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…

Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell at Moss were so excited with their latest exhibition, Poetic License, that I asked Franklin to send over some pics. The show, which celebrates rule breaking, envelope pushing, and taking chances—everything a designer should be doing—showcases works that push the boundaries of what’s been done before in a variety of media. You’ll see some launches by young European designers like Michael Anastassiades, Mathias Bengtsson, Finn Magee, and Oskar Zieta, as well as work by standbys like the Campana brothers, Michele De Lucchi, and Patrick Jouin. The show opens May 16, and is a nice kick-off to ICFF. And if you miss the show this weekend, it’s open until June 26. Read more…

In a story in yesterday’s T The New York Times Style Magazine, Guy Trebay sits down with the 93-year-old furniture designer Irving Harper—and kindly gives credit to Metropolis for first uncovering Harper’s behind-the-scenes role in creating some of the most recognizable icons in midcentury furniture design. Click here to read the full text of Paul Makovsky’s original story on Harper, “Vintage Modern,” from the June 2001 issue.

Upon first encountering the new chair and bench prototypes from the Dutch design duo Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen, of Atelier Remy & Veenhuizen, you’d be forgiven for not immediately registering the furniture’s material. From a distance, the objects appear to be inflated. Are they vinyl? Plastic? Then again, they could be leather; they look malleable and seamed and just a bit overstuffed in places. It’s only on closer inspection that you see the telltale pocking on the surface that can only mean one thing: The chairs and benches are fabricated of concrete. Poured into plastic molds and structured with steel, these pieces read one thing (light, airy) and are another entirely (cement and metal). Read more…

What is happening in the murky video clip to your left? To be honest, I’m not entirely certain. All I can tell you for sure is that this is a preview of the new work by Joris Laarman Lab to be exhibited at Friedman Benda Gallery, in New York, beginning Friday.

Laarman is the young Dutch designer best known for creating the Bone Chair and Bone Chaise, among other bone furniture. For those limited-edition pieces, he used computer algorithms and a trademarked CAD casting method to mimic the growing patterns of bones in bizarre-looking aluminum or polyurethane seats.

His new work includes the Half Life Lamp, which again tries to imitate a biological process in a manufacturing setting. This is a case where it may be best to let the designer speak for himself. Here’s an excerpt from a statement by Laarman:

This lamp Half life – it is half made of living organism and half made of non living material recently died. It was born on February 23 in a Dutch tissue culture laboratory. On the video Half life radiated brightly when it was in healthy conditions. The cells responsible for the emission of light in the hood of the lamp originally stem from a Chinese hamster. In 1957 these CHO cells were isolated from a hamster’s ovary and kept alive as a cell culture for research purposes. In the 1990s this cell line was enriched with the fire fly’s luciferase gene. Ever since than these hamster cells glow in the dark in presence of luciferine. According to present state of knowledge in the life science the development of bioluminescence systems in living organisms occurred naturally about 20 or 30 times in evolution. Well known examples of bioluminescence are found in bacteria, fire flies, and jelly fish.

So the above video illustrates this bioluminescence. And the final result? Read more…