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Design with conscience: transglass.

Sep 5, 2012

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Every year Artecnica pairs a well known designer with an artisan working in a small community to collaborate on a product for their Design With Conscience project. Though each product is typically greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm, the TranSglass collection designed by Studio Tord Boontje and Emma Woffenden has become one of Artecnica’s best-selling items. Aid to Artisans, a non-profit organization providing assistance to artisans worldwide, worked to bring Guatemalan craftsmen together with Woffenden and Boontje and ultimately, to bring their design to market, where MoMA saw it and acquired TranSglass for their permanent collection. The recycled wine bottle vases have been much copied, but Artecnica is the only place to get the original designs. The collection also cleverly repurposes wine bottles into carafes, candleholders and dishes.

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Form pendants, by form us with love. NYIGF 2012.

Aug 30, 2012

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The stockholm-based design studio Form Us With Love contends that “lamps are like people; They are happiest in families.” The sentiment is certainly true for their eponymous pendant lights. The three forms that make up the happy Form family (Cone, Globe and Tube) are handblown in shapes inspired by bare light bulbs.

The affordable lights are sold individually as opposed to being sold in sets that you can choose what combination suits your space and taste best. A row of three or four of the Tube pendants works just as well as a 25-piece cluster of all three shapes combined. “With very modest means and simple forms, Form Pendants can make a big difference in an interior. There is almost an infinite number of possible combinations.” [ design house stockholm ]

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Porcelain tableware by mud australia. NYIGF 2012.

Aug 26, 2012

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Mud Australia‘s line of handmade porcelain tableware easily caught my eye at the ever over-packed New York International Gift Fair this year. A rough wooden tabletop set off the collection’s picture perfect palette of soft greys, rich red, butter yellow and cheery robin’s egg blue. The exterior of all the plates, bowls and cups is left untreated, giving it a vitrified stone-like surface that’s balanced by the shining, glazed interiors. All the pieces are over, microwave and dishwasher safe, so they’re not only beautiful but practical, too.

Mud crafts their porcelain in their Sydney studio, where they also sell Chilewich’s place mats and table runners, Kobo soy candles and Vitsoe furniture. While their products are carried by a number of retailers in the United States, Mud has never had an American storefront of their very own until now. In just a few weeks they’ll be opening up shop in Soho on Crosby Street. Stay tuned for more news of the opening.

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Ferm living. NYIGF 2012

Aug 25, 2012

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Ferm Living, a Danish interior design company, is riding high on the ever-surging trend towards Scandinavian sensibilities. They produce a line of well-crafted everyday objects with eye for color and pattern and a focus on highlighting natural materials. Retro, yes, but not kitsch. Their Autumn/Winter 2012 collection includes textiles with strong geometric prints in black and white and neon orange color combinations. The neon is something of an anomaly, however, as most of their products this year are more subdued – dark mustard, dusky mauve and rich, deep turquoise balanced by grey and wood tones. The images here are just a smattering of their hundred-page catalog. See all their products and continue on to their online shop or see if they’re stocked in your city.

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Destination mexico. NYIGF 2012.

Aug 24, 2012

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It was abundantly clear that Destination Mexico’s big hot pink NYIGF booth full of bright, shiny things was meant to convey this message: We are here. We are fun. We are commercially viable. MoMA Design Store certainly agrees – their New International Design program is a partner. They currently sell a number of Mexican designers featured in the show, like Ariel Rojo, who’s Energy Saving Pig Lamp was prominently displayed. The ceramic lamp comes in black and white, with the curly-Q compact fluorescent bulb attached to the back like a tail.

My favorite Destination Mexico product is the Paper Strip Bowl by Yolanda Resendiz and Jesus Renteria. If MoMA’s goal with their Destination series is to highlight contemporary design that references regional traditions, the Paper Strip Bowl does a beautiful job of making the handcrafted tableware Mexico is known for into a durable consumer product. Discover more contemporary Mexican design at the MoMA store.

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Wonderland candleholder by arctenica. NYIGF 2012.

Aug 23, 2012

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London-based designer Stephen Johnson scoured antique shops in England for the odds and ends that comprise Wonderland, his playful candleholders. Miniature hotdogs, barrels, birds and animal figurines are stacked off-kilter, one on top of the other to make up the candlestick portion, while a base made out of a horse, a rabbit, a lady-in-waiting or a hummingbird fluttering atop a tree branch anchors the whole menagerie.

Wonderland, as in Alice and Wonderland, is made from 100% recycled aluminum and is available in matte white as well as special editions of chrome and gold. At NYIGF this year Artecnica debuted the fantastical table topper in matte red. While I think all modern furniture lovers will agree that the rigors of austerity are key, no house is quite a home if you don’t let loose just a little, and Johnson’s candleholders are just the antidote to an otherwise stark and spare dining room.

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Caterpillar stool, by hyeonil jeong.

Aug 18, 2012

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Say the words molded plywood together and we immediately think of the classic Eames chair. Though its seat is molded to accommodate our posterior and is by no means uncomfortable, its sit-abilty is vastly improved by a cushion. However, emerging designer Hyeonil Jeong was able to take the same materials and create a seat that flexes to provide a cushier seat.

Jeong does use one material that the Eames, to my knowledge, never did: bungee cord. While his Caterpillar Stool has a more or less traditional frame, the seat is made from slats of CNC-cut molded plywood woven together with bungee cord, which acts like a shock absorber when you sit down on it.

“No matter how stiff each piece is, flexible relation makes an smooth flow. Its elastic connection allows an organic surface movement despite the rigidity of ply-wood material.”

I love how the seat, when unoccupied, arches upwards with all the slats fitting nicely into place and running smoothly alongside one another. But when you sit down the seat flexes to support you and the slats shift, forming a jagged layer underneath. I’ve been noticing a trend towards woven elements in furniture in general this year, but I’ve never come across a product that strings pieces of wood together to give the material a whole new functionality.

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Curt deck chair by bernhard burkard.

Aug 17, 2012

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I love it when form mimics function. In this case Swiss design duo Bernhard Burkard has come up with a clever iteration on the patio chair with Curt, a deck chair that works by leaning it against a wall, giving it a profile as relaxed as the sitter’s. The frame is made from local ash or beech wood, one end of which is treated with an anti-slip coating that provides stability. It may look precarious, but Bernhard Burkard assures us that it’s completely safe and perfectly functional. The simplicity also makes it a prime candidate for some color play. The untreated wood and white cloth are quite nice, but Curt could really pop with some bright yellow or aqua fabric and a contrasting painted frame.

Curt is made at Altra, a workshop in Schaffhausen, Switzerland that employs people with mental or physical disabilities. You can buy the chair directly from the designers for $260.

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Druida barbecue by mermeladaestudio.

Aug 16, 2012

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At this point in the summer you’ve probably been to or hosted your fair share of barbecues. If you’re not a grill master yet – or even if you are – any backyard burger would benefit from Mermeladaestudio‘s breathtaking Druida barbecue. The acajou wood tripod legs and spun steel bowl, shown here in classic midcentury mint, will not only beautify your outdoor space, the stainless steel geometric patterned grill top will gussy up your grub, too. The “waterjet-cut crisscrossing grid” will also precent your precious brats from rolling through the grill and down into the charcoal.

Mermeladaestudio named Druida after the wide half bowl-shaped cauldrons that the druids apparently used for their summer soirees. “It shows elegance and its aesthetics are planned as if it was a piece of furniture,” the designers said. Druida is a prototype, but Mermeladaestudio is currently working with a manufacturer to produce a commercial model.

See the other pieces in their spectacular outdoor collection.

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Product update: the little printer.

Aug 15, 2012

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If your day involves too much pinging, pinning, liking, sharing, checking in, following, digging and tweeting for your taste (and sanity), yet you can’t bring yourself to move completely off the grid, there’s an answer – a way to still be a part of your digital community, but in a refreshingly analog way.

A few months back Berg Cloud unveiled the prototype for their latest design, The Little Printer, a teeny tiny printer that uses the cloud to keep track of the tweets you follow, what your friends are up to Facebook and the pictures they take on Instagram, and relays that information in one nonaggressive ‘newspaper.’

“There’s a slightly nightmarish vision of a world full of glistening, super high-res Retina displays all over your house, a sort of Total Recall world where everything’s a TV,” Berg’s Jack Schulze told Co.Design. “These objects have to live in your home, connected, but they can’t all be ringing and pinging, winking and flashing all the time. They have to be kind of calm.”

With that in mind, Berg designed The Little Printer to make it possible for you to access the content from your social networks as well as your personal calendars and to-do lists in the comforting form of a newspaper, albeit a very small one. The Little Printer uses thermal paper, which is cheap (about .50 cents a roll) and, unlike a regular printer, doesn’t require toner. Better yet, every member of your household can use the same Little Printer for their own subscriptions, which they manage on an iPhone app, “so when Mom leaves for work at 7:30, the printer can have current news headlines, a “mini newspaper,” waiting for her to read on the train, along with a crossword and perhaps the most popular pictures from Instagram. When Dad takes the kids to school at 8:30, his daily to-do list could be ready at the door.”

But the really winning element of Berg’s design is The Little Printer’s face. They purposefully gave it a human face (that it prints itself), which might seem like nothing more than a cute touch, but it actually changes the way you think about the information and how you manage it on your many other faceless devices. You may be interacting with people all day long via email, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest, but unless you Skype a lot you’re not actually interacting with anyone face-to-face, and even then there’s a screen in the way. If everyone had The Little Printer set up on their kitchen counter or desktop, it might very well help to humanize their web-based existence, and maybe even serve as a reminder that real life happen offline.

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