings are constructed of dead trees, why not use living ones instead? This approach would increase the longevity of the structure, in addition to purifying the air, and contributing to the local ecology.

On a more realistic note, French designer Mathieu Lehanneur utilizes plants that simultaneously create and purify indoor air. Philodendron and gerbera can filter the majority of indoor air pollutants, all with the help of a little water. Read more…

Yet more news from Yves Béhar: the prolific designer has teamed up with GE to develop the WattStation, a plug-in electric vehicle charger with a cute, colorful form. It’s powerful too: according to GE, the WattStation’s “level 2 capability” will decrease typical charging time from 12–18 hours to as little as 4–8 hours. Check out a video of Behar describing his “small, soft, and friendly dispenser of electricity” after the jump. Read more…

The race for the ultimate classroom computer has been on for a while. One Laptop Per Child was the celebrity frontrunner, of course, but its creators ran into some trouble and had to scrap their dual-screen OLPC XO-2 design. Meanwhile, Intel has had its eye on classrooms in emerging markets since 2007 with its low-cost Classmate PC series. And now a new kid has joined the class, at this month’s Wall Street Journal D8 conference in California. Everybody, say hi to Kno.

Kno (left) is a dual-screen e-reader textbook replacement that also allows students to take notes, access multimedia content, and generally interact with their study material in ways that are impossible with the outmoded paper textbook. The device has two 14-inch screens, each about half an inch thick, that are large enough to allow students to view full textbook pages without scrolling. At 5.5 pounds, it is much heavier than two iPads, but it will also be cheaper (less than $1,000). I’m particularly charmed by one little design detail: the borders around the screens are asymmetrical, so the Kno actually has inner margins and outer margins, just like a textbook. Plus, it carefully avoids the kiddie colors and oversize rounded edges that have become the hallmark of classroom computers. Read more…