Posts Tagged ‘industrial design’

take care, always read the label

Friday, August 31st, 2012

Stevenage street sign

The 1950s new town dream: envisioned, achieved, forgotten.

“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” (Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus). 

Some of us avoid ruining clothes by checking washing instructions. Fogeys young and old appreciate looking after a good pair of shoes. Some humans may have read a few pages of the user manual that came with their car / TV / computer. But most of us pay scant attention to looking after stuff. Our high expectations and short attention spans have made ‘care’ a tiresome inconvenience. 

Architects, designers and other creators are blamed when their enduring work ‘fails’ in the long run. Poorly maintained 70s buildings routinely get torn down where a little care might have preserved the optimistic social statements they once made. The City of London’s Barbican Estate is a rare exception to the rule.

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coloured up

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Photo: Bernard Gagnon

Is fashion is the only design discipline with colour truly embedded at its core? The search for ‘new blacks’ notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine fashion without colour. Interior design takes it fairly seriously and like fashion, devotes significant effort to forecasting colour trends. Architecture and industrial design sometimes seem timid with colour but project leadtimes, materials & regulatory issues inhibit experiment. Somewhere in the middle is graphic design: sometimes using colour well, often not. What is graphic design’s excuse?

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product, Paolozzi & Prima: David Keech on design & music

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Multidisciplinary designer, musician and teacher David Keech was an Associate with architects Foster and Partners, the first non-Japanese designer at Yamaha Design in Japan, and now runs his own product and interior design practise, Keechdesign.

Kumu chair by David Keech with James Johnson. A Japanese word meaning to join together or assemble, Kumu has only five components, no screws or mechanical fixings and is cut from a single sheet of plywood.

What inspires you? Everything.  That’s a serious answer – not just design.  Only a small percentage of my inspiration comes from that world, a very congested one, everyone following each other – I think it’s good not to be too involved in that.  I probably get more of my inspiration from sculpture, fine art, music, popular culture, than design per se. I spend a lot of time and energy pursuing inspiration, it’s a big part of what I do.  In teaching I kick off with slides about inspiration to surprise students a bit, not work by Phillippe Starck or Arne Jacobsen (much as I love them both)… I was at the National Gallery yesterday looking mainly at pre-17th century religious paintings, and I just thought to myself ‘this is fuel’.  It’s profound, the human energy involved – let alone the skill.  If you could get to half that level, you’d be going some…

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plugged

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

© DC Thompson

Hats off to RCA graduate Min-kyu Choi, who has won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award.

The award – a slightly weird exercise in comparing apples with oranges (if not bananas, guava, macadamia nuts and kiwi fruit) – last year favoured Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster and this year pitted the late great Alexander McQueen’s spring/summer collection, a light aircraft and a social housing project against Mr Choi’s clever folding plug design.  Anyone travelling any distance with a thin laptop will appreciate the value of his elegant solution to the problem of the ugly bulk of the UK plug when travelling. The new plug, which folds to 1cm or less, may not save lives but solves a daily irritation for potentially millions of people.  Amazing a) that no-one did this sooner and b) that it is not in production already.  We may now have to put up with endless ‘plugging the market gap’ headlines, but Min-kyu Choi deserves the success that will surely result from his clarity of thought and keen eye for a missed opportunity. Demos here and here.

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