The beautiful people

The American Look (1958) discovered at paper lily.
America lifestyle in the 50's with an *idealistic* sense for design. A must see for any designer.

In France, we have Mon Oncle made in 1958 by Jacques Tati who portrays magnificently a materialistic lifestyle contrasted with a Mr. Hulot who struggles with postwar France's mindless obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism. I recommend anyone to watch any of Jacques Tati's movie. Delight for sure. A must see for anybody!

The following is an extract from Playtime




Mon oncle

I'd like to finish by a welcome into modernity by Jacques Tati. Awesome.

Create your own doll

Oh, I Feel Naked!

Yes, I collect toys, toys that are charged with a period. Maybe this one is charged from the Victorian era, but I love it. It resembles a mix between a voodoo doll and a customizable one. If the author of the work, Eli Gutierrez, commercializes it, I immediately would get one!

Interview in Neo-Nomad!

Yasmine Abbas challenged me on mobile-related questions for her NID serie.
The interview.

Yasmine initiated an interview serie the NID. The NID stands for Neo-nomad ID. The concept wants to push the envelop of a classical interview by providing readers clues to reflect on mobilities, and the paradoxes engendered. These NIDs are "tranches de vies", meaning "slices of lives", rather than a questionnaire listing projects. They dwell into the intimate and the everyday life of beings to understand better our relationship to mobilities and technologies. Necessarily, because the method of investigation relates more to ethnography than journalism, I felt that visuals were essential to the NID. Also, NID in French means "nest".

The world as a palette reviewed by Pantone

Kimiko Ryokai invented I/O brush willing to use the world as a palette, well Pantone just released the Pantone's color cue, a color matching device that one can hold to any surface to know the matching paint from the Pantone library, and get it to decorate their interior. Via Metropolismag.

With the Color Cue, designers can match Pantone paint to any flat surface, including these objects from the MoMA Design Store. From top: Karim Rashid’s Kaj Watch, Frank Gehry’s cardboard Wiggle Side Chair, and Marc Berthier’s Tykho Radio. By Evelyn Dilworth

Image courtesy Pantone

A view on conventional work

At the present time there are enough cultivated entertainment and issue-oriented films, as if cinema were a stroll on walkways in a park… One need not duplicate the cultivated. In fact children prefer the bushes: they play in the sand or in scrap heaps. - Alexander Kluge

Germany in Autumn

As a medium that organizes human needs and qualities in a social form, the existing public sphere maintains a claim to be representative while excluding large areas of people's experience. Among the media that increasingly constitute the public sphere, the cinema lags behind on account of its primarily artisanal mode of production (in Germany, at least), preserving a certain degree of independence thanks to state and television funding. This ironic constellation provides the cinema with a potential for creating an alternative, oppositional public sphere within the larger one, addressing itself primarily to the kinds of experience repressed by the latter. Thus the cinema's intervention aims not only at the systematic non- or misrepresentation of specific issues—eg. family, factory, security, war and Nazism—but also the structure of the public sphere itself. - Alexander Kluge

Music sofa

Very simple input output! Via idealist

Josiah McElheny

Adolf Loos, provocative architect from the early 20th century, basically declared that ornament is a crime and that moving ornament from the world is pure. Ornament in architecture but also on people such as tattoos. To some extend, it is a very colonialist statement ... He expressed that most primitive societies use ornaments and that the most advanced ones rarely use them, basically form follows function.



I discovered the work on Josiah McElheny on art21 and I was immediately impressed by his work: through the quality of the work that is self explanatory and also his excellent presentation of his work.

In the documentary series, Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, Josiah McElheny explains how his white glass sculptures and installations are inspired by Adolf Loos' manifesto, Ornament and Crime. By this idea that primitive people are the ones who decorate and the natural course of progress in men is to remove this decorative impulse from our psyche. He explained that it is about making the world white in the sense of a world without ornamentation, without individuation, without grayness and that almost immediately it falls apart and becomes something really horrible, especially when it becomes imposed upon the world.



“Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime“, 2002
Blown glass, wood, glass, and electric lighting, case dimensions: 49 x 60 x 10 1/2 inches. Collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Photo by Tom Van Eynde . Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago. With Art21 Copyright Notice.

I recently saw Josiah McElheny's Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely piece exhibited at the ICA in Boston.



Modernity circa 1952, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, detail. 2004
Mirrored blown glass, chrome metal, glass, mirror, electric lighting, 30 1/2 x 56 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches
Collection Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo by Tom Van Eynde. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.

Why not?

Shay Alkalay revisited bears as tools: as bin bags and as vacum cleaner bags.


Bin Bag Bear

A simple employee at the council rubbish disposal services had a peculiar imagination: he could see teddy bears in every object he observed. As a child he would stare at the clouds imagining that he could see teddy bears in the sky… and today...everywhere, even the black bin bags looked like teddy bears to him.
No one at work could stand his excited cries every time he shouted 'look at that bear...look at that one...don't throw it into the garbage crusher… nooooo!..'
Of course he was fired from his job, lost his family and friends and became homeless. Yet even though many people thought he was strange, none of them would admit that they too saw the teddy bear bin bags dumped around the streets of London.

Hoover Bag Bears

More on the Hoover Bears by Regine on wmmna.

Duct tape wallet

A wallet that I saw in many hands. Now there is even a kit to make it. The duct tape wallet kit by db clay. Via ohgizmo

The neo-nomads made it to the BBC!

A great article on BBC news In search of the neo-nomad. So if you think you are becoming a laptop warrior or wirelress dependant, maybe you belong to this new class of persons, the Neo-Nomads. This term was invented by Dr Yasmine Abbas and illustrated by her PhD thesis.

Abbas is especially interested in how people who work on the move retain a sense of belonging to places and organisations, and at the way new technologies open up new ways of belonging to groups and even companies.

A lot can be designed for people on the move. Technology can really serve everyday needs of us, post-cyborgs ;) Yasmine and I started with the Touch Sensitive apparel conceived in the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory and we are developping a new trend of haptic apparel to serve "digitally geared people on the move". Keep tuned!

Also I just found that the PhD thesis of Jeff Axup on Methods of Understanding and Designing For Mobile Communities was completed.

Abstract Society is increasingly on the move, mobile devices are commonly being used to coordinate group actions, and group communication features are rapidly being added to existing technologies. Despite this, little is known about how mobile groups act, or how communications technologies should be designed to augment existing behaviour. This is partially due to minimal research being done on the topic, but also to the lack of research methods available to study the topic with. Mobile groups are challenging to study because of frequent and long-duration movement, frequent distribution, and the rapidly changing environments they operate within. To address these issues, this research focuses on methodological issues surrounding the development of mobile devices for mobile groups and communities. More specifically it addresses backpackers, who are a relevant example of this type of community. The research primarily explores the convergence of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and the field of mobile device development. This enables the combination of emphasis on designing technologies for groups, social implications, mobile device design, and mobile settings.

Major research outcomes presented in this thesis lie in three areas: 1) methods, 2) technology designs, and 3) backpacker culture. Five studies of backpacker behaviour and requirements form the core of the research. The methods used are in-situ and exploratory, and apply both novel and existing techniques to the domain of backpackers and mobile groups.

Methods demonstrated in this research include: field trips for exploring mobile group behaviour and device usage, a social pairing exercise to explore social networks, contextual postcards to gain distributed feedback, and blog analysis which provides post-hoc diary data. Theoretical contributions include: observations on method triangulation, a taxonomy of mobility research, method templates to assist method usage, and identification of key categories leading to mobile group requirements. Design related outcomes include: 57 mobile tourism product ideas, a format for conveying product concepts, and a design for a wearable device to assist mobile researchers.

Our understanding of backpacker culture has also improved as a consequence of the research. It has also generated user requirements to aid mobile development, methods of visualising mobile groups and communities, and a listing of relevant design tensions. Additionally, the research has added to our understanding of how new technologies such as blogs, SMS and iPods are being used by backpackers and how mobile groups naturally communicate.

You can download the .pdf of the thesis.