ArtFuture’s booth brought a bit of St. Petersburg to the Javits with designs that played off of the traditional Russian nesting doll, or matryoshka. The shapely silhouette (actually imported from Japan in the late-19th century) was used to great effect in Olga Prozorova’s Button-Table, which is supported by four massive wooden dolls; their white heads poke through the acrylic tabletop, making the shape of a button. Following a similar idea, Anna Pushkareva’s Roundabout table turns nine thin doll shapes, woven together with red cord, into a base for a glass table. The busy, overlapping forms (which would have frustrated Saarinen’s slum-clearing tendencies) are designed to replicate the look of a carousel in motion. Elvira Ziyangirova set the matryoshka on its side, filling a pear-shaped sack with foam and (shades of the Campana brothers) covering it with a layer of felt apples. It is an irresistible form, and passersby constantly stopped to squeeze the felt fruit, as though they were in a farmer’s market sampling the produce. Read more…

In the ICFF student yearbook, the Maryland Institute College of Art, or MICA, would be the crunchy freshman in Birkenstocks, brandishing a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia. The school’s low-tech exhibition, also called MICA (for Material Inspired Concepts & Artifacts), uses simple materials simply. Jute, cork, felt, and banana leaf are the basis for projects that wear their lack of elaboration as a (reclaimed-from-the-scrap-heap) badge of honor: a canopy for outdoor living, a transparent hemp body pillow with a striking geometric structure, bamboo digging tools to get tykes connected to the dirt, and a braided hemp-and-jute sandal with a removable banana-leaf insole. (Hemp is a perfectly fine material on its own, though I started getting other ideas when I was handed a business card made from a Trader Joe’s cereal box; it had just one word of the original packaging on it: “HIGH.” A coincidence?) 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…

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Clockwise from top left: Sushir Kadidal’s Tempo chair; Alexandra Pulver’s Lunch Bag stool; Mike Jozewicz’s Nabolis chair; Esin Arsan’s 142 chair; and Jonathan Gillen’s Primitive chair
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Wilsonart Challenges, a competition that asks a class of design students to come up with a chair to be photographed for an ad campaign, presents an interesting problem, because the winner is more image than object. Though a person does have to be able to sit in it (presumably to avoid nasty spills during the ad photo session), it’s more important that the chair showcase the properties of laminate and bear a recognizable reference to the sample chip (you know, those colorful little rectangles with a hole on one end for a chain to go through). I’ve now judged several of the competitions, and I always find myself torn between what I think is the most commercial design—the one I’d want in my living room—and the one that will best serve the ad. This year that tension was especially pronounced. Read more…

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…

We’ve been following the Swedish lighting manufacturer Wästberg since it released its first collection in 2008—and, in 2009, we wrote about the Stockholm design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune’s experiments crafting furniture from a new material called DuraPulp—so, naturally, we were intrigued to learn just now that Wästberg and CKR have teamed up to produce a task lamp using this durable paper-pulp composite. Called w101 (catchy!), the lamp is made of DuraPulp on a cast-iron base with a five-watt LED. “Paper has been used throughout history for making lamp shades,” the manufacturer’s founder and CEO, Magnus Wästberg, said in a press release. “Now we are using paper for the actual structure of the fixture adding advanced LED technology.” Indeed. The company officially launches w101 in Milan next week; here’s a bigger image of the (origami-influenced?) design: Read more…

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About halfway through Unfolded, Peter Schmidt and Nicola Stattmann’s new book on the uses of paper in contemporary design, you get the idea that one volume probably won’t come close to summarizing the material’s current applications and, more importantly, its potential. It’s not just that there’s too much historical or cultural ground to cover; early on Schmidt and Stattmann confess that they “are not interested in [paper’s] function as a bearer of cultural heritage, or even as a means of mass communication,” but are concerned only with the material’s capacity in constructing three-dimensional art and design. Rather, it’s the sheer variety of works—Unfolded showcases paper furniture, sculpture, drawings, clothing, architecture—that makes a comprehensive review difficult.

Schmidt and Stattmann avoid that approach by treating their work as a primer to the field, and emphasizing a wide breadth of high-quality projects by artists like Mieke Miejer, who reverses the normal life of the material by making a wood table out of recycled newspaper; architects like Shigeru Ban, whose Paper Log Houses were first used as temporary housing for victims of the Kobe earthquake in 1995; and scientists like Shinji Suzuki, whose work may soon produce a paper plane capable of returning to Earth from space. The designers use the material in ways as diverse as their backgrounds, and in the hundred projects outlined in the book, paper is cut, stacked, folded, treated, shredded, worn, hung, lit, cooked, carried, and otherwise manipulated, always with unexpected results. Read more…

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Browsing the MoMA Design Store’s new fall catalog this afternoon, I was struck by a photo of Peter Schlumbohm’s 1941 Chemex coffeemaker, which has long been a part of the museum’s permanent collection but is only now being sold through its retail arm. It’s a familiar enough object, and easy to overlook—but what a funny design! Read more…

The James Dyson Award won’t announce a winner until next month, but its PR team is already promoting one “especially innovative” product by an American design student. Nicholas Riddle’s Prio Paper Cast is a stabilizing cast made from intricately woven paper; intended for disaster-relief efforts, the cast is lightweight, ships flat, and includes easy-to-read triage straps with instructions for medical personnel. Riddle’s proposal is one of 20 to move on to the semifinals; its competition includes an intelligent fire extinguisher from France, an ergonomic wheelchair brake from Ireland, and a collapsible electrical plug from the U.K. We’ll report back when the winner is announced in a few weeks.

Located an hour by bus from Poitiers, France, the Boisbuchet summer workshops are among the design world’s best kept secrets. On this sprawling 15th-century country estate, far from the distractions of the studio or the office, designers can recharge their creative energies by learning about aspects of the field that they wouldn’t normally get a chance to explore. Aside from the more conventional short courses in lighting, graphic design, furniture, and architecture, students can experiment with porcelain, glassblowing, jewelry-making—and even chocolate. Read more…