i-eclectica.org

Aswoon™/Susan Woods Studio specialises amongst other things in the design and fabrication of high-end objects of functional art. The two examples here from aptly named ‘New Wave Line’ series look like beautiful yet functional sculptures. The first is called Ribbon Float Lounge - a golden brown poplar bent plywood lounge chair with a satin finish, whose steel underpinning give it a firm grounding. The furniture piece below is called Short Wave Table and seems to be made from the same material. The glass top is perfect, allowing the full appreciation of both form and material. Quite gorgeous …

AU KDDI’s Design Project basically comprises mobile phone designs that you could never imagine and commercialise. Consequently, when AU displayed the INFOBAR2 and some other imaginative concepts earlier this year, people doubted they will ever become real phones. Well, AU is planning to launch INFOBAR2 in Novermber for the winter line-up.

I quite like the funky design by Naoto Fukasawa, which is the only reason I’m mentioning it here. InfoBar2 is manufactured by Sanyo, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have G3 plus some of its specs are not catering for Australia. It seems to be made for the Japanese market primarily, so I’m not sure whether it will even be available here.

The phone uses a 2.6? 240×400 OLED screen with improved visibility outdoors. A One-Seg DMB tuner is built in and you can record your shows onto the microSD card; I doubt though that DMB is available in Australia. Apparently the 1.97MP auto-focus camera takes reasonable pictures, and one can listen to music via the stereo speakers (I do wonder about the sound quality though).

The InfoBar2 has AGPS built in, you can browse full HTML sites on the CDMA EV-DO network (no G3!), and buy stuff with the Felica electronic money slash ticket microchip built in. The unit measures 47×138×15.5mm (104g) and will start selling in late November. The official kit would also come with a TV stand and protective pouch.

[via latest-mobile]

Designer legend Raymond Loewy was the creative force behind some of the greatest 20th-century industrial design innovations. For more than 50 years, Loewy’s designs helped furnish, accessorise, and shape the color scheme of the American dream. From the sleek Studebaker in the garage to the Formica countertops in the kitchen, his innovations cast a modernising spell over households across the country.

“His designs are so influential and easily understood. Even though some of us don’t immediately recognise his name, we live in Raymond Loewy’s world,” said Hilary Anderson, director of exhibitions and collections at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, which has put together a travelling exhibition of his work. It honours Loewy, who died in 1986, with an array of original drawings, models, products, advertisements, photographs, and rare film footage of the master at work.

His work was not limited to refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, pencil sharpeners, and other basic household items; his designs extended to Air Force One’s interior, NASA’s Skylab, locomotives, and Americana such as the US Postal Service emblem and the Lucky Strike cigarettes, Nabisco, Exxon, Shell, and Coca Cola logos. “His style was sleek but at the same time glitzy and polished. His look can be identified by softened lines and shapes, which are seen throughout his various projects. The locomotives reflect the waffle irons. The refrigerators reflect the lipstick containers. It’s all very pleasing and ultramodern. The word ‘cool’ comes to mind,” said John Ott, executive director of the museum. Loewy’s philosophy, as he put it, was to create the “most advanced, yet acceptable” designs. One result: The French-born designer streamlined every corner and curve, from the well-rounded Filben Maestro jukebox of 1947 to the iconic Greyhound Scenicruiser of 1954.

“His style is a little hard to describe, but to my eye, his designs make things look like they work. Everything is smooth; he left no visible parts. His designs are inviting and easy to the touch. He did a great job redefining modern,” said Anderson, who observed a strong connection between Loewy’s eye and design aesthetics in today’s market. There was a time a product simply had to work well to gain shelf position. Now it has to look good, too. “He had a real sense of public taste. Everything he designed was modern but not too modern. Another aspect of his success was he could think big. Everything designed was a complete experience. He reshaped our world as consumers.”

Take, for example, the famous bullet-shaped passenger locomotives that he designed for the Pennsylvania railroad. Loewy believed passenger trains ought to be pleasing to the eye, both inside and out. “People like Loewy took something practical and made it look really handsome, even it was just a means of transportation,” said Ott. From iPods to sticks of deodorant, today’s consumers might be a little keener on quality design as a result of Loewy’s handiwork.

[source for text: Boston Globe]

“This image was part of Barnbrook’s ‘Tomorrow’s Truth’ exhibition at the Seoul Arts Centre in 2004. The Mickey Mouse hybrid is Kim Jong-il, son of Kim il-Sung who assumed dictatorial control over North Korea in 1948. Barnbrook, on the symbolic link between Disneyland and North Korea explains, “Both are ‘contained realities’. Everything is thought out, controlled- your reality is changed when you’re inside both. Er… they also both cost a fortune to get into.”

Wallpaper published an interview with humanist and political graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, whose work is currently is retrospectively shown in London (Design Museum). Since 1990, Barnbrook Design has produced a wide range of innovative graphic work, under the direction of Central St Martins graduate, Jonathan Barnbrook. The studio is notable for its belief in the ability of graphic design to facilitate social change. From print design to corporate identity, magazine work to typeface, industrial design to CD covers, Barnbrook’s output is prolific and always deeply thought-provoking.

As well as collaborations with Damien Hirst and David Bowie, Barnbrook is a regular contributor to the Canadian anti-corporate magazine, ‘Adbusters’, and has shown self-initiated, often daring, political exhibitions in Tokyo and Seoul.

“Barnbrook admits that the mass media is so tightly controlled, one often has to resort to less ‘legal’ methods to get one’s message across. “When George W. Bush came to visit London on November 18th 2003, we went out and flyposted his purported route to stay with the Queen in the hope he would see the real views of the citizens of ‘his strongest ally’.”"

The images shown here are part of a slide show accompanying the above mentioned interview, allowing a look behind the scenes of the exhibition. The comments here are taken from Wallpaper’s site and give some background information on Jonathan Barnbrook’s political understanding his work is based on.

“This wall features Barnbrook’s self-initiated, political work; from the first Gulf War, through Bush and Blair’s alliance to the second Gulf War, encompassing many familiar faces and symbols from the ‘axis of evil’.”

“Barnbrook says of the collaboration, “I liked David Bowie before I tarted working with him but I was not an obsessive. I hope that meant I had enough distance to see whether what I was doing was good enough or appropriate for him, his target audience and his music. There was a stipulation that the front cover should have his picture on it, so it was more a matter of trying to express the idea of ‘Heathen’ in the layout of the typography. the final version is on the right page with variations on the left.”"

“These pages of the booklet show the combination of vandalised paintings, photographed by Markus Klinko and Indrani. The concept for vandalised artwork stemmed from Barnbrook’s discovery in an academic journal of a Rembrandt that had been desecrated. “It struck me as both shocking and beautiful- a complete violation of what society deems to be of cultural value. Tom me it perfectly exemplified what a Heathen could be and I wanted to use it for the album,” explains Barnbrook. The museum wouldn’t grant copyright for fear of copycat attacks, so he borrowed the concept and faked the vandalism.”

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Ettore Scottsass

The International Herald Tribune carried an article today by Alice Rawthorn, announcing that the loved and loathed Memphis Design is back en vogue. Named after the Bob Dylan song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (coincidentally the song had been played repeatedly throughout the evening and the record player’s needle kept getting stuck on the last three words of the song’s title), the movement/group was founded in December 1980 by Ettore Sottsass, then in his sixties and a grandee of Italian design. He had invited invited a group of younger designers to develop a furniture collection to show at the following year’s Milan Furniture Fair. After that meeting the participants resolved to meet again with their designs in February 1981, and decided then to form a design collaborative. The group, which eventually counted among its members Michele de Lucchi, Matteo Thun, Javier Mariscal, Marco Zanini, Aldo Cibic, Andrea Branzi, Barbara Radice, Martine Bedin, George J. Sowden and Nathalie du Pasquier, disbanded in 1988 when the design pendulum then swung against PoMo playfulness, and back to rationalist restraint.

The result was a highly-acclaimed debut at the 1981 Salone del Mobile of Milan, the world’s most prestigious furniture fair. According to Rawthorn, “the secret of Memphis’s success was its flair for marketing. There were long lines outside the opening party at the Milan Furniture Fair, and Sottsass posed for photographs with his young collaborators in a “conversation pit” designed by Masanori Umeda to look like a boxing ring. That image appeared in magazines all over the world, and Karl Lagerfeld placed a bulk order of Memphis furniture for his Monaco home.

Memphis Design 1980 - unknown designer

Showy, media-savvy and an easily digestible expression of fashionable, but often obscure postmodernist theories, Memphis was perfectly attuned to the early 1980s. It was design’s equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s photo-op presidency, and all of those pantaloon-clad New Romantics - Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club - preening in early MTV promos. But there was only so much leopard-printed plastic laminate that the design world could take and, by 1985, even Sottsass was bored by it. He quit Memphis, followed by most of his young collaborators.”

Memphis was a reaction against the post-Bauhaus “black box” designs of the 1970s and it also hoped to erase the International Style where Postmodernism had failed, preferring an outright revival and continuation of Modernism proper rather than a re-reading of it; Ettore Sottsass, called Memphis design the “New International Style“. Prepared to mix 20th century styles, colours and materials, it positioned itself as a fashion rather than an academic movement, and it had a sense of humour that was lacking at the time in design. In contrast to the severity, starkness and the dark appearance of the objects of modernity (from furniture to buildings), the Memphis Group offered bright, colourful and shocking pieces. Taste of course is a highly subjective matter, but the word tasteful is generally not associated with products generated by the Memphis Group; nevertheless, they were certainly ground breaking at the time.

Ettore Scottsass

All this would seem to suggest that the Memphis Group was very superficial but that was far from the truth. The group intended to develop a new creative approach to design. They drew inspiration from such movements as Art Deco and Pop Art, styles such as the 1950s Kitsch and futuristic themes. Disagreeing with the approach of the time and challenging the idea that products had to follow conventional shapes, colours, textures and patterns, their products were conceptually in stark contrast to so called ‘Good Design’. This in turn split the world of design into those who loved the group’s work and those who absolutely hated it; until today apparently, MoMA still doesn’t have a single piece of Memphis in its collection.

That could change. According to Rawthorn, Memphis design is in demand again - not just at auctions but also as a concept underlying new design. “All of Memphis’s hallmarks - super-sizing, dizzy colors, gaudy patterns and cheesy motifs - were visible in the most directional pieces at this spring’s Milan Furniture Fair. They will surface again at this week’s London Design Festival. And cool young designers are suddenly citing Memphis and Studio Alchymia as inspirations.”

Job Smeets, Robber Baron Collection

Art and design always seem to fluctuate between similar poles: the rational, the romantic and the emotional/expressive. According to Rawthorn, “right now it is rebelling against the slickness of megabranding to chase the ‘emotional and expressive’ qualities that Job Smeets (of Studio Job) relishes in the original Memphis pieces. Design is also searching for alternatives to the delicate neo-romantic style, which was fashionable in the early 2000s.”

Karen Ryan

Memphis’ influence on contemporary design can be spotted “in Marcel Wanders’s giant replicas of ornamental porcelain bells at this spring’s Milan Furniture Fair, and in the super-sized mosaic objects that Jaime Hayon exhibited there. You can see more hints of Memphis in the Day-Glo pattern of the Untitled lamp that Karen Ryan is exhibiting at designersblock in London this week, and you’ll pick them up again in the fantastical Robber Baron collection of objects that Studio Job is designing for Moss to exhibit at the Design Miami fair in Florida this December.” And “the Memphis aesthetic even chimes with what’s happening in pop culture. It is visible in the fluorescent colors worn by the New Ravers, who hang out at the London club, BoomBox, and in the gaudy graphics of SuperSuper, the style magazine, and of acid house revivalist bands, like The Klaxons. And, let’s face it, if ever an era was as showy and media savvy as the early 1980s, it’s this one.”

Jamie Hayon

Marcel Wanders - Antelope