Writing about the ideas behind design. Think about it.
In Como, a small town on the southern shore of Lake Como north of Milan, the Museo della Seta (Silk Museum) recently showed the textile works of Lithuanian artist Inga Liksaite in a solo exhibition called ‘Waterhome’.
The works are a mixture of hand-stitching and machine-stitched canvases, making use of small stitches to create a pattern that only translates its subject when viewed from afar, like an Impressionist painting.
Read moreThere is no question that the world is in climate crisis, with school children on strike and increasing numbers of governments around the world declaring a climate emergency, so the theme of the XXII edition of the Triennale di Milano this year is particularly apt. Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival is an exhibition and series of international installations that explores what designers are doing to tackle the problem.
Broken Nature takes as its starting point the inevitable extinction of humans and explores the myriad ways that designers are attempting to tackle the problem. “Humanity is in peril… the strain we are placing on environmental bonds is significant, the needle measuring the tension is already in the critical zone, and the pressure is mounting,” writes Italian-born NY-based curator Paola Antonelli in the catalogue essay.
Read moreGuest contributor and European correspondent Lara Chapman visits ‘GEO-DESIGN – Alibaba. From here to your home’ at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven as part of a collaboration with the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) for Dutch Design Week.
Wednesday, 7:39pm: Click. A new tab is opened. Tap tap tap. A few keys are pressed. Enter. Scroll. Select. Click. Tap tap tap. A query is typed. Ping, a reply is received. Click. An Item is added to the basket. Click. Details are autofilled. Click. *Ping*. Confirmation email is received at 7:47pm.
Friday, 10:19am: *Ding Dong.* A Door is opened. A “pen” scratches on glass. A package swaps hands.
This scenario seems unremarkable, possibly even mundane. The cycle of search, browse, purchase, repeat, is constantly taking place online. However, for research designer Martina Muzi, e-commerce is an “incredibly urgent topic”. The ease of our interaction with e-commerce platforms belies a complex and sophisticated infrastructure that is entangled with areas such as political diplomacy, psychology, logistics, algorithms and new forms of labour. E-commerce is shaping our everyday behaviours in subtle but undeniable ways. Furthermore, its forces are invisibly shifting and re-defining contemporary geopolitics.
At the exhibition ‘GEO-DESIGN – Alibaba. From here to your home’, nine multidisciplinary design researchers examined China’s largest e-commerce website Alibaba.com from diverse angles. Held as part of an ongoing collaboration between the Van Abbe Museum and the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) as part of Dutch Design Week, the investigation-led project was conceived and curated by Martina Muzi and Joseph Grima. The selected designers, who are all alumni of DAE, had just two months from their briefing to the exhibition and undertook an intensive process of research, concept development and realisation. Read more
Guest contributor Belinda Hungerford visits the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition Modern Impressions: Australian Prints from the Collection.
Modernism arrived in Australia at about the same time as other parts of the world and reached all aspects of Australian culture, with its crowning glory arguably the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Modernism was especially embraced by women with its designs quickly adopted in the domestic sphere through soft furnishings, glassware, crockery, furniture, lighting and women’s clothing. Publications such as the Home magazine were also instrumental in promoting the modernist aesthetic. Modern art began to appear on the walls with women not just admirers but practitioners too.
During the 1920s and 1930s women dominated the modern art movement with various speculations relating to social change as to why. In conjunction with the loss of many men during WWI, the profitability of art-making had declined between the wars resulting in a lessening number of male artists. This, in tandem with the growth of social freedom, a development particularly beneficial for women, meant that more and more women were able to pursue careers with many choosing an artistic life. Those with independent means also took the opportunity to travel and study abroad. Read more
The first permanent exhibition venue in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District has been completed – the M+ Pavilion, designed by three Hong Kong design teams: VPANG architects ltd, JET Architecture Inc and Lisa Cheung. The leaders of each team, Vincent Pang, Tynnon Chow and Lisa Cheung, first met in New York in 1999 and, despite their careers developing separately to this point, took this opportunity to come together, winning the competition entry to design the building.
The pavilion is set within the Art Park and offers a tranquil escape from the busy city centre, with gleaming facades that mirror the surrounding greenery of the park. The building is situated on a grassy slope with the upper level exhibition space cantilevering over the lawn below and offering views of the city and the harbour. Read more
I wrote this article following an interview with Li Edelkoort, one of the world’s leading trend futurists. The interview was conducted over a garden breakfast during the Milan Furniture Fair 2014, was commissioned by Kobe Johns (now of JP Finsbury) and was first published in the DesignEX catalogue 2014.
“My job is to anticipate what will be coming.” Lidewij Edelkoort, or Li for short, is one of the best known and most respected trend forecasters in the world. The list of brands she has worked with reads like a who’s who, including Coca-Cola, Lacoste, Disney, Siemens, GAP, L’Oreal. She regularly releases trend books that are sold to top brands all over the world, she started a number of magazines, including Bloom, which presents fashion, design, perfume and more inspired by horticulture. She directed the Design Academy Eindhoven from 1998 to 2008 and established a new design school in Poland in 2011 that merges design with humanities subjects like psychology or anthropology called the School of Form. Read more