Indulge me.

I once wrote a poem called “Profession of Mission” in which I attempted to write a personal mission statement. The poem rambled a bit, begged for clarity in my life’s purpose and ended with the word “crossroads” – no punctuation or finality – intentionally open-ended.

I wrote the poem in 2009 at age 44 – clearly the beginning of Mid-Life Crisis. Yes, young’uns, even older folks wonder what to do with the rest of their lives.

One week ago, at age 47 – no closer to an answer or closure – I took myself to Manhattan.

If I can “figure it out here, I can figure it out anywhere,” right?

I’m pleased to report that I found clarity in Chelsea … without a stitch of help from any of Woody Allen’s analysts.

But I did have help.

I attended a daylong workshop called “Design the Life You Love” created by New York-based product designer Ayse Birsel.

Ayse became a friend after I heard her speak at a user conference put on by a client of mine, Swedish design-software company Configura. Born in Turkey, Ayse is Pratt Institute-educated, a Fulbright Fellow whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, both in New York City.

She is perhaps best known for designing Herman Miller’s Resolve office system and Moroso’s M’Afrique collection. She and partner Bibi Seck own Birsel+Seck, a design studio that also works with Johnson & Johnson, Hasbro, Hewlett Packard, OfficeMax, Renault, and Target. Ayse designed a potato peeler for Target that’s just $7.99, she says. So, even if you never make it to MoMA or Cooper-Hewitt, you can see (and buy) her products at a Target near you.

Ayse has taken her product design methods – which she calls Deconstruction:Reconstruction™ – and developed the “Design the Life You Love” workshop with concepts and exercises that even non-designers can easily grasp.

The workshop has become a mission for Ayse: “Our lives are our most important project,” she says.

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Image courtesy Vitra Design Museum Archive.

“Design cannot transform a little brown, dark life into a large brightly colored one. Only the person living can do that.” This sentiment was often quoted during the symposium, “George Nelson: Design for Living, American Mid-Century Design and Its Legacy Today,” held recently at Yale School of Architecture. The event revisited the vast and influential career of designer George Nelson who was trained at Yale College (1928) and the Yale School of Fine Arts (1931). In collaboration with the opening of the exhibition, “George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher,” the symposium brought Nelson’s work to a new generation of students. Today, as we may take for granted America’s legacy of “mid-century modern” design, this exhibition reinforces the innovation and energy that embodied Nelson’s era.

Image courtesy Vitra Design Museum Archive.

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One of the world’s busiest commercial districts, Midtown is a unique mix of moxie and polish, packed with not just skyscrapers but top-flight showrooms, restaurants, shops, and museums. Here, we’ve listed the area’s best spots.

Check out the Metropolis Design Guide for Design Week events and highlights from New York’s most design-forward neighborhoods.  And look for the printed version of the Metropolis Design Guide around the city, especially in Chelsea at WantedDesign, in Midtown at the Architects & Designers Building and the Decoration & Design Building, in Flatiron at the New York Design Center, and at the newsstand at ICFF at the Javits Center.

Keep an eye out for what we “like” during NY Design Week. Around the city, you’ll see our lovely signs, produced by 3M Architectural Markets using 3M ™ Crystal Glass Finishes, at all of our editors’ favorite, must-see spots. Throughout our neighborhood listings, you’ll also see a next to our favorites.

METROPOLIS LIKES ICFF
Celebrated hub for the latest trends in international design, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair returns this year to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. May 19^th to May 22^nd. Get there: Eleventh Ave. at W. 38th St. Find out more: 800-272-7469 or icff.com (image courtesy Barcelona).

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In recent years, young designers have flocked to Brooklyn for more affordable work spaces and for the lively, burgeoning creative scenes. Here, we’ve listed showrooms, shops, restaurants, museums and institutions, and galleries in a few Brooklyn neighborhoods, particularly Williamsburg and Dumbo. We’ve also included a few spots in Manhattan, Queens, Long Island, and beyond, for when you find yourself outside of dense design areas.

Check out the Metropolis Design Guide for Design Week events and highlights from New York’s most design-forward neighborhoods. And look for the printed version of the Metropolis Design Guide around the city, especially in Chelsea at WantedDesign, in Midtown at the Architects & Designers Building and the Decoration & Design Building, in Flatiron at the New York Design Center, and at the newsstand at ICFF at the Javits Center.

Keep an eye out for what we “like” during NY Design Week. Around the city, you’ll see our lovely signs, produced by 3M Architectural Markets using 3M™ Crystal Glass Finishes, at all of our editors’ favorite, must-see spots. Throughout our neighborhood listings, you’ll also see a  next to our favorites.

METROPOLIS LIKES BRIGHT LYONS
This downtown Brooklyn curiosity shop features an owner-curated mix of midcentury-modern furniture from the likes of Herman Miller, Knoll, and Laverne; contemporary artwork and prints; and vintage art, architecture, and design books.
For more information, see Bright Lyons listing below (image credit: Julienne Schaer).

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When he was approached by Jack Schreur, the vice president of North American Seating at Herman Miller, Yves Behar finally felt he was ready to take on the “the hardest industrial-design project” – an office chair. The SAYL chair, designed by Behar’s studio Fuse-project, made it to Metropolis’s The Green Vanguard, our A-to-Z list of sustainable design.

At $399, SAYL is one of the least expensive work chairs in the Herman Miller catalog. It appears that Schreur asked Fuse-project to design this chair, not just because they were an excellent design team, but also because of the studio’s specific expertise in developing low-cost solutions like the $100 laptop.

SAYL’s most innovative feature is its 3-D intelligent back, which has different degrees of tension to give each part of your back the support it needs. As opposed to a mesh, or fabric, the back is actually molded in one piece in polyurethane, and it is the geometry of the pattern that gives it its “intelligence.” Here is a rather lovely video of the iterations that Fuse-project created for that pattern: SAYL_back_iterations

With such attention lavished on a single feature, one begins to see why Behar felt that designing an office chair is “the last project a designer should do.” SAYL manages to distinguish itself from the “10,000 chairs out there” because its colorful highlight of a back combines high performance with a subtle hint at poetry.

I was a little worried when I saw the title of Pratt’s exhibition (a collaboration with the furniture giant Herman Miller): Empathy for Culture. Like oatmeal, it sounded a little bland and a little mushy, and I had the strong suspicion that it was going to try to be good for me. Students were asked to research a particular culture—the Hmong tribes of Vietnam, for instance, or New York DIY punk kids—and design an object that communicated something about it. Fortunately, the 14 projects from the Brooklyn school are often sharp and thoughtful, displaying the specificity that comes from careful study and consideration. Sahar Ghaheri created cardboard boxes that double as modular shelving and are screen-printed with details from Chinese lace umbrellas, Mexican doily flags, and a Lebanese mosque. Reenacting the immigrant experience, the boxes can be used both to move and, when unpacked, to display prized possessions, keeping the old world and the new (whether Bahrain or Bushwick) in plain sight. “It’s a reembracing of what you left behind,” Ghaheri says.

Sara McBeen’s low Aata tables (top), which borrow their forms and colors from the Middle East’s vivid marketplaces and geometric design, replicate the region’s hospitality and convivial meals. They’re meant to be linked together, with the mustard-yellow and turquoise surfaces providing a place to share food. And Stevenson Aung’s light and colorful aluminum stools (below) take the Hmong’s dispersed community and translate it into structural lines that come together and draw apart. Read more…

The Aeron Chair has about 200 parts—all of which have to be analyzed to determine its carbon footprint. Photo: courtesy Herman Miller

There’s a reason why big companies are almost duty bound to take the lead in sustainable design. To get a handle on the complexity of the task—whether it’s designing a zero-energy building system, or truly closing the loop on a task chair—requires time, money, and expertise. Recently I spoke to Gabe Wing, Herman Miller’s Design for the Environment manager, about the unique challenges of achieving carbon neutrality for products.

Is carbon neutrality for products even possible and, if it is, what has to be done to get there?

We’ve been working in this area for several years. With products, there are some pretty significant challenges to approaching carbon neutrality. The first thing you have to do is determine how much energy is used to assemble and extract all the raw materials from the ground through your production and delivery. Then you need to look at how you handle end-of-life disposal. To go into that process is a significant endeavor and the best way to do that today is through some proprietary software packages. Read more…