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…

We first wrote about the Helsinki-based design firm Company back in 2008, shortly after its founders, Johan Olin and Aamu Song, debuted their Top Secrets of Finland collection. The idea there was to commission traditional Finnish manufacturers to produce small runs of everyday products unique to the region. Now Company has expanded the line for the exhibition Secrets of Central Finland, on display at the Craft Museum of Finland until September 5. Check out more images of Olin and Song’s latest Finnish design finds after the jump. 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…

The ICFF invites are rolling in (and in and in and in—check our Ultimate Event Guide for a frequently-updated roster of all the happenings) and already we’ve noticed a 2010 show-floor mini-trend: At least three exhibitors this year will be hand-making products in their booths. Should be a nice reminder of just how much painstaking work goes into the creation of all those flawless new products at the Javits.

Here are the details: 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…

For me, the best thing about Rem Koolhaas’s much-hyped design of Prada’s New York “epicenter,” in the early oughties, was not the 180-foot zebrawood half-pipe so much as the wallpaper—a rotating selection of  slyly subversive graphic themes (with titles like Guilt and Vomit) by the New York design studio 2x4. Now even those of us who can’t afford to shop at Prada can have a little of 2x4’s visual savvy in our daily lives: The wall-graphic company Blik—which sells giant, removable stickers as a decorative alternative to wallpaper and painting—announced today that it is carrying four decal sets by the 2x4 team (including “Modular Icons,” above). The prices range from $25 to $55 per set; check out more photos of the new line after the jump. Read more…

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On the site today, you’ll find Metropolis’s annual special product issue. After the jump, senior editor Kristi Cameron explains this year’s theme in the latest installment of our “Metropolis Minute” video series.

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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…

Last week, the New York International Gift Fair arrived at the Javits Center with, as usual, a handful of terrific new products. Here’s a quick look at a few of my personal favorites.

The Brooklyn-based distributor neo-utility was showing this elegant stainless-steel pen by Düller and the German designer Dietrich Lubs, of Braun fame. It’s available as a ballpoint pen, a fountain pen, and a mechanical pencil.

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For more than three decades now, two bright-orange Panton Chairs have graced my apartments in New York City. They started out in the living room, then migrated to the bedroom, and now they’re my dining chairs, to be seen clearly from every angle of my tiny downtown loft. And I love looking at them—their shiny, smooth, sensual plastic forms, their striking Sixties color, their generous seat pans from the front, sleek profiles from the side, and humanoid bottoms from the back please my eye endlessly. Believe it or not, I also enjoy cleaning them—going over the smooth plastic with a damp cloth, then buffing it dry is a satisfying moment, in contrast to my other furniture, which needs vacuuming, dusting, and sometimes  toxic stain removers. My Pantons, in fact, stand in defiance of complex maintenance. They are truly Modern chairs in this regard too. And reports to the contrary, my Pantons did not throw guests across the room, break under them, or in any way cause discomfort or bodily harm to anyone. As far as I’m concerned they’re ergonomically, sculpturally, materially, and aesthetically perfect.

As someone who sometimes teaches design history, I also appreciate the chairs’ breakthrough design and materiality, product engineering, and manufacturing methods. The Panton, after all, is the first chair made of one piece of material, a process that took many years and many trials to develop and perfect, starting in the early 1960s. Knowing these historic facts also increases my appreciation of the chairs. And understanding that many trials and errors go into innovative products reminds me that design breakthroughs are not about “aha!” moments, but a sustained commitment to an idea. Read more…