Afro Art was founded 1967 by Jytte Bonnier and have since that time been working with fair trade products and projects from the third world. In 2003, Afro Art changed hands. Six textile designers took over the business and infused new ideas and their own design into the organization. At this year, 2007, when Afro Art is having their 40 years old anniversary they open up a second store at the prestigious area around Östermalmstorg in Stockholm. The concept for the space is brought out from the same context as the Afro Art works within. To make something extraordinary out of low costs and by a sustainable mean. Gabriella Gustafson & Mattias Ståhlbom tried to use the same method that lots of typical handicraft from the third world comes from. Like using local materials, ready mades, waste etc. In this case Gabriella Gustafson & Mattias Ståhlbom used standard pine beams (45 mm x 45mm) and multiplied them into a display system. The shelves, hooks and display boxes are not fixed and can easily change place and put into the grid of beams. The Afro Art concept has to be the cheapest store concept in Sweden.

Title: Afro Art
Object: Retail Design
Client: Afro Art (www.afroart.se)
Design: Gabriella Gustafson & Mattias Ståhlbom
Photo: Joakim Bergström
Date: 2007

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : afro art stockholm retail design architecture taf

Andra bloggar om: afro art, stockholm, design, arkitektur, inredning, mattias ståhlbom, gabriella gustafson

This exhibition by Olafur Eliasson in Malmö actually took place one and a half year ago. I found the pictures when I browsed through my iPhoto catalogue the other day. The exhibition took place in Malmö Konsthall (public Art Gallery) from 1971 by Swedish architect Klas Anshelm. It was a great experience and I would like to share it with you by posting some of my pictures below.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : olafur eliasson malmo art klas anshelm

Andra bloggar om: olafur eliasson, konst, malmö konsthall, utställning, klas anshelm

Today we have announced the last ten speakers for the Designboost lectures on October 18th. The ten speakers are:

Jody Turner
Culture of Future provides visually flavorful conversation, inspirational POV and leading edge trend language encompassing tech to retail, generations to culture and design to sustainability. Founder and CEO, Jody Turner, is a “Trend Hunter” or “Meaning Hunter” and travels globally to present ideas on the future of culture and design.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey
Sean Pillot de Chenecey works with research and brand development. He injects vitality and creativity into consumer insight and brand positioning. Before starting the company Sean spent ten years with cutting-edge agencies. He is often quoted on brand/consumer issues by the media and writes for a range of business and consumer publications.

Tim Power
Tim Power, architect and designer based in Milan. For the past decade the office of Tim Power has worked on a variety of projects including furniture, lighting, interiors and architecture for a large international client base. Recently, with the participation of Slow Food and Boffi, he has conducted a program at the I.E.D. on researching and designing self sufficient kitchen units.

Oliver Ike
Oliver Ike founded Ikepod Watch company in 1986 and worked as its CEO until 2003. Today manager & contributing writer of Ikebranco productions, a company operating in the field of interior and architecture photography and publishing. He has various consulting mandates in the watch business and as well new projects in the pipeline in the field of watches.

Kevin Low
Kevin Low runs smallprojects which is a company that conceptualizes, designs and builds things; primarily architecture and utility design. Kevin studied closely with the Aga Khan Foundation and over various periods, has been professionally involved in writing, environmental sculpture, illustration, teaching and copyrighting.

Mårten Claesson

Mårten Claesson is one of the designers and architects of Claesson Koivisto Rune. They have been working with everything from interiors, culture house in Japan to products and furniture design. Their assigners include Asplund, Offecct, Boffi and Cappellini. Mårten Claesson is a regular lecturer and has spoken all around the world.

Jonas Bylund
Jonas Bylund is the co-founder and Creative Director of Syntes Studio, a product design and branding agency based in Stockholm. Syntes Studios work spans from strategy, product design, packaging and graphic design and the client list include British mobile communications leader O2, H&M, L’oreal and Estee Lauder. He is regularly lecturing at various conferences around the world.

Olof Kolte
Civil Engineer KTH, Stockholm 1990, Master of Art RCA, London 1998, has worked as Civil Engineer in France, Mexico, and Latvia, own design practice in London 1998-2000 and in Malmö, Sweden since 2000, part time lecturer at Industrial Design LTH since 2001

Ewa Kumlin and Kerstin Sylwan
Ewa Kumlin is managing director at Svensk Form which is missioned by the Governement to promote Swedish Design in Sweden and abroad and to run the official meeting place for design in Sweden. Kerstin Sylwan works as a designer with a deep interest for sustainable development. She is also founder of the project “Saving the planet in style.

The fifteen speakers that have been announced before include: Satyendra Pakhale, Jennifer Leonard, Kristina Dryza, Brent Richards, Stephen Burks, Mathilda Tham, Ilkka Suppanen, Katarina Graffman + Ida Hult, Kristina Börjesson, Jens Martin Skibsted, Nina Jobs, John-Michael Ekeblad, Björn Jeffery and Thomas Sandell.

The lecture part of Designboost will be held Thursday October 18, 9am – 6pm. The venue is Europaporten conference center in Malmö, Sweden.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : designboost sustainability sustainable design conference festival event

Andra bloggar om: designboost, design, event, konferens, hållbar utveckling

Brand new Danish design company Mater has recently presented its first collection at this years Maison et Objet in Paris. I would like to follow up my first presentation of Mater with some pictures of a really cool series of products called MarbleWood. Its designed by Todd Bracher and the materials are black and white jaipur marble and Indian hardwood (which are sourced through official government auctions in India). The eight pieces of the MarbleWood collection are interchangeable which offers you an interesting possibility to personalize your own serving bowls, candleholders and candelabras.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : mater csr sustainability sustainable design denmark marble

Andra bloggar om: mater, prylar, design, csr

Robert Mankoff is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker magazine. Over the years he has also been doing some great cartoons. I think that the one above is the best of them all. Try to use the phrase next time an unpleasant sales person calls you!

You will find this and a lot of other great memorable cartoons in the book The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : cartoons new yorker robert mankoff

Andra bloggar om: tecknat, skämt, cartoon, robert mankoff, the new yorker

Friday October 5th is the last day for the “early bird” offer for the lectures during the event Designboost which I’m organising in Malmö 18th of October. The overall theme this year is sustainable design and the speaker list includes Stephen Burks, Satyendra Pakhale, Jennifer Leonard, Eero Koivisto, Kristina Dryza, Brent Richards, Mathilda Tham, Ilkka Suppanen, Katarina Graffman/Ida Hult, Thomas Sandell, Kristina Börjesson, Jens Martin Skibsted, Björn Jeffery, Nina Jobs and John-Michael Ekeblad. The nine last speakers will be announced early next week. The number of tickets are limited. Do you dare to wait? Order your personal ticket here.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : designboost sustainability sustainable design conference festival event
Andra bloggar om: designboost, hållbar utveckling, miljö, konferens, malmö

Yoo is a design-focused property development company enhancing quality and adding value through design, branding and marketing expertise to development project across the world. The mission of Yoo is to add a new approach to contemporary living by bringing good design into homes and make it more accessible. Among the persons behind Yoo you will find Philippe Starck, Jade Jagger and John Hitchcox.

One of the latest project from Yoo is Yoo Denmark situated at Adelgade 5–7 in the Copenhagen. Yoo Denmark consists of 60 apartments and 6 penthouses, all with Philippe Starck designed interiors, individually specified and coordinated by Yoo. Inside the floor spaces are open plan and fluid, ripe for manipulation. Floor to ceiling windows, private balconies, underground parking and a huge communal roof terrace, which is one of the largest private gardens in Copenhagen. On top of this the location of Yoo Denmark is on the pinpoint axis of everything that’s fascinating and fabulous in Copenhagen.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : yoo yoo denmark philippe starck copenhagen design jade jagger

Andra bloggar om: yoo, yoo denmark, köpenhamn, design, inredning, lägenhet, vardagsliv, philippe starck

Belgian designer Arne Quinze has recently finalised a new piece of timber art in Brussels. It’s called Cityscape (see first picture below). Where I live, in the southern part of Sweden, we have our own version of timber artwork (rest of the pictures below). It’s called Nimis (lat. “too much”) and according to the artist Lars Vilks, it’s also an independent state which he calls Ladonia. If you are lucky you can hear the artist play the national anthem, the sound of a rock thrown into the sea…. Lars Vilks started to work on Nimis, a construction of driftwood and rests from the cutting areas, already back in 1980. However, Nimis is probably more of a naturescape than cityscape artwork.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : arne quinze lars vilks nimis cityscape art sculpture artwork

Andra bloggar om: lars vilks, nimis, arne quinze, konst, skulptur

The Infobar 2 mobile phone by Naoto Fukasawa will be released by Japanese producer AU in November. The new images of this beautiful mobile phone speaks for themselves.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : naoto fukasawa au infobar 2 mobile phone design

Andra bloggar om: mobil, telefon, teknik, prylar, design, naoto fukasawa

Reuse is the word of the day. From recently finished London Fashion week we have seen a recycling tendency in fashion, and during London Design Festival the pattern once again is to find amongst the interiors.
At Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington I find the flagmen Campana brother´s well known trash aesthetics expressed through a collection of sofas with cut rubber in layers. This we have seen before, but what strikes me when I walk through the expo areas, is that litter seem to have taken over our minds and our expressions.Sometimes in pure anarchy as in Joanne Hamilton´s jewelry collection (Tent London) – wires, cables and ropes, knitted together to beautiful pieces of body adornments. At Designers Block, I am facing the trash again in the Campana inspired “Meltdown Chair” by Tom Price, made through heating and pressing a seat-shaped former in a ball of polypropylene rope. Simple and spectacular. “London Still Life” is a series of photographs by Jack Cole. At first look they appear as Dutch 17th century still life oil paintings, but at a closer look each part of the still life is rubbish found at varied locations in London. All together this gives us a portrait of each area, with titles like “Brick Lane E1”, “Portland Rise Estate, N4” and” Southbank SE1”. The feeling of doom I find in this work can characterize the London Design Festival in all; the litter overwhelms us, taking over our controlled lives and attacks our cultural and historical icons in anarchistic forms. Tables and lamps are breaking apart, melting to a non-recognizable mess. The bookshelves are fragile, missing support and fall on the floor at first attempt using them. Our world is breaking down and we are all aware of it.
But there is hope! The London-based design group Postlerferguson questions the food transportation systems and the food industry. They recommend us to hold a door open to our roots – for a socially and ecological sustainability. Inspired by farming societies and the community’s social bonds, they have created a tray for chopping and preparing vegetables for the winter season. The separate handles means that you have to cooperate physical and strategic with at least another person to handle the preparation process. Even at Royal College of Art the students are showing fearlessness when it comes to creative thinking and urgent solutions. In the “slow Water” exhibition they have focused on innovations to minimize the water waste. For example the greenhouse that collects rainwater, a tap display to control our water consumption, or a heat sensitive shower curtain that reacts to the time spent in the shower.
Even if Postlerferguson´s and the RCA student´s projects more or less are on a conceptual level, they catch something essential – they have understood that they have to dig deep under the designed surface. It is about changing deep rooted patterns of consumption that is affecting our environment in a negative way; from avoiding long-distance transports to creating low-waste products made to last for generations - in shape, material and quality.
What worries me is that even if the young and independent designers urgent reflects about the environmentally future at London Design Festival and obvious has understood that a big change is to come very soon, many of the greater actors still do not show reflections in their product range.
In spite of sustainability as this year´s festival theme and several good initiatives such as seminars, exhibitions and workshops from the festival management, there seems to be difficult to translate theory to practice in the never ending stream of products. To ignore the climate debate and in the year of 2007 go for products that only focus on form experiment is provokingly thoughtless. Whether you choose to work with the often used “good/bad taste” theme, as in Moooi´s stand amongst others, or highlight expressions shown in the Zaha Hadid exhibition “Architecture and Design” at Design Museum, where as for example a non-functional city car in SUV size is shown and where she time after time tell us that size and form stands above both nature and culture – then you are going a provocative road that only will end up in a dead end.

Post and pictures by Hanna Ljungström, Designer, LOTS.

Ping Intressant.se

tags technorati : london design festival reuse sustainability design

Andra bloggar om: london design festival, design, mässa, hållbar utveckling