When forecasting the trends we’d see at Salone, we imagined that designers would invent new ways to maximize space, and that portability and adaptive re-use would be seen everywhere. But we encountered one surprising trend: designers weaving new concepts utilizing the abstractions of Space, Place and Time. Here’s what we saw at the SaloneSatellite, featuring 700 young designers, 20 international design schools, an exhibition whose theme was “50+50 Projects- Designing the Future.”

SPACE MAPPING

gt_t2P, Parametric Design and Digital Fabrication Studio, based in Chile, creates a design “DNA” through digital crafting of “generative algorithms.” Their objective is to arrive at a custom template that can move from objects to buildings for efficiency, as well as the creation of a kind of natural mapping of form by topographical waves. Read more…

Lamps are generally not made to be touched, but taking the chance with Spanish lighting designer Arturo Alvarez’s Nevo lamp certainly pays off. The way it holds its vaguely floral shape suggests that it is made of a metal mesh, perhaps clogged with paint. But my hands encountered silicone, rendered almost skin-like and organic by the mild warmth of the bulb inside.

Alvarez’s eponymous lighting company has been working for two years to get this material right. Silicone by itself couldn’t offer enough sculptural possibilities. But using it to cover metal gives it rigidity. The covering isn’t uniform, so the light that passes through is diffused unevenly. The material seems to have captivated Alvarez. He has used it the roses of the Nevo collection, and as the stormy Planum ceiling lights. And the lamps he is developing for the Milan Furniture Fair this year will continue the love affair, albeit in more tightly structured surfaces. Read more…

We can thank the United States Postal Service’s art director Derry Noyes for once again putting some design history on our mail. After the Masterworks of Modern Architecture stamps in 2005 and celebrating Charles + Ray Eames in 2008, its time for the golden age of American industrial design to get some philatelic love.

The new issue is a set of 12 stamps featuring iconic products designed by some of the “nation’s most important and influential industrial designers.” The focus is on the years after the Great Depression in 1929, when the economy pulled itself up by the bootstraps, and Americans looked to industrial designers for a new vision of their future. The designers of the era that gave us not just streamlining and chrome plating, but also design management and human factors. The stamps, which will go on sale in July 2011, mix the usual suspects – Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, and Henry Dreyfuss – with some lesser known choices. Read more…

Design award categories are often unfortunate anachronisms. Most awards are given in categories based on disciplines — “Furniture Design”, “Consumer Products” – and then the organizers resort to lengthy definitions to try and force today’s exciting, interdisciplinary work into these outdated boxes. And as we saw with the I.D Annual Design Review, the results are not very convincing.

The recently announced IDSA Design of the Decade awards must be commended for giving up the disciplinary model for categories. But while one might think that having nice, open categories like “Design’s Contribution to Market Share Growth” is preferable, it turns out to be even more confusing. I appreciate the distinction between “Solution to a Developed World Social Problem” and “Solution to a Developing World Social Problem,” recognizing that social issues are embedded in economic and political disparities. But trying to decipher why “Solution to a Consumer Problem” is a separate category from “Most Appealing Consumer Solution” is baffling, to say the least. There are five different categories for design contribution to business, indistinguishable except for the finest nuance. And then there is the greatest enigma of all, “Most Responsible Design Solution,” with no inkling of what this responsibility constitutes. They might as well have called the category “Most Awesome Best Thing.”

Nonetheless, the Gold winners in each category are some really worthy design objects, and deserve a round-up:

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ClearRx
Solution to a Consumer Problem

“The first decade of the 21st century has been frequently accused of lacking coherence. Ironically, coherence emerged as one of the prevailing themes of some of the decade’s most important design work. Target’s Clear Rx bottles—hailed by IDSA’s esteemed jury as the standout Design of the Decade—exist very explicitly to deliver a clearer, more intelligible and more logical healthcare experience.”

Metropolis featured ClearRx in our November 2005 issue.

Read more…

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.

When I.D, the oldest product design magazine in the U.S., folded after 55 years, its publishers promised that the Annual Design Review (ADR), at least, would continue in an expanded, online avatar. The ADR was a long standing tradition at the magazine, in which the editors and industry experts pored over applications from designers in various fields, and selected the very best to be published in the August/September issue each year.

The MeyerHoffer Surfboard – Best in Show, Consumer Products. 

This year’s review comes a little late, and it has quite a few quirky surprises. Read more…

Photos: Edward Lifson

Great world’s fairs traditionally leave one main, indelible image in the public’s consciousness.  In 1893, Chicago gave us civic monuments around a reflecting pool, out of which sprang the golden statue of the Republic. The Eiffel Tower soared above the 1899 Paris fair; it was the tallest man-made structure at the time. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at Montreal’s Expo ‘67 enveloped a brave new world. This year, Shanghai presents the biggest World Expo ever, with more than 200 pavilions. But the most unforgettable building is not the largest. (That would be the red inverted pyramid representing China. It’s grand and imperial, but retreaded modernism without great detail.) The most indelible experience of architecture at this fair is at one of the smallest pavilions—the one from the United Kingdom, designed by London’s Heatherwick Studio.

After walking great distances in the dreadful heat and humidity of the Shanghai summer; after being bombarded with flashing lights and LED monitors and music and hundreds of thousands of people from all over China waiting three, four, up to nine hours to visit the most popular pavilions; just when you’re so beat you think you cannot absorb another thing—there it is. The sculptural structure is like a giant sea urchin, or a porcupine, or a squashed exploding star. Its protruding rods seem to carry energy from inside this alien thing. Other pavilions claim to take visitors into the future, but this one actually delivers. Or is this crazy moon-crawler taking us back to a primordial past?

Recently, I spoke to Thomas Heatherwick about his design, his message to the Chinese people, and the purpose of world’s fairs in the 21st century.

Tell me about the project brief—what did the British government want from its pavilion?

We were very conscious of the context in which it was going to sit—the world’s largest-ever Expo. But the brief from the government asked for a building that showed that the U.K. is a good place to live and work, has good governance, and is multicultural and diverse and sustainable. So you’re going slightly numb reading that brief, because you know that that’s exactly the same brief that every other designer of every other pavilion has been given. And the British government added,  ‘And get voted one of the top ten pavilions!’ We felt that if we just did a cheesy advert for Britain, with clichés, we would not achieve that goal. The only way we would be noticed is by being slightly oblique. Read more…

Ruediger Otte and Roman Lindebaum’s Greenwich Tea Time table. Image: courtesy the designers

The notion of a single designer creating an object that is finished when it rolls off the assembly line is as antiquated as Ford’s Model T. Increasingly, the decision-making power is being put in the hands of consumers, who are being asked to vote for potential product releases, customize their new purchases, and even design their own wares through open-source Web applications. It’s a broad-reaching and often grassroots movement in which individuals, from laymen to pros, are participating in the creation or modification of mass-produced objects, blurring the line between the role of designer and consumer. In his first curatorial effort, the industrial designer Yves Béhar—the founder of fuseproject, whose products include the $100 XO laptop, a jewel-like Bluetooth headset, and, most recently, hip glasses for needy Mexican children—explores these developments for an exhibition called TechnoCRAFT, opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for Contemporary Art on July 10. Recently, Behar spoke with me about this 21st-century arts-and-crafts movement and what it means for the future of design and the assembly line.

How do you define “techno-craft?”

It’s all these new ways in which people are bringing the notion of craft into design, the notion of self-made, self-crafted, self-developed products and software. The big phenomenon that the show is trying to explain and walk visitors through is this notion that while a lot of people said craft was disappearing, actually there’s a new type of craft, a new type of involvement of the human and the hand in the mass-production process. Read more…

From this year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair, in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart: Nearly 200 photos of the best in workplace furniture, lighting, textiles, technology, and more. 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…